"Why, Basil!" she cried, "you don't suppose I believed in such a monstrous thing as that, do you?"
"You made me believe in it."
"Well, then, I can tell you that I merely said it so as to convince him that he ought to let his daughter decide whether she would see him or not, and it had nothing whatever to do with the matter. Do you think you could find me anything to eat, dear? I'm perfectly famishing, and it doesn't seem as if I could stir a step till I've had a bite of something."
She sank down on the sofa in the hall in proof of her statement, and I went out into the culinary regions (deserted of their dwellers after our early tea) and made her up a sandwich along with the one I had the Sunday-night habit of myself. I found some half-bottles of ale on the ice, and I brought one of them, too. Before we had emptied it we resigned ourselves to what we could not help in Tedham's case; perhaps we even saw it in a more hopeful light.
VII.
The next day was one of those lax Mondays which come before the Tuesdays and Wednesdays when business has girded itself up for the week, and I got home from the office rather earlier than usual. My wife met me with, "Why, what has happened?"
"Nothing," I said; "I had a sort of presentiment that something had happened here."
"Well, nothing at all has happened, and you have had your presentiment for your pains, if that's what you hurried home for."
I justified myself as well as I could, and I added, "That wretched Tedham has been in my mind all day. I think he has made a ridiculous mistake. As if he could stop the harm by taking himself off! The harm goes on independently of him; it is hardly his harm any more."
"That is the way it has seemed to me, too, all day," said my wife. "You don't suppose he has been out of my mind either? I wish we had never had anything to do with him."