“But this is where I think I re-establish myself,” Sir Timothy continued, the peculiar nature of his smile reasserting itself. “I did not do this for the sake of the neighbourhood. I did not do it from any sense of justice at all. I did it to provide for myself an enjoyable and delectable spectacle.” She smiled lazily. “That does rather let you out,” she admitted. “However, on the whole I am disappointed. I am afraid that you are not so bad as people think.” “People?” he repeated. “Francis Ledsam, for instance--my son-in-law in posse?” “Francis Ledsam is one of those few rather brilliant persons who have contrived to keep sane without becoming a prig,” she remarked. “You know why?” he reminded her. “Francis Ledsam has been a tremendous worker. It is work which keeps a man sane. Brilliancy without the capacity for work drives people to the madhouse.” “Where we are all going, I suppose,” she sighed. “Not you,” he answered. “You have just enough--I don't know what we moderns call it--soul, shall I say?--to keep you from the muddy ways.” She rose to her feet and leaned over the rails. Sir Timothy watched her thoughtfully. Her figure, notwithstanding its suggestions of delicate maturity, was still as slim as a young girl's. She was looking across the tree-tops towards an angry bank of clouds--long, pencil-like streaks of black on a purple background. Below, in the street, a taxi passed with grinding of brakes and noisy horn. The rail against which she leaned looked very flimsy. Sir Timothy stretched out his hand and held her arm. “My nerves are going with my old age,” he apologised. “That support seems too fragile.” She did not move. The touch of his fingers grew firmer. “We have entered upon an allegory,” she murmured. “You are preserving me from the depths.” He laughed harshly. “I!” he exclaimed, with a sudden touch of real and fierce bitterness which brought the light dancing into her eyes and a spot of colour to her cheeks. “I preserve you! Why, you can never hear my name without thinking of sin, of crime of some sort! Do you seriously expect me to ever preserve any one from anything?” “You haven't made any very violent attempts to corrupt me,” she reminded him. “Women don't enter much into my scheme of life,” he declared. “They played a great part once. It was a woman, I think, who first headed me off from the pastures of virtue.” “I know,” she said softly. “It was Margaret's mother.” His voice rang out like a pistol-shot. “How did you know that?” She turned away from the rail and threw herself back in her chair. His hand, however, she still kept in hers. “Uncle Joe was Minister at Rio, you know, the year it all happened,” she explained. “He told us the story years ago--how you came back from Europe and found things were not just as they should be between Margaret's mother and your partner, and how you killed your partner.”