“Let him come back?” she said scornfully. “I made him come back! When I got him into the house, I had him like that. I knew how you’d turn up. I knew there was money here, and I was going to stay with it. It’s a funny thing about me that, of all the affinities I’ve met, noth’n’ is quite so close as money. Noth’n’ understands me better or talks more like Governor George Demosthenes.” The man was finished. He too was a philosopher. “Well, there’s no help for it,” he said with a groan that he could not suppress. “We’ll have to share. The old terms, mind--none of your fifty-fifty stuff. Seventy-thirty.” “Seventy-thirty! Well, I admire cold blood! It’s fifty-fifty or nothing with me, Dan. But there ain’t anything to share.” Here he corrected her. “She’s paying up. I’ve given her back the cheque. If you wait half-an-hour she’ll have it cashed. Now are you satisfied? Sixty-forty?” “Fifty-fifty!” said Heloise firmly. “You’d never forgive yourself if you gave me less.” They wrangled for ten minutes; in the end Heloise gained a victory for principle. CHAPTER XXVII Eleanor came furtively in search of her mistress and found her in Gordon’s room, valiantly overhauling his wardrobe. “The clergyman, miss,” she said, with an air of mystery that was natural. The well-trained servant has an air appropriate to the calling of every visitor. Dread and a funereal solemnity for doctors, a primness for elderly ladies, a suppressed blitheness to announce the young, mystery for the clergy; only a lawyer baffles interpretation. The secret dispositions of lawyers have never been probed. “The clergyman!” Diana’s heart fell. “A priest, ma’am, by his clothes,” said Eleanor. She was a Primitive Methodist and was secretly thrilled by priests and nuns. Not before had Diana considered Mr. Dempsi’s sectarian leanings. Nor had she before had sufficient confidence to meet the man whom she guessed had been sent by Dempsi to arrange the details of her servitude. “I will come down,” she said, and took the card from Eleanor’s hand. She read the few printed words carefully, then she read them again and passed her hand over her eyes. “Father Guiseppi Dempsi, Vicar of Banhurst.” “Father Guiseppi Dempsi!” she said aloud, and in another second was flying down the stairs. She recognised him instantly, clean-shaven, dark, the old grin in his brown eyes. She would have known him even had he not been wearing his black cassock. “Diana!” he said. “After all these years!” “Mr. Dempsi,” she grasped, gripping the thin hand outstretched, “it _is_ you! You don’t know how glad I am to see you!” Dempsi, the real Dempsi! Then who was the other? The solution of the mystery came to her in a flash, and in the realisation the whole weight of the universe was lifted from her heart. “Father Dempsi!” she said, in a wondering way, still holding his hand. “It doesn’t seem possible!”