Hearing which sentence Mr. Swanland stared. He had never before seen Mortomley roused. He did not know each man has his weak point, and that Mortomley's pregnable spot lay close to the colours himself had begotten.

Homewood, his business, his house, his furniture, his horses, his carriages, his plant, his connection, Mortomley had yielded without a struggle, but his mental children he could not so relinquish, nor would he. Upon that point Mortomley, generally pliable, was firm, and consequently, after an amount of bickering only a degree less unpleasant to the trustee than to the bankrupt, Mortomley shook the dust of Salisbury House off his feet, declaring his intention of never entering it again.

As he passed down the staircase he met Mr. Asherill.

"Ah! Mr. Mortomley, and _how_ are _you_?" cried that gentleman with effusion. "Getting on pretty well, eh? Had your discharge, of course?

No. Why they ought to have given it to you long ago. So glad to see you looking so well. _Good_-bye, God bless you."

Never in his life had Mortomley felt more tempted to do anything than he did at that moment to pitch the old hypocrite downstairs.

"My discharge!" he exclaimed, when he was recounting the incidents of the day to his wife, "and the vagabond knew it was never intended I should have it. Looking well! why, just as I was going out into the street, Gibbons ran up against me.

"'What's the matter, Mortomley?' he said, 'you look like a ghost,' and he made me go back into the passage, and sent for some brandy, and he hailed a cab, and remarking, 'Perhaps you have not got much money loose about you, take this, and you can pay me when you are next in town, six months hence will do,' he forced his purse into my hand. I used to think hardly of Gibbons, but he is not a bad fellow as times go."

"You will never go to Salisbury House again, Archie?" she asked.

"Never, Dolly. Never, that I declare most positively."

"Cannot we go into the country, then, for a time?" she suggested.

"I should like to go anywhere away from London," he answered.

After a short time she led the conversation back to his interview with Mr. Swanland.

"I cannot imagine," she said, "how it happens that amongst the papers that went from Homewood they never happened to find any of your formulae."

"It would have puzzled them to do that," he answered, opening his tired eyes and looking at her with an expression she could not exactly understand.

"You must have had formulae," she persisted.

"Well, yes," he agreed; "perhaps you think they extended to eight volumes of manuscript bound in morocco. You poor little woman, it would be a bad thing for colour-makers if trade secrets were not more easily carried than all that comes to. Look," and taking out his pocket-book he handed her a couple of sheets of note-paper, "every receipt of mine worth having is written down there; they are all clear enough to me, though if I lost them to-morrow they would prove Greek to any other person."

"Could you explain them to me?" she asked.

"Not now, dear," he answered, "I feel very tired; I think I could go to sleep." Which utterance proved the commencement of another relapse; but Dolly was not dismayed, on the contrary she wrote the very next day to Lang and said,

"Whenever Mr. Mortomley is well enough to leave town we shall go to a cottage I have taken in Hertfordshire. _All the special colours can now be made without difficulty._ There is a barn near the cottage which may be rented."

That was sufficient for Lang. Within a week he had got leave of absence, and was on his way back to England. He saw the barn, he measured up its size, he made out a list of the articles necessary, and received sufficient money from Mrs. Mortomley to pay for them.

He tried to get a fresh order from the firm that had wanted the new blue, but Mr. Miller shook his head.

"We have had enough of dealing with Mr. Mortomley at second-hand," he said, "when he is in a position to come to us and enter into an arrangement personally, possibly we may be able to do business." Which was just--though he did not know it--as if he had said, "When Mr.

Mortomley has been to the moon and comes back again, we will resume negotiations with him."

"However, there is a trade to be done, ma'am," said Lang confidently, "and when I have finished my job, which will be in six weeks, I am thankful to say, for I am sick of the place and of those outlandish foreigners who can talk nothing but gibberish, we will do it."

"We shall have to be content with small beginnings though," suggested Mrs. Mortomley, whose views were indeed of the most modest description.

"And then at the end of a twelvemonth we shall not be ashamed to count our profits," agreed Lang, and he left assuring Dolly that his stay among the "mounseers," as he styled all persons who had not been privileged to first see the light in Great Britain, would be short as he could make it.

He had set his heart upon being back in time to attend the final sale at Homewood; but if he was quick Mr. Swanland proved quicker, and before his return another act in the liquidation play was finished, and all the vats, coppers, mills, boilers, and other paraphernalia in which Mortomley's soul had once rejoiced were scattered to the four winds of Heaven.

When Dolly saw the preliminary advertisements announcing that the extensive and valuable plant of a colour-maker would shortly be offered for sale, she lowered her flag so far as to write to Mr. Dean asking him to buy Black Bess.

She requested this, she said, as a special favour,--she would be more than grateful if he could give the pretty creature a good home. To which Mr. Dean indited a long and pompous reply. He stated that his stables only held so many horses, that each stall had its occupant, that he had long given up riding, and that Black Bess would not be a match for any carriage horse of the height he habitually purchased; he remarked that she was too light even for his single brougham, and that it would be a pity to keep such an animal merely to run to and from the station in a dog-cart. Finally, Mr. Dean believed excessive affection for any dumb animal to be a mistake; Providence had given them for the use of man, and if when a horse ceased to be of service to a person in a superior rank of life, it were retained in idleness from any feeling of sentiment, what, asked Mr. Dean, would those in an inferior station do for animals? This was not very _apropos_ of Black Bess--at that stage of her existence, at all events,--but it was _apropos_ of the fact that Mr.

Dean had the day before sold a horse which for fifteen years had served him faithfully, and got its knees cut through the carelessness of a spruce young groom,--sold this creature to which he might well have given the run of the meadows in summer and the straw-yards in winter, for six pounds.

Antonia, on whom all the traditions of Homewood had not been spent in vain, remonstrated with her husband on "the cruelty of sending the old thing away," but her words produced no effect on Mr. Dean.

"Archie Mortomley never would sell a horse that had been long about Homewood," she said.

"I dare say not, my dear," answered Mr. Dean; "but then you see it is attention to these small details that has enabled me to keep Elm Park.

It was the want of that attention which drove Mr. Mortomley out of Homewood."

Upon the top of this came Mrs. Mortomley's letter. Mr. Dean devoted a whole morning to answering that letter, and then insisted upon reading his effusion aloud to his wife.

"I think I have put that very clearly," he said when he had quite finished; "I hope Mrs. Mortomley will lay what I have expressed to heart."

"If you knew anything of Mrs. Mortomley you would never send her that epistle," retorted Antonia. "She will read it to her friends, she will mimic your tone, your accent, your manner; she will borrow a pair of eyeglasses, and let them drop off her nose in the middle of each sentence; and, in a word, she will make the written wisdom of Mr. Dean of Elm Park as thoroughly ridiculous as I have often heard her make your spoken remarks."

Mr. Dean reddened, but answered with considerable presence of mind that the possession of such a wife had no doubt hastened Mortomley's ruin as much as his fatal inattention to small details.

"Perhaps so," agreed Mrs. Dean, "but still she will help him to bear being ruined with equanimity. Dolly never was dull, and, I declare, when one comes to realize how fearfully dull almost every person is, I feel as if she must, by that one virtue, have condoned all the rest of her sins."

Which was really a very hard phrase for Mr. Dean to hear proceed from the lips of the woman he had honoured so far as to make mistress of Elm Park.

But Mrs. Dean was mistaken about Dolly, and Mr. Dean need have felt no fear that ever again she would make him the butt at which to aim the shafts of ridicule. For her the champagne of mirth had ceased to sparkle; for her there was no fun in pompous respectability; for her the glittering sparkle of wit had come to be but as a flare of light to one with a maddening headache.

The cakes and ale of life had been for her, but they were for her no more. Dolly, my Dolly, you were right when you said that last look on the dead face of Homewood killed you,--for the Dolly of an earlier time, so bright, so gracious, so happy, so young-looking, as girl, as wife, as mother, you were from thenceforth never beheld by human being.

CHAPTER VI.

SAUVE QUI PEUT.

When Mr. Swanland had sold off all the plant of Homewood, and got the best prices he could for Mortomley's carts and horses, Black Bess included, who had for months been so badly groomed that the auctioneer entered her as "One Brown Mare, Black Bess,"--he began to cast about him how anything more could be got out of Mortomley.

He knew he had about squeezed the orange dry, but he knew a considerable amount of juice had been lost--through "no fault of his own,"--and he consequently set his wits to work to see how that spilled liquor could be replaced.

It was not long before inspiration came to him, and when it did he summoned another meeting of the committee.

At that meeting he gravely proposed that Mortomley should be invited to bid for the remaining book debts, the books, and his discharge. The question was discussed gravely--and as gravely agreed to--though three, at all events, of the committee intended Mortomley never should have his discharge; and accordingly the same evening Mr. Swanland, who really could not dictate to a shorthand-writer, did something which passed muster for dictation, so that eventually Mortomley received a letter asking him to make an offer for the purchase of all the good things duly mentioned.

Now considering that Mortomley had been stripped as clean of all worldly belongings as the Biblical traveller who fell among thieves; considering a man in process of liquidation is in the same state as regards the inability to make personal contracts as a bankrupt; considering Dolly had not a halfpenny left of her fortune, and that friends possessed of great wealth are not in the habit of rushing forward at such times as these with frantic entreaties for their purses to be made use of,--there was a humour about this letter which might have excited the risible muscles of a looker-on.