f at the door by his master's abrupt exit, preceded her.
Norah and Bee pushed back their plates.

"I can't eat, Norah," said Bee. "It's horrible not to know what's going
on."

Norah answered

"It's perfectly brutal not being a man. You might just as well be a dog
as a girl, for anything anyone tells you!"

Mrs. Pendyce did not go to her room; she went to the library. Her
husband, seated at his table, had George's letter before him. A pen was
in his hand, but he was not writing.

"Horace," she said softly, "here is poor John!"

Mr. Pendyce did not answer, but put down the hand that did not hold his
pen. The spaniel John covered it with kisses.

"Let me see the letter, won't you?"

Mr. Pendyce handed it to her without a word. She touched his shoulder
gratefully, for his unusual silence went to her heart. Mr. Pendyce
took no notice, staring at his pen as though surprised that, of its own
accord, it did not write his answer; but suddenly he flung it down and
looked round, and his look seemed to say: 'You brought this fellow into
the world; now see the result!'

He had had so many days to think and put his finger on the doubtful
spots of his son's character. All that week he had become more and more
certain of how, without his wife, George would have been exactly like
himself. Words sprang to his lips, and kept on dying there. The doubt
whether she would agree with him, the feeling that she sympathised with
her son, the certainty that something even in himself responded to those
words: "You can tell Bellew I will see him d---d first!"--all this, and
the thought, never out of his mind, 'The name--the estate!' kept him
silent. He turned his head away, and took up his pen again.

Mrs. Pendyce had read the letter now three times, and instinctively had
put it in her bosom. It was not hers, but Horace must know it by heart,
and in his anger he might tear it up. That letter, for which they had
waited so long; told her nothing; she had known all there was to tell.
Her hand had fallen from Mr. Pendyce's shoulder, and she did not put
it back, but ran her fingers through and through each other, while the
sunlight, traversing the narrow windows, caressed her from her hair down
to her knees. Here and there that stream of sunlight formed little pools
in her eyes, giving them a touching, anxious brightness; in a curious
heart-shaped locket of carved steel, worn by her mother and her
grandmother before her, containing now, not l