"Do your sons never-- ?" "Borrow money of their mother's visitors ?" Mr.Cashmore had taken him up, eager, evidently, quite to satisfy him; but the question was caught on the wing by Mrs.Brookenham herself, who had opened the door as her friend spoke and who quickly advanced with an echo of it.
"Lady Fanny's visitors ?"--and, though her eyes rather avoided than met his own, she seemed to cover her ladyship's husband with a vague but practised sympathy.

"What on earth are you saying to Harold about them ?" Thus it was that at the end of a few minutes Mr.Cashmore, on the sofa face to face with her, found his consciousness quite purged of its actual sense of his weakness and a new turn given to the idea of what, in one's very drawing-room, might go on behind one's back.

Harold had quickly vanished--had been tacitly disposed of, and Mrs.Brook's caller had moved even in the short space of time so far in another direction as to have drawn from her the little cold question: "'Presents'?
You don't mean money ?" He clearly felt the importance of expressing at least by his silence and his eye-glass what he meant.

"Her extravagance is beyond everything, and though there are bills enough, God knows, that do come in to me, I don't see how she pulls through unless there are others that go elsewhere." Mrs.Brookenham had given him his tea--her own she had placed on a small table near her; and she could now respond freely to the impulse felt, on this, of settling herself to something of real interest.

Except to Harold she was incapable of reproach, though there were of course shades in her resignation, and her daughter's report of her to Mr.Longdon as conscious of an absence of prejudice would have been justified for a spectator by the particular feeling that Mr.Cashmore's speech caused her to disclose.