ke that----If you were just to
give me a little note--in your handwriting--on your paper--just asking
me----I don't suppose I need show it to anyone...."

"I'll write the note," said Lady Harman. A new set of uncomfortable
ideas was dawning upon her. "But Susan----You don't mean that anyone,
anyone who's really honest--might get into trouble?"

"You can't be too careful," said Susan, manifestly resolved not to give
our highly civilized state half a chance with her.

Sec.6

The problem of Sir Isaac and just what he was doing and what he thought
he was doing and what he meant to do increased in importance in Lady
Harman's mind as the days passed by. He had an air of being malignantly
up to something and she could not imagine what this something could be.
He spoke to her very little but he looked at her a great deal. He had
more and more of the quality of a premeditated imminent explosion....

One morning she was standing quite still in the drawing-room thinking
over this now almost oppressive problem of why the situation did not
develop further with him, when she became aware of a thin flat unusual
book upon the small side table near the great armchair at the side of
the fire. He had been reading that overnight and it lay obliquely--it
might almost have been left out for her.

She picked it up. It was _The Taming of the Shrew_ in that excellent
folio edition of Henley's which makes each play a comfortable thin book
apart. A curiosity to learn what it was had drawn her husband to
English Literature made her turn over the pages. _The Taming of the
Shrew_ was a play she knew very slightly. For the Harmans, though deeply
implicated like most other rich and striving people in plans for
honouring the immortal William, like most other people found scanty
leisure to read him.

As she turned over the pages a pencil mark caught her eye. Thence words
were underlined and further accentuated by a deeply scored line in the
margin.

"But for my bonny Kate, she must with me.
Nay; look not big, nor stamp, nor stare, nor fret;
I will be master of what is mine own:
She is my goods, my chattels; she is my house,
She is my household stuff, my field, my barn,
My horse, my ox, my ass, my any thing:
And here she stands, touch her whoever dare;
I'll bring mine action on the proudest He,
That stops my way in Padua."

With a slightly heightened colour, Lady Harman read on and presently
found another page s