which fortified this resolve.  The Baron, at one time a familiar figure in a much-observed London set, had been mixed up in an ugly money-lending business ending in suicide, which had excluded him from the society most accessible to his race.  His alliance with Mrs. Newell was doubtless a desperate attempt at rehabilitation, a forlorn hope on both sides, but likely to be an enduring tie because it represented, to both partners, their last chance of escape from social extinction.  That Hermione’s marriage was a mere stake in their game did not in the least affect Garnett’s view of its urgency.  If on their part it was a sordid speculation, to her it had the freshness of the first wooing.  If it made of her a mere pawn in their hands, it would put her, so Garnett hoped, beyond farther risk of such base uses; and to achieve this had become a necessity to him.

The sense that, if he lost sight of Mr. Newell, the latter might not easily be found again, nerved Garnett to hold his ground in spite of the resistance he encountered; and he tried to put the full force of his plea into the tone with which he cried:  “Ah, you don’t know your daughter!”

VI

MRS. NEWELL, that afternoon, met him on the threshold of her sitting-room with a “Well?” of pent-up anxiety.

In the room itself, Baron Schenkelderff sat with crossed legs and head thrown back, in an attitude which he did not see fit to alter at the young man’s approach.

Garnett hesitated; but it was not the summariness of the Baron’s greeting which he resented.

“You’ve found him?” Mrs. Newell exclaimed.

“Yes; but—­”

She followed his glance and answered it with a slight shrug.  “I can’t take you into my room, because there’s a dress-maker there, and she won’t go because she is waiting to be paid.  Schenkelderff,” she exclaimed, “you’re not wanted; please go and look out of the window.”

The Baron rose and, lighting a cigarette, laughingly retired to the embrasure.  Mrs. Newell flung herself down and signed to Garnett to take a seat at her side.

“Well—­you’ve found him?  You’ve talked with him?”

“Yes; I have talked with him—­for an hour.”

She made an impatient movement.  “That’s too long!  Does he refuse?”

“He doesn’t consent.”

“Then you mean—?”

“He wants time to think it over.”

“Time?  There is no time—­did you tell him so?”

“I told him so; but you must remember that he has plenty.  He has taken twenty-four hours.”

Mrs. Newell groaned.  “Oh, that’s too much.  When he thinks things over he always refuses.”

“Well, he would have refused at once if I had not agreed to the delay.”

She rose nervously from her seat and pressed her hands to her forehead.  “It’s too hard, after all I’ve done!  The trousseau is ordered—­think how disgraceful!  You must have managed him badly; I’ll go and see him myself.”