disgrace is likely
to begin?
    With regard to the Transome affairs, the family had been in pressing need of
money, and it had lain with him to get it for them: was it to be expected that
he would not consider his own advantage where he had rendered services such as
are never fully paid? If it came to a question of right and wrong instead of
law, the least justifiable things he had ever done had been done on behalf of
the Transomes. It had been a deucedly unpleasant thing for him to get Bycliffe
arrested and thrown into prison as Henry Scaddon - perhaps hastening the man's
death in that way. But if it had not been done by dint of his (Jermyn's)
exertions and tact, he would like to know where the Durfey-Transomes might have
been by this time. As for right or wrong, if the truth were known, the very
possession of the estate by the Durfey-Transomes was owing to law-tricks that
took place nearly a century ago, when the original old Durfey got his base fee.
    But inward argument of this sort now, as always, was merged in anger, in
exasperation, that Harold, precisely Harold Transome, should have turned out to
be the probable instrument of a visitation which would be bad luck, not justice;
for is there any justice where ninety-nine out of a hundred escape? He felt
himself beginning to hate Harold as he had never -
    Just then Jermyn's third daughter, a tall slim girl wrapped in a white
woollen shawl, which she had hung over her blanketwise, skipped across the lawn
towards the greenhouse to get a flower. Jermyn was startled, and did not
identify the figure, or rather he identified it falsely with another tall
white-wrapped figure which had sometimes set his heart beating quickly more than
thirty years before. For a moment he was fully back in those distant years when
he and another bright-eyed person had seen no reason why they should not indulge
their passion and their vanity, and determine for themselves how their lives
should be made delightful in spite of unalterable external conditions. The
reasons had been unfolding themselves gradually ever since through all the years
which had converted the handsome, soft-eyed, slim young Jermyn (with a touch of
sentiment) into a portly lawyer of sixty, for whom life had resolved itself into
the means of keeping up his head among his professional brethren and maintaining
an establishment - into a grey-haired husband and father, whose third
affectionate and expensive daughter now rapped at the window and called to him,
»Papa