"Pray let me see him—this evening. There is not an hour to be lost."
"I will telegraph to him when I leave you. But he may be away from London. His business takes him to the Continent very often. You may have to wait some time before he is free to work for you."
"Not long, I hope. I am devoured with impatience. But can you—can the law of the land—do nothing for me? Can't I bring an action against somebody?"
"Not under the present aspect of affairs. If you were in a different walk of life—a governess, for instance, or a domestic servant, and you were refused a situation on account of something specific that had been said against you—an action might lie, you might claim damages. It would be a case for a jury. But in your position, the slander being unwritten, a floating rumour, it would hardly be possible to focus your wrongs, from a legal point of view."
"Then the law is very one-sided," said Grace, pettishly, "if a housemaid can get redress and I can't."
Mr. Harding did not argue the point.
"When you have seen Faunce, and he has worked up the case, we may be able to hit upon something in Bedford Row, Lady Perivale," he said blandly, as he rose and took up his highly respectable hat, whose shape had undergone no change for a quarter of a century.
There was a new hat of the old shape always ready for him in the little shop in St. James's Street, and the shopman could have put his hand upon the hatbox in the dark.
CHAPTER VI.