imagine about him she hadn't arrived at anything so belittling as an
idiotic secret marriage with a dyed and painted hag. Adela repeated
this last word as if it gave her comfort; and indeed where everything
was so bad fifteen years of seniority made the case little worse.
Miss Flynn was portentous, for Miss Flynn had had it out with the
wretch. She had cross-questioned her and had not broken her down.
This was the most uplifted hour of Miss Flynn's life; for whereas she
usually had to content herself with being humbly and gloomily in the
right she could now be magnanimously and showily so. Her only
perplexity was as to what she ought to do--write to Colonel Chart or
go up to town to see him. She bloomed with alternatives--she
resembled some dull garden-path which under a copious downpour has
begun to flaunt with colour. Toward evening Adela was obliged to
recognise that her brother's worry, of which he had spoken to her,
had appeared bad enough to consist even of a low wife, and to
remember that, so far from its being inconceivable a young man in his
position should clandestinely take one, she had been present, years
before, during her mother's lifetime, when Lady Molesley declared
gaily, over a cup of tea, that this was precisely what she expected
of her eldest son. The next morning it was the worst possibilities
that seemed clearest; the only thing left with a tatter of dusky
comfort being the ambiguity of Godfrey's charge that her own action
had "done" for him. That was a matter by itself, and she racked her
brains for a connecting link between Mrs. Churchley and Mrs. Godfrey.
At last she made up her mind that they were related by blood; very
likely, though differing in fortune, they were cousins or even
sisters. But even then what did the wretched boy mean?

Arrested by the unnatural fascination of opportunity, Miss Flynn
received before lunch a telegram from Colonel Chart--an order for