“And did he take the money from you?” asked Connie aghast.

“Why, of course, my Lady! Debt of honour!”

Connie expostulated roundly, and was angry with both of them. The upshot was, Sir Clifford raised Mrs. Bolton’s wages a hundred a year, and she could gamble on that. Meanwhile it seemed to Connie, Clifford was really going deader.

She told him at length she was leaving on the seventeenth.

“Seventeenth!” he said. “And when will you be back?”

“By the twentieth of July at the latest.”

“Yes! the twentieth of July.”

Strangely and blankly he looked at her, with the vagueness of a child, but with the queer blank cunning of an old man.