state
of stupefaction.

"Of course," said Graham, "it is not worth while to notice that rag.
Half of what it says is clearly a downright invention. If only you could
get hold of the writer and thrash him, it might do some good; but these
liars are very hard to catch. As to the 'other lady,' there is nothing
in that, is there?"

Both Graham and his wife looked anxiously at Walcott. They knew of his
attentions to Lettice, and were jealous of him on that account; and they
had been discussing with each other the possibility of their friend's
name being dragged into a scandal.

Walcott was livid with rage.

"The cur!" he cried; "the lying hound! He has entirely fabricated the
beginning and the end of this paragraph. There is no ground whatever for
saying that a case may come into court. There is no 'lady in the case'
at all. He has simply put on that tag to make his scrap of gossip worth
another half-crown. Is it not abominable, Graham?"

"It is something more than abominable. To my mind this sort of thing is
one of the worst scandals of the present day. But I felt sure there was
nothing in it, and the few who guess that it refers to you will draw the
same conclusion. Don't think any more about it!"

"A lie sticks when it is well told," said Walcott, gloomily. "There are
plenty of men who would rather believe it than the uninteresting truth."

But the Grahams, relieved on the point that mainly concerned them, could
not see much gravity in the rest of the concoction, and Walcott had
scant pity from them. He went home disconsolate, little dreaming of the
reception which awaited him there.

He occupied a floor in Montagu Place, Bloomsbury, consisting of three
rooms: a drawing-room, a bed-room, and a small study; and, latterly,
Mrs. Bundlecombe, whose acquaintance the reader has already made, had
used a bed-room at the top of the house.

Alan's mother and Mrs. Bundlecombe had been sisters. They were the
daughters of a well-to-do farmer in Essex, and, as will often happen
with sisters of the same family, brought up and cared for in a precisely
similar way, they had exhibited a marked contrast in intellect, habits
of thought, and outward bearing. The one had absorbed the natural
refinement of her mother, who had come of an old Huguenot family long
ago settled on English soil; the other was moulded in the robust and
coarse type of her father. Bessy was by preference the household
factotum not to say the drudge of the fa