Bunny nodded, and dabbed his eyes, too shocked and miserable even to care that he had been seen crying. Hal sat down on the edge of the bed, hands interlocked across his knees, his broad shoulders bent forward. “That’s just it”--after a long pause. “It puts the wind up me a bit to realize that if I could freeze on to that quid--I could do almost anything. I could do anything,” he repeated, cutting out the “almost.” “And the fact that I wasn’t really that sort of chap--that of course I was always frightfully down on lying and cheating and--and thieving--the sort of things a decent fellow doesn’t do--it wouldn’t stop me. Like it hasn’t stopped me this time. It’s awful not to be certain that one has any sort of a self that one can rely on.” “Murder?” whispered Bunny, his imagination, always on a loose rein, beginning now to gallop. “Could it just as easily have been murder, you mean? And is that how criminals do it--in the same way as you....” “I suppose so.” “Then--nobody’s safe--not even ordinary people?” They both felt horror very close to them ... stirring their hair with its breath. “And--feeling so oddly bucked just before----” “They might have meant that. Like premonition upside down.” Bunny had a swift glimpse into the neat ironies in life’s working-out. But when Hal gruffly bade him explain himself, he pretended, out of an odd deference to his senior’s less flexible speech and fancy, that he could not. This was not the time to swank any superiority over Hal. You only did that in the days when he was indubitably the Magnificent, and in self-defence you paraded any small advantages that were yours. The significance of any need for chivalry smote Bunny with a fresh pang ... he fought back a great lump which swelled up in his throat. “Need any one know?” “The money’s got to go back somehow, hasn’t it?” “Aunt Lavvy----” “I’ve just come from Aunt Lavvy.” “Oh--good!” Bunny sighed, faintly relieved. “No.” Hal contradicted him with a touch of grimness. “Not a bit of good. She’s as hard as nails.” “_Aunt Lavvy?_” And Hal suddenly made a brilliant, if embittering, discovery: “Scratch an Aunt Lavvy,” he flung into the face of Bunny’s incredulity, “and you find a paying guest underneath.” [VII] GRACE WATSON knocked at the door of the attic Miss Roberts shared with Lottie: “Am I disturbing you? I looked into the nursery on my way up, and saw Lottie there with my babies, so I thought you might be alone.” The governess beamed a welcome with her teeth, and hustled Grace out of two consecutive chairs into a third which was dubitably more comfortable. “And I thought it would be a great help to talk over this terrible affair quietly with some one sensible,” continued Grace, who believed too firmly in the wonders achieved by quiet “talking-over.” “Oh dear!” Miss Roberts began, tentatively, to be shocked and grieved.