"The rent," repeated Nancy; "up to the end of the term we took it for. About three years longer, I think, Edwin. That would be sixty pounds." "And where do you suppose the sixty pounds would come from?" "I don't know. There's the impediment, you see," remarked Nancy blankly. "We cannot leave without paying up." "Unless we made a moonlight flitting of it, my dear." "That I never will," she rejoined, with a firmness he could not mistake. "You are only jesting, Edwin." "It would be no jesting matter to pay up that claim, and others; for there are others. Our better plan, Nancy, will be to go off by the London boat some night, and not let any one know where we are until I can come back to pay. You may see it is the only thing to be done, and you must bring your mind to it." "Never by me," said Nancy, strong in her innate rectitude. "As to hiding ourselves anywhere, that can never be; I should not conceal my address from Mary Carimon--I _could_ not conceal it from Colonel Selby." Captain Fennel ground his teeth. "Suppose I say that this shall be, that we will go, and order you to obey me? What then?" "No, Edwin, I could not. I should go in to Monsieur Gustave Sauvage, and say to him, 'We were thinking of running away, but I cannot do it; please put me in prison until I can pay the debt.' And then----" "Are you an idiot?" asked Captain Fennel, staring at her. "And then, when I was in prison," went on Nancy, "I should write to tell William Selby; and perhaps he would come over and release me. Please don't talk in this kind of way again, Edwin. I should keep my word." Mr. Edwin Fennel could not have felt more astounded had his wife then and there turned into a dromedary before his eyes. She had hitherto been tractable as a child. But he had never tried her in a thing that touched her honour, and he saw that the card which he had intended to play was lost. Captain Fennel played another. He went away himself. Making the best he could of the house and its haunted state (though day by day saw him looking more and more like a walking skeleton) throughout the greater part of June, for the summer had come in, he despatched his wife to Pontipette one market day--Saturday--to remain there until the following Wednesday. Old Mrs. Hardy had gone to the homely but comfortable hotel at Pontipette for a change, and she wrote to invite Nancy to stay a short time with her. Charles Palliser was in England. Captain Fennel proceeded to London by that same Saturday night's boat, armed with a letter from his wife to Colonel Selby, requesting the colonel to pay over to her husband her quarterly instalment instead of sending it to herself. Captain Fennel had bidden her do this; and Nancy, of strict probity in regard to other people's money, could not resist signing over her own. "But you will be sure to bring it all back, won't you, Edwin? and to be here by Wednesday, the day I return?" she said to him. "Why, of course I shall, my dear."