u know I feel a responsibility to look after you in
the absence of your lord and master."

"Thank you."

"By the way, I had a note from him this morning."

"From Mr. Dale?"

"Yes."

"Oh, had you? Where--" Mavis gripped the baluster rail so tightly that
the slender wooden uprights rattled. She had nearly asked a question
which would have betrayed the fact that she did not know her husband's
address. "Did he write from his lodgings?"

"No, he wrote from a public library. Lambeth--yes, the Lambeth
Library."

"What did he say?"

"Only confirmed your report that he wouldn't be back till the
twenty-eighth." Mr. Ridgett laughed again. "And told me that the
clocks ought to be wound up Thursday, and he hoped we hadn't let them
run down. We hadn't, you know."

Mavis was inexpressibly relieved; and yet that night she did not sleep
any better than on the preceding nights. The worst anxiety had gone,
but so much that was distressing in her situation remained. Since Will
was alive now, he would continue to live. And that little circumstance
of his remembering about the clocks was full of promise--that is,
promise concerning himself. It implied that he meant to go on much as
usual. He would come back, and be postmaster as in the past. But what
would he do with her?

Would he go for a divorce? Publish her shame? Perhaps, even if he were
willing to spare her, he would not forego the chance of dragging down
Mr. Barradine. Feeling as strongly as he did--and since the world
began, surely no one in such circumstances had ever felt quite so
strongly--he would seize upon the overthrow of Mr. Barradine's
reputation as the obvious means of obtaining his own revenge. Then she
thought of what such a scandal would mean to a gentleman of Mr.
Barradine's state and status. Mr. Barradine would move heaven and
earth to avert it. He might even get Will spirited away, never to be
found again! One was always reading in the newspaper of mysterious,
inexplicable disappearances. New fears almost as bad as the old fear
began to shake her again.

Of this there could be no question. Mr. Barradine would pay a very
large sum of money to avoid the threatened disgrace. And--in the midst
of her acute apprehension and distress--the plain matter-of-fact idea
presented itself: that if Dale were not rendered irresponsible by
jealous ire, one might hope that he would eventually fall in with Mr.
Barradine's views--that he ought, for everybody's sake, to ta