, "is what you did it for?"

"You've seen him," she answered. "You don't seriously suppose I
could have done it for anything else! What possible use had I for
that young man?"

He remembered that that was what she had said about Mr. Higginson.
But he confessed that, for a lady in a disconcerting situation, she
had shown genius in extricating herself.

Fanny's house party broke up and scattered the next day. A week
later Straker and Will Brocklebank saw Furnival in the Park. He was
driving a motor beyond his means in the society of a lady whom he
certainly could not afford.

"Good God!" said Brocklebank. "That's Philippa."

By which he meant, not that Furnival's lady in the least resembled
Philippa, but that she showed the heights to which Philippa had led
him on.

X

Brocklebank agreed with Straker that they had got to get him out of
that.

It was difficult, because the thing had come upon Furnival like a
madness. He would have had more chance if he had been a man with a
talent or an absorbing occupation, a politician, an editor, a
journalist; if he had even been, Brocklebank lamented, on the London
Borough Council it might have made him less dependent on the
sympathy of ruinous ladies. But the Home Office provided no
competitive distraction.

What was worse, it kept him on the scene of his temptation.

If it hadn't been for the Home Office he might have gone abroad with
the Brocklebanks; they had wanted him to go. Straker did what he
could for him. He gave him five days' yachting in August, and he
tried to get him away for week-ends in September; but Furnival
wouldn't go. Then Straker went away for his own holiday, and when he
came back he had lost sight of Furnival. So had the Home Office.

For three months Furnival went under. Then one day he emerged. The
Higginsons (Mary Probyn and her husband) ran up against him in
Piccadilly, or rather, he ran up against them, and their forms
interposed an effective barrier to flight. He was looking so
wretchedly ill that their hearts warmed to him, and they asked him
to dine with them that evening, or the next, or--well, the next
after that. He refused steadily, but Mary managed to worm his
address out of him and sent it on to Fanny Brocklebank that night.

Then the Brocklebanks, with prodigious forbearance and persistence,
went to work on him. Once they succeeded in getting well hold of him
they wouldn't let him go, and between them, very gradually, they got