t hot. But she'll recognise that at such
a pass more must be done for a fellow, and that may lead to
something--indirectly, don't you see? for she won't TELL my father,
she'll only, in her own way, work on him--that will put me on a better
footing and for which therefore at bottom I shall have to thank YOU!"

The eye assisted by Mr. Cashmore's glass had with a discernible growth
of something like alarm fixed during this address the subject of his
beneficence. The thread of their relations somehow lost itself in the
subtler twist, and he fell back on mere stature, position and property,
things always convenient in the presence of crookedness. "I shall say
nothing to your mother, but I think I shall be rather glad you're not a
son of mine."

Harold wondered at this new element in their talk. "Do your sons
never--?"

"Borrow money of their mother's visitors?" Mr. Cashmore had taken him
up, eager, evidently, quite to satisfy him; but the question was caught
on the wing by Mrs. Brookenham herself, who had opened the door as her
friend spoke and who quickly advanced with an echo of it.

"Lady Fanny's visitors?"--and, though her eyes rather avoided than met
his own, she seemed to cover her ladyship's husband with a vague but
practised sympathy. "What on earth are you saying to Harold about them?"
Thus it was that at the end of a few minutes Mr. Cashmore, on the sofa
face to face with her, found his consciousness quite purged of its
actual sense of his weakness and a new turn given to the idea of what,
in one's very drawing-room, might go on behind one's back. Harold had
quickly vanished--had been tacitly disposed of, and Mrs. Brook's caller
had moved even in the short space of time so far in another direction as
to have drawn from her the little cold question: "'Presents'? You don't
mean money?"

He clearly felt the importance of expressing at least by his silence and
his eye-glass what he meant. "Her extravagance is beyond everything, and
though there are bills enough, God knows, that do come in to me, I don't
see how she pulls through unless there are others that go elsewhere."

Mrs. Brookenham had given him his tea--her own she had placed on a small
table near her; and she could now respond freely to the impulse felt,
on this, of settling herself to something of real interest. Except to
Harold she was incapable of reproach, though there were of course shades
in her resignation, and her daughter's report of her to Mr.