Two or three days later Peggy Ryle brought him seven hundred pounds--because he had a safe. He said the money would be all right, and, when she had gone, stowed it away in the appointed receptacle. 'I keep my own there,' he had explained with an ironical smile, and had watched Peggy's carefully grave nod with an inward groan. CHAPTER IX BRUISES AND BALM Gossip in clubs and whispers from more secret circles had a way of reaching Mrs. Bonfill's ears. In the days that followed Mr. Liffey's public inquiry as to who Brown, Jones, and Robinson might be, care sat on her broad brow, and she received several important visitors. She was much troubled; it was the first time that there had been any unpleasantness with regard to one of her _protégés_. She felt it a slur on herself, and at first there was a hostility in her manner when Lord Glentorly spoke to her solemnly and Constantine Blair came to see her in a great flutter. But she was open to reason, a woman who would listen; she listened to them. Glentorly said that only his regard for her made him anxious to manage things quietly; Blair insisted more on the desirability of preventing anything like a scandal in the interests of the Government. There were rumours of a question in the House; Mr. Liffey's next article might even now be going to press. As to the fact there was little doubt, though the details were rather obscure. 'We are willing to leave him a bridge to retreat by, but retreat he must,' said Glentorly in a metaphor appropriate to his office. 'You're the only person who can approach both Liffey and Chance himself,' Constantine Blair represented to her. 'Does it mean his seat as well as his place?' she asked. 'If it's all kept quite quiet, we think nothing need be said about his seat,' Blair told her. There had been a difference of opinion on that question, but the less stringent moralists--or the more compassionate men--had carried their point. 'But once there's a question, or an exposure by Liffey--piff!' Blair blew Beaufort Chance to the relentless winds of heaven and the popular press. 'How did he come to be so foolish?' asked Mrs. Bonfill in useless, regretful wondering. 'You'll see Liffey? Nobody else can do anything with him, of course.' Mrs. Bonfill was an old friend of Liffey's; before she became motherly, when Liffey was a young man, and just establishing 'The Sentinel,' he had been an admirer of hers, and, in that blameless fashion about which Lady Blixworth was so flippant, she had reciprocated his liking; he was a pleasant, witty man, and they had always stretched out friendly hands across the gulf of political difference and social divergence. Liffey might do for Mrs. Bonfill what he would not for all the Estates of the Realm put together. 'I don't know how much you know or mean to say,' she began to Liffey, after cordial greetings. 'I know most of what there is to know, and I intend to say it all,' was his reply. 'How did you find out?'