IT is said that the Chinese use a form of torture consisting in the uninterrupted dripping, drop by drop, of water on the head of a victim who eventually goes mad. Mrs. Verners, though not Chinese, used a similar form of torture as they drove North from London in the coach, but Dorothy did not go mad under the interminable flow of bitter comment. Instead, she watched the milestones and, as each was passed, made and kept the resolution not to scream, or to jump out or to strike her mother until they reached the next, and so, by a series of mile-long constraints, disciplined herself to bear the whole. After Mrs. Verners had said that Dorothy was a graceless girl who had made them all into laughing-stocks and an affected prude whose nicety was monstrous, and a conceited, pedantic, prim ignoramus who had the bumkinly expectation that men were saints, and a pampered milksop who had made her unfortunate parents the jest of the town, there really was not much more to say, but the lady had suffered disappointment and did not suffer it silently. Occasionally, for a change, she turned her batteries on Mr. Verners who, poor man, was paying by an attack of gout for his London indulgences and couldn’t sleep the miles away. There was some justice in her attacks on Mr. Verners. He was first cause of Dorothy’s conduct to Sir Harry: he had brought Sir Harry home to them that night: he was accessory to their disaster. “Well, well, but it is over,” he said a dozen times. “But--,” and she began again with stupid and stupefying iteration. Mr. Verners, after a trip to town, was matter apt for stupefaction. It would need days of hard riding on penitential diet at home to sweat the aches out of him, but even while Mrs. Verners was elaborating the theme that all was lost, he was conscious of a reason, somewhere at the back of his mind, for believing that all was not lost. He couldn’t dredge the reason to the surface, and he couldn’t imagine what grounds for cheerfulness there were, but he felt sure that something had happened in London, or that something had been said in London which offered new hope to a depressed family. For three days he fished vainly in the muddied waters of his recollection for that bright treasure-trove, then, when they were reaching their journey’s end and were within a few miles of home, he saw Hepplestall’s factory crowning the hill-top, with its stack belching black smoke, and remembered how unexpectedly significant this Hepplestall had loomed in a conversation at Almack’s Club.