ering the hotel,
and he rose by force of habit and went to the office to see if there
were anything for him.

There was one, and it was from Lady Fan, by no means the first she had
written since she had gone to England. And there were several for Sir
Adam and two for Lady Johnstone. Brook took them all, and opened his own
at once. He did not belong to that class of people who put off reading
disagreeable correspondence. While he read he walked slowly along the
corridor.

Lady Fan was actually consulting a firm of solicitors with a view to
getting a divorce. She said that she of course understood his conduct on
that last night at Amalfi--the whole plan must have seemed unrealisable
to him then--she would forgive him. She refused to believe that he would
ruin her in cold blood, as she must be ruined if she got a divorce from
Crosby, and if Brook would not marry her; and much more.

Why should she be ruined? Brook asked himself. If Crosby divorced her on
Brook's account, it would be another matter altogether. But she was
going to divorce Crosby, who was undoubtedly a beast, and her reputation
would be none the worse for it. People would only wonder why she had not
done it before, and so would Crosby, unless he took it into his head to
examine the question from a financial point of view. For Crosby was, or
had been, rich, and Lady Fan had no money of her own, and Crosby was
quite willing to let her spend a good deal, provided she left him in
peace. How in the world could Clare ever know all the truth about such
people? It would be an insult to her to think that she could understand
half of it, and she would not think the better of him unless she could
understand it all. The situation did not seem to admit of any solution
in that way. All he could hope for was that Clare might change her mind.
When she should be older she would understand that she had made a
mistake, and that the world was not merely a high-class boarding-school
for young ladies, in which all the men were employed as white-chokered
professors of social righteousness. That seemed to be her impression, he
thought, with a resentment which was not against her in particular, but
against all young girls in general, and which did not prevent him from
feeling that he would not have had it otherwise for anything in the
world.

He stuffed the letter into his pocket, and went in search of his father.
He was strongly inclined to lay the whole matter before him, and