for me," said Madame Beattie equably. "And I actually walked
over. I thought it would be good for me, but it wasn't. Isn't that a
hack out there? If it's that Denny, I think I'll get him to take me for
a little drive. Don't come down."

But Alston went in a silence he recognised as sulky, and put her into
the carriage with a perfect solicitude.

"I must ask you," he said stiffly before he closed the carriage door,
"not to mention this to Mrs. Blake."

"Bless you, no," said Madame Beattie. "I'm going to let you stir the
pot, you and that imp. Tell him to drive out into the country somewhere
for half an hour. I suppose I've got to get the air."

But he was not to escape that particular coil so soon. Back in his
office again, giving himself another ten minutes of grave amused
consideration, before he called the stenographer, he looked up, at the
opening of the door, and saw Anne. She came forward at once and without
closing the door, as if to assure him she would not keep him long. There
was no misreading the grave trouble of her face. He met her, and now
they shook hands, and after he had closed the door he set a chair for
her. But Anne refused it.

"I came to tell you how sorry I am to have troubled you so," she began.
"Of course Lydia won't go on with this. She won't be allowed to. I don't
know what could stop her," Anne admitted truthfully. "But I shall do
what I can. Farvie mustn't be told. He'd be horrified. Nor Jeff. I must
see what I can do."

"You are very much troubled," said Alston, in a tone of grave concern.
It seemed to him Anne was a perfect type of the gentlewoman of another
time, not even of his mother's perhaps, but of his grandmother's when
ladies were a mixture of fine courage and delicate reserve. That type
had, in his earliest youth, seemed inevitable. If his mother had escaped
from it, it was because she was the inexplicable wonder of womankind,
unlike the rest and rarer than all together.

Anne looked at him, pleading in her eyes.

"Terribly," she said, "terribly troubled. Lydia has always been
impulsive, but not unmanageable. And I don't in the least know what to
do."

"Suppose you leave it with me," said Alston, his deference an exquisite
balm to her hurt feeling. Then he smiled, remembering Lydia. "I don't
know what to do either," he said. "Your sister's rather terrifying. But
I think we're safe enough so long as she doesn't go to Weedon Moore."

Anne was wordlessly grateful, but he u