‘You have no right to ask anything whatever
about me,’ came from Nancy, who was already
moving away.
He allowed her to go.
‘So it is to be as I wished,’ he said
to himself, with mock courage. ‘So much
the better.’
And he went home to a night of misery.
Not long after the disappearance of Fanny French,
Mrs. Damerel called one day upon Luckworth Crewe at
his office in Farringdon Street. Crewe seldom
had business with ladies, and few things could have
surprised him more than a visit from this lady in particular,
whom he knew so well by name, and regarded with such
special interest. She introduced herself as a
person wishing to find a good investment for a small
capital; but the half-hour’s conversation which
followed became in the end almost a confidential chat.
Mrs. Damerel spoke of her nephew Horace Lord, with
whom, she understood, Mr. Crewe was on terms of intimacy;
she professed a grave solicitude on his account, related
frankly the unhappy circumstances which had estranged
the young man from her, and ultimately asked whether
Crewe could not make it worth his own while to save
Horace from the shoals of idleness, and pilot him
into some safe commercial haven. This meeting
was the first of many between the fashionable lady
and the keen man of affairs. Without a suspicion
of how it had come about, Horace Lord presently found
himself an informal partner in Crewe’s business;
he invested only a nominal sum, which might be looked
upon as a premium of apprenticeship; but there was
an understanding that at the close of the term of
tutelage imposed by his father’s will, he should
have the offer of a genuine partnership on very inviting
terms.
Horace was not sorry to enter again upon regular occupation.
He had considerably damaged his health in the effort
to live up to his ideal of thwarted passion, and could
no longer entertain a hope that Fanny’s escapade
was consistent with innocence. Having learnt how
money slips through the fingers of a gentleman with
fastidious tastes, he welcomed a prospect of increased
resources, and applied himself with some energy to
learning his new business. But with Mrs. Damerel
he utterly refused to be reconciled, and of his sister
he saw very little. Nancy, however, approved
the step he had taken, and said she would be content
to know that all was well with him.
Upon a Sunday morning, when the church bells had ceased
to clang, Luckworth Crewe, not altogether at his ease
in garb of flagrant respectability, sat by the fireside
of a pleasant little room conversing with Mrs. Damerel.
Their subject, as usual at the beginning of talk,
was Horace Lord.
‘He won’t speak of you at all,’
said Crewe, in a voice singularly subdued, sympathetic,
respectful. ’I have done all I could, short
of telling him that I know you. He’s very
touchy still on that old affair.’
‘How would he like it,’ asked the lady,
’if you told him that we are acquaintances?’
