But it was not to be so.
"We can never have him here again," said the angry lady.
Amberley shook his head. "Very unfortunate, extremely unfortunate," he murmured.
"I cannot understand it. Such a thing has never happened here before. Now I understand why Mr. Lothian hides himself in the country and never goes about. Il y avait raison!"
"I don't say that genius is any excuse for this sort of thing," Amberley replied uneasily, "and Lothian has genius—but one must take more than one thing into consideration . . ."
He paused, not quite knowing how to continue the sentence, and genuinely sorry and upset. His glance fell upon Herbert Toftrees, and he had a sort of feeling that the novelist might help him out.
"Don't you think so, Toftrees?" he asked.
The novelist surveyed the room with his steady grey eyes, marshalling his hearers as it were.
"But let us put his talent aside," he said. "Think of him as an ordinary person in our own rank of life—Mrs. Amberley's guest. Certainly he could not have taken anything here to have made him in the strange state he is in. Surely he must have known that he was not fit to come to a decent house."
"I shall give his poems away," Muriel Amberley said with a little shudder. "I can never read them again. And I did love them so! I wish you hadn't asked Mr. Lothian to come here, Father."