ore the Van Heigens even saw Julia.
He wondered what she would do alone and wished he knew how she fared;
he thought over the explanations possible and the various ways out
that might suggest themselves to a fertile brain. They were not many,
and they were not good; the simple truth would probably be best, and
that would be so exceedingly compromising under the circumstances that
the Van Heigens were hardly likely to find it palatable. Indeed, he
began to see that, even if they two could have presented themselves,
as they had first intended, to the anxious family before Denah
arrived, it was very doubtful if the matter could have been
satisfactorily cleared up to a suspicious and prudish Dutch mind. The
girl was only a companion, a person of no importance, easy to replace;
and, no matter how the fact might be explained, it still remained that
she had been out all night with an unknown man; one, who, if he were
known, would show to be of a position to make the proceeding more
compromising still.

At this point Rawson-Clew got up and walked to the window. It was
then that it struck him that he had, in these his mature years,
committed an act of stupendous folly, the like of which his youth had
never known.

But the girl, what would become of the girl? In England, in
ninety-nine cases out of a hundred, she would have been dismissed; in
Holland that one last hope did not exist. She would be dismissed with
her character considerably damaged and her chance of getting another
situation entirely gone. What would she do? She had told him yesterday
she could not leave, but was obliged to stay on at the Van Heigens';
although she had failed in the first object of her coming, and so had
no motive for remaining, she had nowhere else to go. Perhaps she had
quarrelled with her relatives; perhaps they could not afford to keep
her--they were poor enough he knew. She had once said her eldest
sister had lately married the nephew of a bishop; he remembered that,
and he also remembered that, after his unfortunate visit to Captain
Polkington, he had heard they were people with some good connections.
But that did not mean that they could afford to help this girl, or
would be delighted to receive her home under the present conditions.
Rather it indicated that their position was too precarious for them to
be able to do it. They would be bitterly hard on her--these aspiring
people of gentle birth and doubtful shifts, clinging to society by the