For Godfrey Pavely there followed days full of discomfort, unease, and rising annoyance. The whole course of his life was changed. As he came and went about the quiet streets of his native town, as he granted business interviews to the townspeople, he was perpetually asking himself if the person he was speaking to was concerned with this odious matter, whether he or she was among those who took his beautiful wife's name lightly. His object each afternoon was now to get home early, and see for himself what was going on there, and how far Laura was giving cause for low, vulgar gossip. Laura was not a child! She must know, if she ever brought herself to think of such a thing, that if a married woman allows a man to hang about her, day after day, in the absence of her husband, there is sure to be talk. Pavely regarded Tropenell's share in the matter with a strange toleration--it was his wife whom he blamed with an increasing severity as the minutes, the hours, and the days went by. He still went to see Katty Winslow, but no longer as often as he had been wont to do. And when in her company he was distrait, uncomfortable, longing to ask if _she_ thought Oliver's constant presence in his house odd or--or peculiar. But he kept a prudent guard over his tongue. One day Katty said something which would have made it easy for him to speak, and which, as a matter of fact, very nearly did cause him to unburden his heart to her. It was a little word, and said quite pleasantly, with, he felt sure, no ulterior motive of any kind. "It's odd," she said musingly, "to see what good friends Laura has become with Oliver Tropenell! Who would have thought that she would ever like any man as much as she seems to like him? I suppose it's really owing to the fact that he's in partnership with her brother----" She waited, and as he said nothing, she went on, with a smile, "But then, for the matter of that, you're just as fond of him as she is, aren't you? I can't see the attraction myself, but I admit that it must be there, for two people as unlike you and Laura are to each other both to like him so much." "Yes, I do like Tropenell," Godfrey spoke very decidedly. "But I can't make out why he gets on so well with Gilbert Baynton. Gillie couldn't run straight if he tried." "So I've always understood----" Katty looked at him curiously. She had never been told the real story of the quarrel between the brothers-in-law, but she was clever enough to have reached a very shrewd notion of the truth. Baynton, so much was clear, had done something which Pavely could neither tolerate nor forgive. In the old days, as a girl, Katty had met Gillie Baynton several times, and he had struck her as a very amusing, agreeable sort of young man.