'Certainly. One thing is that I've ordered the cab to come round for you to-morrow in time for the early train.' 'Oh thank you, Everard. That is most thoughtful,' said Miss Entwhistle. 'I had already told Lucy, when she said you would be down to-morrow, that I would go home early.' 'That's one thing,' said Wemyss, taking no notice of this and going on carefully filling his pipe. 'The other is, that I don't wish you to see Lucy again, either to-night or before you go.' She looked at him in astonishment. 'But why not?' she asked. 'I'm not going to have her upset.' 'But my dear Everard, don't you see it will upset her much more if I don't say good-bye to her? It won't upset her at all if I do, because she knows I'm going to-morrow anyhow. Why, what will the child think?' 'Oblige me by allowing me to be the best judge of my own affairs.' 'Do you know I very much doubt if you're that,' said Miss Entwhistle earnestly, really moved by his inability to perceive consequences. Here he had got everything, everything to make him happy for the rest of his life,--the wife he loved adoring him, believing in him, blotting out by her mere marrying him every doubt as to the exact manner of Vera's death, and all he had to do was to be kind and ordinarily decent. And poor Everard--it was absurd of her to mind for him, but she did in fact at that moment mind for him, he seemed such a pathetic human being, blindly bent on ruining his own happiness--would spoil it all, inevitably smash it all sooner or later, if he wasn't able to see, wasn't able to understand.... Wemyss considered her remark so impertinent that he felt he would have been amply justified in requesting her to leave his house then and there, dark or no dark, train or no train. And so he would have done, if he hadn't happened to prefer a long rather than a short scene. 'I didn't ask you into my library to hear your opinion of my character,' he said, lighting his pipe. 'Well then,' said Miss Entwhistle, for there was too much at stake for her to allow herself either to be silenced or goaded, 'let me tell you a few things about Lucy's.' 'About Lucy's?' echoed Wemyss, amazed at such effrontery. 'About my wife's?'