“Perhaps that is it,” she murmured, letting Mrs. Peyton pass. * * * * * Mr. Orme’s returning carriage-wheels crossed Mrs. Peyton’s indignant flight; and an hour later Kate, in the bland candle-light of the dinner-hour, sat listening with practised fortitude to her father’s comments on the venison. She had wondered, as she awaited him in the drawing-room, if he would notice any change in her appearance. It seemed to her that the flagellation of her thoughts must have left visible traces. But Mr. Orme was not a man of subtle perceptions, save where his personal comfort was affected: though his egoism was clothed in the finest feelers, he did not suspect a similar surface in others. His daughter, as part of himself, came within the normal range of his solicitude; but she was an outlying region, a subject province; and Mr. Orme’s was a highly centralized polity. News of the painful incident--he often used Mrs. Peyton’s vocabulary--had reached him at his club, and to some extent disturbed the assimilation of a carefully ordered breakfast; but since then two days had passed, and it did not take Mr. Orme forty-eight hours to resign himself to the misfortunes of others. It was all very nasty, of course, and he wished to heaven it hadn’t happened to any one about to be connected with him; but he viewed it with the transient annoyance of a gentleman who has been splashed by the mud of a fatal runaway. Mr. Orme affected, under such circumstances, a bluff and hearty stoicism as remote as possible from Mrs. Peyton’s deprecating evasion of facts. It was a bad business; he was sorry Kate should have been mixed up with it; but she would be married soon now, and then she would see that life wasn’t exactly a Sunday-school story. Everybody was exposed to such disagreeable accidents: he remembered a case in their own family--oh, a distant cousin whom Kate wouldn’t have heard of--a poor fellow who had got entangled with just such a woman, and having (most properly) been sent packing by his father, had justified the latter’s course by promptly forging his name--a very nasty affair altogether; but luckily the scandal had been hushed up, the woman bought off, and the prodigal, after a season of probation, safely married to a nice girl with a good income, who was told by the family that the doctors recommended his settling in California. _Luckily the scandal was hushed up_: the phrase blazed out against the dark background of Kate’s misery. That was doubtless what most people felt--the words represented the consensus of respectable opinion. The best way of repairing a fault was to hide it: to tear up the floor and bury the victim at night. Above all, no coroner and no autopsy! She began to feel a strange interest in her distant cousin. “And his wife--did she know what he had done?” Mr. Orme stared. His moral pointed, he had returned to the contemplation of his own affairs.