“Oh, what a tangled web we weave,

When first we practise to deceive!”

Sir Walter Scott (1771-1832) 

There was silence in the book-room, not the silence of intimacy but a silence fraught with tension. My lady’s blue eyes, staring across the desk into my lord’s cool gray ones, dropped to the pile of bills under his hand. Her fair head was hung, and her nervous hands clasped one another tightly. In spite of a modish (and very expensive) morning-dress of twilled French silk, and the smart crop achieved for her golden curls by the most fashionable coiffeur in London, she looked absurdly youthful, like a schoolgirl caught out in mischief. She was, in fact, not yet nineteen years old, and she had been married for nearly a year to the gentleman standing on the other side of the desk, and so steadily regarding her.

“Well?”

She swallowed rather convulsively. The Earl had spoken quite gently, but her ears were quick to catch the note of implacability in his voice. She stole a scared look up at him, and dropped her eyes again, colouring. He was not frowning, but there was no doubt that he meant to obtain an answer to the quite unanswerable question he had put to his erring bride.

Another silence fell, broken only by the ticking of the large clock on the mantelpiece. My lady gripped her fingers so tightly together that they whitened.

“I asked you, Nell, why all these tradesmen—” the Earl lifted the bills and let them fall again—“have found it necessary to apply to me for the settlement of their accounts?”

“I am very sorry!” faltered the Countess.

“But that doesn’t answer my question,” he said dryly.

“Well—well, I expect it was because I—because I forgot to pay them myself!”