He was now alone on the ground floor.  He caught no sound from above.

“Well, I’d better get out of this,” he said to himself.  “Anyhow, I’m all right!...  What a girl!  Terrific!” And, lighting a fresh cigarette, he left the house.

V

“And now what’s amiss?” Thomas Batchgrew demanded, alone with Mrs. Maldon in the tranquillity of the bedroom.

Mrs. Maldon lay once more in bed; the bedclothes covered her without a crease, and from the neat fold-back of the white sheet her wrinkled ivory face and curving black hair emerged so still and calm that her recent flight to the stairs seemed unreal, impossible.  The impression her mien gave was that she never had moved and never would move from the bed.  Thomas Batchgrew’s blusterous voice frankly showed acute irritation.  He was angry because nine hundred and sixty-five pounds had monstrously vanished, because the chance of a good investment was lost, because Mrs. Maldon tied his hands, because Rachel had forgotten her respect and his dignity in addressing him; but more because he felt too old to impose himself by sheer rough-riding, individual force on the other actors in the drama, and still more because he, and nobody else, had left the nine hundred and sixty-five pounds in the house.  What an orgy of denunciation he would have plunged into had some other person insisted on leaving the money in the house with a similar result!

Mrs. Maldon looked up at him with a glance of compassion.  She was filled with pity for him because he had arrived at old age without dignity and without any sense of what was fine in life; he was not even susceptible to the chastening influences of a sick-room.  She knew, indeed, that he hated and despised sickness in others, and that when ill himself he became a moaning mass of cowardice and vituperation.  And in her heart she invented the most wonderful excuses for him, and transformed him into a martyr of destiny who had suffered both through ancestry and through environment.  Was it his fault that he was thus tragically defective?  So that by the magic power of her benevolence he became dignified in spite of himself.

She said—­

“Mr. Batchgrew, I want you to oblige me by not discussing my affairs with any one but me.”

At that moment the front door closed firmly below, and the bedroom vibrated.

“Is that Louis going?” she asked.

Batchgrew went to the window and looked downward, lowering the pupils as far as possible so as to see the pavement.

“It’s Louis going,” he replied.

Mrs. Maldon sighed relief.

Mr. Batchgrew said no more.

“What were you talking about downstairs to those two?” Mrs. Maldon went on carefully.

“What d’ye suppose we were talking about?” retorted Batchgrew, still at the window.  Then he turned towards her and proceeded in an outburst:  “If you want to know, missis, I was asking that young wench what the secret was between you and her.”