Fledgeby’s hands. Let me tell you that, for your guidance. The information may be of use to you, if only to prevent your credulity, in judging another man’s truthfulness by your own, from being imposed upon.”

“Impossible!” cries Twemlow, standing aghast. “How do you know it?”

“I scarcely know how I know it. The whole train of circumstances seemed to take fire at once, and show it to me.”

“Oh! Then you have no proof.”

“It is very strange,” says Mrs. Lammle, coldly and boldly, and with some disdain, “how like men are to one another in some things, though their characters are as different as can be! No two men can have less affinity between them, one would say, than Mr. Twemlow and my husband. Yet my husband replies to me ‘You have no proof,’ and Mr. Twemlow replies to me with the very same words!”

“But why, madam?” Twemlow ventures gently to argue. “Consider why the very same words? Because they state the fact. Because you have no proof.”

“Men are very wise in their way,” quoth Mrs. Lammle, glancing haughtily at the Snigsworth portrait, and shaking out her dress before departing; “but they have wisdom to learn. My husband, who is not over- confiding, ingenuous, or inexperienced, sees this plain thing no more than Mr. Twemlow does — because there is no proof! Yet I believe five women out of six, in my place, would see it as clearly as I do. However, I will never rest (if only in remembrance of Mr. Fledgeby’s having kissed my hand) until my husband does see it. And you will do well for yourself to see it from this time forth, Mr. Twemlow, though I can give you no proof.”

As she moves towards the door, Mr. Twemlow, attending on her, expresses his soothing hope that the condition of Mr. Lammle’s affairs is not irretrievable.

“I don’t know,” Mrs. Lammle answers, stopping, and sketching out the pattern of the paper on the wall with the point of her parasol; “it depends. There may be an opening for him dawning now, or there may be none. We shall soon find out. If none, we are bankrupt here, and must go abroad, I suppose.”

Mr. Twemlow, in his good-natured desire to make the best of it, remarks that there are pleasant lives abroad.

“Yes,” returns Mrs. Lammle, still sketching on the wall; “but I doubt whether billiard-playing, card-playing, and so forth, for the means to live under suspicion at a dirty table-d’hôte, is one of them.”

It is much for Mr. Lammle, Twemlow politely intimates (though greatly shocked), to have one always beside him who is attached to him in all his fortunes, and whose restraining influence will prevent him from courses that would be discreditable and ruinous. As he says it, Mrs. Lammle leaves off sketching, and looks at him.

“Restraining influence, Mr. Twemlow? We must eat and drink, and dress, and have a roof over our heads. Always beside him and attached in all his fortunes? Not much to boast of in that; what can a woman at my age do? My husband and I deceived one another when we married; we must bear the consequences of the deception — that is to say, bear one another, and bear the burden of scheming together for to-day’s dinner and to-morrow’s breakfast — till death divorces us.”

With those words, she walks out into Duke Street, Saint James’s. Mr. Twemlow returning to his sofa, lays down his aching head on its slippery little horsehair bolster, with a strong internal conviction that a painful interview is not the kind of thing to be taken after the dinner pills which are so highly salutary in connexion with the pleasures of the table.