The storm had fallen on Janet at last. She saw it was a storm, and met it with courage and patience, and without apprehension as to what so fierce a hurricane might ultimately destroy, what foundations its rising floods might sweep away. She suffered dumbly under the knowledge that Monkey Brand and Fred both firmly believed her to be guilty, suffered dumbly the gradual alienation of her brother, who never forgave her her obtuseness when a way of escape had been offered her, and who shivered under an acute anxiety as to what Monkey Brand would do next, together with a gnawing suspense respecting the eldest Miss Ford, who had become the object of marked attentions on the part of a colonial Bishop. Janet said to herself constantly in these days, "Truth will prevail." She did not believe in the principle, but in her version of it. Her belief in the power of truth became severely shaken as the endless July days dragged themselves along, each slower than the last. Truth did not prevail. The storm prevailed instead. Foundations began to crumble. How it came about it would be difficult to say, but the damning evidence against Janet, the suspicion, the almost certainty of her duplicity, reached Easthope. Mrs Trefusis seized upon it to urge her son to break with Janet. He resisted with stubbornness his mother's frenzied entreaties. Nevertheless after a time his fixity of purpose was undermined by a sullen, growing suspicion that Janet was guilty. Fred had hinted as much. Fred's evident conviction of Janet's action, and inability to see that it was criminal, his confidential assertion that the money would be repaid, pushed George slowly to the conclusion that Janet had been her brother's catspaw--perhaps not for the first time. George felt with deep if silent indignation, that with him, her future husband if with any one, Janet ought to be open, truthful. But she was not. She repeated her obvious lie even to him when at last he forced himself to speak to her on the subject. His narrow, upright nature abhorred crookedness, and, according to his feeble searchlight, he deemed Janet crooked. His mother's admonitions began to work in him like leaven. How often she had said to him, "She has lied to others. The day will come when she will lie to you." That day had already come. Perhaps his mother was right after all. He had heard men say the same thing. "What is bred in the bone will come out in the flesh." "Take a bird out of a good nest," etc., etc. And George who, in other circumstances, would have defended Janet to the last drop of his blood, who would have carried her over burning deserts till he fell dead from thirst--George, who was capable of heroism on her behalf--weakened towards her.