The first time he came--I, if you please, was not allowed in the room--, Arthur would only stamp up and down, saying that Will--_our boy_--was a scamp and deserved horse-whipping. I begged for enlightenment, but at this period the wild man only claimed that Will had compromised his Molly and that there had been a promise of marriage... _Exactly_ what one would have expected! _Precisely_ what the girl was working for! _That_ was the moment to strike and to strike hard. "A promise of marriage? _Prove_ it!" I well knew that Will was too instinctively wise to write her letters--and they were in the same house!--or to give her presents. But I was informed that this was not a woman's province. So we dragged on, waiting for the blow... I quite dreaded the Morecambe post-mark. The girl wrote every other day, and every letter seemed to plunge poor Will into deeper gloom. The code would not let him make a confidant of his mother, but one day I saw one of these letters. It bore no name and opened with a flood of mingled passion and reproach; only when I saw "_Your heart-broken Molly_" at the end did I realize that the letter was intended for Will. She was begging him to come back and talking a great deal about his "promise"... I should have paid no attention if there had not been other things as well: talk about her "honour" and so on and so forth... Her "_soul_"... God would never forgive her--the egotism of the girl! ... Then I felt that, to get a _hold_ on Will, she had stopped at nothing... I wonder what you would have done in my place? ... Constant dripping wears away a stone, and this dazing attack would in time have broken down my boy's resistance. Suppose he had _let_ himself be blackmailed into marrying her! No money on either side--and Will's _parents_ could do nothing to help--, not a taste in common, two people drawn from different worlds... And this terrible, _blasting_ knowledge that he--and _she_--and _I_ had of the girl's character. Ruin, misery lay before them. And _nothing_ else... I had to save Will from any temptation to yield. If he could have fallen in love with some nice girl and forgotten the whole episode... If I could have sent him _right_ away... It was not easy, and you know better than any one that my hands have been fairly full. At one time I thought that South American woman was attracted by him, at another my niece Phyllida roused to interest. He was so much preoccupied that he seemed indifferent to women; one after another, they gave him up in despair. Then I bethought me of my second string and cast about in my mind for means to send him far away where he could forget this girl and her importunity...