to make a speech, and it
was such a poor speech--squeaky....

When at last Lady Harman entered the box--the strangest place it seemed
for her--he tried to emerge from the jostling crowd about him into
visibility, to catch her eye, to give her the support of his devoted
presence. Twice at least she glanced in his direction but gave no sign
of seeing him. He was surprised that she could look without fear or
detestation, indeed once with a gesture of solicitude, at Sir Isaac. She
was astonishingly serene. There seemed to be just the faintest shadow of
a smile about her lips as the stipendiary explained the impossibility
of giving her anything less than a month. An uneasy object like the
smashed remains of a colossal box of bonbons that was riding out a gale,
down in the middle of the court, turned round at last completely and
revealed itself as the hat of Lady Beach-Mandarin, but though Mr.
Brumley waved his hand he could not even make that lady aware of his
presence. A powerful rude criminal-looking man who stood in front of him
and smelt grossly of stables, would not give him a fair chance of
showing himself, and developed a strong personal hostility to him on
account of his alleged "shoving about." It would not he felt be of the
slightest help to Lady Harman for him to involve himself in a personal
struggle with a powerful and powerfully flavoured criminal.

It was all very dreadful.

After the proceedings were over and Lady Harman had been led away into
captivity, he went out and took a taxi in an agitated distraught manner
to Lady Beach-Mandarin's house.

"She meant," said Lady Beach-Mandarin, "to have a month's holiday from
him and think things out. And she's got it."

Perhaps that was it. Mr. Brumley could not tell, and he spent some days
in that state of perplexity which, like the weariness that heralds a
cold, marks so often the onset of a new series of ideas....

Why hadn't she come to him? Had he after all rather overloaded his
memory of her real self with imaginative accessories? Had she really
understood what he had been saying to her in the garden? Afterwards
when he had met her eyes as he and she went over the new wing with Sir
Isaac she had so manifestly--and, when one came to think of it, so
tranquilly--seemed to understand....

It was such an extraordinary thing to go smashing a window like
that--when there he was at hand ready to help her. She knew his address?
Did she? For a moment Mr. Brumley