“Very well,” she said faintly; for it had never occurred to her mind that Billy would be business-like with herself. She was used to people who, whether they had little or much, never stooped to _marchander_. Nobody had ever asked her to sign anything before, except Beaumont. “What do you want a signature for?” she said impatiently. “Can’t you forget you sold sausages?” She was looking at a brougham entering the courtyard, and not at the face of William Massarene; had she seen it, careless as she was, she might have been alarmed. He did not reply. As he put her in her carriage, she said, with anxiety: “You won’t tell anybody, will you?” William Massarene smiled grimly. “A man who sold sausages don’t come to be what I am by telling people what he does. Telling aren’t my habit, your Grace. Go straight home and wait for my messenger.” She was not used to remembering that her servants existed, but she was for once nervously conscious that the footman holding open the carriage-door heard these words, and must wonder at them. Oh, what a path of thorns she had entered upon, all because Providence, or the Ormes, or Ronnie, or whatever it was, had made life so difficult for her! She did go straight home, for she was conscious that she could not afford to miss Massarene’s messenger, who arrived punctually within the hour. She glanced feverishly at what he had sent her; a few lines printed in typewriting, so that his own handwriting did not appear; it seemed to her inoffensive; it authorized him to pay Beaumont the money for her, and get back the Otterbourne jewels; it further stated that when he should have completed the transaction, she would be his debtor for the sum of twelve thousand pounds sterling. This last clause she did not like. It alarmed her. For an instant a flash of good sense came across her mind and suggested to her that it would be a thousand times better to send for Ronald, even for any of the Ormes, and confess her position to one of them, than to put herself in the power of this man whom she had cheated, fooled, derided, ridiculed, and ordered about under the whip of her contemptuous words. Her relatives would save her from all exposure, at whatever painful cost to themselves. But her vanity and her stubbornness rejected the whispers of common sense. She detested Alberic Orme, and her feeling toward her brother was now little less virulent. “No!” she said to herself, “rather than confess myself and humiliate myself to either of them, I would die like Sarah Bernhardt in _Ixeile_!” But she forgot that there are worse things than death. After hesitating for ten minutes, and looking down with disgust on this paper, which looked so vulgar with its big type-written words, she decided with a reckless plunge into the unknown to sign it, and scrawled at the bottom of the lines the name which she wrote so seldom, Clare Otterbourne. With similar haste she thrust it into an envelope, sealed and sent it down to Massarene’s messenger.