The Captain, however, had had something to say to her. At first his mumbling into his moustache had not penetrated to her intelligence; she had only heard broken repetitions of "Dear old Mops--only for a week or two--knew you weren't without--meant to write, but dashed awkward thing to explain by letter, and was coming up in a week in any case--if she stuck fast he'd see what could be done----" "Eh?" Louie had said at last. "What's that, Chaff?" Chaff had repeated his mumblings. At the end of them she had gathered that the needy Captain had borrowed the quarter's allowance that had been entrusted to him for despatch. Louie had merely given a little preoccupied laugh and patted his hand. "All right, old boy; don't worry," she had said. A sample or two of her conversation with her mother must answer for the rest. For quite twenty minutes the Honourable Emily's head had been buried in the sofa-cushions, and the Trant coal-and-blanket charitable account had lain where it had fallen from her hand--across her cheek. "That's all," Louie had ended with hard composure. "Oh--oh----" the mother had moaned. "And as I say, I won't marry him." "Oh--you must--you must!" "Why? Because Uncle Augustus will say I must?" "Oh--you must!" "I'll go and see Uncle Augustus." "Oh, you mustn't--you mustn't!" Then, in an interlude, the reasons why everything must at all costs be kept from Lord Moone had been brokenly explained. In another interlude a few minutes later Louie had invented a fictitious name. "That conveys nothing to me," Mrs. Chaffinger had moaned. "What is he?" Louie had invented a station in life to fit the name. Her mother's face had disappeared behind the coal-and-blanket account again. "And this--this!--is your study of horticulture!" she had half faintingly wailed. "Yes. Yours was art, wasn't it?" Then Mrs. Chaffinger's querulous despair had shown a weak, vindictive gleam. Both pronouns had been a little emphasised as she had retorted: "I married your father!" It was only a flicker. Her head had gone into the cushions again. "That didn't last very long," the devilish girl had commented. "I married your father, I say--for your sake," had come from the cushions. "That's one of the differences. There are others. If you're thinking of wiring to Uncle Augustus I'll wait; if you're not, I'll go." Lord Moone had been wired for. He had wired back: "Impossible"; but a second wire had brought him over post-haste the next morning. The situation had been explained to him; the peer had walked away for a few moments; Louie had thought she had heard something about "our damnable women"; then, coming back, Lord Moone had abruptly convened a Committee of Ways and Means. Words like "Impossible ... once in a lifetime quite enough ... secrecy ... the Continent for a few months ... institution," had been used; and at one other alternative Louie's eyes had become hard and chill as ice.