He did not go home to dinner that evening. He slunk back late at night, hoping that all his family would be in bed. Yet when he found that accusing sister sitting alone in the drawing-room, he grounded a grievance on her solitude. She was sewing--and she went on sewing in a determined manner and in unbroken silence. "Well, where's everybody? Have you nothing to say? I'm sent to Coventry, I suppose?" "Mother's in bed. Oh, she's pretty easy now; you needn't worry. Daddy's in his study; he was tired out, and I expect he's gone to sleep. I'm quite ready to talk to you, Godfrey." Perhaps--but her tone did not forebode a cheerful conversation. He got up from the chair into which he had plunged himself when he came in. "Pretty gay here, isn't it? Oh, you do know how to rub it in, all of you! I should think living in this house would drive any man to drink and blue ruin in a fortnight." Amy sewed on. She had offered to talk, but what he said seemed to call for no comment. He strode to the door and opened it violently. "I'm off to bed." "Good-night, Godfrey," said Amy; her speech was smothered by the banging of the door. Poor sinner! Poor creature! Winnie Maxon might indeed plead that her theory had not been fairly tried; she had chosen the wrong man for the experiment. Here, then--save for the one formality on which Cyril Maxon now insisted--Winnie and the Ledstone family were at the parting of the ways. Their concurrence had been fortuitous--it was odd what people met one another at Shaylor's Patch, Stephen's appetite for humanity being so voracious--fortuitous, and ill-starred for all parties. They would not let her into their life; they would not rest till they had ejected her from her tainted connexion with it. Now they went out of hers. She remembered Godfrey as her great disappointment, her lost illusion, her blunder; Amy as it were with a friendly stretching-out of hands across a gulf impassable; the old folk with understanding and toleration--since they did no other than what they and she herself had been taught to regard as right. How could the old change their ideas of right? Their memory of her was far harder--naturally, perhaps. She was a raider, a brigand, a sadly disturbing and destructive invader. At last she had been driven out, but a track of desolation spread behind her retreating steps. Indeed there were spots where the herbage never grew again. The old folk forgave their son and lived to be proud of him once more. But Amy Ledstone had gauged her brother with an accuracy destructive of love; and within twelve months Mabel Thurseley married a stockbroker, an excellent fellow with a growing business. She never knew it, but she, at least, had cause for gratitude to Winnie Maxon. Godfrey returned to the obedience of the code. He was at home there. It was an air that he could breathe. The air of Shaylor's Patch was not--nor that of the Kensington studio. CHAPTER XVIII NOTHING SERIOUS