life was laid bare for a million curious eyes.

Such an exposure was too terrible to be faced. Mrs. Pendleton saw her own
comfortable life affected by it; saw her position in her small social
circle shaken and overwhelmed by the clamour of notoriety. She saw herself
the focus of the malicious tea-table gossip of all her friends. Decidedly,
it would not do.

She did her brother the justice to realize that he had overlooked the
public effect of the disclosure of his painful domestic secret as
completely as she had. He had forgotten that his accession to the peerage
would make him, as it were, a public figure, and the glamour which the
newspapers would throw over his lifelong quest would invest every act of
his life with a publicity from which he could not hope to escape. If he
had foreseen this, he would have made some other arrangement for his
daughter's future, not for the girl's sake, but for the honour of the
famous old name of which he was so fanatically proud.

The question remained, what was to be done? Robert would have to be told,
of course. Mrs. Pendleton's first impulse was to retract her promise to
take charge of Sisily, and wash her hands of the whole affair. Then she
thought of the money, and wavered. Robert had made her a generous offer,
and the money would have helped so much! She had already planned the
spending of the cheque he had given her that afternoon. She had thought of
a new suite of drawing-room furniture, and bedroom carpets. She had a
vision of a small motor-car, later on.

As she pondered over the situation she thought she saw a way out--a way so
simple and practical that she was astonished that it had not occurred to
her before.

Mrs. Pendleton was a woman of decision and prompt of action when she made
up her mind. Her mind was made up now. She glanced across the table at her
husband. "Joseph!" she said.

Mr. Pendleton, hidden behind the sheets of a newspaper just arrived from
London, had the temerity not to hear. He was in a grumpy mood, arising, in
the first instance, from having been dragged away from his business and
his club to Cornwall. It was nothing to him that he was in the Land of
Lyonesse. His brief impression of the Duchy was that it was all rocks, and
that Penzance was a dull town without a proper seafront, swarming with
rascally shopkeepers who tried to sell serpentine match-boxes at the price
of gold ones, and provided with hotels where dull tourists submitted to a
daily