We are weak mortals, when we are civilized, and live in the best society, and that visit of Lady Morningside's, that hearty kindness from a motherly woman who had fashion and influence, exercised a soothing and a stimulating effect on Grace Perivale.
"I am a fool to sit quiet under such an atrocious calumny," she thought. "There must be some way of letting the world know that I was spending my winter alone in my Italian villa, while some short-sighted fools thought they saw me in Africa. It ought not to be difficult. I must get some one to help me, somebody who knows the world. Oh, how I wish I could go to law with somebody!"
That word "law" reminded her of the man whose wisdom Sir Hector had believed infallible, and whose advice he had taken in all business matters, the management of his estate, the form of his new investments. Mr. Harding, the old family lawyer, was Hector's idea of incarnate caution, "a long-headed fellow," the essence of truth and honesty, and as rich as Crœsus.
"Why didn't I think of him before?" Lady Perivale wondered. "Of course he is the proper person to help me."
She sent a groom with a note to Mr. Harding's office in Bedford Row, begging him to call upon her before he went home; but it was past five o'clock when the man arrived at the office, and Mr. Harding had left at four.
He had a sumptuous modern Queen Anne house at Beckenham, moved in the best—Beckenham and Bickley—society, and amused himself by the cultivation of orchids, in a mild way. He did not affect specimens that cost £200 a piece and required a gardener to sit up all night with them. He talked of his orchids deprecatingly as poor things, which he chose for their prettiness, not for their rarity. He liked to potter about from hothouse to hothouse, in the long summer afternoons, and to feel that out of parchment and foolscap and ferret he had created this suburban paradise.
Lady Perivale had a telegram from him before eleven o'clock next morning.
"I shall do myself the pleasure of calling at 4.30. Impossible earlier.—Joseph Harding."
There was another Harding, a younger brother, in the firm, and a certain Peterson, who had his own clients, and his own walk in life, which took him mostly to Basinghall Street; but Joseph Harding was the man of weight, family solicitor and conveyancer, learned in the laws of real property, the oracle whom landed proprietors and titled personages consulted.