anced
significantly around him.

"Oh--that!"

"Yes," he said, "that. Will you really let me save you?"

"Can you?"

"I can, if I do it my own way."

"I don't care how you do it."

"Good." He rose. "Is there anything in those letters you mind my
seeing?"

"Not a word."

He sat down at her writing-table and stirred the litter with rapid,
irritable hands. In two minutes he had gathered into a heap all the
little notes of invitation. He then went round the room collecting the
tickets and the cards and the telegrams. These he added to his heap.

"What are you going to do?" she asked.

"I am going," he said, "to destroy this hornets' nest you've raised
about you."

He took it up, carrying it gingerly, as if it stung, and dropped it on
the fire.

"George----" she cried, and sat looking at him as he stirred the pile to
flame and beat down its ashes into the grate. She was paralyzed,
fascinated by the bold splendour of his deed.

"There," he said. "Is there anything else I can do for you."

"Yes." She smiled. "You can tell me what I'm to say to my stepmother."

"Your stepmother?"

"She wants to know if I'll have Effy."

"Effy?"

"My half-sister."

"Well?"

"I think, George, I may have to have her."

"Have her? It's you who'll be had. Don't I tell you you're always being
had?"

He looked down at her half-tenderly, smiling at the pathos, the absurd
pathos of her face. He was the same George Tanqueray that he had always
been, except he was no longer restless, no longer excited.

"Jinny," he said, "if you begin to gather round you a family, or even
the rudiments of a family, you're done for. And so is Hambleby."

She said nothing.

"Can you afford to have him done for?"

"If it would help them, George."

"You want to help them?"

"Of course I do."

"But you can't help them without Hambleby. It's he who goes out and
rakes in the shekels, not you."

"Ye-es. I know he does."

"Apart from Hambleby what are you? A simple idiot."

Jane's face expressed her profound and contrite persuasion of this
truth.

"Well," he said, "have you written to the lady?"

"Not yet."

"Then sit down and write to her now exactly what I tell you. It will be
a beautiful letter; in your manner, not mine."

He stood over her and dictated the letter. It had a firmness of
intention that no letter of Jinny's to her people had hitherto
expressed, but in all other respects it was a masterly reproduction of
Jinny's