“What are you doing here?” he asked roughly.
“Thank God you’ve come, Gaunt. You must let me make some money. We haven’t had a meal for two days and the children are starving,” Braithwaite said piteously. He was a broken man and tears were in his eyes.
“I told you that I had helped you for the last time, and when I say——”
Gaunt stopped and an expression of dismay came to his face when he remembered his vow.
“For pity’s sake——” Braithwaite appealed.
“No, for the sake of my word,” Gaunt answered as he drew a case from his pocket from which he took a couple of bank notes. “Take these and I’ll give orders that a basket shall be got ready for you. It’s too late for shopping to-night. No thanks, please.”
“May God bless you,” Braithwaite said fervently, and he was crying quietly.
But Gaunt made no reply.
CHAPTER XII
As soon as his visitor had gone, Gaunt took a cigar and sat down in an armchair before the fire. Very carefully he thought over the events of the night, and it seemed to him that he could not have acted differently, although at the meeting he had said more than he had intended. It was his wife that troubled him, and the effect which his speech would have upon her. Here he was totally in the dark, and he began to understand that he knew very little of Lady Mildred’s real character.