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'But you aren't,' Macmaster said with real anguish, 'going to let Sylvia behave like that.'

'I don't know,' Tietjens said. 'How am I to stop it? Mind you, I think Conder was quite right. Such calamities are the will of God. A gentleman accepts them. If the woman won't divorce, he must accept them, and it gets talked about. You seem to have made it all right this time. You and, I suppose, Mrs Satterthwaite between you. But you won't be always there. Or I might come across another woman.'

Macmaster said:

'Ah!' and after a moment:

'What then?'

Tietjens said:

'God knows...There's that poor little beggar to be considered. Marchant says he's beginning to talk broad Yorkshire already.'

Macmaster said:

'If it wasn't for that...That would be a solution.'

Tietjens said: 'Ah!'

When he paid the cabman, in front of a grey cement portal with a gabled arch, reaching up, he said:

'You've been giving the mare less liquorice in her mash. I told you she'd go better.'

The cabman, with a scarlet, varnished face, a shiny hat, a drab box-cloth coat and a gardenia in his buttonhole, said: