nd I promised Sarratt to look
after them!'

Farrell's blue eyes were now bright and stubborn. Hester realised him as
ready for an argument which both he and she had long foreseen. She and
Farrell had always been rather intimate friends, and he had come to her
for advice in some very critical moments of his life.

'Her sister!' repeated Hester, contemptuously. 'Yes, indeed, Bridget
Cookson--in my opinion--is a great deal too ready to accept everything
you do! But Nelly has fought it again and again. Only, in her weakness,
with you on one side--and Bridget on the other--what could she do?'

She had taken the plunge now. Her own colour had risen--her hand shook a
little on her needles. And she had clearly roused some strong emotion in
Farrell. After a few moments' silence, he fell upon her, speaking rather
huskily.

'You mean I have taken advantage of her?'

'I don't mean anything of the kind!' Hester's tone shewed her distress.
'I know that all you have done has been out of pure friendship and
goodness--

He stopped her.

'Don't go on!' he said roughly. 'Whatever I am, I'm not a hypocrite. I
worship the ground she treads on!'

There was silence. Hester bent again over her work. The thoughts of both
flew back over the preceding six months. Nelly's utter collapse after
five or six weeks in London, when the closest enquiries, backed by
Farrell's intelligence, influence and money--he had himself sent out a
special agent to Geneva--had failed to reveal the slightest trace of
George Sarratt; her illness, pneumonia, the result of a slight chill
affecting a general physical state depressed by grief and sleeplessness;
her long and tedious convalescence; and that pitiful dumbness and
inertia from which she had only just begun to emerge. Hester was
thinking too of the nurses, the doctors, the lodgings at Torquay, the
motor, the endless flowers and books!--all provided, practically, by
Farrell, aided and abetted by Bridget's readiness--a discreditable
readiness, in the eyes of a person of such Spartan standards as Hester
Martin--to avail herself to any extent of other people's money. The
patient was not to blame. Even in the worst times of her illness, Nelly
had shewn signs of distress and revolt. But Bridget, instructed by
Farrell, had talked vaguely of 'a loan from a friend'; and Nelly had
been too ill, too physically weak, to urge enquiry further.

Seeing that he was to blame, Farrell broke in upon Hester's
recollectio