Mr Danton composed his chin in his collar, and deliberately turned himself towards his companion. His small eyes wandered, and instantaneously met and rested on those of Mrs Lawford. ‘Arthur thought he would prefer to come down and see you himself.’ ‘You take such formidable risks, Lawford,’ said Mr Bethany in a dry, difficult voice. ‘Am I really to believe,’ Danton began huskily. ‘I am sure, Bethany, you will—My dear Mrs Lawford!’ said he, stirring vaguely, glancing restlessly. ‘It was not my wish, Vicar, to come at all,’ said a voice from the doorway. ‘To tell you the truth, I am too tired to care a jot either way. And’—he lifted a long arm—‘I must positively refuse to produce the least, the remotest proof that I am not, so far as I am personally aware, even the Man in the Moon. Danton at heart was always an incorrigible sceptic. Aren’t you, T. D.? You pride your dear old brawn on it in secret?’ ‘I really—’ began Danton in a rich still voice. ‘Oh, but you know you are,’ drawled on the slightly hesitating long-drawn syllables; ‘it’s your parochial métier_. Firm, unctuous, subtle, scepticism; and to that end your body flourishes. You were born fat; you became fat; and fat, my dear Danton, has been deliberately thrust on you—in layers! Lampreys! You’ll perish of surfeit some day, of sheer Dantonism. And fat, postmortem, Danton. Oh, what a basting’s there!’ Mr Bethany, with a convulsive effort, woke. He turned swiftly on Mrs Lawford. ‘Why, why, could you not have seen?’ he cried. ‘It’s no good, Vicar. She’s all sheer Laodicean. Blow hot, blow cold. North, south, east, west—to have a weathercock for a wife is to marry the wind. There’s nothing to be got from poor Sheila but...’ ‘Lawford!’ the little man’s voice was as sharp as the crack of a whip; ‘I forbid it. Do you hear me? I forbid it. Some self-command; my dear good fellow, remember, remember it’s only the will, the will that keeps us breathing.’ Lawford peered as if out of a gathering dusk, that thickened and flickered with shadows before his eyes. ‘What’s he mean, then,’ he muttered huskily, ‘coming here with his black, still carcase—peeping, peeping—what’s he mean, I say?’ There was a moment’s silence. Then with lifted brows and wide eyes that to every one of his three witnesses left an indelible memory of clear and wolfish light within their glassy pupils, he turned heavily, and climbed back to his solitude. ‘I suppose,’ began Danton, with an obvious effort to disentangle himself from the humiliation of the moment, ‘I suppose he was—wandering?’ ‘Bless me, yes,’ said Mr Bethany cordially—‘fever. We all know what that means.’ ‘Yes,’ said Danton, taking refuge in Mrs Lawford’s white and intent gaze. ‘Just think, think, Danton—the awful, incessant strain of such an ordeal. Think for an instant what such a thing _means_!’ Danton inserted a plump, white finger between collar and chin. ‘Oh yes. But—eh?—needlessly abusive? I never _said_ I disbelieved him.’