Then he turned to his wife. “You—did you know about this—did you know that this was going on?” Then Maradick saw how wise she had been in her decision to keep the whole affair away from her. It was a turning-point. If she had been privy to it, Maradick saw, Sir Richard would never forgive her. It would have remained always as a hopeless, impassable barrier between them. It would have hit at the man’s tenderest, softest place, his conceit. He might forgive her anything but that. And so it was a tremendous clearing of the air when she raised her eyes to her husband’s and said, without hesitation, “No, Richard. Of course not. I knew nothing until just now when Mr. Maradick told me.” Sir Richard turned back from her to Maradick. “And so, sir, you see fit, do you, sir, to interfere in matters in which you have no concern. You come between son and father, do you? You——” But again he stopped. Maradick said nothing. There was nothing at all to say. It was obvious that the actual affair, Tony’s elopement, had not, as yet, penetrated to Sir Richard’s brain. The only thing that he could grasp at present was that some one—anyone—had dared to step in and meddle with the Gales. Some one had had the dastardly impertinence to think that he was on a level with the Gales, some one had dared to put his plebeian and rude fingers into a Gale pie. Such a thing had never happened before. Words couldn’t deal with it. He looked as though in another moment he would have a fit. He was trembling, quivering in every limb. Then, in a voice that could scarcely be heard, he said, “My God, I’ll have the law of you for this.” He turned round and, without looking at anyone, left the room. There was silence. Rupert said “My word!” and whistled. No one else said anything. And, in this interval of silence, Maradick almost, to his own rather curious surprise, entirely outside the whole affair, was amused rather than bothered by the way they all took it, although “they,” as a matter of strict accuracy, almost immediately resolved itself down to Mrs. Lester. Lady Gale had shown him, long ago, her point of view; Sir Richard and Rupert could have only, with their limited conventions, one possible opinion; Alice Du Cane would probably be glad for Tony’s sake and so be indirectly grateful; but Mrs. Lester! why, it would be, he saw in a flash, the most splendid bolstering up of the way that she was already beginning to look on last night’s affair. He could see her, in a day or two, making his interference with the “Gale pie” on all fours with his own brutal attack on her immaculate virtues. It would be all of a piece in a short time, with the perverted imagination that she would set to play on their own “little” situation. It would be a kind of rose-coloured veil that she might fling over the whole proceeding. “The man who can behave in that kind of way to the Gales is just the kind of man who would, so horribly and brutally, insult a defenceless woman.”