"How much ice will this cut?" Mrs. Sharpe asked Robert, stabbing her skinny index finger at the correspondence page of the Watchman.
"Not much, I think. Even among the Watchman clique the Bishop is looked at slightly sideways nowadays, I understand. His championship of Mahoney didn't do him any good."
"Who was Mahoney?" Marion asked.
"Have you forgotten Mahoney? He was the Irish 'patriot' who put a bomb in a woman's bicycle basket in a busy English street and blew four people to pieces, including the woman, who was later identified by her wedding ring. The Bishop held that Mahoney was merely misguided, not a murderer; that he was fighting on behalf of a repressed minority-the Irish, believe it or not-and that we should not make him into a martyr. That was a little too much for even Watchman stomachs, and since then the Bishop's prestige is not what it was, I hear."
"Isn't it shocking how one forgets when it doesn't concern oneself," Marion said. "Did they hang Mahoney?"
"They did, I am glad to say-much to his own pained surprise. So many of his predecessors had benefited from the plea that we should not make martyrs, that murder had ceased to be reckoned in their minds as one of the dangerous trades. It was rapidly becoming as safe as banking."
"Talking of banking," Mrs. Sharpe said, "I think it would be best if our financial position were made clear to you, and for that you should get in touch with old Mr. Crowle's solicitors in London, who manage our affairs. I shall write to them explaining that you are to be given full details, so that you may know how much we have to come and go on, and can make corresponding arrangements for the spending of it in defence of our good name. It is not exactly the way we had planned to spend it."
"Let us be thankful we have it to spend," Marion said. "What does a penniless person do in a case like this?"
Robert quite frankly did not know.
He took the address of the Crowle solicitors and went home to lunch with Aunt Lin, feeling happier than he had at any time since he had first caught sight of the Ack-Emma 's front page on Bill's desk last Friday. He felt as one feels in a bad thunderstorm when the noise ceases to be directly overhead; it will still continue, and probably still be very unpleasant, but one can see a future through it, whereas but a moment ago there was nothing but the dreadful "now."