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‘A monstrous foible?’ said Lyon.

‘He’s a thumping liar.’

Lyon’s brush stopped short, while he repeated, for somehow the formula startled him, ‘A thumping liar?’

‘You are very lucky not to have found it out.’

‘Well, I confess I have noticed a romantic tinge—-‘

‘Oh, it isn’t always romantic. He’ll lie about the time of day, about the name of his hatter. It appears there are people like that.’

‘Well, they are precious scoundrels,’ Lyon declared, his voice trembling a little with the thought of what Everina Brant had done with herself.

‘Oh, not always,’ said the old man. ‘This fellow isn’t in the least a scoundrel. There is no harm in him and no bad intention; he doesn’t steal nor cheat nor gamble nor drink; he’s very kind–he sticks to his wife, is fond of his children. He simply can’t give you a straight answer.’

‘Then everything he told me last night, I suppose, was mendacious: he delivered himself of a series of the stiffest statements. They stuck, when I tried to swallow them, but I never thought of so simple an explanation.’

‘No doubt he was in the vein,’ Sir David went on. ‘It’s a natural peculiarity–as you might limp or stutter or be left-handed. I believe it comes and goes, like intermittent fever. My son tells me that his friends usually understand it and don’t haul him up–for the sake of his wife.’

‘Oh, his wife–his wife!’ Lyon murmured, painting fast.

‘I daresay she’s used to it.’

‘Never in the world, Sir David. How can she be used to it?’

‘Why, my dear sir, when a woman’s fond!–And don’t they mostly handle the long bow themselves? They are connoisseurs–they have a sympathy for a fellow-performer.’

Lyon was silent a moment; he had no ground for denying that Mrs. Capadose was attached to her husband. But after a little he rejoined: ‘Oh, not this one! I knew her years ago–before her marriage; knew her well and admired her. She was as clear as a bell.’

‘I like her very much,’ Sir David said, ‘but I have seen her back him up.’

Lyon considered Sir David for a moment, not in the light of a model. ‘Are you very sure?’

The old man hesitated; then he answered, smiling, ‘You’re in love with her.’

‘Very likely. God knows I used to be!’

‘She must help him out–she can’t expose him.’

‘She can hold her tongue,’ Lyon remarked.

‘Well, before you probably she will.’

‘That’s what I am curious to see.’ And Lyon added, privately, ‘Mercy on us, what he must have made of her!’ He kept this reflection to himself, for he considered that he had sufficiently betrayed his state of mind with regard to Mrs. Capadose. None the less it occupied him now immensely, the question of how such a woman would arrange herself in such a predicament. He watched her with an interest deeply quickened when he mingled with the company; he had had his own troubles in life, but he had rarely been so anxious about anything as he was now to see what the loyalty of a wife and the infection of an example would have made of an absolutely truthful mind. Oh, he held it as immutably established that whatever other women might be prone to do she, of old, had been perfectly incapable of a deviation. Even if she had not been too simple to deceive she would have been too proud; and if she had not had too much conscience she would have had too little eagerness. It was the last thing she would have endured or condoned–the particular thing she would not have forgiven. Did she sit in torment while her husband turned his somersaults, or was she now too so perverse that she thought it a fine thing to be striking at the expense of one’s honour? It would have taken a wondrous alchemy–working backwards, as it were–to produce this latter result. Besides these two alternatives (that she suffered tortures in silence and that she was so much in love that her husband’s humiliating idiosyncrasy seemed to her only an added richness–a proof of life and talent), there was still the possibility that she had not found him out, that she took his false pieces at his own valuation. A little reflection rendered this hypothesis untenable; it was too evident that the account he gave of things must repeatedly have contradicted her own knowledge. Within an hour or two of his meeting them Lyon had seen her confronted with that perfectly gratuitous invention about the profit they had made off his early picture. Even then indeed she had not, so far as he could see, smarted, and–but for the present he could only contemplate the case.