"Well, really, father," began Roger. He had almost the air of resenting an imputation. "I don't mean that, Roger," said his father, in some distress. "I have every confidence in you; I believe you're all right. But--" "Has anybody seen the girl?" "Your mother says that--well, she says that Jane has seen her"--he brought in his daughter's name with a great distress--"and your aunt Lydia. She told your mother she was sure this girl was one to lend herself to--to--" "H'm," said Roger, in a non-committal way. He always subjected his aunt Lydia's opinions and impressions to a double discount. Meanwhile the odor of Truesdale's offence permeated the house as completely as the office. Rosy wondered what could be under way as she saw her mother and Jane seated on unaccustomed chairs in unaccustomed attitudes at unaccustomed times in unaccustomed rooms while they engaged in brief and infrequent interchanges of words, or co-operated for the production of long and eloquent silences. Jane, in fact, took the matter with the rigorous thoroughness of the complete theorist. She knew what it was to thread the mazes of a guilty conscience through half a dozen consecutive chapters; she knew how it felt to see the agonies of acknowledged sin transferred from chair to sofa and sofa to chair over the full extent of a large and well-equipped stage. How the leaves had fluttered! How the footlights had palpitated! How those people had suffered--and how she had suffered with them! How she was suffering now--and how much greater still must be the suffering of her erring and idolized brother! "If he had only been born with eyes like other people's!" she would moan. The actual mental state of Truesdale was, however, with Jane and with everybody else, a matter of pure conjecture. Very little, in fact, was seen of him. He breakfasted in his own room, as he had done ever since his return home. When the waitress had declined to enter the chamber with his coffee and rolls he had shrugged his shoulders and had directed to have them set on the floor outside. "_Quelle pudeur!_" he more than once observed, as her knock drew him towards the door. His lunch he took wherever he happened to be, and he dined at his French restaurant, or at a new Italian one where the _spaghetti_ was unapproachable, and where everything was cheap, plentiful, and informal. He returned home at his own discretion, and sometimes was heard working upon the obdurate old night-lock at midnight or later. Among the first of the family to have extended speech with him after the _exposé_ was his aunt Lydia. He had gone to her house to put the last few finishing touches to Bertie Patterson's portrait. To his aunt and to Bertie herself the portrait seemed already finished, but it is only the artist who knows when the end has really been reached. He asked his aunt for Bertie.