Waldo rose slowly. “Yes. I should like to change first.” He still wore his frock coat and still had a white flower in his buttonhole. Receiving a nod of assent from Sir Paget, he left the room. Sir Paget returned to the fireplace and lit a fresh cigarette. “He will do what’s right,” he pronounced. “And I think we’d better get him to Cragsfoot to-morrow. You come too, Julius. We’ll wait developments there. I have done and said what I could in quarters to which I have access. There’s nothing to do now but wait for the storm.” He broke away from the subject with an abrupt turn to Aunt Bertha. “It’s a damned queer affair. Have you any views?” “The mother’s weak and foolish, and keeps some rather second-rate company,” said the old lady. “Surroundings of that sort have their effect even on a good girl. And she’s very charming—isn’t she?” “You know her yourself,” Sir Paget observed with a smile. “To men, I mean. In that particular way, Paget?” “Well, Julius?” “Oh, without a doubt of it. Just born to make trouble!” “Well, she’s made it! We shall meet again at tea, Aunt Bertha? I’ll pick up Waldo at his room along the passage. And I’d better get rid of my wedding ornament too.” He took the rose out of the lapel of his coat, flung it into the fireplace, and went out of the room, leaving me with Aunt Bertha. “On the face of it, she has just suddenly and very tardily changed her mind, hadn’t the courage to face it and own up, and so has made a bolt of it?” I suggested. “From love—sudden love, apparently—of Arsenio Valdez, or just to avoid Waldo? For there seems no real doubt that Arsenio’s taken her. He’s only once been to the flat, but the girl’s been going out for walks every day—all alone; a thing that I understand from her mother she very seldom did before.” “Oh, it’s the Monkey all right. But that only tells us the fact—it doesn’t explain it.” “Very often there aren’t any explanations in love affairs—no reasonable ones, Julius. Waldo takes it very hard, I’m afraid.” “She’s made an ass of him before all London. It can’t really be hushed up, you know.” “Well,” Aunt Bertha admitted candidly, “if such an affair happened in any other family, I should certainly make it my business to find out all I could about it.” She gave a little sigh. “It’s a shock to me. I’ve seen a lot, and known a lot of people in my day. But when you grow old, your world narrows. It grows so small that a small thing can smash it. You Rillington men had become my world; and I had just opened it wide enough to let in Lucinda. Now it seems that I might just as well have let in a high explosive. In getting out again herself, she’s blown the whole thing—the whole little thing—to bits.” “Love’s a mad and fierce master,” I said—with a reminiscence of my classics, I think. “He doesn’t care whom or what he breaks.” “No! Poor Lucinda! I wish she’d a nice woman with her!” I laughed at that. “The nice woman would feel singularly _de trop_, I think.”