I tried to keep my composure and my dignity, but I do not think I made a very fine figure. “Perhaps you will tell me,” I said quietly, “why you would refuse?” “I will tell you, but you won’t believe it. Money has nothing whatever to do with the matter. If Mr. Charles Holding were a pauper it would be all the same to me. If it were necessary, I could earn enough by this nonsense to keep us both.” “Well,” I said, “let us get on to something more interesting to me personally. Will you go on reading my hand, please?” She took her revenge by giving me a remarkably bad character. I took a hansom back to my rooms. “Take cabs everywhere when you are on my business,” Mr. Holding had said, though he seemed to prefer the ’bus himself. The bothering thing was that everybody was quite right. Mr. Holding had not exaggerated the bad points of Miss Norton’s character or the weakness of his son. But Miss Norton, dishonest money-grubber though she was, was perfectly sincere in her attachment to Charles Holding and was not to be influenced by money in that particular. The position was impossible of solution, and I decided that I had nothing to do but to call on Mr. Wentworth Holding on the following day and tell him so. I did not find the volume of poems awaiting me, and had not expected to find it, but there was a letter in my letter-box, which began by explaining why it had not arrived. Mr. Charles Holding had wished to have it put into a rather more suitable dress before it was presented to me. His letter went on to say that his meeting with me had been a revelation to him. It had compelled him to break off his engagement. It was not a time to hesitate. Whatever might be the attractions of the woman whom he had once meant to marry, she had not the high ideals, the quixotic spirit, the chivalrous devotion to all that is best which he had found in me. (Naturally, in talking to him I had humoured him a little in what I knew to be his bent. I even saw that I had made some impression on him, but this was too astounding.) The letter went on in rather enraptured terms to speak of the loveliness of my hair and to propose marriage to me. So the game had, of its own accord, dropped neatly into my hand. I refused Mr. Charles Holding in writing and immediately, and the same post transmitted to his father Charles Holding’s letter to me. The queer thing about the whole business, in the eyes of Mr. Wentworth Holding, was that Miss Sibyl Norton did not bring an action for breach of promise and scornfully refused the extremely handsome solatium which was suggested to her. But this did not surprise me. I had to show a certain amount of conscience myself, or I should have been made rich and unhappy, for Mr. Wentworth Holding’s gratitude was extreme. Even as it was I was enabled to feel myself out of all danger of such privations as I had recently suffered for the next year or two. VIII THE PEGASUS CAR