Chance

Fyne was not willing to talk; but as I had been already let into the

secret, the fair-minded little man recognized that I had some right to

information if I insisted on it. And I did insist, after the third game.

We were yet some way from the end of our journey.

"Oh, if you want to know," was his somewhat impatient opening. And then

he talked rather volubly. First of all his wife had not given him to

read the letter received from Flora (I had suspected him of having it in

his pocket), but had told him all about the contents. It was not at all

what it should have been even if the girl had wished to affirm her right

to disregard the feelings of all the world. Her own had been trampled in

the dirt out of all shape. Extraordinary thing to say--I would admit,

for a young girl of her age. The whole tone of that letter was wrong,

quite wrong. It was certainly not the product of a--say, of a

well-balanced mind.

"If she were given some sort of footing in this world," I said, "if only

no bigger than the palm of my hand, she would probably learn to keep a

better balance."

Fyne ignored this little remark. His wife, he said, was not the sort of

person to be addressed mockingly on a serious subject. There was an

unpleasant strain of levity in that letter, extending even to the

references to Captain Anthony himself. Such a disposition was enough,

his wife had pointed out to him, to alarm one for the future, had all the

circumstances of that preposterous project been as satisfactory as in

fact they were not. Other parts of the letter seemed to have a

challenging tone--as if daring them (the Fynes) to approve her conduct.

And at the same time implying that she did not care, that it was for

their own sakes that she hoped they would "go against the world--the

horrid world which had crushed poor papa."

Fyne called upon me to admit that this was pretty cool--considering. And

there was another thing, too. It seems that for the last six months (she

had been assisting two ladies who kept a kindergarten school in

Bayswater--a mere pittance), Flora had insisted on devoting all her spare

time to the study of the trial. She had been looking up files of old

newspapers, and working herself up into a state of indignation with what

she called the injustice and the hypocrisy of the prosecution. Her

father, Fyne reminded me, had made some palpable hits in his answers in

Court, and she had fastened on them triumphantly. She had reached the

conclusion of her father's innocence, and had been brooding over it. Mrs.

Fyne had pointed out to him the danger of this.