As usual, he went to his room first, to wash and change.  He hated to pass the door of a sitting-room with the dust of travel on him; he could not shake hands with equanimity until he had restored his person and toilet to their normal perfection, which meant more or less the restoring of his nerves and temper to repose.  So he appeared on this occasion, fresh and finished to the last degree, the finest gentleman in the world—­the very light of Deb’s eyes, and the satisfaction of her own fastidious taste—­walking in to her where she awaited him, in the morning-room, herself ‘groomed’ to match, with as much care as she had taken when she had no more serious matter to think of than how to dress to please him.

He met her, apparently, as usual.  She, turning to him as to a rock in a weary land, flung herself into his arms with more than her usual self-abandonment.

“Oh, darling!” she breathed, in that delicious voice of hers, “it is good to see you.  I have wanted you so badly.”

“I am sorry I did not come before,” he replied, kissing her gravely.  “Somebody has been wanted to deal with that extraordinary girl.”

“Ah, poor girl!  Do you know she is very ill with brain fever?  Keziah has gone to nurse her.  It must have been that coming on.  She was out of her mind.”

“I should think so—­and everybody else too, apparently.  What were you all about, Debbie, not to see this Goldsworthy affair going on under your noses?”

“It hasn’t been going on.  It has been Guthrie Carey—­until now.”

“I am told”—­it was Frances who had told him in the passage just now—­ “that she refused Carey only the day before.”

“She did.”

“In order to make a runaway match with this parson fellow.  The facts speak for themselves.”

“Ah!” sighed Deb, turning to the tea-table, “I expect we don’t know all the facts.”

She meant that he did not know them.  He only knew what Frances knew, and providentially they had been able to keep the episode of the dam out of the published story.  That was the secret of Mary herself, her husband, her father, and this one sister; and they kept it close, even from Claud Dalzell.  “I will tell him some day when we are married,” Deb had promised herself; but as things fell out, she never did tell him.  And it was on account of her brother-in-law’s part in the suppressed event that she now forbore to call him behind his back what she had not hesitated to call him before his face—­that is, failed to show that she fully shared her lover’s indignation at the MESALLIANCE, and the scandalous way that it had been brought about.

“But, good heavens!”—­Claud took his cup perfunctorily from her hand, and at once set it down—­“are more facts necessary?  She has made a clandestine marriage with a man whose bishop will turn him out of the church, I hope.  They were right, I suppose, in concluding that no one here would consent to it; and what conceivable circumstances could excuse such an act?”