by a gesture. "I don't know... Anything you like."

"Very well, sir."

The butler did not shut the street door after Fyne, but remained on the
doorstep for a while, looking up and down the street in the spirit of
independent expectation like a man who is again his own master. Mrs
Fyne hearing her husband return came out of the room where the girl was
lying in bed. "No change," she whispered; and Fyne could only make a
hopeless sign of ignorance as to what all this meant and how it would
end.

He feared future complications--naturally; a man of limited means, in a
public position, his time not his own. Yes. He owned to me in the
parlour of my farmhouse that he had been very much concerned then at the
possible consequences. But as he was making this artless confession I
said to myself that, whatever consequences and complications he might
have imagined, the complication from which he was suffering now could
never, never have presented itself to his mind. Slow but sure (for I
conceive that the Book of Destiny has been written up from the beginning
to the last page) it had been coming for something like six years--and
now it had come. The complication was there! I looked at his unshaken
solemnity with the amused pity we give the victim of a funny if somewhat
ill-natured practical joke.

"Oh hang it," he exclaimed--in no logical connection with what he had
been relating to me. Nevertheless the exclamation was intelligible
enough.

However at first there were, he admitted, no untoward complications, no
embarrassing consequences. To a telegram in guarded terms dispatched to
de Barral no answer was received for more than twenty-four hours. This
certainly caused the Fynes some anxiety. When the answer arrived late
on the evening of next day it was in the shape of an elderly man. An
unexpected sort of man. Fyne explained to me with precision that he
evidently belonged to what is most respectable in the lower middle
classes. He was calm and slow in his speech. He was wearing a
frock-coat, had grey whiskers meeting under his chin, and declared on
entering that Mr de Barral was his cousin. He hastened to add that he
had not seen his cousin for many years, while he looked upon Fyne (who
received him alone) with so much distrust that Fyne felt hurt (the
person actually refusing at first the chair offered to him) and retorted
tartly that he, for his part, had _never_ seen Mr de Barral, in his
life, and that, si