People of Position

by Stanley Portal Hyatt

Marlow frowned. "It's not my idea of what is right. You know Jimmy left this girl long ago. Why can't you forget it, and give him a chance to start again?" He addressed himself almost pointedly to his wife; but May shook her head.

"One can't forget in that way, Henry," she replied, gently; "at least not in this case. It wouldn't be fair to Vera, knowing what we do about Jimmy's instincts. No; Ida is right. We must certainly tell Canon Farlow."

"But he's left the girl," Henry persisted; he had always liked Jimmy, even if he had never understood him or been greatly interested in him; moreover, the whole idea of writing to the prospective father-in-law was repugnant to his ideas of fairness.

"How do you know he has really left her?" Ida asked coldly. "He has deceived us before and may be deceiving us again. The only address he has given us is his club, and this letter from Ethel is the first intimation we have had as to where he was living. She may be there, too."

Mr. Marlow laughed scornfully. "And under Ethel Grimmer's eyes? Hardly, Ida. And, according to the character you give her, she is not likely to allow him to get engaged to someone else. When did you hear of her last?"

"Never, after she fled that night." It was May who answered. "I wish we had been able to follow her up."

"Why?" Henry demanded. "I think you got pretty well revenged as it was."

Ida picked up her needlework again, rather ostentatiously. She had never seen her brother-in-law in this combative mood before, and it made her a little uneasy; but she was not going to let him see that fact, so she answered even more coldly than before:

"There was no question of revenge, Henry. Really, the suggestion is a little coarse, if May will forgive my saying so. Why we wished to find her was for this reason. Gilbert"—she coloured rather becomingly as she pronounced the name—Gilbert was Mr. Fugnell, Ethel's "Additional Curate," to whom she had recently become engaged—"Gilbert is greatly interested in a home for these people, where they do laundry work, and so on, and he was very anxious to save her. He said they had several vacancies, and they had been forced to refuse work for want of hands. That, if you want to know, is why we were anxious to discover where she had gone. It was entirely for her own good."

Marlow did not answer. He was a keen business man himself, and he liked clear balance sheets, even from a charitable institution, but Mr. Fugnell's charities issued no accounts at all. Moreover, of late a certain weekly paper had been displaying a great deal of interest in this very Home of which Ida was speaking, and only that day, coming down in the train, Henry had been wondering whether he ought not to mention the matter to Ida; but now he realised that his very advocacy of Jimmy's claim to be left alone had practically rendered it impossible for him to warn his sister-in-law. He would be doing the same thing he had condemned in her. So he held his peace, and, by a kind of tacit consent, the whole matter was dropped for the time being.