“To leave Peter with the excellent Saunders,” Robert Grimshaw said; “I can’t take him to Athens.” “Oh, you’re going to Athens?” Dudley Leicester said, and oddly it came into his mind that he was glad Grimshaw was going to Athens. He wanted Grimshaw not to hear of his disgrace. For although Grimshaw had frequently spoken dispassionately of unfaithful husbands--dispassionately, as if he were registering facts that are neither here nor there, facts that are the mere inevitabilities of life, he had the certainty, the absolute certainty, that Grimshaw would condemn him. “I start at one, you know,” Grimshaw said. “You’re not looking very bright.” Dudley Leicester sat down before his coffeepot; his hand, with an automatic motion, went out to the copy of the _Times_, which was propped between the toast-rack and the cream-jug; but it suddenly shot back again, and with a hang-dog look in his eyes he said: “How long does it take things to get into the newspapers?” It was part of his sensation of loneliness and of fear that he could not any more consult Robert Grimshaw. He might ask him questions, but he couldn’t tell just what question wouldn’t give him away. Robert Grimshaw had so many knowledges; so that when Robert Grimshaw asked: “What sort of things?” he answered, with a little fluster of hurry and irritation: “Oh, any sort of thing; the things they do print.” Grimshaw raised his eyelids. “I don’t see how I can be expected to know about newspapers,” he said; “but I fancy they get printed about half-past one in the morning--about half-past one. I shouldn’t imagine it was any earlier.” At this repetition, at this emphasis of the hour at which the telephone-bell had rung, Dudley seized and opened his paper with a sudden eagerness. He had the conviction that it must have been a newspaper reporter who had rung him up, and that by now the matter might well’be in print. He looked feverishly under the heading of Court and Society, and under the heading of Police Court and Divorce Court. But his eye could do no more than travel over the spaces of print and speckled paper, as if it had been a patterned fabric. And suddenly he asked: “Do you suppose the servants spy upon us?” “Really, my dear fellow,” Grimshaw said, “why can’t you buy an encyclopædia of out-of-the-way things?” “But _do_ you?” Dudley insisted. “I don’t know,” Grimshaw speculated. “Some do; some don’t. It depends on their characters; on whether it would be worth their whiles. I’ve, never heard of an authentic case of a servant blackmailing a master, but, of course, one would not hear of it.” “But your man Jervis? Or Saunders, now? They talk about us, for instance, don’t they?” Grimshaw considered the matter with his eyes half closed.