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.
The train ran into the station and Fyne, jumping out directly it came to a standstill,
seemed glad to cut short the conversation. We walked in silence a little way, boarded a
bus, then walked again. I don't suppose that since the days of his childhood, when
surely he was taken to see the Tower, he had been once east of Temple Bar. He looked
about him sullenly; and when I pointed out in the distance the rounded front of the
Eastern Hotel at the bifurcation of two very broad, mean, shabby thoroughfares, rising
