"That's high-faluting, it's talk of that sort which makes me suspect that you must be even worse than I supposed. Your father held you out to the world as a young woman who was rich already, and who would be still richer later on, and you tacitly endorsed his positive statements; then he dies just in time to save himself from being made a fraudulent bankrupt, leaving you worse than a pauper, and you have the assurance to pretend to wonder why I and the Earl regard you--I will be as civil as I can--askance. Talk sense, Miss Lindsay; don't presume on our simplicity any longer. You are perfectly well aware that, had we been aware of the truth from the first, we should never have countenanced you in any way whatever. Your father's lies, with which you went out of your way to associate yourself--I know!--deceived us; and they deceived my son; there's the truth for you, if you never heard it before." Nora looked as if she could have said many things; but she only asked a question. "What, precisely, is it that you wish me to do?" "I wish you to do something to, at least in part, undo the mischief which you have done already, to atone for the evil of which you have been the cause; I wish you to show by your demeanour your consciousness of the miserably false position in which you have been placed by others, or in which you have placed yourself, it doesn't matter which. In other, and plainer words, I wish you to hand me my son's letters and presents, and to sit down at once and write a letter, which I will hand him, in which you express your appreciation of the fact that he asked you to become his wife under an entire misapprehension, and that now, since circumstances have turned out so wholly different to what they were represented to be, your own self-respect forbids you to allow any association to continue between you; and that, in short, all is over between you, in every possible sense of the phrase. I want you to put that down, as plainly, and as finally, as it can be put, in black and white, because, Miss Lindsay, I wish to save my son Robert, at the earliest possible, from the danger in which he stands, and to do it while he is still absent." "But, my dear mother," exclaimed the voice of some new-comer, "your son Robert is not still absent, he is here." Looking round the trio saw that the Honourable Robert Spencer was standing at the open window. CHAPTER XI ROBERT