“There are two more versions of the story I must hear before I can understand all its bearings. You understand, Colonel, that where a woman is concerned, the man’s view of the question is not enough to judge by. I must hear Sundran and Madame di Valdestillas.” “Hear every hag in ---- if you please,” said the Colonel irritably. “Only I warn you it is foolish behaviour rattling the bones of decently buried skeletons.” “If it were only an old scandal I shouldn’t care,” said George with a deepening of the collected gravity he had shown all through the conversation. “But you must see, Colonel, that the whole course of our lives depends on the following into its corners of this wretched story. My wife and I, starting quietly in a humdrum way, a pair of very poor town-mice, suddenly find ourselves in a Tom Tiddler’s ground, and are bidden not to trouble ourselves how we came there, or why we are inundated with invitations, and our eccentricities treated as delightful innovations, when a few weeks before they would have been ‘bad style.’ It isn’t in human nature not to ask why.” “Why can’t you take my explanation and be satisfied?” “Because it goes such a very little way. It explains why we receive one thousand a year, when we are getting and spending five thousand; why you treat Nouna with secret liberality, but not why you show her open dislike. Above all it explains your relation with Madame di Valdestillas, but not your objection to my seeing her.” The Colonel, who had been fidgeting uneasily with his cane, grew suddenly still. “If you see her,” he said slowly after a pause, “she’ll consider the contract broken, and she’ll ruin every man jack of us; and you and your wife may say good-bye to domestic felicity as well as I and mine. Be warned, George; you’d better leave things as they are, for both our sakes.” “I can’t,” said Lauriston, who felt that a chill had come upon spirits and senses at the Colonel’s homely but forcible warning. “No man can blunder on like this in the dark and be satisfied. Whatever I find out, it sha’n’t hurt you more than I can help, Colonel.” He added something about Nouna’s waiting for him to take her out, anxious to get away. But the Colonel, who seemed loth to part with him, turned back when they had shaken hands at his initiative, and said:-- “Madame di Valdestillas is abroad, is she not?” “So I have been told. But in the mesh of lies they have entangled me with, I shouldn’t like to answer for the truth of it.” “Look here, if you will leave this to me, I’ll write to her lawyers and arrange a meeting for you and me at the same time. And we’ll talk to her together.” “Thanks, Colonel. But I can’t wait for that; and I’m not going to trust to the lawyers this time.” “But if she is abroad?” “If!”