e. "Mr. Brumley," she said, "I want
friendship so badly, I want some one to be my friend. I don't want to
think of things--disturbing things--things I have lost--things that are
spoilt. _That_--that which you spoke of; what has it to do with me?"

She interrupted him as he was about to speak.

"Be my friend. Don't talk to me of impossible things. Love! Mr. Brumley,
what has a married woman to do with love? I never think of it. I never
read of it. I want to do my duty. I want to do my duty by him and by my
children and by all the people I am bound to. I want to help people,
weak people, people who suffer. I want to help him to help them. I want
to stop being an idle, useless, spending woman...."

She made a little gesture of appeal with her hands.

"Oh!" he sighed, and then, "You know if I can help you----Rather than
distress you----"

Her manner changed. It became confidential and urgent.

"Mr. Brumley," she said, "I must go up to my husband. He will be
impatient. And when I tell him you are here he will want to see you....
You will come up and see him?"

Mr. Brumley sought to convey the struggle within him by his pose.

"I will do what you wish, Lady Harman," he said, with an almost
theatrical sigh.

He closed the door after her and was alone in his former study once
more. He walked slowly to his old writing-desk and sat down in his
familiar seat. Presently he heard her footfalls across the room above.
Mr. Brumley's mind under the stress of the unfamiliar and the unexpected
was now lapsing rapidly towards the theatrical. "My _God_!" said Mr.
Brumley.

He addressed that friendly memorable room in tones that mingled
amazement and wrong. "He is her husband!" he said, and then: "The power
of words!" ...

Sec.7

It seemed to Mr. Brumley's now entirely disordered mind that Sir Isaac,
propped up with cushions upon a sofa in the upstairs sitting-room,
white-faced, wary and very short of breath, was like Proprietorship
enthroned. Everything about him referred deferentially to him. Even his
wife dropped at once into the position of a beautiful satellite. His
illness, he assured his visitor with a thin-lipped emphasis, was "quite
temporary, quite the sort of thing that might happen to anyone." He had
had a queer little benumbing of one leg, "just a trifle of nerve fag did
it," and the slight asthma that came and went in his life had taken
advantage of his condition to come again with a little beyond its usual
ag