After five minutes' question and answer the Maxwells understood something of the situation. A servant of Ancoats's had been induced to disclose what he knew. There could be no question that the young fellow had gone off to Normandy, where he possessed a chalet close to Trouville, in the expectation that his fair lady would immediately join him there. She had not yet started. So much Fontenoy had already ascertained. But she had thrown up a recent engagement within the last few days, and before Ancoats's flight all Fontenoy's information had pointed to the likelihood of a _coup_ of some sort. As for the boy himself, he had left his mother at Castle Luton, three days before, on the pretext of a Scotch visit, and had instead taken the evening train to Paris, leaving a letter for his mother in which the influence of certain modern French novels of the psychological kind could perhaps be detected. "The call of the heart that drives me from you," wrote this incredible young man, "is something independent of myself. I wring my hands, but I follow where it leads. Love has its crimes,--that I admit,--but they are the only road to experience. And experience is all I care to live for! At any rate, I cannot accept the limits that you, mother, would impose upon me. Each of us must be content to recognise the other's personality. I have tried to reconcile you to an affection that must be content to be irregular. You repel it and me, under the influence of a bigotry in which I have ceased to believe. Suffer me, then, to act for myself in this respect. At any time that you like to call upon me I will be your dutiful son, so long as this matter is not mentioned between us. And let me implore you not to bring in third persons. They have already done mischief enough. Against them I should know how to protect myself." Maxwell returned the letter with a disgust he could hardly repress. Everything in it seemed to him as pinchbeck as the passion itself. Mrs. Allison took it with the same miserable look, which had in it, Marcella noticed, a certain strange sternness, as of some frail creature nerving itself to desperate things. "Now what shall we do?" said Maxwell, abruptly. Fontenoy moved forward. "I presume you still command the same persons you set in motion before? Can you get at them to-day?" Maxwell pondered. "Yes, the clergyman. The solicitor-brother is too far away. Your idea is to stop the girl from crossing?" "If it were still possible." Fontenoy dropped his voice, and his gesture induced Maxwell to follow him to the recess of a distant window. "The chief difficulty, perhaps," said Fontenoy, resuming, "concerns the lad himself. His mother, you will understand, cannot run any risk of being brought in contact with that woman. Nor is she physically fit for the voyage; but someone must go, if only to content her. There has been some wild talk of suicide, apparently--mere bombast, of course, like so much of it, but she has been alarmed."