of it is settled?"

"That part of it is settled to the extent that no action will be taken
against papa."

She continued to talk on gently, evenly, giving him the facts
unsparingly. It was the only way. Her very statements, so it seemed to
her, implied that as marriage between them was no longer possible their
engagement was at an end.

She was not surprised that he scarcely noticed when, having said all she
had to say, she ceased speaking. Taking it for granted that he was
thinking out the most merciful way of putting his verdict into words,
she, too, remained silent. She was not impatient, nor uneasy, nor
alarmed. The fact that the business of telling him was no longer ahead
of her, that she had got it over, brought so much relief that she felt
able to await his pleasure.

She mistook, however, the nature of his thoughts. Once he had grasped
the gist of her information, he paid little attention to its details.
The important thing was his own conduct. Amid circumstances
overwhelmingly difficult he must act so that every one, friend or rival,
relative, county magnate or brother officer, the man in his regiment or
the member of his club, the critic in England or the onlooker in
America, should say he had done precisely the right thing.

He used the words "precisely the right thing" because they formed a
ruling phrase in his career. For twenty-odd years they had been written
on the tablets of his heart and worn as frontlets between his brows.
They had first been used in connection with him by a great dowager
countess now deceased. She had said to his mother, apropos of some
forgotten bit of courtliness on his part, "You can always be sure that
Rupert will do precisely the right thing." Though he was but a lad at
Eton at the time, he had been so proud of this opinion, expressed with
all a dowager countess's authority, that from the moment it was repeated
to him by his mother he made it a device. It had kept him out of more
scrapes than he could reckon up, and had even inspired the act that
would make his name glorious as long as there were annals of the
Victoria Cross.

He had long been persuaded that had the dowager countess not thus given
the note to his character his record would never have been written on
that roll of heroes. "I should have funked it," was his way of putting
it, by which he meant that he would have funked it through sheer
ignorance of himself and of his aptitude for the high and noble. It was
a