“I’m afraid not. And if I were I should conceal them from you! I had liefer by far let Fontley go than see you sacrificed to save it, and though you haven’t yet been in love there’s no saying but what you might be one day, and then what a bore it would be for you to be tied to a wealthy old gentleman!”

“Yes,” she agreed, “but one ought to be ready to make sacrifices for one’s family, I think. And, after all, he might be dead by then!”

“Very true! And if he had survived — though I don’t think it at all likely that he would! — we could always finish him off with a phial of some subtle poison.”

This appealed so strongly to Lydia that she went into a peal of laughter, at which inopportune moment the door opened to admit Lady Lynton, trailing yards of crape, mobled with ‘black lace, and leaning on the arm of her elder daughter. She paused on the threshold, saying in a faint, incredulous voice: “Laughing, my dear ones?”

Charlotte, who was as kind as she was beautiful, said: “It was so delightful to hear! Lydia was always able to make dear Adam laugh, even when he was in pain, wasn’t she, Mama?”

“I am glad to know that there is anyone at Fontley who is able to laugh at this moment,” said Lady Lynton.

There was nothing in her voice or mien to lend colour to this statement, but none of her dear ones ventured to cavil at it. Having completed the discomfiture of the guilty parties by heaving a mournful sigh she allowed Charlotte to support her to a sofa, and sank down upon it Charlotte arranged a cushion behind her head, placed a stool under her feet, and retired to a chair on the other side of the wide hearth, directing a look of anxious enquiry at her brother as she sat down. There was a strong resemblance between them. Both favoured their mama, unlike the larger and darker Lydia, who took after her father. Lady Lynton’s oft-repeated assertion that Charlotte was the image of what she herself had been strained no one’s credulity, for although time had faded the widow’s fair beauty, and domestic trials had implanted a peevish expression on her classic countenance, she was still a remarkably handsome woman.

“I collect,” she said, “that That Man has departed. I might have expected, perhaps, that he would have thought it proper to have taken leave of me. No doubt I must accustom myself to being treated as a person of no account.”

“I’m afraid I must take the blame of that omission on myself, Mama,” said Adam. “Wimmering was anxious to pay his parting respects to you, but I wouldn’t permit it, knowing you to be laid down upon your bed. He charged me with the task of making his apologies.”

“I am only too thankful to have been spared the necessity of seeing him again,” stated her ladyship, somewhat irrationally. “I never liked him, never! And nothing will convince me that our misfortunes are not due to his management of your poor father’s affairs!”

Once again Charlotte intervened. “May we know how matters stand, Adam? We feel they can’t be worse than our conjectures, don’t we, Mama? It can scarcely come as a shock to us, even if we are quite ruined.”

“Nothing could be a shock to me,” said her parent. “After all, I have undergone I have become inured to disaster. I only wish to know when I must expect to find the roof sold over my head.”

“I won’t do that, I promise you, Mama,” Adam replied. “Indeed, I hope that you at least may be able to live in tolerable comfort, even if we can none of us remain at Fontley.”

Charlotte said in a faltering voice: “Must Fontley be sold? Can nothing be done to save it?”

He was looking down at the smouldering logs in the hearth, and answered only with a tiny shake of his head. Tears started to her eyes, but before they could spill over Lydia created a diversion by observing dispassionately that she rather thought Mama was suffering a Spasm.

The widow’s aspect was certainly alarming, and although she revived sufficiently, when her vinaigrette was held under her nose, to express a desire for hartshorn, it was not until a dose of this cordial had been procured by her younger daughter, and held to her lips by Charlotte, that she was able to raise her head from the cushion, and to utter in brave, but failing accents: “Thank you, my dear ones! Pray don’t regard it! It was nothing — merely the agitation of having the dreadful tidings broken to me in such a way — ! You. have been for so long a stranger to your home, dearest Adam, that you could not be expected to know how wretchedly worn down are my poor nerves.”

“You must forgive me, Mama: I had really no intention of oversetting you,” said Adam. “It seemed to me to be cruel to conceal from you what you must learn, sooner or later.”

“No doubt you did as you thought right, my dear son. My first-born!” said the widow, extending to him one frail hand. “But had your brother been spared to me he would have understood how shattering this blow must be to me! Ah, my poor Stephen! always so considerate, so exactly partaking of my sentiments!”

Since the career of her second-born, cut off while he was still up at Oxford, had been distinguished by a sublime disregard for any other considerations than those immediately concerning himself, this ejaculation caused her surviving children to exchange speaking glances.

It was when Adam was struggling to convince her that her jointure and the direst penury were not synonymous terms that Lydia suddenly exclaimed: “So Dawes was right! I didn’t think it in the least, but only see! These odious tradesmen are sending bills for things Papa never bought, Adam!”

He turned his head quickly to discover that she was engaged in studying the accounts he had left on the desk. Before he could intervene she had betrayed an embarrassing gap in her store of worldly knowledge. “Papa never gave you a necklace of emeralds and diamonds, did he, Mama? But here are Rundell & Bridge demanding the most outrageous sum for one! Of all the wicked cheats!”

The effect of this disclosure on the Dowager was galvanic. Reduced to a moribund state by the efforts of her two elder children to portray in attractive colours her future existence, she sat bolt upright, demanding sharply: “What?”

“Lydia, put those papers back on my desk!” commanded Adam, a look of vexation on his face.

“But, Adam — ”

“Flaunting it under my very nose!” said Lady Lynton. “I might have known it! At the Opera, and very vulgar I thought it! Exactly what one would have expected of such a Creature! Oh, it’s all of a piece! We might go in rags, but he would offer a carte blanche to any Cyprian that took his fancy!”

“Good gracious!” exclaimed Lydia, round-eyed with surprise. “You can’t mean that Papa — Papa! — had a — ”

“Hold your tongue!” said Adam briefly, taking the bill out of her hand, and thrusting it into one of the drawers in the desk.

Perceiving that he was seriously displeased she at once begged pardon, but she was obviously so much less concerned with her own indiscretion than with the problem of how any female could welcome the attentions of a gentleman so stricken in years as her father, who had had no fewer than two-and-fifty in his dish, that Charlotte, amongst whose excellencies a sense of humour was absent, later felt obliged to point out to Adam that dear Lydia’s impenitence argued innocence rather than depravity.

Lady Lynton had accepted her lord’s vagaries with well-bred indifference for years, but the emerald necklace, for some cause which her children never discovered, exercised a powerful effect upon her. Indignation brought a flush to her cheeks, and she so far forgot herself as to recall several of his lordship’s previous lapses, declaring, however, that those she had been able to condone. The emerald necklace, which she described as bread snatched from his children’s mouths to hang round the neck of an abandoned female, was, she asserted, Too Much. It was certainly too much for Lydia, who uttered a choked giggle, and thus reclaimed her afflicted parent to a sense of her company. She was, she said, grieved that any child of hers could be so totally devoid of delicacy, or proper feeling. She seemed to derive some slight comfort from the reflection that Lydia had always been just like her father; but that damsel’s imperfections naturally challenged comparison with the infant Maria’s virtues, and led the widow to bemoan the cruelty of Fate, which had reft from her the two children who would have supported and consoled her in her hour of need. One thing leading to another, it was not long before Adam found himself convicted of gross insensibility; while as for Charlotte, who was doing her best to soothe her mama, Lady Lynton wondered that she could hold up her head after her wilful refusal to avail herself of the opportunity offered her to restore the fallen fortunes of her family.

“No word of censure will ever pass my lips,” she said magnanimously. “I merely marvel at you, dearest, for anything in the nature of selfishness is wholly foreign to me. Poor child! I wish you may not live to regret that day’s work, but, alas, I fear you will find a sad falling-off in young Ryde’s attentions now that we are beggared.”

But in this she was wrong. Not twenty-four hours after she had uttered the dismal prophecy Mr Ryde was wringing Adam’s hand, and saying: “By Jove, it’s good to see you again, Adam, and looking pretty stout too! But you know how sorry I am for the cause of your being here! What a fellow you must have been thinking me! But I dare say Charlotte told you how it was: I’ve been away from home — one of my old aunts cut her stick, and I was obliged to post up to Scotland in a hurry. What with the other two clinging to my coat-tails, and all the lawyers’ nonsense, I thought I never should be able to break free! But no use to run off before the business was settled: I must have gone back, you know, and that I don’t mean to do, unless I take Charlotte there on our honeymoon!” He grinned, and added: “You don’t mean to forbid our marriage, do you? You’d better not, I can tell you, old chap!”