im if I were you, and sit on
him hard. I'd knock him flat--and let Delia Rodman and Clorinda Clay go
to the deuce."

She looked at him wonderingly. "Let--who--go to the deuce?"

"I said Delia Rodman and Clorinda Clay. I might have included Fanny
Burnaby and the Brown girls. I meant them, of course. I suppose you've
been doing a lot of worrying on their account."

"I--I haven't," she stammered. "I haven't thought of them at all."

"Then I wouldn't. They've got no legal claim on you whatever. When they
put their money into your father's hands--or when other people put it
there for them--they took their chances. Life is full of risks like
that. You're not responsible for them, not any more than you are for the
fortunes of war. If they've had bad luck, then that's their own lookout.
Oh, I shouldn't have them on my mind for a minute."

She was too startled to suspect him of ruse or strategy.

"I haven't had them on my mind. It seems queer--and yet I haven't. Now
that you speak of them, of course I see--" She passed her hand across her
brow. There was a long, meditative silence before she resumed. "I don't
know what I've been dreaming of that it didn't occur to me before. Papa
and Mr. Davenant both said that I hadn't considered all the sides to the
question; and I suppose that's what they were thinking of. It seems so
obvious--now."

She adjusted her veil and picked up her parasol as though about to take
leave; but when she rose it was only to examine, without seeing it, a
plaque hanging on the wall.

"If papa were to take Mr. Davenant's money," she said, after long
silence, without turning round, "then his clients would be as well off
as before, wouldn't they?"

"I presume they would."

"And now, I suppose, they're very poor."

"I don't know much about that. None of them were great heiresses, as it
was. Miss Prince, who keeps the school, told your cousin Cherry
yesterday that the Rodman girls had written her from Florence, asking if
she could give them a job to teach Italian. They'll have to teach away
like blazes now--anything and everything they know."

She turned round toward him, her eyes misty with distress.

"See this bit of jade?" he continued, getting up from his chair. "Real
jade that is. Cosway, of the Gallery, brought it to me when he came home
from Peking. That's not real jade you've got at Tory Hill. It's
jadeite."

"Is it?" She took the little mandarin in her hand, but without examining
him. "