Rather to Tony\'s surprise, she and her father drove in silence. As a matter of fact, Sir Gambier was baffled by his younger daughter. Awdrey he could have dealt with easily enough—he was used to Awdrey\'s scrapes. But Tony had always been more or less impersonal—a vague some one for whom one paid school-bills, who came home for the holidays, made herself pretty scarce, and then went back to school again, to write prim letters home every Sunday. It was a new idea that this half-realised being should suddenly show herself possessed of a personality in the form of a scrape—and such a scrape too! Furlonger! He grunted with fury, but—as would never have been the case if he had had Awdrey to deal with—he said nothing.

Once, however, he looked sideways, and noticed how Tony was sitting. Her back was bent, and her arms rested on her knees, the hands clenched between them; her chin was a little thrust forward into the darkness through which they rushed.

At last they reached Shovelstrode. The moon was high above the pines, and they seemed to be waving in waters of silver. The house-front shimmered in the white light, as the motor pulsed up to it. Tony climbed down, and stood stiffly on the step.

[Pg 123]

"You\'d better go to your room," said Sir Gambier in muddled rage. "I—I expect your mother will want to speak to you."

"Very well," said Tony.

She walked quickly upstairs, went into her room, and sat down on the bed. A square of moonlight lay on the floor, and the moving shadows curtsied across it. They and the pines outside seemed to be nodding to her grotesquely under the moon—they seemed to be mocking her for her great illusion lost.

"Furlonger...." she repeated to herself. "Furlonger...."

A sick quake of rage was in her heart. Her feelings were still confused, but definite grievances stood out of the jumble. This man whom she had thought so much of—in school-girl language "had a rave on"—had deceived her, told her lies, acted them, and won by them ... well, the horrible thing was that she did not really know how much or how little he had won.

But worse still was the realisation that he had made her do unconsciously something she thought wrong. Like most girls of her age she had a cast-iron code of morals. When a school-girl sets out to be moral, there is no professor of ethics or minister of religion that can touch her—her morality has behind it all the enormous force of inexperience, it can neither stretch nor bend, and it breaks only at the risk of her whole spiritual life.

She was horrified to think she had given her friendship to a scoundrel, even though she had[Pg 124] done it ignorantly. It was like befriending a girl who cheated or told tales. For her his crime had no attraction or interest—it was just a hideous blot and defilement. She had often heard the Wickham Rubber scandal discussed, and now store-housed memories came to appal her. Hundreds of people, most of them already poor, had been ruined and plunged into misery—widows with growing families, elderly spinsters with hard-gathered savings, poor old men with the terror of the workhouse closing on them with age, had trusted this Furlonger once and execrated him now. He was like that dreadful man in the Psalms, who laid wait to murder the innocent—"he doth ravish the poor when he getteth him into his den." And she had allowed this man to be her friend, she had confided her secrets to him, she had dreamed of him and prayed to meet him.... Tony\'s teeth and hands clenched, and her eyes grew miserable and hard.

Then she began to wonder what had made Furlonger want her friendship. What had he and she in common? Somehow she could not for a moment believe that he had sought her out from unworthy motives. The fact would always remain that he had wanted her friendship, that he had not given her a word which was not kind or courteous, that he had come to her rescue in her hour of need ... the tears rushed to her eyes; that was the bitterest part of all—her memories of his kindliness and knight-errantry—pictures of East Grinstead, Swites Wood, Brambletye, Lingfield Park, and that little old cottage by Goatsluck Farm. [Pg 125]Suddenly she found herself making up her mind not to join her father and mother in condemning him. She would take his part in the scene which she knew was at hand.

She soon heard her father calling her, and went down. He pointed into her mother\'s boudoir, a small room with French windows opening on the lawn. It was full of vague furniture and vague mixed colours, and it seemed to Tony as if she were swimming through it up to the couch where her mother lay. It never struck her as strange that her father should seem unable to deal with her himself, but should hand her over to this weak invalid, who lay with closed eyes in the lamplight.

"Now, I don\'t want a scene," she said, without opening them.

"Tony won\'t make a scene," said Sir Gambier; "she\'s a deep one."

"Oh, Antoinette," sighed Lady Strife—"I never was so surprised in my life as when I heard of your deceit."

"My deceit!" said Tony quickly.

"Yes—going about with a man like Furlonger, and hiding it from your father and mother—don\'t you call that deceit?"

"I didn\'t know he was Furlonger."

"But you knew it was wrong to have a secret friendship with any man whatsoever. I never heard of such a thing in a young girl of your age and position—it\'s what housemaids do, and not nice housemaids at that."

"Mother," cried Tony, her voice shaking unexpectedly, "it was an adventure."

[Pg 126]

"A what!" shouted Sir Gambier.

His wife winced.

"Don\'t startle me, dear. And let the child say what she likes—I\'m glad she has a theory to explain her actions."

Strife muttered something unintelligible, but made no more interruptions.

"Now tell me, Antoinette," said her mother, "exactly how long you have known this man—and what have you and he been doing together?"

"Mother, I can\'t explain. I know it sounds deceitful and caddish and all that, but it—it wasn\'t. It was an adventure, just as I\'ve said. I\'ve done something."

The invalid smiled distantly.

"When you are older you will realise the superiority of thought to action. The soul is built of thoughts—actions harden and coarsen it. But we won\'t discuss that now. Tell me how you and he got to know each other."

"He was the man who was so splendid at East Grinstead station. He told me his name was Smith, because, of course, he didn\'t want me to know who he really was. Then I met him one morning when I was giving Prince a run in Swites Wood, and then another time when I\'d punctured my bicycle, and...."

"Go on, Antoinette."

"Oh, you\'ll never understand. But he was so different from any one else I\'d met. He spoke so differently—about such different things——"

"I can imagine that."

"But he wasn\'t horrid, mother—I swear he[Pg 127] wasn\'t. He was very quiet, and interesting, and rather unhappy—and I liked him—I liked him awfully."

Lady Strife did not speak, but her eyes were wide open. As for Sir Gambier, an unheard-of thing happened—he became sarcastic.

"Oh, you liked him, did you? Found him a nice-mannered young fellow?—well-informed? I didn\'t know you were interested in the inner life of his Majesty\'s prisons."

"Father!" cried Tony sharply.

"Now, listen to me, dear," said her mother; "you are very young, and consequently very inexperienced. A grown-up person would at once have realised that this man\'s friendship for you could not be disinterested."

"What do you mean?"

"I mean that he\'s not the type of man who would naturally want to be the friend of a young and innocent girl like you. He must have had some ulterior motive in seeking your friendship. You have possibly seen no signs of that so far, but it would have been plain enough later."

"I don\'t believe it."

"Hush, dear. Your impertinence disconcerts me. I am trying to view the matter from the standpoint of pure thought, and how am I to do that if you keep on rudely interrupting me and dragging me down into the surge of human annoyance? You must take it from those older and more experienced than yourself that this man\'s motives in seeking your friendship could not have been disinterested. Besides, even suppose for the[Pg 128] sake of argument that they were, don\'t you think you\'ve been acting most disloyally to your father and me in associating with a man you know we disapprove of?"

"Mother, I\'ve told you I\'d no idea who he really was. Why, I thought the other ............