When it was time for him to go, she would revive the question of the guinea. “But as to next week, Mr Black, I cannot say. Next week I may need a guinea very badly – people do not always pay their bills – and so I will be so bold as to ask you to bring it again on Wednesday. Wednesday at about three o’clock. I shall be quite disengaged at three o’clock and I shall be sure to have a pot of chocolate ready, as you are so kind as to say you like it very much.”

The gentlemen among my readers will smile to themselves and say that women never did understand business, but the ladies may agree with me that Mrs Brandy understood her business very well, for the chief business of Mrs Brandy’s life was to make Stephen Black as much in love with her as she was with him.

In due course Toby returned, not with a message from Stephen Black, but with Stephen himself and Mrs Brandy’s anxiety about the coins was swept away by a new and altogether more pleasant agitation. “Oh, Mr Black! We did not expect to see you so soon! I did not imagine you would be at liberty!”

Stephen stood in the darkness outside the radiance cast by the strange coins. “It does not matter where I am tonight,” he said in a dull tone quite unlike his usual voice. “The house is all at sixes and sevens. Her ladyship is not well.”

Mrs Brandy, John and Toby were shocked to hear this. Like every other citizen of London they took a close interest in everything that concerned her ladyship. They prided themselves upon their connexion with all sorts of aristocratic persons, but it was the patronage of Lady Pole which gave them the greatest satisfaction. Nothing pleased them so much as being able to assure people that when Lady Pole sat down to breakfast, her ladyship’s roll was spread with Mrs Brandy’s preserves and her coffee cup was filled with coffee made with Mrs Brandy’s beans.

Mrs Brandy was suddenly struck with a most unpleasant idea. “I hope her ladyship did not eat something which disagreed with her?” she asked.

“No,” said Stephen with a sigh, “it is nothing of that sort. She complains of aches in all her limbs, odd dreams and feeling cold. But mostly she is silent and out of spirits. Her skin is icy to the touch.”

Stephen stepped into the queer light.

The strange alterations which it had made to the appearance of Toby, John and Mrs Brandy were nothing to the changes it worked upon Stephen: his native handsomeness increased five-, seven-, tenfold; he acquired an expression of almost supernatural nobility; and, most extraordinary of all, the light somehow seemed to concentrate in a band around his brow so that he appeared to have been crowned with a diadem. Yet, just as before, none of those present noticed anything out of the common.