“And pray, what should you do, allowing that you went alone, without lodgings and living and attendance, and all the rest of it?” asked Lady Verner.  “Take a room at one of their model lodging-houses, at half a crown a week, and live upon the London air?”

“Not very healthy air for fastidious lungs,” observed Lionel, with a smile.  “I don’t quite know how I should manage for myself, mother; except that I should take care to condense my expenses into the very narrowest compass that man ever condensed them yet.”

“Not you, Lionel.  You were never taught that sort of close economy.”

“True,” he answered.  “But the most efficient of all instructors has come to me now—­necessity.  I wish you would increase my gratitude and my obligation to you by allowing Sibylla to remain here.  In a little time, if I have luck, I may make a home for her in London.”

“Lionel, it cannot be,” was the reply of Lady Verner.  And he knew when she spoke in that quiet tone of emphasis, that it could not be.  “Why should you go to London?” she resumed.  “My opinion is that you will do no good by going; that it is a wild-goose scheme altogether which you have got in your head.  I think I could tell you a better.”

“What is yours?”

“Remain contentedly here with me until the return of Colonel Tempest.  He may even now be on his road.  He will no doubt be able to get you some civil appointment in one of the Presidencies; he has influence here with the people that have to do with India.  That will be the best plan, Lionel.  You are always wishing you could go abroad.  Stay here quietly until he comes; I should like you to stay, and I will put up with your wife.”

Some allusion, or allusions, in the words brought the flush to Lionel’s cheeks.  “I cannot reconcile it to my conscience, mother, to remain on here, a burden, upon your small income.”

“But it is not a burden, Lionel,” she said.  “It is rather a help.”

“How can that be?” he asked.

“So long as Jan pays.”

“So long as Jan pays!” echoed Lionel, in astonishment.  “Does Jan—­pay?”

“Yes he does.  I thought you knew it?  Jan came here the day you arrived—­don’t you remember it, when he had the pins in his shirt?  Decima had invited him to dinner, and he came in ten minutes before it, and called me out of the room here, where I was with Lucy.  The first thing he did was to tumble into my lap a roll of bank-notes, which he had been to Heartburg to get.  A hundred and forty pounds, it was; the result of his savings since he joined Dr. West in partnership.  The next thing he said was that all his own share of the profits of the practice, he should bring to me to make up for the cost of you and Sibylla.  Jan said he had proposed that you should go to him; but Sibylla would not consent to it.”

Lionel’s blood coursed on with a glow.  Jan slaving and working for him!

“I never knew this,” he cried.