"My dear, you must allow me to judge in such matters," he would say in reply to mild remonstrance. And she deferred invariably to his judgment. When his son Godfrey and his daughter Sybil went their respective unfilial ways, it was enough for him to remark with cold eyes and slight, expressive gesture: "My dear, distressing as I know it is to you, their conduct has broken my heart and I forbid the mention of their names in this house." And the years passed and the perfect wife, though, in secret, she may have mourned like Rachel for her children, obeyed the very letter of her husband's law. There remains the third vital point, to which I must refer, if I am to make comprehensible the strange story of Sir Hildebrand Oates. It was money--or, more explicitly, the diabolical caprice of finance--that first shook Sir Hildebrand's faith, not, perhaps, in his own infallibility, but in the harmonious co-operation of Divine Providence and himself. For the four or five years preceding his wife's death his unerring instinct in financial affairs failed him. Speculations that promised indubitably the golden fruit of the Hesperides produced nothing but Dead Sea apples. He lost enormous sums of money. Irritability constricted both his brow and the old debonair "s" at the end of his signature. And when the County Guarantee Investment Society of which he was one of the original founders and directors called up unpaid balance on shares, and even then hovered on the verge of scandalous liquidation, Sir Hildebrand found himself racked with indignant anxiety. He was sitting at a paper-strewn table in his library, a decorous library, a gentleman's library, lined from floor to ceiling with bookcases filled with books that no gentleman's library should be without, and trying to solve the eternal problem why two and two should not make forty, when the butler entered announcing the doctor. "Ah, Thompson, glad to see you. What is it? Have you looked at Lady Oates? Been a bit queer for some days. These east winds. I hold them responsible for half the sickness of the county."