Drake put his hand to his head and his flushed face turned pale. But Lord Robert Ure stepped forward and said with a smile: “Well, and if you've lost your church so much the better. You are only an outsider in the ecclesiastical stud anyway. Who wants you? Your rector doesn't want you; your Bishop doesn't want you. Nobody wants you, if you ask me.” “I don't ask you, Lord Robert,” said John. “But there's somebody who does want me for all that. Shall I tell you who it is? It's the poor and helpless girl who has been deceived by the base and selfish man, and then left to fight the battle of life alone, or to die by suicide and go shuddering down to hell! That's who wants me, and, God willing, I mean to stand by her.” “Damme, sir, if you mean _me_, let me tell you what _you_ are,” said Lord Robert, screwing up his eyeglass. “You”--shaking his head right and left--“you are a man who takes delicately nurtured ladies out of sheltered homes and sends them into holes and hovels in search of abandoned women and their misbegotten children! Why”--turning to Drake-“what do you think has happened? My wife has fallen under this gentleman's influence--the poor simpleton!--and not one hour before I left my house she brought home a child which he had given her to adopt. Think of it!--out of the shambles of Soho, and God knows whose brat and bastard!” The words were hardly out of the man's mouth when John Storm had taken him by both shoulders. “God _does_ know,” he said, “and so do I! Shall I tell you whose child that is? Shall I? It's yours!” The man saw it coming and turned white as a ghost. “Yours! and your wife has taken up the burden of your sin and shame, for she's a good woman, and you are not fit to live on the earth she walks upon!” He left the two men speechless and went heavily down the stairs. Glory was waiting for him at the door. Her eyes were glistening after recent tears. “You will come no more?” she said. She could read him like a book. “I can see that you intend to come no more.” He did not deny it, and after a moment she opened the door and he passed out with a look of utter weariness. Then she went back to her room and flung herself on the bed, face downward. The men in the drawing-room were beginning to recover themselves. Lord Robert was humming a tune, Drake pacing to and fro. “Buying up his church to make a theatre for Glory was the very refinement of cruelty!” said Drake. “Good heavens! what possessed me?” “Original sin, dear boy!” said Lord Robert, with a curl of the lip. “Original? A bad plagiarism, you mean!” “Very well. If _I_ helped you to do it, shall I help you to give it up? Withdraw the prospectus and return the deposits on shares--the dear Archdeacon's among the rest.” Drake took up his hat and left the house. Lord Robert followed him presently. Then the drawing-room was empty, and the hollow sound of sobbing came down to it from the bedroom above. * * * * *