"Need we admit quite so much as that? Let's say he's facing the situation manfully!"
"Oh, he talked like that to you too, did he?" He jumped up, and took a few paces about the lawn, then came back and stood beside her. "By God, if he's glad, she was right to go, Judith!"
"I've never said anything to the contrary, have I? Have you seen Margaret this morning?"
"No, I haven't. What made you ask me that just now?"
"She came into my head. After all, she's a—a factor in the situation which, as Godfrey observes, has to be faced. I suppose I shall have to adopt her—more or less. Premature cares! Not so much Rome and Florence! It's as well to realise where one comes in oneself. When Godfrey talks of facing the situation, I don't think he proposes to do it alone, you know. You and I come into it."
"Yes." He added after a pause: "Well, we can't turn our backs on him, can we?"
"I've told her that her mother's gone on a visit—suddenly, to see a friend who's ill—and didn't like to wake her up to say good-bye. But that's a temporary solution, of course. She'll have to know more, and something'll have to be arranged about her and Bernadette. I don't suppose he'll object to Bernadette seeing her sometimes." She ended with a smile: "Perhaps you'll be asked to take her and be present at the interviews—and see that Sir Oliver's off the premises."
"I'll be hanged if I do anything of the sort! And, as you asked me to stay here, I don't think you need go on laughing at me."
Judith was impenitent. "It's a thing quite likely to happen," she insisted. "Bernadette would like it."
He turned away angrily and resumed his pacing. Yet in his heart he assented to the tenor of her argument. She might, in her malice, take an extravagant case—a case which, at all events, seemed to him just now cruelly extravagant—but she was right in her main contention. No more than she herself could he turn his back on Godfrey, or cut himself adrift from Hilsey. In last night's desperate hour Bernadette and he, between them, seemed to have cut all the bonds and severed all the ties; his only impulse had been to get away quickly. But it could not be so. Life was not like that—at least not to men who owned the sway of obligations and felt the appeal of loyalty and affection. He could not desert the ship.