The man paused; then he added, with the offensive chuckling laugh:
“Go to such an one, Lady Muriel. Who shall turn aside from virtue in distress? Perhaps, in the whole of London, I alone have the brutality—shall we call it—to resist that spectacle.”
The woman rose. Her face was now flushed and angry.
“I do not know of any form of brutality in which you do not excel, Hecklemeir,” she said. “I have a notion to, go to Scotland Yard with the whole story of your secret traffic.”
The man continued to smile.
“Alas, my Lady,” he replied, “we are coupled together. Scotland Yard would hardly separate us.... you could scarcely manage to drown me and, keep afloat yourself. Dismiss the notion; it is from the pit.”
There was no virtue in her threat as the woman knew. Already her mind was on the way that Hecklemeir had ironically suggested—an elderly relative, with no children, from whom one might borrow,—she valued the ramifications of her family, running out to the remote, withered branches of that noble tree. She appraised the individuals and rejected them.
Finally her searching paused.
There was her father's brother who had gone in for science—deciding against the army and the church—Professor Bramwell Winton, the biologist. He lived somewhere toward Covent Garden.
She had not thought of him for years. Occasionally his name appeared in some note issued by the museum, or a college at Oxford.