They had had some very turbulent scenes after the receipt of Mr. Urquhart’s first answer to his appeal. But as she had no income and only very limited savings, the sheer weight of economic necessity drove her into submission.

“You shall come down to me there when I’ve got a cottage,” he had flung out; and her agitated, handsome face, beneath its disordered mass of wavy, grey hair, had hardened itself under the impact of those words, as if he had taken up her most precious tea-set and dashed it into fragments at her feet.