She cried bitterly when it was irrevocably gone from her, but she felt that she could do no less than she had done; everybody took such dreadful advantage of poor Cocky’s death! “I shall treat the beast worse than ever,” she thought, as her sobs ceased gradually. “_Poignez vilain il vous oindra._” She had always beaten her _vilain_, and he had always submitted and cowed before her. She believed that he would do so as long as he lived. For this satirical, intelligent, and _fin-de-siècle_ creature, so quick to see and ridicule the follies and frailties of other creatures, did not in the very faintest degree understand the stuff of which William Massarene was made. Meantime, he was travelling toward Dover in the club train with the type-written paper safe in his inner breast-pocket. This errand pleased him. CHAPTER XXV. She had never known great anxiety before. She had had many worries, many troublesome moments, when she wanted money, but never such a weight of care as this. There had always been Cocky, on to whose shoulders she had been able to throw the blame of everything; and whose ingenuity had frequently (for a consideration) been of exceeding use to her. Now she was alone, without even the solace of having Harry to quarrel with and upbraid; and she had put herself and her secret and her signature into the hands of William Massarene. When she thought of it she felt as if a rush of ice-cold wind passed over her. It was Sunday. She went to a fashionable church and took Boo with her, looking a picture of childish loveliness in the crape frock, and her big black hat and her little black silk legs displayed far above the knee. “Mammy’s got a lot o’ bills to pay,” said Boo at the schoolroom dinner. “How d’you know?” asked Jack. “Cos she prayed such a deal,” said his sister. “She flopped down on her knees and I think she cried.” “There must be bills then,” said Jack seriously. “Or p’rhaps,” he added, “’twas only the church. Churches is always sorrowful.” “I don’t mind ’em,” said Boo. “There’s a lot o’ fun in people’s bonnets. I drawed two or three bonnets in my Prayer Book.” Their mother was, indeed, as Boo’s observant eyes had discovered, greatly disturbed and apprehensive. Throughout the service of the fashionable church she was absorbed in one thought: would Billy play her false? Would he, if he were true to her, be in time? Might not Beaumont be away from Paris for the Sunday, like so many Parisian tradesmen; he had a country house, she knew, at Compigne. What would happen to her if, when the men from Coutts’s came, and she had not the veritable diamonds to give? Exposure, complete and inevitable, must follow; when the jewels should be brought to valuation Hurstmanceaux and the Ormes must at least know the truth, and that seemed to her worse than to be pilloried, as people were of old, and stoned by the multitude.