“He would have looked rather foolish though, don’t you think, in the witness-box? You see,” added Meredith, with a laugh, “you might have spared this lady the trouble of last night.” “No, I don’t see that, sir,” said the policeman, promptly, “for if it didn’t answer one purpose, it did another. I’m very sorry to upset a lady, but she didn’t ought to bottle up a madman in a private house without no register, nor information to the commissioners, nor proper precautions. You know that, sir, just as well as me.” “How do you know that the lady has no license?” said Meredith, “or that her relation’s illness is not perfectly known? I think you will find a little difficulty in proving that: and then your superiors will be less pleased with the discovery. However, that’s my business, as Mrs. Harwood has confided it to me,” he added, with a laugh, which he could not restrain, at the man’s sudden look of alarm. “Don’t find fault with our friend; he was as civil as it was possible to be. Good-morning, and thank you,” said Mrs. Harwood, sitting, with her placid smile, watching her visitor, stiff and uneasy in his plain clothes, as he went away. When the door was shut upon him by Priscilla, who sniffed and tossed her head at the necessity of being thus civil to a man who had made so much commotion in the house--much as she and her fellow-servants had enjoyed the excitement--Mrs. Harwood’s countenance underwent a certain change. The smile faded; a look of age crept round the still beaming eyes. “If you will wheel me back to my room, Charley, we can talk,” she said. She could not but be conscious that he was thinking, asking himself why she could not walk, she who had found power to do so when she wanted it; but she betrayed no consciousness of this inevitable thought. She was very grave when he came round from the back of her chair and stood facing her in the firelight, which, on a dull London morning in the end of January, was the chief light in the room. Perhaps the dreary atmosphere threw a cloud upon her face. Her soft, half-caressing tone was gone. She had become hard and businesslike in a moment. “You want me to explain,” she said. “If you please. You know how much my father was involved: that craze about the money to be paid back means something. Even a mad repetition like that seems likely to have a foundation in fact. Is it true?” She bent her head a little, and for the moment cast down her eyes. “It was true.” “It _was_ true; then you have alienated----” “Wait a little. There were no such creditors as his own children, who would have been ruined had not I saved them. They know nothing of any question of money. They knew nothing of----” “Of his existence at all--till last night?”