"Poppy St. John, you're not such a bad lot after all," she cried. "But oh! oh! oh! it's beastly rough to be so young, and have gone so far, and know so much. There, Willie Onions, don't snivel. It's both superfluous and unpleasant." She sat up and wiped her eyes. "Upon my honour, I think it was just as well I gave Phillimore the little revolver last night, to lock up in the plate chest," she said. CHAPTER XXIX It followed that Dominic Iglesias walked on across the common to Barnes Station and travelled Citywards, solaced and uplifted in spirit, yet greatly troubled by the idea of those newly arrived complications at which the Lady of the Windswept Dust had hinted. He did not permit himself to inquire what they might be. Doubtless she knew best--in her social sense he had great confidence--so he acquiesced in her silence about them. Still, as he reflected, it is not a little lamentable that even friendship, the angelic relation between man and woman, should be thus beset by perils from within and pitfalls without. Where lay the fault--with over-civilisation and the improper proprieties resultant therefrom? Or was it of far more ancient origin, resident in the very foundations of human nature? Woman, eternally the vehicle of man's being, eternally the inspiration of quite three-fifths of his action; yet, at the same time, the eternal stumbling block and danger to the highest of his moral and intellectual attainment! Mr. Iglesias smiled sadly and soberly to himself as the train rolled on into Waterloo. In any case she remains the most astonishing of God's creatures. It would be dull enough here on earth without her, though, to employ one of Poppy's characteristic phrases, "it's most infernally risky" with! But once inside the bank, such far-ranging meditations gave place to considerations immediate and concrete, Iglesias' whole mind being focussed to arrive at the facts of the case. And this was far from easy. For alarm stalked those usually self-secure and self-complacent rooms and glass and mahogany-walled corridors; men looking up from their desks as he, Iglesias, passed, with anxious faces, or moving with hushed footsteps as though someone lay sick to death within the house. In Sir Abel Barking's private room the drama reached its climax, panic sitting there sensibly enthroned. Her chill presence had visibly affected Sir Abel, causing the contrast between the overblown portrait upon the wall and the subject of it to be ironical to the point of cruelty. For Sir Abel was aged and shrivelled. His clothes hung loose upon him. Hardly could he rally his tongue to the enunciation of a single platitude even of the most obviously staring sort. The mighty, indeed, were fallen and the weapons of wealth-getting perished! Yet never had Iglesias felt so drawn in sympathy towards his late employer, for the spectre of possible ruin had made Sir Abel almost humble, almost human.