“But, indeed, you must come in, Baron,” she insisted. “There is something of the greatest importance I have to say to you, and it need not detain you ten minutes.”
He followed her upstairs to her parlour. It was still early in the day and there was something of the slattern in her dragging gown. As he walked behind her, the remembrance would intrude of that betraying letter, and he had the notion that perhaps she somehow knew he shared her shameful secret. Nor was the idea dispelled when she stopped and faced him in the privacy of her room with her eyes swollen and a trembling under-lip.
“And it has come to this of it, Baron?” said she.
“It has come to this,” said Doom simply.
“I cannot tell you how vexed I am. But you know my husband—”
“I have the honour, ma'am,” said he, bowing with an old-fashioned inclination.
“—You know my husband, a hard man, Baron, though I perhaps should be the last to say it, and I have no say in his business affairs.”
“Which is doubtless proper enough,” said Doom, and thought of an irony breeding forbade him to give utterance to.
“But I must tell you I think it is a scandal you should have to go from the place of your inheritance; and your sweet girl too! I hope and trust she is in good health and spirits?”
“My good girl is very well,” said he, “and with some reason for cheerfulness in spite of our misfortunes. As for them, ma'am, I am old enough to have seen and known a sufficiency of ups and downs, of flux and change, to wonder at none of them. I am not going to say that what has come to me is the most joco of happenings for a person like myself that has more than ordinary of the sentimentalist in me, and is bound to be wrapped up in the country-side hereabouts. But the tail may go with the hide, as the saying runs. Doom, that's no more than a heart-break of memories and an' empty shell, may very well join Duntorvil and Drimdarroch and the Islands of Lochow, that have dribbled through the courts of what they call the law and left me scarcely enough to bury myself in another country than my own.”