"She said, 'Very well. If she's going to be in the house, I'm going out of it. I'm going to my father's. Now. You'll not expect the servants to stay in the house while you've got this--this woman living with you--' (Yes, she said that.) 'So I shall pay them up and send them off, _now_, before I go. Are you still determined?' "The poor devil, standing there with his stick and his game leg, and his face working, said, 'Mabel, Mabel, believe me, it kills me to say it, but I am, absolutely. The girl's got no home. She only wants to keep her baby. She must stop.' "His wife went off to the kitchen. "Pretty fierce, eh? "Sabre said he sat where she'd left him, in the morning room in a straight-backed chair, with his legs stuck out in front of him, wrestling with it--like hell. The girl was in the dining room. His wife and the servants were plunging about overhead. "In about two hours his wife came back dressed to go. She said, 'I've packed my boxes. I shall send for them. The maids have packed theirs and they will send. I've sent them on to the station in front of me. There's only one more thing I want to say to you. You say this woman--' ('This woman, you know!' old Sabre said when he was telling me.) 'You say this woman has a claim on us?' "He began, 'Mabel, I do. I--' "She said, 'Do you want my answer to that? My answer is that perhaps she has a claim on _you!_' "And she went." III "Well, there you are, old man. There it is. That's the story. That's the end. That's the end of my story, but what the end of the story as Sabre's living it is going to be, takes--well, it lets in some pretty wide guessing. There he is, and there's the girl, and there's the baby; and he's what he says he is--what I told you: a social outcast, beyond the pale, ostracized, excommunicated. No one will have anything to do with him. They've cleared him out of the office, or as good as done so. He says the man Twyning worked that. The man Twyning--that Judas Iscariot chap, you remember--is very thick with old Bright, the girl's father. Old Bright pretty naturally thinks his daughter has gone back to the man who is responsible for her ruin, and this Twyning person--who's a partner, by the way--wrote to Sabre and told him that, although he personally didn't believe it--'not for a moment, old man,' he wrote--still Sabre would appreciate the horrible scandal that had arisen, and would appreciate the fact that such a scandal could not be permitted in a firm like theirs with its high and holy Church connections. And so on. He said that he and Fortune had given the position their most earnest and sympathetic thought and prayers--and prayers, mark you--and that they'd come to the conclusion that the best thing to be done was for Sabre to resign.