For a minute the wretched woman sat silent facing her misery. Leave Homewood! leave the business of which her husband thought so much! Perhaps it was not true, perhaps she had not understood him. "Do you really think we had better go away, away altogether," she gasped. "Certainly," he answered. At that moment, that critical moment, when she was about to ask if such a proposal were possible what the meaning of liquidation could be, Mr. Swanland, pale, bland, pleasant, courteous, Mr. Asherill's perfect gentleman the accountant cat, with his claws sheathed in velvet, folded in his muff, purring complacently, re-entered the room. "Well, Mrs. Mortomley," he said, "everything seems most satisfactory. The trade appears good and the men employed respectable. Yes, thank you; I will take a cup of tea." This was between the lines, and when Mrs. Mortomley handed him the tea she noticed how he stirred it, not at all as Mr. Asherill's perfect gentleman should have done, but holding the spoon upright. "It is a shame for me to be so hypercritical," she thought. "I dare say he is a far honester man than this dreadful lawyer." And so she inclined her ear to his pleasant words. "Do not think, Mrs. Mortomley," he said, as he was leaving, with a sudden uplifting of his Albino eyes, "that because I am placed here in a disagreeable position I wish to make matters disagreeable to you. Pray let me hear from you when you want anything, and be quite sure it is my desire to act towards you as a friend in every way." And he put out his hand. Dolly took it, and thought she must by some accident have got hold of a frog. Kleinwort was right. Mr. Asherill's partner had no digestion and no heart. The more Mrs. Mortomley thought about Mr. Swanland the less she believed in him, spite of his plausible manner and his pleasant utterances, and when she crept into bed that night she caught herself wondering whether there could be any good in a person whose hand was like wet clay and who stirred his tea as the accountant stirred his. Mr. Swanland left Homewood with an instinctive knowledge that the _quondam_ mistress of that place disliked him, which knowledge touched the trustee in no vulnerable point. It made, however, some slight difference to Mrs. Mortomley in the future, that future which, lying awake in the darkness, she vainly tried to forecast. CHAPTER IX. IN THE 'TIMES.' If there was trouble at Homewood on that especial Wednesday, it had not been a day of unmixed pleasure to two people in the city. His worst enemy might have pitied Mr. Forde when on opening the 'Times,' lying over the back of the official chair at St. Vedast Wharf, the first sentence which met his eye was, "Before Mr. Commissioner Blank." "_Re_ Archibald Mortomley," and all the rest of it.