So Prudence was not really defeated; though she was denied the satisfaction of knowing of her victory. Mr Graynor's subsequent generosity amazed the recipients no more than it amazed his eldest daughter and William, both of whom entirely disapproved of a munificence they deemed unnecessary and an encouragement in wrong-doing. But old Mr Graynor, furtively watching Prudence's golden head bowed over her clasped hands during the evening prayers, bowed in almost aggressive supplication, knew that he could not view it thus night and morning with a deaf ear turned to her appeal for succour for the friendless. The good-night kiss he gave her was, had she but known it, an answer to her prayer. Prudence retired to her room that night in a state of antagonism towards every one. She knew herself to be in disgrace. Agatha treated her with chill disapproval, and William ignored her. It was William's invariable rule to show his displeasure by treating the object thereof as though she did not exist. Prudence had been ignored before: she did not resent this; it amused her. William, when he attempted to be dignified, was altogether ridiculous. He maintained the dignified role throughout the next day, and laboured under the delusion that his pompous disregard was impressing his young sister with a proper sense of the enormity of her indiscretion; a belief which suffered a rude awakening at luncheon, when Prudence threw off her ill-humour and emerged from the large silences in which she had enwrapped herself to participate in the unenlivening talk carried on fragmentally by the various members of the family. She had watched brother William, who was a big man and corpulent of build, as she had watched him for many years, with an amazed dumb criticism in her look, unfasten with big deliberate fingers the two bottom buttons of his waistcoat and the top button of his trousers on sitting down to lunch for his greater convenience and the more thorough enjoyment of his food. He performed this office regularly, with the formal solemnity of an important rite. Prudence had come to regard it as William's grace before meals. She sometimes wondered what ran through the serious minds of the portly whiskered butler and the elderly parlourmaid, who ministered to the family needs under his direction, daily privileged to witness this public tribute of respect to the good things of life. Perhaps they regarded these manifestations of epicurean nicety, as Agatha regarded them, as becoming in William as a man and the prospective head of the house of Graynor. It was an inconsistency in Agatha's prudish nature to consider that men might do things which could not be tolerated in the other sex, and that whatever William did must of necessity be seemly. In Prudence's opinion, William's table manners were gluttonous and disgusting.