More than once during the night Honora awoke with a sense of oppression, and each time went painfully through the whole episode from the evening —­some weeks past when Trixton Brent had first mentioned the subject of the trust company, to the occurrence in the automobile and Howard’s triumphant announcement.  She had but a vague notion of how that scene had finished; or of how, limply, she had got to bed.  Round and round the circle she went in each waking period.  To have implored him to relinquish the place had been waste of breath; and then—­her reasons?  These were the moments when the current was strongest, when she grew incandescent with humiliation and pain; when stray phrases in red letters of Brent’s were illuminated.  Merit!  He had a contempt for her husband which he had not taken the trouble to hide.  But not a business contempt.  “As good as the next man,” Brent had said—­or words to that effect.  “As good as the next man!” Then she had tacitly agreed to the bargain, and refused to honour the bill!  No, she had not, she had not.  Before God, she was innocent of that!  When she reached this point it was always to James Wing that she clung—­the financier, at least, had been impartial.  And it was he who saved her.

At length she opened her eyes to discover with bewilderment that the room was flooded with light, and then she sprang out of bed and went to the open window.  To seaward hung an opal mist, struck here and there with crimson.  She listened; some one was whistling an air she had heard before—­Mrs. Barclay had been singing it last night!  Wheels crunched the gravel—­Howard was going off.  She stood motionless until the horse’s hoofs rang on the highroad, and then hurried into her dressing-gown and slippers and went downstairs to the telephone and called a number.

“Is this Mr. Brent’s?  Will you say to Mr. Brent that Mrs. Spence would be greatly, obliged if he stopped a moment at her house before going to town?  Thank you.”

She returned to her room and dressed with feverish haste, trying to gather her wits for an ordeal which she felt it would have killed her to delay.  At ten minutes to eight she emerged again and glanced anxiously at Mrs. Holt’s door; and scarcely had she reached the lower hall before he drove into the circle.  She was struck more forcibly than ever by the physical freshness of the man, and he bestowed on her, as he took her hand, the peculiar smile she knew so well, that always seemed to have an enigma behind it.  At sight and touch of him the memory of what she had prepared to say vanished.

“Behold me, as ever, your obedient servant,” he said, as he followed her into the screened-off portion of the porch.

“You must think it strange that I sent for you, I know,” she cried, as she turned to him.  “But I couldn’t wait.  I—­I did not know until last night.  Howard only told me then.  Oh, you didn’t do it for me!  Please say you didn’t do it for me!”