“Well, I am not perfectly sure what that is,” she said naively, “but indeed I won’t do it again, so pray don’t do anything horrid!”

“Very well,” he replied. He glanced down at the bills on his desk. “Ill settle these, and any others that you may have. Will you bring them to me, please?”

“Now?” she faltered, uneasily aware of a drawer stuffed with bills.

“Yes, now.” He added, with a smile: “You will be much more comfortable, you know, when you have made a clean breast of the whole.”

She agreed to this, but when she presently rendered up a collection of crumpled bills she did not feel at all comfortable. There could be no denying that she had been woefully extravagant. The allowance Cardross made her had seemed so enormous to a girl who had never had anything to spend beyond the small sum bestowed on her with the utmost reluctance by her papa for pin-money that she had bought things quite recklessly, feeling her resources to be limitless. But now, as she watched my lord glance through the appalling sheaf, she thought she must have been mad to have spent so much and so heedlessly.

For some moments he read with an unmoved countenance, but presently his brows knit, and he said: “A two-colour gold snuffbox with grisaille paintings?”

“For Dysart!” she explained apprehensively.

“Oh!” He resumed his study of the incriminating bills. With a sinking heart, she saw him pick up a document headed, in elegant scroll-work, by the name of her favourite dressmaker. He said nothing, however, and she was able to breathe again. But an instant later he read aloud: “Singing-bird, with box embellished turquoise-blue enamelled panels—What the devil—?”