“Still—­it’s no good saying that now.”

“But she’ll spend all your money, Poff!  She’ll break your back with debts.  What’s to prevent her?  With him living on her!  For that’s what it comes to practically.”

“Well, what am I to do?”

“You aren’t going back without tying her up, Poff?  You ought to stop every farthing of her money—­every farthing.  It’s your duty.”

“I can’t do things like that.”

“But have you no Shame?  To let that sort of thing go on!”

“If I don’t feel the Shame of it—­ And I don’t.”

“And that money—.  I got you that money, Poff!  It was my money.”

Benham stared at her perplexed.  “What am I to do?” he asked.

“Cut her off, you silly boy!  Tie her up!  Pay her through a solicitor.  Say that if she sees him once again—­”

He reflected.  “No,” he said at last.

“Poff!” she cried, “every time I see you, you are more and more like your father.  You’re going off—­just as he did.  That baffled, mulish look—­priggish—­solemn!  Oh! it’s strange the stuff a poor woman has to bring into the world.  But you’ll do nothing.  I know you’ll do nothing.  You’ll stand everything.  You—­you Cuckold!  And she’ll drive by me, she’ll pass me in theatres with the money that ought to have been mine!  Oh!  Oh!”

She dabbed her handkerchief from one swimming eye to the other.  But she went on talking.  Faster and faster, less and less coherently; more and more wildly abusive.  Presently in a brief pause of the storm Benham sighed profoundly. . . .

It brought the scene to a painful end. . . .

For weeks her distress pursued and perplexed him.

He had an extraordinary persuasion that in some obscure way he was in default, that he was to blame for her distress, that he owed her—­ he could never define what he owed her.

And yet, what on earth was one to do?

And something his mother had said gave him the odd idea that he had misjudged his father, that he had missed depths of perplexed and kindred goodwill.  He went down to see him before he returned to India.  But if there was a hidden well of feeling in Mr. Benham senior, it had been very carefully boarded over.  The parental mind and attention were entirely engaged in a dispute in the school world about the heuristic method.  Somebody had been disrespectful to Martindale House and the thing was rankling almost unendurably.  It seemed to be a relief to him to show his son very fully the essentially illogical position of his assailant.  He was entirely inattentive to Benham’s carefully made conversational opportunities.  He would be silent at times while Benham talked and then he would break out suddenly with:  “What seems to me so unreasonable, so ridiculous, in the whole of that fellow’s second argument—­if one can call it an argument—. . . .  A man who reasons as he does is bound to get laughed at.  If people will only see it. . . .”