That unfortunate meeting on the stairs made a very deep impression upon Maude Tredethlyn. She had never before encountered drunkenness; and it was one of those sins which seemed to her to belong to a region of outer darkness, in which decent people had no place. Her father had always been as sober as an anchorite; her father’s guests were gentlemen. She had heard, now and then, in the course of her life at the Cedars, of a drunken gardener dismissed with ignominy from the gardens--a drunken groom degraded from has rank in the stables. But Francis, her husband,--that _he_ should be thick of speech and unsteady of foot under the influence of strong drink!--it seemed almost too horrible for belief. She lay awake in the morning sunlight, thinking of Francis Tredethlyn’s misdemeanour. “And just as I fancied that I was beginning to love him!” she thought, regretfully. Would they meet at breakfast? she wondered. And if they did meet, what would Francis say to her? A sickly dread of that meeting took possession of her mind. If he apologized, how was she to answer him? Would it be possible for her to conceal her disgust? “Let me remember his goodness to my father,” she murmured. “Oh, can I ever be so base as to forget that?” The possible meeting at the breakfast-table was very easily avoided. Mrs. Tredethlyn had a headache, and took her strong green tea and dry toast in the pretty little boudoir, with the pink draperies and Parian statuettes, the satin-wood cabinets and bookcases, the Persian carpets and polar-bear-skin rugs, the marqueterie _jardinières_, and toy Swiss-cottage birdcages, selected by Harcourt Lowther. It was rather an enervating little boudoir, eminently adapted for the perusal of French novels, and the neglect of all the duties of life. Mrs. Tredethlyn breakfasted in this room; so there was no uncomfortable meeting between the husband and wife. Francis left the house before noon, in order to keep an appointment with his friend Mr. Lowther. They were going together to the Doncaster spring meeting, where Bohemianism would be rampant, and were to be away for some days. Poor Francis ran into the library, while his friend waited for him, and scribbled a hasty note to his wife, full of penitence and self-humiliation. He gave the missive to Mrs. Tredethlyn’s maid at the foot of the stairs, while Harcourt was standing in a little room opening out of the hall, arranging the strap of a race-glass across his light overcoat. Mr. Tredethlyn went back to the library in search of a railway rug which he had flung off his arm when he sat down to write the letter; and during his brief absence there was a flutter of silk in the hall, and a little conference between Mr. Lowther and the Abigail. Half an hour afterwards, when the two men were walking up and down the platform at the King’s Cross station, with cigars in their mouths, Mr. Lowther handed his friend the identical letter which Francis had entrusted to his wife’s maid.