The Little Warrior

Freddie Rooke gazed coldly at the breakfast-table. Through a gleaming eye-glass he inspected the revolting object which Parker, his faithful man, had placed on a plate before him.

“Parker!” His voice had a ring of pain.

“Sir?”

“What’s this?”

“Poached egg, sir.”

Freddie averted his eyes with a silent shudder.

“It looks just like an old aunt of mine,” he said. “Remove it!”

He got up, and, wrapping his dressing-gown about his long legs, took up a stand in front of the fireplace. From this position he surveyed the room, his shoulders against the mantelpiece, his calves pressing the club-fender. It was a cheerful oasis in a chill and foggy world, a typical London bachelor’s breakfast-room. The walls were a restful gray, and the table, set for two, a comfortable arrangement in white and silver.

“Eggs, Parker,” said Freddie solemnly, “are the acid test!”

“Yes, sir?”

“If, on the morning after, you can tackle a poached egg, you are all right. If not, not. And don’t let anybody tell you otherwise.”

“No, sir.”

Freddie pressed the palm of his hand to his brow, and sighed.

“It would seem, then, that I must have revelled a trifle whole-heartedly last night. I was possibly a little blotto. Not whiffled, perhaps, but indisputably blotto. Did I make much noise coming in?”

“No, sir. You were very quiet.”

“Ah! A dashed bad sign!”

Freddie moved to the table, and poured himself a cup of coffee.

“The cream-jug is to your right, sir,” said the helpful Parker.

“Let it remain there. Café noir for me this morning. As noir as it can jolly well stick!” Freddie retired to the fireplace and sipped delicately. “As far as I can remember, it was Ronny Devereux’ birthday or something …”

“Mr Martyn’s, I think you said, sir.”

“That’s right. Algy Martyn’s birthday, and Ronny and I were the guests. It all comes back to me. I wanted Derek to roll along and join the festivities—he’s never met Ronny—but he gave it a miss. Quite right! A chap in his position has responsibilities. Member of Parliament and all that. Besides,” said Freddie earnestly, driving home the point with a wave of his spoon, “he’s engaged to be married. You must remember that, Parker!”

“I will endeavor to, sir.”

“Sometimes,” said Freddie dreamily, “I wish I were engaged to be married. Sometimes I wish I had some sweet girl to watch over me and … No, I don’t, by Jove! It would give me the utter pip! Is Sir Derek up yet, Parker?”

“Getting up, sir.”

“See that everything is all right, will you? I mean as regards the foodstuffs and what not. I want him to make a good breakfast. He’s got to meet his mother this morning at Charing Cross. She’s legging it back from the Riviera.”

“Indeed, sir?”

Freddie shook his head.

“You wouldn’t speak in that light, careless tone if you knew her! Well, you’ll see her tonight. She’s coming here to dinner.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Miss Mariner will be here, too. A foursome. Tell Mrs Parker to pull up her socks and give us something pretty ripe. Soup, fish, all that sort of thing. She knows. And let’s have a stoup of malvoisie from the oldest bin. This is a special occasion!”

“Her ladyship will be meeting Miss Mariner for the first time, sir?”

“You’ve put your finger on it! Absolutely the first time on this or any stage! We must all rally round and make the thing a success.”

“I am sure Mrs Parker will strain every nerve, sir.” Parker moved to the door, carrying the rejected egg, and stepped aside to allow a tall, well-built man of about thirty to enter. “Good morning, Sir Derek.”

“Morning, Parker.”

Parker slid softly from the room. Derek Underhill sat down at the table. He was a strikingly handsome man, with a strong, forceful face, dark, lean and cleanly shaven. He was one of those men whom a stranger would instinctively pick out of a crowd as worthy of note. His only defect was that his heavy eyebrows gave him at times an expression which was a little forbidding. Women, however, had never been repelled by it. He was very popular with women, not quite so popular with men—always excepting Freddie Rooke, who worshipped him. They had been at school together, though Freddie was the younger by several years.

“Finished, Freddie?” asked Derek.

Freddie smiled wanly,

“We are not breakfasting this morning,” he replied. “The spirit was willing, but the jolly old flesh would have none of it. To be perfectly frank, the Last of the Rookes has a bit of a head.”

“Ass!” said Derek.

“A bit of sympathy,” said Freddie, pained, “would not be out of place. We are far from well. Some person unknown has put a threshing-machine inside the old bean and substituted a piece of brown paper for our tongue. Things look dark and yellow and wobbly!”

“You shouldn’t have overdone it last night.”

“It was Algy Martyn’s birthday,” pleaded Freddie.

“If I were an ass like Algy Martyn,” said Derek, “I wouldn’t go about advertising the fact that I’d been born. I’d hush it up!”

He helped himself to a plentiful portion of kedgeree, Freddie watching him with repulsion mingled with envy. When he began to eat, the spectacle became too poignant for the sufferer, and he wandered to the window.

“What a beast of a day!”

It was an appalling day. January, that grim month, was treating London with its usual severity. Early in the morning a bank of fog had rolled up off the river, and was deepening from pearly white to a lurid brown. It pressed on the window-pane like a blanket, leaving dark, damp rivulets on the glass.

“Awful!” said Derek.

“Your mater’s train will be late.”

“Yes. Damned nuisance. It’s bad enough meeting trains in any case, without having to hang about a draughty station for an hour.”

“And it’s sure, I should imagine,” went on Freddie, pursuing his train of thought, “to make the dear old thing pretty tolerably ratty, if she has one of those slow journeys.” He pottered back to the fireplace, and rubbed his shoulders reflectively against the mantelpiece. “I take it that you wrote to her about Jill?”

“Of course. That’s why she’s coming over, I suppose. By the way, you got those seats for that theatre tonight?”

“Yes. Three together and one somewhere on the outskirts. If it’s all the same to you, old thing, I’ll have the one on the outskirts.”

Derek, who had finished his kedgeree and was now making himself a blot on Freddie’s horizon with toast and marmalade, laughed.

“What a rabbit you are, Freddie! Why on earth are you so afraid of mother?”

Freddie looked at him as a timid young squire might have gazed upon St. George when the latter set out to do battle with the dragon. He was of the amiable type which makes heroes of its friends. In the old days when he had fagged for him at Winchester he had thought Derek the most wonderful person in the world, and this view he still retained. Indeed, subsequent events had strengthened it. Derek had done the most amazing things since leaving school. He had had a brilliant career at Oxford, and now, in the House of Commons, was already looked upon by the leaders of his party as one to be watched and encouraged. He played polo superlatively well, and was a fine shot. But of all his gifts and qualities the one that extorted Freddie’s admiration in its intensest form was his lion-like courage as exemplified by his behavior in the present crisis. There he sat, placidly eating toast and marmalade, while the boat-train containing Lady Underhill already sped on its way from Dover to London. It was like Drake playing bowls with the Spanish Armada in sight.

“I wish I had your nerve!” he said, awed. “What I should be feeling, if I were in your place and had to meet your mater after telling her that I was engaged to marry a girl she had never seen, I don’t know. I’d rather face a wounded tiger!”

“Idiot!” said Derek placidly.

“Not,” pursued Freddie, “that I mean to say anything in the least derogatory and so forth to your jolly old mater, if you understand me, but the fact remains she scares me pallid! Always has, ever since the first time I went to stay at your place when I was a kid. I can still remember catching her eye the morning I happened by pure chance to bung an apple through her bedroom window, meaning to let a cat on the sill below have it in the short ribs. She was at least thirty feet away, but, by Jove, it stopped me like a bullet!”

“Push the bell, old man, will you? I want some more toast.”

Freddie did as he was requested with growing admiration.

“The condemned man made an excellent breakfast,” he murmured. “More toast, Parker,” he added, as that admirable servitor opened the door. “Gallant! That’s what I call it. Gallant!”

Derek tilted his chair back.

“Mother is sure to like Jill when she sees her,” he said.

“When she sees her! Ah! But the trouble is, young feller-me-lad, that she hasn’t seen her! That’s the weak spot in your case, old companion! A month ago she didn’t know of Jill’s existence. Now, you know and I know that Jill is one of the best and brightest. As far as we are concerned, everything in the good old garden is lovely. Why, dash it, Jill and I were children together. Sported side by side on the green, and what not. I remember Jill, when she was twelve, turning the garden-hose on me and knocking about seventy-five per cent off the market value of my best Sunday suit. That sort of thing forms a bond, you know, and I’ve always felt that she was a corker. But your mater’s got to discover it for herself. It’s a dashed pity, by Jove, that Jill hasn’t a father or a mother or something of that species to rally round just now. They would form a gang. There’s nothing like a gang! But she’s only got that old uncle of hers. A rummy bird! Met him?”

“Several times. I like him.”

“Oh, he’s a genial old buck all right. A very bonhomous lad. But you hear some pretty queer stories about him if you get among people who knew him in the old days. Even now I’m not so dashed sure I should care to play cards with him. Young Threepwood was telling me only the other day that the old boy took thirty quid off him at picquet as clean as a whistle. And Jimmy Monroe, who’s on the Stock Exchange, says he’s frightfully busy these times buying margins or whatever it is chappies do down in the City. Margins. That’s the word. Jimmy made me buy some myself on a thing called Amalgamated Dyes. I don’t understand the procedure exactly, but Jimmy says it’s a sound egg and will do me a bit of good. What was I talking about? Oh, yes, old Selby. There’s no doubt he’s quite a sportsman. But till you’ve got Jill well established, you know, I shouldn’t enlarge on him too much with the mater.”

“On the contrary,” said Derek. “I shall mention him at the first opportunity. He knew my father out in India.”

“Did he, by Jove! Oh, well, that makes a difference.”

Parker entered with the toast, and Derek resumed his breakfast.

“It may be a little bit awkward,” he said, “at first, meeting mother. But everything will be all right after five minutes.”

“Absolutely! But, oh, boy! that first five minutes!” Freddie gazed portentously through his eye-glass. Then he seemed to be undergoing some internal struggle, for he gulped once or twice. “That first five minutes!” he said, and paused again. A moment’s silent self-communion, and he went on with a rush. “I say, listen. Shall I come along, too?”

“Come along?”

“To the station. With you.”

“What on earth for?”

“To see you through the opening stages. Break the ice and all that sort of thing. Nothing like collecting a gang, you know. Moments when a feller needs a friend and so forth. Say the word, and I’ll buzz along and lend my moral support.”

Derek’s heavy eyebrows closed together in an offended frown, and seemed to darken his whole face. This unsolicited offer of assistance hurt his dignity. He showed a touch of the petulance which came now and then when he was annoyed, to suggest that he might not possess so strong a character as his exterior indicated.

“It’s very kind of you,” he began stiffly.

Freddie nodded. He was acutely conscious of this himself.

“Some fellows,” he observed, “would say ‘Not at all!’ I suppose. But not the Last of the Rookes! For, honestly, old man, between ourselves, I don’t mind admitting that this is the bravest deed of the year, and I’m dashed if I would do it for anyone else.”

“It’s very good of you, Freddie …”

“That’s all right. I’m a Boy Scout, and this is my act of kindness for today.”

Derek got up from the table.

“Of course you mustn’t come,” he said. “We can’t form a sort of debating society to discuss Jill on the platform at Charing Cross.”

“Oh, I would just hang around in the offing, shoving in an occasional tactful word.”

“Nonsense!”

“The wheeze would simply be to …”

“It’s impossible.”

“Oh, very well,” said Freddie, damped. “Just as you say, of course. But there’s nothing like a gang, old man, nothing like a gang!”

Derek Underhill threw down the stump of his cigar, and grunted irritably. Inside Charing Cross Station business was proceeding as usual. Porters wheeling baggage-trucks moved to and fro like Juggernauts. Belated trains clanked in, glad to get home, while others, less fortunate, crept reluctantly out through the blackness and disappeared into an inferno of detonating fog-signals. For outside the fog still held. The air was cold and raw and tasted coppery. In the street traffic moved at a funeral pace, to the accompaniment of hoarse cries and occasional crashes. Once the sun had worked its way through the murk and had hung in the sky like a great red orange, but now all was darkness and discomfort again, blended with that odd suggestion of mystery and romance which is a London fog’s only redeeming quality.

It seemed to Derek that he had been patrolling the platform for a life-time, but he resumed his sentinel duty. The fact that the boat-train, being already forty-five minutes overdue, might arrive at any moment made it imperative that he remain where he was instead of sitting, as he would much have preferred to sit, in one of the waiting-rooms. It would be a disaster if his mother should get out of the train and not find him there to meet her. That was just the sort of thing which would infuriate her; and her mood, after a Channel crossing and a dreary journey by rail, would be sufficiently dangerous as it was.

The fog and the waiting had had their effect upon Derek. The resolute front he had exhibited to Freddie at the breakfast-table had melted since his arrival at the station, and he was feeling nervous at the prospect of the meeting that lay before him. Calm as he had appeared to the eye of Freddie and bravely as he had spoken, Derek, in the recesses of his heart, was afraid of his mother. There are men—and Derek Underhill was one of them—who never wholly emerge from the nursery. They may put away childish things and rise in the world to affluence and success, but the hand that rocked their cradle still rules their lives. As a boy, Derek had always been firmly controlled by his mother, and the sway of her aggressive personality had endured through manhood. Lady Underhill was a born ruler, dominating most of the people with whom life brought her in contact. Distant cousins quaked at her name, while among the male portion of her nearer relatives she was generally alluded to as The Family Curse.

Now that his meeting with her might occur at any moment, Derek shrank from it. It was not likely to be a pleasant one. The mere fact that Lady Underhill was coming to London at all made that improbable. When a man writes to inform his mother, who is wintering on the Riviera, that he has become engaged to be married, the natural course for her to pursue, if she approves of the step, is to wire her congratulations and good wishes. When for these she substitutes a curt announcement that she is returning immediately, a certain lack of complaisance seems to be indicated.

Would his mother approve of Jill? That was the question which he had been asking himself over and over again as he paced the platform in the disheartening fog. Nothing had been said, nothing had even been hinted, but he was perfectly aware that his marriage was a matter regarding which Lady Underhill had always assumed that she was to be consulted, even if she did not, as he suspected, claim the right to dictate. And he had become engaged quite suddenly, without a word to her until it was all over and settled.

That, as Freddie had pointed out, was the confoundedly awkward part of it. His engagement had been so sudden. Jill had swept into his life like a comet. His mother knew nothing of her. A month ago he had known nothing of her himself. It would, he perceived, as far as the benevolent approval of Lady Underhill was concerned, have been an altogether different matter had his choice fallen upon one of those damsels whose characters, personality, and ancestry she knew. Daughters of solid and useful men; sisters of rising young politicians like himself; nieces of Burke’s peerage; he could have introduced without embarrassment one of these in the role of bride-elect. But Jill … Oh, well, when once his mother had met Jill, everything was sure to be all right. Nobody could resist Jill. It would be like resisting the sunshine.

Somewhat comforted by this reflection, Derek turned to begin one more walk along the platform, and stopped in mid-stride, raging. Beaming over the collar of a plaid greatcoat, all helpfulness and devotion, Freddie Rooke was advancing towards him, the friend that sticketh closer than a brother. Like some loving dog, who, ordered home, sneaks softly on through alleys and by-ways, peeping round corners and crouching behind lamp-posts, the faithful Freddie had followed him after all. And with him, to add the last touch to Derek’s discomfiture, were those two inseparable allies of his, Ronny Devereux and Algy Martyn.

“Well, old thing,” said Freddie, patting Derek encouragingly on the shoulder, “here we are after all! I know you told me not to roll round and so forth, but I knew you didn’t mean it. I thought it over after you had left, and decided it would be a rotten trick not to cluster about you in your hour of need. I hope you don’t mind Ronny and Algy breezing along, too. The fact is, I was in the deuce of a funk—your jolly old mater always rather paralyzes my nerve-centers, you know—so I roped them in. Met ’em in Piccadilly, groping about for the club, and conscripted ’em both, they very decently consenting. We all toddled off and had a pick-me-up at that chemist chappie’s at the top of the Hay-market, and now we’re feeling full of beans and buck, ready for anything. I’ve explained the whole thing to them, and they’re with you to the death! Collect a gang, dear boy, collect a gang! That’s the motto. There’s nothing like it!”

“Nothing!” said Ronny.

“Absolutely nothing!” said Algy.

“We’ll just see you through the opening stages,” said Freddie, “and then leg it. We’ll keep the conversation general, you know.”

“Stop it getting into painful channels,” said Ronny.

“Steer it clear,” said Algy, “of the touchy topic.”

“That’s the wheeze,” said Freddie. “We’ll … Oh, golly! There’s the train coming in now!” His voice quavered, for not even the comforting presence of his two allies could altogether sustain him in this ordeal. But he pulled himself together with a manful effort. “Stick it, old beans!” he said doughtily. “Now is the time for all good men to come to the aid of the party!”

“We’re here!” said Ronny Devereux.

“On the spot!” said Algy Martyn.

The boat-train slid into the station. Bells rang, engines blew off steam, porters shouted, baggage-trucks rattled over the platform. The train began to give up its contents, now in ones and twos, now in a steady stream. Most of the travellers seemed limp and exhausted, and were pale with the pallor that comes of a choppy Channel crossing. Almost the only exception to the general condition of collapse was the eagle-faced lady in the brown ulster, who had taken up her stand in the middle of the platform and was haranguing a subdued little maid in a voice that cut the gloomy air like a steel knife. Like the other travellers, she was pale, but she bore up resolutely. No one could have told from Lady Underhill’s demeanor that the solid platform seemed to heave beneath her feet like a deck.

“Have you got a porter, Ferris? Where is he, then? Ah! Have you got all the bags? My jewel-case? The suit-case? The small brown bag? The rugs? Where are the rugs?

“Yes, I can see them, my good girl. There is no need to brandish them in my face. Keep the jewel-case and give the rest of the things to the porter, and take him to look after the trunks. You remember which they are? The steamer trunk, the other trunk, the black box … Very well. Then make haste. And, when you’ve got them all together, tell the porter to find you a four-wheeler. The small things will go inside. Drive to the Savoy and ask for my suite. If they make any difficulty, tell them that I engaged the rooms yesterday by telegraph from Mentone. Do you understand?”

“Yes, m’lady.”

“Then go along. Oh, and give the porter sixpence. Sixpence is ample.”

“Yes, m’lady.”

The little maid, grasping the jewel-case, trotted off beside the now pessimistic porter, who had started on this job under the impression that there was at least a bob’s-worth in it. The remark about the sixpence had jarred the porter’s faith in his species.

Derek approached, acutely conscious of Freddie, Ronny, and Algy, who were skirmishing about his flank. He had enough to worry him without them. He had listened with growing apprehension to the catalogue of his mother’s possessions. Plainly this was no flying visit. You do not pop over to London for a day or two with a steamer trunk, another trunk, a black box, a suit-case, and a small brown bag. Lady Underhill had evidently come prepared to stay; and the fact seemed to presage trouble.

“Well, mother! So there you are at last!”

“Well, Derek!”

Derek kissed his mother. Freddie, Ronny, and Algy shuffled closer, like leopards. Freddie, with the expression of one who leads a forlorn hope, moved his Adam’s apple briskly up and down several times, and spoke.

“How do you do, Lady Underhill?”

“How do you do, Mr Rooke?”

Lady Underhill bowed stiffly and without pleasure. She was not fond of the Last of the Rookes. She supposed the Almighty had had some wise purpose in creating Freddie, but it had always been inscrutable to her.

“Like you,” mumbled Freddie, “to meet my friends. Lady Underhill. Mr Devereux.”

“Charmed,” said Ronny affably.

“Mr Martyn.”

“Delighted,” said Algy with old-world courtesy.

Lady Underhill regarded this mob-scene with an eye of ice.

“How do you do?” she said. “Have you come to meet somebody?”

“I-er-we-er-why-er—” This woman always made Freddie feel as if he were being disembowelled by some clumsy amateur. He wished that he had defied the dictates of his better nature and remained in his snug rooms at the Albany, allowing Derek to go through this business by himself. “I-er-we-er-came to meet you, don’t you know!”

“Indeed! That was very kind of you!”

“Oh, not at all.”

“Thought we’d welcome you back to the old homestead,” said Ronny, beaming.

“What could be sweeter?” said Algy. He produced a cigar-case, and extracted a formidable torpedo-shaped Havana. He was feeling delightfully at his ease, and couldn’t understand why Freddie had made such a fuss about meeting this nice old lady. “Don’t mind if I smoke, do you? Air’s a bit raw today. Gets into the lungs.”

Derek chafed impotently. These unsought allies were making a difficult situation a thousand times worse. A more acute observer than young Mr Martyn, he noted the tight lines about his mother’s mouth and knew them for the danger-signal they were. Endeavoring to distract her with light conversation, he selected a subject which was a little unfortunate.

“What sort of crossing did you have, mother?”

Lady Underhill winced. A current of air had sent the perfume of Algy’s cigar playing about her nostrils. She closed her eyes, and her face turned a shade paler. Freddie, observing this, felt quite sorry for the poor old thing. She was a pest and a pot of poison, of course, but all the same, he reflected charitably, it was a shame that she should look so green about the gills. He came to the conclusion that she must be hungry. The thing to do was to take her mind off it till she could be conducted to a restaurant and dumped down in front of a bowl of soup.

“Bit choppy, I suppose, what?” he bellowed, in a voice that ran up and down Lady Underhill’s nervous system like an electric needle. “I was afraid you were going to have a pretty rough time of it when I read the forecast in the paper. The good old boat wobbled a bit, eh?”

Lady Underhill uttered a faint moan. Freddie noticed that she was looking deucedly chippy, even chippier than a moment ago.

“It’s an extraordinary thing about that Channel crossing,” said Algy Martyn meditatively, as he puffed a refreshing cloud. “I’ve known fellows who could travel quite happily everywhere else in the world—round the Horn in sailing-ships and all that sort of thing—yield up their immortal soul crossing the Channel! Absolutely yield up their immortal soul! Don’t know why. Rummy, but there it is!”

“I’m like that myself,” assented Ronny Devereux. “That dashed trip from Calais gets me every time. Bowls me right over. I go aboard, stoked to the eyebrows with seasick remedies, swearing that this time I’ll fool ’em, but down I go ten minutes after we’ve started and the next thing I know is somebody saying, ‘Well, well! So this is Dover!’”

“It’s exactly the same with me,” said Freddie, delighted with the smooth, easy way the conversation was flowing. “Whether it’s the hot, greasy smell of the engines …”

“It’s not the engines,” contended Ronny Devereux.

“Stands to reason it can’t be. I rather like the smell of engines. This station is reeking with the smell of engine-grease, and I can drink it in and enjoy it.” He sniffed luxuriantly. “It’s something else.”

“Ronny’s right,” said Algy cordially. “It isn’t the engines. It’s the way the boat heaves up and down and up and down and up and down …” He shifted his cigar to his left hand in order to give with his right a spirited illustration of a Channel steamer going up and down and up and down and up and down. Lady Underhill, who had opened her eyes, had an excellent view of the performance, and closed her eyes again quickly.

“Be quiet!” she snapped.

“I was only saying …”

“Be quiet!”

“Oh, rather!”

Lady Underhill wrestled with herself. She was a woman of great will-power and accustomed to triumph over the weaknesses of the flesh. After awhile her eyes opened. She had forced herself, against the evidence of her senses, to recognize that this was a platform on which she stood and not a deck.

There was a pause. Algy, damped, was temporarily out of action, and his friends had for the moment nothing to remark.

“I’m afraid you had a trying journey, mother,” said Derek. “The train was very late.”

“Now, train-sickness,” said Algy, coming to the surface again, “is a thing lots of people suffer from. Never could understand it myself.”

“I’ve never had a touch of train-sickness,” said Ronny.

“Oh, I have,” said Freddie. “I’ve often felt rotten on a train. I get floating spots in front of my eyes and a sort of heaving sensation, and everything kind of goes black …”

“Mr Rooke!”

“Eh?”

“I should be greatly obliged if you would keep these confidences for the ear of your medical adviser.”

“Freddie,” intervened Derek hastily, “my mother’s rather tired. Do you think you could be going ahead and getting a taxi?”

“My dear old chap, of course! Get you one in a second. Come along, Algy. Pick up the old waukeesis, Ronny.”

And Freddie, accompanied by his henchmen, ambled off, well pleased with himself. He had, he felt, helped to break the ice for Derek and had seen him safely through those awkward opening stages. Now he could totter off with a light heart and get a bite of lunch.

Lady Underhill’s eyes glittered. They were small, keen, black eyes, unlike Derek’s, which were large and brown. In their other features the two were obviously mother and son. Each had the same long upper lip, the same thin, firm mouth, the prominent chin which was a family characteristic of the Underhills, and the jutting Underhill nose. Most of the Underhills came into the world looking as though they meant to drive their way through life like a wedge.

“A little more,” she said tensely, “and I should have struck those unspeakable young men with my umbrella. One of the things I have never been able to understand, Derek, is why you should have selected that imbecile Rooke as your closest friend.”

Derek smiled tolerantly.

“It was more a case of him selecting me. But Freddie is quite a good fellow really. He’s a man you’ve got to know.”

“I have not got to know him, and I thank heaven for it!”

“He’s a very good-natured fellow. It was decent of him to put me up at the Albany while our house was let. By the way, he has some seats for the first night of a new piece this evening. He suggested that we might all dine at the Albany and go on to the theatre.” He hesitated a moment. “Jill will be there,” he said, and felt easier now that her name had at last come into the talk. “She’s longing to meet you.”

“Then why didn’t she meet me?”

“Here, do you mean? At the station? Well, I—I wanted you to see her for the first time in pleasanter surroundings.”

“Oh!” said Lady Underhill shortly.

It is a disturbing thought that we suffer in this world just as much by being prudent and taking precautions as we do by being rash and impulsive and acting as the spirit moves us. If Jill had been permitted by her wary fiancé to come with him to the station to meet his mother, it is certain that much trouble would have been avoided. True, Lady Underhill would probably have been rude to her in the opening stages of the interview, but she would not have been alarmed and suspicious; or, rather, the vague suspicion which she had been feeling would not have solidified, as it did now, into definite certainty of the worst. All that Derek had effected by his careful diplomacy had been to convince his mother that he considered his bride-elect something to be broken gently to her.

She stopped and faced him.

“Who is she?” she demanded. “Who is this girl?”

Derek flushed.

“I thought I made everything clear in my letter.”

“You made nothing clear at all.”

“By your leave!” chanted a porter behind them, and a baggage-truck clove them apart.

“We can’t talk in a crowded station,” said Derek irritably. “Let me get you to the taxi and take you to the hotel. … What do you want to know about Jill?”

“Everything. Where does she come from? Who are her people? I don’t know any Mariners.”

“I haven’t cross-examined her,” said Derek stiffly. “But I do know that her parents are dead. Her father was an American.”

“American!”

“Americans frequently have daughters, I believe.”

“There is nothing to be gained by losing your temper,” said Lady Underhill with steely calm.

“There is nothing to be gained, as far as I can see, by all this talk,” retorted Derek. He wondered vexedly why his mother always had this power of making him lose control of himself. He hated to lose control of himself. It upset him, and blurred that vision which he liked to have of himself as a calm, important man superior to ordinary weaknesses. “Jill and I are engaged, and there is an end of it.”

“Don’t be a fool,” said Lady Underhill, and was driven away by another baggage-truck. “You know perfectly well,” she resumed, returning to the attack, “that your marriage is a matter of the greatest concern to me and to the whole of the family.”

“Listen, mother!” Derek’s long wait on the draughty platform had generated an irritability which overcame the deep-seated awe of his mother which was the result of years of defeat in battles of the will. “Let me tell you in a few words all that I know of Jill, and then we’ll drop the subject. In the first place, she is a lady. Secondly, she has plenty of money …”

“The Underhills do not need to marry for money.”

“I am not marrying for money!”

“Well, go on.”

“I have already described to you in my letter—very inadequately, but I did my best—what she looks like. Her sweetness, her loveableness, all the subtle things about her which go to make her what she is, you will have to judge for yourself.”

“I intend to!”

“Well, that’s all, then. She lives with her uncle, a Major Selby …”

“Major Selby? What regiment?”

“I didn’t ask him,” snapped the goaded Derek. “And, in the name of heaven, what does it matter?”

“Not the Guards?”

“I tell you I don’t know.”

“Probably a line regiment,” said Lady Underhill with an indescribable sniff.

“Possibly. What then?” He paused, to play his trump card. “If you are worrying about Major Selby’s social standing, I may as well tell you that he used to know father.”

“What! When? Where?”

“Years ago. In India, when father was at Simla.”

“Selby? Selby? Not Christopher Selby?”

“Oh, you remember him?”

“I certainly remember him! Not that he and I ever met, but your father often spoke of him.”

Derek was relieved. It was abominable that this sort of thing should matter, but one had to face facts, and, as far as his mother was concerned, it did. The fact that Jill’s uncle had known his dead father would make all the difference to Lady Underhill.

“Christopher Selby!” said Lady Underhill reflectively. “Yes! I have often heard your father speak of him. He was the man who gave your father an I.O.U. to pay a card debt, and redeemed it with a check which was returned by the bank!”

“What!”

“Didn’t you hear what I said? I will repeat it, if you wish.”

“There must have been some mistake.”

“Only the one your father made when he trusted the man.”

“It must have been some other fellow.”

“Of course!” said Lady Underhill satirically. “No doubt your father knew hundreds of Christopher Selbys!”

Derek bit his lip.

“Well, after all,” he said doggedly, “whether it’s true or not …”

“I see no reason why your father should not have spoken the truth.”

“All right. We’ll say it is true, then. But what does it matter? I am marrying Jill, not her uncle.”

“Nevertheless, it would be pleasanter if her only living relative were not a swindler!… Tell me, where and how did you meet this girl?”

“I should be glad if you would not refer to her as ‘this girl.’ The name, if you have forgotten it, is Mariner.”

“Well, where did you meet Miss Mariner?”

“At Prince’s.”

“Restaurant?”

“Skating-rink,” said Derek impatiently. “Just after you left for Mentone. Freddie Rooke introduced me.”

“Oh, your intellectual friend Mr Rooke knows her?”

“They were children together. Her people lived next to the Rookes in Worcestershire.”

“I thought you said she was an American.”

“I said her father was. He settled in England. Jill hasn’t been in America since she was eight or nine.”

“The fact,” said Lady Underhill, “that the girl is a friend of Mr Rooke is no great recommendation.”

Derek kicked angrily at a box of matches which someone had thrown down on the platform.

“I wonder if you could possibly get it into your head, mother, that I want to marry Jill, not engage her as an under-housemaid. I don’t consider that she requires recommendations, as you call them. However, don’t you think the most sensible thing is for you to wait till you meet her at dinner tonight, and then you can form your own opinion? I’m beginning to get a little bored with this futile discussion.”

“As you seem quite unable to talk on the subject of this girl without becoming rude,” said Lady Underhill, “I agree with you. Let us hope that my first impression will be a favorable one. Experience has taught me that first impressions are everything.”

“I’m glad you think so,” said Derek, “for I fell in love with Jill the very first moment I saw her!”

Parker stepped back, and surveyed with modest pride the dinner-table to which he had been putting the finishing touches. It was an artistic job and a credit to him.

“That’s that!” said Parker, satisfied.

He went to the window and looked out. The fog which had lasted well into the evening, had vanished now, and the clear night was bright with stars. A distant murmur of traffic came from the direction of Piccadilly.

As he stood there, the front-door bell rang, and continued to ring in little spurts of sound. If character can be deduced from bell-ringing, as nowadays it apparently can be from every other form of human activity, one might have hazarded the guess that whoever was on the other side of the door was determined, impetuous, and energetic.

“Parker!”

Freddie Rooke pushed a tousled head, which had yet to be brushed into the smooth sleekness that made it a delight to the public eye, out of a room down the passage.

“Sir?”

“Somebody ringing.”

“I heard, sir. I was about to answer the bell.”

“If it’s Lady Underhill, tell her I’ll be in in a minute.”

“I fancy it is Miss Mariner, sir. I think I recognise her touch.”

He made his way down the passage to the front-door, and opened it. A girl was standing outside. She wore a long gray fur coat, and a filmy gray hood covered her hair. As Parker opened the door, she scampered in like a gray kitten.

“Brrh! It’s cold!” she exclaimed. “Hullo, Parker!”

“Good evening, miss.”

“Am I the last or the first or what?”

Parker moved to help her with her cloak.

“Sir Derek and her ladyship have not yet arrived, miss. Sir Derek went to bring her ladyship from the Savoy Hotel. Mr Rooke is dressing in his bedroom and will be ready very shortly.”

The girl had slipped out of the fur coat, and Parker cast a swift glance of approval at her. He had the valet’s unerring eye for a thoroughbred, and Jill Mariner was manifestly that. It showed in her walk, in every move of her small, active body, in the way she looked at you, in the way she talked to you, in the little tilt of her resolute chin. Her hair was pale gold, and had the brightness of coloring of a child’s. Her face glowed, and her gray eyes sparkled. She looked very much alive.

It was this aliveness of hers that was her chief charm. Her eyes were good and her mouth, with its small, even teeth, attractive, but she would have laughed if anybody had called her beautiful. She sometimes doubted if she were even pretty. Yet few men had met her and remained entirely undisturbed. She had a magnetism. One hapless youth, who had laid his heart at her feet and had been commanded to pick it up again, had endeavored subsequently to explain her attraction (to a bosom friend over a mournful bottle of the best in the club smoking-room) in these words: “I don’t know what it is about her, old man, but she somehow makes a feller feel she’s so damned interested in a chap, if you know what I mean.” And, though not generally credited in his circle with any great acuteness, there is no doubt that the speaker had achieved something approaching a true analysis of Jill’s fascination for his sex. She was interested in everything Life presented to her notice, from a Coronation to a stray cat. She was vivid. She had sympathy. She listened to you as though you really mattered. It takes a man of tough fibre to resist these qualities. Women, on the other hand, especially of the Lady Underhill type, can resist them without an effort.

“Go and stir him up,” said Jill, alluding to the absent Mr Rooke. “Tell him to come and talk to me. Where’s the nearest fire? I want to get right over it and huddle.”

“The fire’s burning nicely in the sitting-room, miss.”

Jill hurried into the sitting-room, and increased her hold on Parker’s esteem by exclaiming rapturously at the sight that greeted her. Parker had expended time and trouble over the sitting-room. There was no dust, no untidiness. The pictures all hung straight; the cushions were smooth and unrumpled; and a fire of exactly the right dimensions burned cheerfully in the grate, flickering cosily on the small piano by the couch, on the deep leather arm-chairs which Freddie had brought with him from Oxford, that home of comfortable chairs, and on the photographs that studded the walls. In the center of the mantelpiece, the place of honor, was the photograph of herself which she had given Derek a week ago.

“You’re simply wonderful, Parker! I don’t see how you manage to make a room so cosy!” Jill sat down on the club-fender that guarded the fireplace, and held her hands over the blaze. “I can’t understand why men ever marry. Fancy having to give up all this!”

“I am gratified that you appreciate it, miss. I did my best to make it comfortable for you. I fancy I hear Mr Rooke coming now.”

“I hope the others won’t be long. I’m starving. Has Mrs Parker got something very good for dinner?”

“She has strained every nerve, miss.”

“Then I’m sure it’s worth waiting for. Hullo, Freddie.”

Freddie Rooke, resplendent in evening dress, bustled in, patting his tie with solicitous fingers. It had been right when he had looked in the glass in his bedroom, but you never know about ties. Sometimes they stay right, sometimes they wiggle up sideways. Life is full of these anxieties.

“I shouldn’t touch it,” said Jill. “It looks beautiful, and, if I may say so in confidence, is having a most disturbing effect on my emotional nature. I’m not at all sure I shall be able to resist it right through the evening. It isn’t fair of you to try to alienate the affections of an engaged young person like this.”

Freddie squinted down, and became calmer.

“Hullo, Jill, old thing. Nobody here yet?”

“Well, I’m here,—the petite figure seated on the fender. But perhaps I don’t count.”

“Oh, I didn’t mean that, you know.”

“I should hope not, when I’ve bought a special new dress just to fascinate you. A creation I mean. When they cost as much as this one did, you have to call them names. What do you think of it?”

Freddie seated himself on another section of the fender, and regarded her with the eye of an expert. A snappy dresser, as the technical term is, himself, he appreciated snap in the outer covering of the other sex.

“Topping!” he said spaciously. “No other word for it! All wool and a yard wide! Precisely as mother makes it! You look like a thingummy.”

“How splendid! All my life I’ve wanted to look like a thingummy, but somehow I’ve never been able to manage it.”

“A wood-nymph!” exclaimed Freddie, in a burst of unwonted imagery.

“Wood-nymphs didn’t wear creations.”

“Well, you know what I mean!” He looked at her with honest admiration. “Dash it, Jill, you know, there’s something about you! You’re—what’s the word?—you’ve got such small bones!”

“Ugh! I suppose it’s a compliment, but how horrible it sounds! It makes me feel like a skeleton.”

“I mean to say, you’re—you’re dainty!”

“That’s much better.”

“You look as if you weighed about an ounce and a half! You look like a bit of thistledown! You’re a little fairy princess, dash it!”

“Freddie! This is eloquence!” Jill raised her left hand, and twiddled a ringed finger ostentatiously. “Er—you do realize that I’m bespoke, don’t you, and that my heart, alas, is another’s? Because you sound as if you were going to propose.”

Freddie produced a snowy handkerchief, and polished his eye-glass. Solemnity descended on him like a cloud. He looked at Jill with an earnest, paternal gaze.

“That reminds me,” he said. “I wanted to have, a bit of a talk with you about that—being engaged and all that sort of thing. I’m glad I got you alone before the Curse arrived.”

“Curse? Do you mean Derek’s mother? That sounds cheerful and encouraging.”

“Well, she is, you know,” said Freddie earnestly. “She’s a bird! It would be idle to deny it. She always puts the fear of God into me. I never know what to say to her.”

“Why don’t you try asking her riddles?”

“It’s no joking matter,” persisted Freddie, his amiable face overcast. “Wait till you meet her! You should have seen her at the station this morning. You don’t know what you’re up against!”

“You make my flesh creep, Freddie. What am I up against?”

Freddie poked the fire scientifically, and assisted it with coal.

“It’s this way,” he said. “Of course, dear old Derek’s the finest chap in the world.”

“I know that,” said Jill softly. She patted Freddie’s hand with a little gesture of gratitude. Freddie’s devotion to Derek was a thing that always touched her. She looked thoughtfully into the fire, and her eyes seemed to glow in sympathy with the glowing coals. “There’s nobody like him!”

“But,” continued Freddie, “he always has been frightfully under his mother’s thumb, you know.”

Jill was conscious of a little flicker of irritation.

“Don’t be absurd, Freddie. How could a man like Derek be under anybody’s thumb?”

“Well, you know what I mean!”

“I don’t in the least know what you mean.”

“I mean, it would be rather rotten if his mother set him against you.”

Jill clenched her teeth. The quick temper which always lurked so very little beneath the surface of her cheerfulness was stirred. She felt suddenly chilled and miserable. She tried to tell herself that Freddie was just an amiable blunderer who spoke without sense or reason, but it was no use. She could not rid herself of a feeling of foreboding and discomfort. It had been the one jarring note in the sweet melody of her love-story, this apprehension of Derek’s regarding his mother. The Derek she loved was a strong man, with a strong man’s contempt for other people’s criticism; and there had been something ignoble and fussy in his attitude regarding Lady Underhill. She had tried to feel that the flaw in her idol did not exist. And here was Freddie Rooke, a man who admired Derek with all his hero-worshipping nature, pointing it out independently. She was annoyed, and she expended her annoyance, as women will do, upon the innocent bystander.

“Do you remember the time I turned the hose on you, Freddie,” she said, rising from the fender, “years ago, when we were children, when you and that awful Mason boy—what was his name? Wally Mason—teased me?” She looked at the unhappy Freddie with a hostile eye. It was his blundering words that had spoiled everything. “I’ve forgotten what it was all about, but I know that you and Wally infuriated me and I turned the garden hose on you and soaked you both to the skin. Well, all I want to point out is that, if you go on talking nonsense about Derek and his mother and me, I shall ask Parker to bring me a jug of water, and I shall empty it over you! Set him against me! You talk as if love were a thing any third party could come along and turn off with a tap! Do you suppose that, when two people love each other as Derek and I do, that it can possibly matter in the least what anybody else thinks or says, even if it is his mother? I haven’t got a mother, but suppose Uncle Chris came and warned me against Derek …”

Her anger suddenly left her as quickly as it had come. That was always the way with Jill. One moment later she would be raging; the next, something would tickle her sense of humor and restore her instantly to cheerfulness. And the thought of dear, lazy old Uncle Chris taking the trouble to warn anybody against anything except the wrong brand of wine or an inferior make of cigar conjured up a picture before which wrath melted away. She chuckled, and Freddie, who had been wilting on the fender, perked up.

“You’re an extraordinary girl, Jill! One never knows when you’re going to get the wind up.”

“Isn’t it enough to make me get the wind up, as you call it, when you say absurd things like that?”

“I meant well, old girl!”

“That’s the trouble with you. You always do mean well. You go about the world meaning well till people fly to put themselves under police protection. Besides, what on earth could Lady Underhill find to object to in me? I’ve plenty of money, and I’m one of the most charming and attractive of Society belles. You needn’t take my word for that, and I don’t suppose you’ve noticed it, but that’s what Mr Gossip in the Morning Mirror called me when he was writing about my getting engaged to Derek. My maid showed me the clipping. There was quite a long paragraph, with a picture of me that looked like a Zulu chieftainess taken in a coal-cellar during a bad fog. Well, after that, what could anyone say against me? I’m a perfect prize! I expect Lady Underhill screamed with joy when she heard the news and went singing all over her Riviera villa.”

“Yes,” said Freddie dubiously. “Yes, yes, oh, quite so, rather!”

Jill looked at him sternly.

“Freddie, you’re concealing something from me! You don’t think I’m a charming and attractive Society belle! Tell me why not and I’ll show you where you are wrong. Is it my face you object to, or my manners, or my figure? There was a young bride of Antigua, who said to her mate, ‘What a pig you are!’ Said he, ‘Oh, my queen, is it manners you mean, or do you allude to my fig-u-ar?’ Isn’t my figuar all right, Freddie?”

“Oh, I think you’re topping.”

“But for some reason you’re afraid that Derek’s mother won’t think so. Why won’t Lady Underhill agree with Mr Gossip?”

Freddie hesitated.

“Speak up!”

“Well, it’s like this. Remember I’ve known the old devil …”

“Freddie Rooke! Where do you pick up such expressions? Not from me!”

“Well, that’s how I always think of her! I say I’ve known her ever since I used to go and stop at their place when I was at school, and I know exactly the sort of things that put her back up. She’s a what-d’you-call-it.”

“I see no harm in that. Why shouldn’t the dear old lady be a what-d’you-call-it? She must do something in her spare time.”

“I mean to say, one of the old school, don’t you know. And you’re so dashed impulsive, old girl. You know you are! You are always saying things that come into your head.”

“You can’t say a thing unless it comes into your head.”

“You know what I mean,” Freddie went on earnestly, not to be diverted from his theme. “You say rummy things and you do rummy things. What I mean to say is, you’re impulsive.”

“What have I ever done that the sternest critic could call rummy?”

“Well, I’ve seen you with my own eyes stop in the middle of Bond Street and help a lot of fellows shove along a cart that had got stuck. Mind you, I’m not blaming you for it …”

“I should hope not. The poor old horse was trying all he knew to get going, and he couldn’t quite make it. Naturally, I helped.”

“Oh, I know. Very decent and all that, but I doubt if Lady Underhill would have thought a lot of it. And you’re so dashed chummy with the lower orders.”

“Don’t be a snob, Freddie.”

“I’m not a snob,” protested Freddie, wounded. “When I’m alone with Parker—for instance—I’m as chatty as dammit. But I don’t ask waiters in public restaurants how their lumbago is.”

“Have you ever had lumbago?”

“No.”

“Well, it’s a very painful thing, and waiters get it just as badly as dukes. Worse, I should think, because they’re always bending and stooping and carrying things. Naturally one feels sorry for them.”

“But how do you ever find out that a waiter has got lumbago?”

“I ask him; of course.”

“Well, for goodness sake,” said Freddie, “if you feel the impulse to do that sort of thing tonight, try and restrain it. I mean to say, if you’re curious to know anything about Parker’s chilblains, for instance, don’t enquire after them while he’s handing Lady Underhill the potatoes! She wouldn’t like it.”

Jill uttered an exclamation.

“I knew there was something! Being so cold and wanting to rush in and crouch over a fire put it clean out of my head. He must be thinking me a perfect beast!” She ran to the door. “Parker! Parker!”

Parker appeared from nowhere.

“Yes, miss?”

“I’m so sorry I forgot to ask before. How are your chilblains?”

“A good deal better, miss, thank you.”

“Did you try the stuff I recommended?”

“Yes, miss. It did them a world of good.”

“Splendid!”

Jill went back into the sitting-room.

“It’s all right,” she said reassuringly. “They’re better.”

She wandered restlessly about the room, looking at the photographs.

“What a lot of girls you seem to know, Freddie. Are these all the ones you’ve loved and lost?” She sat down at the piano and touched the keys. The clock on the mantelpiece chimed the half hour. “I wish to goodness they would arrive,” she said.

“They’ll be here pretty soon, I expect.”

“It’s rather awful,” said Jill, “to think of Lady Underhill racing all the way from Mentone to Paris and from Paris to Calais and from Calais to Dover and from Dover to London simply to inspect me. You can’t wonder I’m nervous, Freddie.”

The eye-glass dropped from Freddie’s eye.

“Are you nervous?” he asked, astonished.

“Of course I’m nervous. Wouldn’t you be in my place?”

“Well, I should never have thought it.”

“Why do you suppose I’ve been talking such a lot? Why do you imagine I snapped your poor, innocent head off just now? I’m terrified inside, terrified!”

“You don’t look it, by Jove!”

“No, I’m trying to be a little warrior. That’s what Uncle Chris always used to call me. It started the day when he took me to have a tooth out, when I was ten. ‘Be a little warrior, Jill!’ he kept saying—‘Be a little warrior!’ And I was.” She looked at the clock. “But I shan’t be if they don’t get here soon. The suspense is awful.” She strummed the keys. “Suppose she doesn’t like me, Freddie! You see how you’ve scared me.”

“I didn’t say she wouldn’t. I only said you’d got to watch out a bit.”

“Something tells me she won’t. My nerve is oozing out of me.” Jill shook her head impatiently. “It’s all so vulgar! I thought this sort of thing only happened in the comic papers and in music-hall songs. Why, it’s just like that song somebody used to sing.” She laughed. “Do you remember? I don’t know how the verse went, but …

John took me round to see his mother,
                    his mother,
                    his mother!
And when he’d introduced us to each other,
    She sized up everything that I had on.
She put me through a cross-examination:
I fairly boiled with aggravation:
    Then she shook her head,
    Looked at me and said:
        ‘Poor John! Poor John!’

“Chorus, Freddie! Let’s cheer ourselves up! We need it!”

‘John took me round to see his mother … !

“His mo-o-o-other!” croaked Freddie. Curiously enough, this ballad was one of Freddie’s favorites. He had rendered it with a good deal of success on three separate occasions at village entertainments down in Worcestershire, and he rather flattered himself that he could get about as much out of it as the next man. He proceeded to abet Jill heartily with gruff sounds which he was under the impression constituted what is known in musical circles as “singing seconds.”

“His mo-o-o-other!” he growled with frightful scorn.

“And when she’d introduced us to each other …”

“O-o-o-other!”

“She sized up everything that I had on!”

“Pom-pom-pom!”

“She put me through a cross-examination …”

Jill had thrown her head back, and was singing jubilantly at the top of her voice. The appositeness of the song had cheered her up. It seemed somehow to make her forebodings rather ridiculous, to reduce them to absurdity, to turn into farce the gathering tragedy which had been weighing upon her nerves.

“Then she shook her head,
Looked at me and said:
        ‘Poor John!’…”

“Jill,” said a voice at the door. “I want you to meet my mother!”

“Poo-oo-oor John!” bleated the hapless Freddie, unable to check himself.

“Dinner,” said Parker the valet, appearing at the door and breaking a silence that seemed to fill the room like a tangible presence, “is served!”

The front-door closed softly behind the theatre-party. Dinner was over, and Parker had just been assisting the expedition out of the place. Sensitive to atmosphere, he had found his share in the dinner a little trying. It had been a strained meal, and what he liked was a clatter of conversation and everybody having a good time and enjoying themselves.

“Ellen!” called Parker, as he proceeded down the passage to the empty dining-room. “Ellen!”

Mrs Parker appeared out of the kitchen, wiping her hands. Her work for the evening, like her husband’s, was over. Presently what is technically called a “useful girl” would come in to wash the dishes, leaving the evening free for social intercourse. Mrs Parker had done well by her patrons that night, and now she wanted a quiet chat with Parker over a glass of Freddie Rooke’s port.

“Have they gone, Horace?” she asked, following him into the dining-room.

Parker selected a cigar from Freddie’s humidor, crackled it against his ear, smelt it, clipped off the end, and lit it. He took the decanter and filled his wife’s glass, then mixed himself a whisky-and-soda.

“Happy days!” said Parker. “Yes, they’ve gone!”

“I didn’t see her ladyship.”

“You didn’t miss much! A nasty, dangerous specimen, she is! ‘Always merry and bright’, I don’t think. I wish you’d have had my job of waiting on ’em, Ellen, and me been the one to stay in the kitchen safe out of it all. That’s all I say! It’s no treat to me to ‘and the dishes when the atmosphere’s what you might call electric. I didn’t envy them that vol-au-vent of yours, Ellen, good as it smelt. Better a dinner of ’erbs where love is than a stalled ox and ’atred therewith,” said Parker, helping himself to a walnut.

“Did they have words?”

Parker shook his head impatiently.

“That sort don’t have words, Ellen. They just sit and goggle.”

“How did her ladyship seem to hit it off with Miss Mariner, Horace?”

Parker uttered a dry laugh.

“Ever seen a couple of strange dogs watching each other sort of wary? That was them! Not that Miss Mariner wasn’t all that was pleasant and nice-spoken. She’s all right, Miss Mariner is. She’s a little queen! It wasn’t her fault the dinner you’d took so much trouble over was more like an evening in the Morgue than a Christian dinner-party. She tried to help things along best she could. But what with Sir Derek chewing his lip ’alf the time and his mother acting about as matey as a pennorth of ice-cream, she didn’t have a chance. As for the guv’nor,—well, I wish you could have seen him, that’s all. You know, Ellen, sometimes I’m not altogether easy in my mind about the guv’nor’s mental balance. He knows how to buy cigars, and you tell me his port is good—I never touch it myself—but sometimes he seems to me to go right off his onion. Just sat there, he did, all through dinner, looking as if he expected the good food to rise up and bite him in the face, and jumping nervous when I spoke to him. It’s not my fault,” said Parker, aggrieved. “I can’t give gentlemen warning before I ask ’em if they’ll have sherry or hock. I can’t ring a bell or toot a horn to show ’em I’m coming. It’s my place to bend over and whisper in their ear, and they’ve no right to leap about in their seats and make me spill good wine. (You’ll see the spot close by where you’re sitting, Ellen. Jogged my wrist, he did!) I’d like to know why people in the spear of life which these people are in can’t behave themselves rational, same as we do. When we were walking out and I took you to have tea with my mother, it was one of the pleasantest meals I ever ate. Talk about ’armony! It was a love-feast!”

“Your ma and I took to each other right from the start, Horace,” said Mrs Parker softly—“That’s the difference.”

“Well, any woman with any sense would take to Miss Mariner. If I told you how near I came to spilling the sauce-boat accidentally over that old fossil’s head, you’d be surprised, Ellen. She just sat there brooding like an old eagle. If you ask my opinion, Miss Mariner’s a long sight too good for her precious son!”

“Oh, but Horace! Sir Derek’s a baronet!”

“What of it? Kind ’earts are more than coronets and simple faith than Norman blood, aren’t they?”

“You’re talking Socialism, Horace.”

“No, I’m not. I’m talking sense. I don’t know who Miss Mariner’s parents may have been—I never enquired—but anyone can see she’s a lady born and bred. But do you suppose the path of true love is going to run smooth, for all that? Not it! She’s got a ’ard time ahead of her, that poor girl.”

“Horace!” Mrs Parker’s gentle heart was wrung. The situation hinted at by her husband was no new one—indeed, it formed the basis of at least fifty per cent of the stories in the True Heart Novelette Series, of which she was a determined reader—but it had never failed to touch her. “Do you think her ladyship means to come between them and wreck their romance?”

“I think she means to have a jolly good try.”

“But Sir Derek has his own money, hasn’t he? I mean, it’s not like when Sir Courtenay Travers fell in love with the milk-maid and was dependent on his mother, the Countess, for everything. Sir Derek can afford to do what he pleases, can’t he?”

Parker shook his head tolerantly. The excellence of the cigar and the soothing qualities of the whisky-and-soda had worked upon him, and he was feeling less ruffled.

“You don’t understand these things,” he said. “Women like her ladyship can talk a man into anything and out of anything. I wouldn’t care, only you can see the poor girl is mad over the feller. What she finds attractive in him, I can’t say, but that’s her own affair.”

“He’s very handsome, Horace, with those flashing eyes and that stern mouth,” argued Mrs Parker.

Parker sniffed.

“Have it your own way,” he said. “It’s no treat to me to see his eyes flash, and if he’d put that stern mouth of his to some better use than advising the guv’nor to lock up the cigars and trouser the key, I’d be better pleased. If there’s one thing I can’t stand,” said Parker, “it’s not to be trusted!” He lifted his cigar and looked at it censoriously. “I thought so! Burning all down one side. They will do that if you light ’em careless. Oh, well,” he continued, rising and going to the humidor, “there’s plenty more where that came from. Out of evil cometh good,” said Parker philosophically. “If the guv’nor hadn’t been in such a overwrought state tonight, he’d have remembered not to leave the key in the key-hole. Help yourself to another glass of port, Ellen, and let’s enjoy ourselves!”

When one considers how full of his own troubles, how weighed down with the problems of his own existence the average playgoer generally is when he enters a theatre, it is remarkable that dramatists ever find it possible to divert and entertain whole audiences for a space of several hours. As regards at least three of those who had assembled to witness its opening performance, the author of “Tried by Fire,” at the Leicester Theater, undoubtedly had his work cut out for him.

It has perhaps been sufficiently indicated by the remarks of Parker, the valet, that the little dinner at Freddie Rooke’s had not been an unqualified success. Searching the records for an adequately gloomy parallel to the taxi-cab journey to the theatre which followed it, one can only think of Napoleon’s retreat from Moscow. And yet even that was probably not conducted in dead silence. There must have been moments when Murat got off a good thing or Ney said something worth hearing about the weather.

The only member of the party who was even remotely happy was, curiously enough, Freddie Rooke. Originally Freddie had obtained three tickets for “Tried by Fire.” The unexpected arrival of Lady Underhill had obliged him to buy a fourth, separated by several rows from the other three. This, as he had told Derek at breakfast, was the seat he proposed to occupy himself.

It consoles the philosopher in this hard world to reflect that, even if man is born to sorrow as the sparks fly upwards, it is still possible for small things to make him happy. The thought of being several rows away from Lady Underhill had restored Freddie’s equanimity like a tonic. It thrilled him like the strains of some grand, sweet anthem all the way to the theatre. If Freddie Rooke had been asked at that moment to define happiness in a few words, he would have replied that it consisted in being several rows away from Lady Underhill.

The theatre was nearly full when Freddie’s party arrived. The Leicester Theatre had been rented for the season by the newest theatrical knight, Sir Chester Portwood, who had a large following; and, whatever might be the fate of the play in the final issue, it would do at least one night’s business. The stalls were ablaze with jewelry and crackling with starched shirt-fronts; and expensive scents pervaded the air, putting up a stiff battle with the plebeian peppermint that emanated from the pit. The boxes were filled, and up in the gallery grim-faced patrons of the drama, who had paid their shillings at the door and intended to get a shilling’s-worth of entertainment in return, sat and waited stolidly for the curtain to rise.

First nights at the theatre always excited Jill. The depression induced by absorbing nourishment and endeavouring to make conversation in the presence of Lady Underhill left her. The worst, she told herself, had happened. She had met Derek’s mother, and Derek’s mother plainly disliked her. Well, that, as Parker would have said, was that. Now she just wanted to enjoy herself. She loved the theatre. The stir, the buzz of conversation, the warmth and life of it, all touched a chord in her which made depression impossible.

The lights shot up beyond the curtain. The house-lights dimmed. Conversation ceased. The curtain rose. Jill wriggled herself comfortably into her seat, and slipped her hand into Derek’s. She felt a glow of happiness as it closed over hers. All, she told herself, was right with the world.

All, that is to say, except the drama which was unfolding on the stage. It was one of those plays which start wrong and never recover. By the end of the first ten minutes there had spread through the theatre that uneasy feeling which comes over the audience at an opening performance when it realises that it is going to be bored. A sort of lethargy had gripped the stalls. The dress-circle was coughing. Up in the gallery there was grim silence.

Sir Chester Portwood was an actor-manager who had made his reputation in light comedy of the tea-cup school. His numerous admirers attended a first night at his theatre in a mood of comfortable anticipation, assured of something pleasant and frothy with a good deal of bright dialogue and not too much plot. Tonight he seemed to have fallen a victim to that spirit of ambition which intermittently attacks actor-managers of his class, expressing itself in an attempt to prove that, having established themselves securely as light comedians, they can, like the lady reciter, turn right around and be serious. The one thing which the London public felt that it was safe from in a Portwood play was heaviness, and “Tried by Fire” was grievously heavy. It was a poetic drama, and the audience, though loth to do anybody an injustice, was beginning to suspect that it was written in blank verse.

The acting did nothing to dispel the growing uneasiness. Sir Chester himself, apparently oppressed by the weightiness of the occasion and the responsibility of offering an unfamiliar brand of goods to his public, had dropped his customary debonair method of delivering lines and was mouthing his speeches. It was good gargling, but bad elocution. And, for some reason best known to himself, he had entrusted the role of the heroine to a doll-like damsel with a lisp, of whom the audience disapproved sternly from her initial entrance.

It was about half-way through the first act that Jill, whose attention had begun to wander, heard a soft groan at her side. The seats which Freddie Rooke had bought were at the extreme end of the seventh row. There was only one other seat in the row, and, as Derek had placed his mother on his left and was sitting between her and Jill, the latter had this seat on her right. It had been empty at the rise of the curtain, but in the past few minutes a man had slipped silently into it. The darkness prevented Jill from seeing his face, but it was plain that he was suffering, and her sympathy went out to him. His opinion of the play so obviously coincided with her own.

Presently the first act ended, and the lights went up. There was a spatter of insincere applause from the stalls, echoed in the dress-circle. It grew fainter in the upper circle, and did not reach the gallery at all.

“Well?” said Jill to Derek. “What do you think of it?”

“Too awful for words,” said Derek sternly.

He leaned forward to join in the conversation which had started between Lady Underhill and some friends she had discovered in the seats in front; and Jill, turning, became aware that the man on her right was looking at her intently. He was a big man with rough, wiry hair and a humorous mouth. His age appeared to be somewhere in the middle twenties. Jill, in the brief moment in which their eyes met, decided that he was ugly, but with an ugliness that was rather attractive. He reminded her of one of those large, loose, shaggy dogs that break things in drawing-rooms but make admirable companions for the open road. She had a feeling that he would look better in tweeds in a field than in evening dress in a theatre. He had nice eyes. She could not distinguish their color, but they were frank and friendly.

All this Jill noted with her customary quickness, and then she looked away. For an instant she had had an odd feeling that somewhere she had met this man or somebody very like him before, but the impression vanished. She also had the impression that he was still looking at her, but she gazed demurely in front of her and did not attempt to verify the suspicion.

Between them, as they sat side by side, there inserted itself suddenly the pinkly remorseful face of Freddie Rooke. Freddie, having skirmished warily in the aisle until it was clear that Lady Underhill’s attention was engaged elsewhere, had occupied a seat in the row behind which had been left vacant temporarily by an owner who liked refreshment between the acts. Freddie was feeling deeply ashamed of himself. He felt that he had perpetrated a bloomer of no slight magnitude.

“I’m awfully sorry about this,” he said penitently. “I mean, roping you in to listen to this frightful tosh! When I think I might have got seats just as well for any one of half a dozen topping musical comedies, I feel like kicking myself with some vim. But, honestly, how was I to know? I never dreamed we were going to be let in for anything of this sort. Portwood’s plays are usually so dashed bright and snappy and all that. Can’t think what he was doing, putting on a thing like this. Why, it’s blue round the edges!”

The man on Jill’s right laughed sharply.

“Perhaps,” he said, “the chump who wrote the piece got away from the asylum long enough to put up the money to produce it.”

If there is one thing that startles the well-bred Londoner and throws him off his balance, it is to be addressed unexpectedly by a stranger. Freddie’s sense of decency was revolted. A voice from the tomb could hardly have shaken him more. All the traditions to which he had been brought up had gone to solidify his belief that this was one of things which didn’t happen. Absolutely it wasn’t done. During an earthquake or a shipwreck and possibly on the Day of Judgment, yes. But only then. At other times, unless they wanted a match or the time or something, chappies did not speak to fellows to whom they had not been introduced. He was far too amiable to snub the man, but to go on with this degrading scene was out of the question. There was nothing for it but flight.

“Oh, ah, yes,” he mumbled. “Well,” he added to Jill, “I suppose I may as well be toddling back. See you later and so forth.”

And with a faint ‘Good-bye-ee!’ Freddie removed himself, thoroughly unnerved.

Jill looked out of the corner of her eye at Derek. He was still occupied with the people in front. She turned to the man on her right. She was not the slave to etiquette that Freddie was. She was much too interested in life to refrain from speaking to strangers.

“You shocked him!” she said, dimpling.

“Yes. It broke Freddie all up, didn’t it!”

It was Jill’s turn to be startled. She looked at him in astonishment.

“Freddie?”

“That was Freddie Rooke, wasn’t it? Surely I wasn’t mistaken?”

“But—do you know him? He didn’t seem to know you.”

“These are life’s tragedies. He has forgotten me. My boyhood friend!”

“Oh, you were at school with him?”

“No. Freddie went to Winchester, if I remember. I was at Haileybury. Our acquaintance was confined to the holidays. My people lived near his people in Worcestershire.”

“Worcestershire!” Jill leaned forward excitedly. “But I used to live near Freddie in Worcestershire myself when I was small. I knew him there when he was a boy. We must have met!”

“We met all right.”

Jill wrinkled her forehead. That odd familiar look was in his eyes again. But memory failed to respond. She shook her head.

“I don’t remember you,” she said. “I’m sorry.”

“Never mind. Perhaps the recollection would have been painful.”

“How do you mean, painful?”

“Well, looking back, I can see that I must have been a very unpleasant child. I have always thought it greatly to the credit of my parents that they let me grow up. It would have been so easy to have dropped something heavy on me out of a window. They must have been tempted a hundred times, but they refrained. Yes, I was a great pest around the home. My only redeeming point was the way I worshipped you!”

“What!”

“Oh, yes. You probably didn’t notice it at the time, for I had a curious way of expressing my adoration. But you remain the brightest memory of a checkered youth.”

Jill searched his face with grave eyes, then shook her head again. “Nothing stirs?” asked the man sympathetically.

“It’s too maddening! Why does one forget things?” She reflected. “You aren’t Bobby Morrison?”

“I am not. What is more, I never was!”

Jill dived into the past once more and emerged with another possibility.

“Or Charlie—Charlie what was it?—Charlie Field?”

“You wound me! Have you forgotten that Charlie Field wore velvet Lord Fauntleroy suits and long golden curls? My past is not smirched with anything like that.”

“Would I remember your name if you told me?”

“I don’t know. I’ve forgotten yours. Your surname, that is. Of course I remember that your Christian name was Jill. It has always seemed to me the prettiest monosyllable in the language.” He looked at her thoughtfully. “It’s odd how little you’ve altered in looks. Freddie’s just the same, too, only larger. And he didn’t wear an eye-glass in those days, though I can see he was bound to later on. And yet I’ve changed so much that you can’t place me. It shows what a wearing life I must have led. I feel like Rip van Winkle. Old and withered. But that may be just the result of watching this play.”

“It is pretty terrible, isn’t it?”

“Worse than that. Looking at it dispassionately, I find it the extreme, ragged, outermost edge of the limit. Freddie had the correct description of it. He’s a great critic.”

“I really do think it’s the worst thing I have ever seen.”

“I don’t know what plays you have seen, but I feel you’re right.”

“Perhaps the second act’s better,” said Jill optimistically.

“It’s worse. I know that sounds like boasting, but it’s true. I feel like getting up and making a public apology.”

“But … Oh!”

Jill turned scarlet. A monstrous suspicion had swept over her.

“The only trouble is,” went on her companion, “that the audience would undoubtedly lynch me. And, though it seems improbable just at the present moment, it may be that life holds some happiness for me that’s worth waiting for. Anyway I’d rather not be torn limb from limb. A messy finish! I can just see them rending me asunder in a spasm of perfectly justifiable fury. ‘She loves me!’ Off comes a leg. ‘She loves me not!’ Off comes an arm. No, I think on the whole I’ll lie low. Besides, why should I care? Let ’em suffer. It’s their own fault. They would come!”

Jill had been trying to interrupt the harangue. She was greatly concerned.

“Did you write the play?”

The man nodded.

“You are quite right to speak in that horrified tone. But, between ourselves and on the understanding that you don’t get up and denounce me, I did.”

“Oh, I’m so sorry!”

“Not half so sorry as I am, believe me!”

“I mean, I wouldn’t have said …”

“Never mind. You didn’t tell me anything I didn’t know.” The lights began to go down. He rose. “Well, they’re off again. Perhaps you will excuse me? I don’t feel quite equal to assisting any longer at the wake. If you want something to occupy your mind during the next act, try to remember my name.”

He slid from his seat and disappeared. Jill clutched at Derek.

“Oh, Derek, it’s too awful. I’ve just been talking to the man who wrote this play, and I told him it was the worst thing I had ever seen!”

“Did you?” Derek snorted. “Well, it’s about time somebody told him!” A thought seemed to strike him. “Why, who is he? I didn’t know you knew him.”

“I don’t. I don’t even know his name.”

“His name, according to the programme, is John Grant. Never heard of him before. Jill, I wish you would not talk to people you don’t know,” said Derek with a note of annoyance in his voice. “You can never tell who they are.”

“But …”

“Especially with my mother here. You must be more careful.”

The curtain rose. Jill saw the stage mistily. From childhood up, she had never been able to cure herself of an unfortunate sensitiveness when sharply spoken to by those she loved. A rebuking world she could face with a stout heart, but there had always been just one or two people whose lightest word of censure could crush her. Her father had always had that effect upon her, and now Derek had taken his place.

But if there had only been time to explain … Derek could not object to her chatting with a friend of her childhood, even if she had completely forgotten him and did not remember his name even now. John Grant? Memory failed to produce any juvenile John Grant for her inspection.

Puzzling over this problem, Jill missed much of the beginning of the second act. Hers was a detachment which the rest of the audience would gladly have shared. For the poetic drama, after a bad start, was now plunging into worse depths of dulness. The coughing had become almost continuous. The stalls, supported by the presence of large droves of Sir Chester’s personal friends, were struggling gallantly to maintain a semblance of interest, but the pit and gallery had plainly given up hope. The critic of a weekly paper of small circulation, who had been shoved up in the upper circle, grimly jotted down the phrase “apathetically received” on his programme. He had come to the theatre that night in an aggrieved mood, for managers usually put him in the dress-circle. He got out his pencil again. Another phrase had occurred to him, admirable for the opening of his article. “At the Leicester Theatre,” he wrote, “where Sir Chester Portwood presented ‘Tried by Fire,’ dulness reigned supreme. …”

But you never know. Call no evening dull till it is over. However uninteresting its early stages may have been, that night was to be as animated and exciting as any audience could desire,—a night to be looked back to and talked about. For just as the critic of London Gossip wrote those damning words on his programme, guiding his pencil uncertainly in the dark, a curious yet familiar odor stole over the house.

The stalls got it first, and sniffed. It rose to the dress-circle, and the dress-circle sniffed. Floating up, it smote the silent gallery. And, suddenly, coming to life with a single-minded abruptness, the gallery ceased to be silent.

“Fire!”

Sir Chester Portwood, ploughing his way through a long speech, stopped and looked apprehensively over his shoulder. The girl with the lisp, who had been listening in a perfunctory manner to the long speech, screamed loudly. The voice of an unseen stage-hand called thunderously to an invisible “Bill” to cummere quick. And from the scenery on the prompt side there curled lazily across the stage a black wisp of smoke.

“Fire! Fire! Fire!”

“Just,” said a voice at Jill’s elbow, “what the play needed!” The mysterious author was back in his seat again.

In these days when the authorities who watch over the welfare of the community have taken the trouble to reiterate encouragingly in printed notices that a full house can be emptied in three minutes and that all an audience has to do in an emergency is to walk, not run, to the nearest exit, fire in the theatre has lost a good deal of its old-time terror. Yet it would be paltering with the truth to say that the audience which had assembled to witness the opening performance of the new play at the Leicester was entirely at its ease. The asbestos curtain was already on its way down, which should have been reassuring: but then asbestos curtains never look the part. To the lay eye they seem just the sort of thing that will blaze quickest. Moreover, it had not yet occurred to the man at the switchboard to turn up the house-lights, and the darkness was disconcerting.

Portions of the house were taking the thing better than other portions. Up in the gallery a vast activity was going on. The clatter of feet almost drowned the shouting. A moment before it would have seemed incredible that anything could have made the occupants of the gallery animated, but the instinct of self-preservation had put new life into them.

The stalls had not yet entirely lost their self-control. Alarm was in the air, but for the moment they hung on the razor-edge between panic and dignity. Panic urged them to do something sudden and energetic: dignity counselled them to wait. They, like the occupants of the gallery, greatly desired to be outside, but it was bad form to rush and jostle. The men were assisting the women into their cloaks, assuring them the while that it was “all right” and that they must not be frightened. But another curl of smoke had crept out just before the asbestos curtain completed its descent, and their words lacked the ring of conviction. The movement towards the exits had not yet become a stampede, but already those with seats nearest the stage had begun to feel that the more fortunate individuals near the doors were infernally slow in removing themselves.

Suddenly, as if by mutual inspiration, the composure of the stalls began to slip. Looking from above, one could have seen a sort of shudder run through the crowd. It was the effect of every member of that crowd starting to move a little more quickly.

A hand grasped Jill’s arm. It was a comforting hand, the hand of a man who had not lost his head. A pleasant voice backed up its message of reassurance.

“It’s no good getting into that mob. You might get hurt. There’s no danger: the play isn’t going on.”

Jill was shaken: but she had the fighting spirit and hated to show that she was shaken. Panic was knocking at the door of her soul, but dignity refused to be dislodged.

“All the same,” she said, smiling a difficult smile, “it would be nice to get out, wouldn’t it?”

“I was just going to suggest something of that very sort,” said the man beside her. “The same thought occurred to me. We can stroll out quite comfortably by our own private route. Come along.”

Jill looked over her shoulder. Derek and Lady Underhill were merged into the mass of refugees. She could not see them. For an instant a little spasm of pique stung her at the thought that Derek had deserted her. She groped her way after her companion, and presently they came by way of a lower box to the iron pass-door leading to the stage.

As it opened, smoke blew through, and the smell of burning was formidable. Jill recoiled involuntarily.

“It’s all right,” said her companion. “It smells worse than it really is. And, anyway, this is the quickest way out.”

They passed through onto the stage, and found themselves in a world of noise and confusion compared with which the auditorium which they had left had been a peaceful place. Smoke was everywhere. A stage-hand, carrying a bucket, lurched past them, bellowing. From somewhere out of sight on the other side of the stage there came a sound of chopping. Jill’s companion moved quickly to the switchboard, groped, found a handle, and turned it. In the narrow space between the corner of the proscenium and the edge of the asbestos curtain lights flashed up: and simultaneously there came a sudden diminution of the noise from the body of the house. The stalls, snatched from the intimidating spell of the darkness and able to see each other’s faces, discovered that they had been behaving indecorously and checked their struggling, a little ashamed of themselves. The relief would be only momentary, but, while it lasted, it postponed panic.

“Go straight across the stage,” Jill heard her companion say, “out along the passage and turn to the right, and you’ll be at the stage-door. I think, as there seems no one else around to do it, I’d better go out and say a few soothing words to the customers. Otherwise they’ll be biting holes in each other.”

He squeezed through the narrow opening in front of the curtain.

“Ladies and gentlemen!”

Jill remained where she was, leaning with one hand against the switchboard. She made no attempt to follow the directions he had given her. She was aware of a sense of comradeship, of being with this man in this adventure. If he stayed, she must stay. To go now through the safety of the stage-door would be abominable desertion. She listened, and found that she could hear plainly in spite of the noise. The smoke was worse than ever, and hurt her eyes, so that the figures of the theatre-firemen, hurrying to and fro, seemed like Brocken specters. She slipped a corner of her cloak across her mouth, and was able to breathe more easily.

“Ladies and gentlemen, I assure you that there is absolutely no danger. I am a stranger to you, so there is no reason why you should take my word, but fortunately I can give you solid proof. If there were any danger, I wouldn’t be here. All that has happened is that the warmth of your reception of the play has set a piece of scenery alight. …”

A crimson-faced stage-hand, carrying an axe in blackened hands, roared in Jill’s ear.

“Gerroutofit!”

Jill looked at him, puzzled.

“’Op it!” shouted the stage-hand. He cast his axe down with a clatter. “Can’t you see the place is afire?”

“But—but I’m waiting for …” Jill pointed to where her ally was still addressing an audience that seemed reluctant to stop and listen to him.

The stage-hand squinted out round the edge of the curtain.

“If he’s a friend of yours, miss, kindly get ’im to cheese it and get a move on. We’re clearing out. There’s nothing we can do. It’s got too much of an ’old. In about another two ticks the roof’s going to drop on us.”

Jill’s friend came squeezing back through the opening.

“Hullo! Still here?” He blinked approvingly at her through the smoke. “You’re a little soldier! Well, Augustus, what’s on your mind?” The simple question seemed to take the stage-hand aback.

“Wot’s on my mind? I’ll tell you wot’s on my blinking mind …”

“Don’t tell me. Let me guess. I’ve got it! The place is on fire!”

The stage-hand expectorated disgustedly. Flippancy at such a moment offended his sensibilities.

“We’re ’opping it,” he said.

“Great minds think alike! We are hopping it, too.”

“You’d better! And damn quick!”

“And, as you suggest, damn quick! You think of everything!”

Jill followed him across the stage. Her heart was beating violently. There was not only smoke now, but heat. Across the stage little scarlet flames were shooting, and something large and hard, unseen through the smoke, fell with a crash. The air was heavy with the smell of burning paint.

“Where’s Sir Portwood Chester?” enquired her companion of the stage-hand, who hurried beside them.

“’Opped it!” replied the other briefly, and coughed raspingly as he swallowed smoke.

“Strange,” said the man in Jill’s ear, as he pulled her along. “This way. Stick to me. Strange how the drama anticipates life! At the end of act two there was a scene where Sir Chester had to creep sombrely out into the night, and now he’s gone and done it! Ah!”

They had stumbled through a doorway and were out in a narrow passage, where the air, though tainted, was comparatively fresh. Jill drew a deep breath. Her companion turned to the stage-hand and felt in his pocket.

“Here, Rollo!” A coin changed hands. “Go and get a drink. You need it after all this.”

“Thank you, sir.”

“Don’t mention it. You’ve saved our lives. Suppose you hadn’t come up and told us, and we had never noticed there was a fire! Charred bones, believed to be those of a man and a woman, were found in the ruined edifice!”

He turned to Jill. “Here’s the stage-door. Shall we creep sombrely out into the night?”

The guardian of the stage-door was standing in the entrance of his little hutch, plainly perplexed. He was a slow thinker and a man whose life was ruled by routine: and the events of the evening had left him uncertain how to act.

“Wot’s all this about a fire?” he demanded.

Jill’s friend stopped.

“A fire?” He looked at Jill. “Did you hear anything about a fire?”

“They all come bustin’ past ’ere yelling there’s a fire,” persisted the door-man.

“By George! Now I come to think of it, you’re perfectly right! There is a fire! If you wait here a little longer, you’ll get it in the small of the back. Take the advice of an old friend who means you well and vanish. In the inspired words of the lad we’ve just parted from, ’op it!”

The stage-door man turned this over in his mind for a space.

“But I’m supposed to stay ’ere till eleven-thirty and lock up!” he said. “That’s what I’m supposed to do. Stay ’ere till eleven-thirty and lock up! And it ain’t but ten-forty-five now.”

“I see the difficulty,” said Jill’s companion thoughtfully. “It’s what you might call an impasse. French! Well, Casabianca, I’m afraid I don’t see how to help you. It’s a matter for your own conscience. I don’t want to lure you from the burning deck: on the other hand, if you stick on here, you’ll most certainly be fried on both sides … But, tell me. You spoke about locking up something at eleven-thirty. What are you supposed to lock up?”

“Why, the theatre.”

“Then that’s all right. By eleven-thirty there won’t be a theatre. If I were you, I should leave quietly and unostentatiously now. Tomorrow, if you wish it, and if they’ve cooled off sufficiently, you can come and sit on the ruins. Good night!”

Outside, the air was cold and crisp. Jill drew her warm cloak closer. Round the corner there was noise and shouting. Fire-engines had arrived. Jill’s companion lit a cigarette.

“Do you wish to stop and see the conflagration?” he asked.

Jill shivered. She was more shaken than she had realized.

“I’ve seen all the conflagration I want.”

“Same here. Well, it’s been an exciting evening. Started slow, I admit, but warmed up later! What I seem to need at the moment is a restorative stroll along the Embankment. Do you know, Sir Portwood Chester didn’t like the title of my play. He said ‘Tried by Fire’ was too melodramatic. Well, he can’t say now it wasn’t appropriate.”

They made their way towards the river, avoiding the street which was blocked by the crowds and the fire-engines. As they crossed the Strand, the man looked back. A red glow was in the sky.

“A great blaze!” he said. “What you might call—in fact what the papers will call—a holocaust. Quite a treat for the populace.”

“Do you think they will be able to put it out?”

“Not a chance. It’s got too much of a hold. It’s a pity you hadn’t that garden-hose of yours with you, isn’t it!”

Jill stopped, wide-eyed.

“Garden-hose?”

“Don’t you remember the garden-hose? I do! I can feel that clammy feeling of the water trickling down my back now!”

Memory, always a laggard by the wayside that redeems itself by an eleventh-hour rush, raced back to Jill. The Embankment turned to a sunlit garden, and the January night to a July day. She stared at him. He was looking at her with a whimsical smile. It was a smile which, pleasant today, had seemed mocking and hostile on that afternoon years ago. She had always felt then that he was laughing at her, and at the age of twelve she had resented laughter at her expense.

“You surely can’t be Wally Mason!”

“I was wondering when you would remember.”

“But the programme called you something else,—John something.”

“That was a cunning disguise. Wally Mason is the only genuine and official name. And, by Jove! I’ve just remembered yours. It was Mariner. By the way,”—he paused for an almost imperceptible instant—“is it still?”

Jill was hardly aware that he had asked her a question. She was suffering that momentary sense of unreality which comes to us when the years roll away and we are thrown abruptly back into the days of our childhood. The logical side of her mind was quite aware that there was nothing remarkable in the fact that Wally Mason, who had been to her all these years a boy in an Eton suit, should now present himself as a grown man. But for all that the transformation had something of the effect of a conjuring-trick. It was not only the alteration in his appearance that startled her: it was the amazing change in his personality. Wally Mason had been the bete noire of her childhood. She had never failed to look back at the episode of the garden-hose with the feeling that she had acted well, that—however she might have strayed in those early days from the straight and narrow path—in that one particular crisis she had done the right thing. And now she had taken an instant liking for him. Easily as she made friends, she had seldom before felt so immediately drawn to a strange man. Gone was the ancient hostility, and in its place a soothing sense of comradeship. The direct effect of this was to make Jill feel suddenly old. It was as if some link that joined her to her childhood had been snapped.

She glanced down the Embankment. Close by, to the left, Waterloo Bridge loomed up, dark and massive against the steel-gray sky, A tram-car, full of home-bound travellers, clattered past over rails that shone with the peculiarly frostbitten gleam that seems to herald snow. Across the river, everything was dark and mysterious, except for an occasional lamp-post and the dim illumination of the wharves. It was a depressing prospect, and the thought crossed her mind that to the derelicts whose nightly resting-place was a seat on the Embankment the view must seem even bleaker than it did to herself. She gave a little shiver. Somehow this sudden severance from the old days had brought with it a forlornness. She seemed to be standing alone in a changed world.

“Cold?” said Wally Mason.

“A little.”

“Let’s walk.”

They moved westwards. Cleopatra’s Needle shot up beside them, a pointing finger. Down on the silent river below, coffin-like row-boats lay moored to the wall. Through a break in the trees the clock over the Houses of Parliament shone for an instant as if suspended in the sky, then vanished as the trees closed in. A distant barge in the direction of Battersea wailed and was still. It had a mournful and foreboding sound. Jill shivered again. It annoyed her that she could not shake off this quite uncalled-for melancholy, but it withstood every effort. Why she should have felt that a chapter, a pleasant chapter, in the book of her life had been closed, she could not have said, but the feeling lingered.

“Correct me if I am wrong,” said Wally Mason, breaking a silence that had lasted several minutes, “but you seem to me to be freezing in your tracks. Ever since I came to London I’ve had a habit of heading for the Embankment in times of mental stress, but perhaps the middle of winter is not quite the moment for communing with the night. The Savoy is handy, if we stop walking away from it. I think we might celebrate this reunion with a little supper, don’t you?”

Jill’s depression disappeared magically. Her mercurial temperament asserted itself.

“Lights!” she said. “Music!”

“And food! To an ethereal person like you that remark may seem gross, but I had no dinner.”

“You poor dear! Why not?”

“Just nervousness.”

“Why, of course.” The interlude of the fire had caused her to forget his private and personal connection with the night’s events. Her mind went back to something he had said in the theatre. “Wally—” She stopped, a little embarrassed. “I suppose I ought to call you Mr Mason, but I’ve always thought of you …”

“Wally, if you please, Jill. It’s not as though we were strangers. I haven’t my book of etiquette with me, but I fancy that about eleven gallons of cold water down the neck constitutes an introduction. What were you going to say?”

“It was what you said to Freddie about putting up money. Did you really?”

“Put up the money for that ghastly play? I did. Every cent. It was the only way to get it put on.”

“But why … ? I forget what I was going to say!”

“Why did I want it put on? Well, it does seem odd, but I give you my honest word that until tonight I thought the darned thing a masterpiece. I’ve been writing musical comedies for the last few years, and after you’ve done that for a while your soul rises up within you and says, ‘Come, come, my lad! You can do better than this!’ That’s what mine said, and I believed it. Subsequent events have proved that Sidney the Soul was pulling my leg!”

“But—then you’ve lost a great deal of money?”

“The hoarded wealth, if you don’t mind my being melodramatic for a moment, of a lifetime. And no honest old servitor who dangled me on his knee as a baby to come along and offer me his savings! They don’t make servitors like that in America, worse luck. There is a Swedish lady who looks after my simple needs back there, but instinct tells me that, if I were to approach her on the subject of loosening up for the benefit of the young master, she would call a cop. Still, I’ve gained experience, which they say is just as good as cash, and I’ve enough money left to pay the check, at any rate, so come along.”

In the supper-room of the Savoy Hotel there was, as anticipated, food and light and music. It was still early, and the theatres had not yet emptied themselves, so that the big room was as yet but half full. Wally Mason had found a table in the corner, and proceeded to order with the concentration of a hungry man.

“Forgive my dwelling so tensely on the bill-of-fare,” he said, when the waiter had gone. “You don’t know what it means to one in my condition to have to choose between poulet en casserole and kidneys a la maitre d’hotel. A man’s cross-roads!”

Jill smiled happily across the table at him. She could hardly believe that this old friend with whom she had gone through the perils of the night and with whom she was now about to feast was the sinister figure that had cast a shadow on her childhood. He looked positively incapable of pulling a little girl’s hair—as no doubt he was.

“You always were greedy,” she commented. “Just before I turned the hose on you, I remember you had made yourself thoroughly disliked by pocketing a piece of my birthday-cake.”

“Do you remember that?” His eyes lit up and he smiled back at her. He had an ingratiating smile. His mouth was rather wide, and it seemed to stretch right across his face. He reminded Jill more than ever of a big, friendly dog. “I can feel it now,—all squashy in my pocket, inextricably mingled with a catapult, a couple of marbles, a box of matches, and some string. I was quite the human general store in those days. Which reminds me that we have been some time settling down to an exchange of our childhood reminiscences, haven’t we?”

“I’ve been trying to realise that you are Wally Mason. You have altered so.”

“For the better?”

“Very much for the better! You were a horrid little brute. You used to terrify me. I never knew when you were going to bound out at me from behind a tree or something. I remember your chasing me for miles, shrieking at the top of your voice!”

“Sheer embarrassment! I told you just now how I used to worship you. If I shrieked a little, it was merely because I was shy. I did it to hide my devotion.”

“You certainly succeeded. I never even suspected it.”

Wally sighed.

“How like life! I never told my love, but let concealment like a worm i’ the bud …”

“Talking of worms, you once put one down my back!”

“No, no,” said Wally in a shocked voice. “Not that! I was boisterous, perhaps, but surely always the gentleman.”

“You did! In the shrubbery. There had been a thunderstorm and …”

“I remember the incident now. A mere misunderstanding. I had done with the worm, and thought you might be glad to have it.”

“You were always doing things like that. Once you held me over the pond and threatened to drop me into the water—in the winter! Just before Christmas. It was a particularly mean thing to do, because I couldn’t even kick your shins for fear you would let me fall. Luckily Uncle Chris came up and made you stop.”

“You considered that a fortunate occurrence, did you?” said Wally. “Well, perhaps from your point of view it may have been. I saw the thing from a different angle. Your uncle had a whangee with him, and the episode remains photographically lined on the tablets of my mind when a yesterday has faded from its page. My friends sometimes wonder what I mean when I say that my old wound troubles me in frosty weather. By the way, how is your uncle?”

“Oh, he’s very well. Just as lazy as ever. He’s away at present, down at Brighton.”

“He didn’t strike me as lazy,” said Wally thoughtfully. “Dynamic would express it better. But perhaps I happened to encounter him in a moment of energy.”

“He doesn’t look a day older than he did then.”

“I’m afraid I don’t recall his appearance very distinctly. On the only occasion on which we ever really foregathered—hobnobbed, so to speak—he was behind me most of the time. Ah!” The waiter had returned with a loaded tray. “The food! Forgive me if I seem a little distrait for a moment or two. There is man’s work before me!”

“And later on, I suppose, you would like a chop or something to take away in your pocket?”

“I will think it over. Possibly a little soup. My needs are very simple these days.”

Jill watched him with a growing sense of satisfaction. There was something boyishly engaging about this man. She felt at home with him. He affected her in much the same way as did Freddie Rooke. He was a definite addition to the things that went to make her happy.

She liked him particularly for being such a good loser. She had always been a good loser herself, and the quality was one which she admired. It was nice of him to dismiss from his conversation—and apparently from his thoughts—that night’s fiasco and all that it must have cost him. She wondered how much he had lost. Certainly something very substantial. Yet it seemed to trouble him not at all. Jill considered his behavior gallant, and her heart warmed to him. This was how a man ought to take the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune.

Wally sighed contentedly, and leaned back in his chair.

“An unpleasant exhibition!” he said apologetically. “But unavoidable. And, anyway, I take it that you would prefer to have me well-fed and happy about the place than swooning on the floor with starvation. A wonderful thing, food! I am now ready to converse intelligently on any subject you care to suggest. I have eaten rose-leaves and am no more a golden ass, so to speak! What shall we talk about?”

“Tell me about yourself.”

Wally beamed.

“There is no nobler topic! But what aspect of myself do you wish me to touch on? My thoughts, my tastes, my amusements, my career, or what? I can talk about myself for hours. My friends in New York often complain about it bitterly.”

“New York?” said Jill. “Oh then you live in America?”

“Yes. I only came over here to see that darned false alarm of a play of mine put on.”

“Why didn’t you put it on in New York?”

“Too many of the lads of the village know me over there. This was a new departure, you see. What the critics in those parts expect from me is something entitled ‘Wow! Wow!’ or ‘The Girl from Yonkers’. It would have unsettled their minds to find me breaking out in poetic drama. They are men of coarse fibre and ribald mind and they would have been very funny about it. I thought it wiser to come over here among strangers, little thinking that I should sit in the next seat to somebody I had known all my life.”

“But when did you go to America? And why?”

“I think it must have been four—five—well, quite a number of years after the hose episode. Probably you didn’t observe that I wasn’t still around, but we crept silently out of the neighborhood round about that time and went to live in London.” His tone lost its lightness momentarily. “My father died, you know, and that sort of broke things up. He didn’t leave any too much money, either. Apparently we had been living on rather too expansive a scale during the time I knew you. At any rate, I was more or less up against it until your father got me a job in an office in New York.”

“My father!”

“Yes. It was wonderfully good of him to bother about me. I didn’t suppose he would have known me by sight, and even if he had remembered me, I shouldn’t have imagined that the memory would have been a pleasant one. But he couldn’t have taken more trouble if I had been a blood-relation.”

“That was just like father,” said Jill softly.

“He was a prince.”

“But you aren’t in the office now?”

“No. I found I had a knack of writing verses and things, and I wrote a few vaudeville songs. Then I came across a man named Bevan at a music-publisher’s. He was just starting to write music, and we got together and turned out some vaudeville sketches, and then a manager sent for us to fix up a show that was dying on the road and we had the good luck to turn it into a success, and after that it was pretty good going. Managers are just like sheep. They know nothing whatever about the show business themselves, and they come flocking after anybody who looks as if he could turn out the right stuff. They never think any one any good except the fellow who had the last hit. So, while your luck lasts, you have to keep them off with a stick. Then you have a couple of failures, and they skip off after somebody else, till you have another success, and then they all come skipping back again, bleating plaintively. George Bevan got married the other day—you probably read about it—he married Lord Marshmoreton’s daughter. Lucky devil!”

“Are you married?”

“No.”

“You were faithful to my memory?” said Jill with a smile.

“I was.”

“It can’t last,” said Jill, shaking her head. “One of these days you’ll meet some lovely American girl and then you’ll put a worm down her back or pull her hair or whatever it is you do when you want to show your devotion, and … What are you looking at? Is something interesting going on behind me?”

He had been looking past her out into the room.

“It’s nothing,” he said. “Only there’s a statuesque old lady about two tables back of you who has been staring at you, with intervals for refreshment, for the last five minutes. You seem to fascinate her.”

“An old lady?”

“Yes. With a glare! She looks like Dunsany’s Bird of the Difficult Eye. Count ten and turn carelessly round. There, at that table. Almost behind you.”

“Good Heavens!” exclaimed Jill.

She turned quickly round again.

“What’s the matter? Do you know her? Somebody you don’t want to meet?”

“It’s Lady Underhill! And Derek’s with her!”

Wally had been lifting his glass. He put it down rather suddenly.

“Derek?” he said.

“Derek Underhill. The man I’m engaged to marry.”

There was a moment’s silence.

“Oh!” said Wally thoughtfully. “The man you’re engaged to marry? Yes, I see!”

He raised his glass again, and drank its contents quickly.

Jill looked at her companion anxiously. Recent events had caused her completely to forget the existence of Lady Underhill. She was always so intensely interested in what she happened to be doing at the moment that she often suffered these temporary lapses of memory. It occurred to her now,—too late, as usual,—that the Savoy Hotel was the last place in London where she should have come to supper with Wally. It was the hotel where Lady Underhill was staying. She frowned. Life had suddenly ceased to be careless and happy, and had become a problem-ridden thing, full of perplexity and misunderstandings.

“What shall I do?”

Wally Mason started at the sound of her voice. He appeared to be deep in thoughts of his own.

“I beg your pardon?”

“What shall I do?”

“I shouldn’t be worried.”

“Derek will be awfully cross.”

Wally’s good-humored mouth tightened almost imperceptibly.

“Why?” he said. “There’s nothing wrong in your having supper with an old friend.”

“N-no,” said Jill doubtfully. “But …”

“Derek Underhill,” said Wally reflectively. “Is that Sir Derek Underhill, whose name one’s always seeing in the papers?”

“Derek is in the papers a lot. He’s an M.P. and all sorts of things.”

“Good-looking fellow. Ah, here’s the coffee.”

“I don’t want any, thanks.”

“Nonsense. Why spoil your meal because of this? Do you smoke?”

“No, thanks.”

“Given it up, eh? Daresay you’re wise. Stunts the growth and increases the expenses.”

“Given it up?”

“Don’t you remember sharing one of your father’s cigars with me behind the haystack in the meadow? We cut it in half. I finished my half, but I fancy about three puffs were enough for you. Those were happy days!”

“That one wasn’t! Of course I remember it now. I don’t suppose I shall ever forget it.”

“The thing was my fault, as usual. I recollect I dared you.”

“Yes. I always took a dare.”

“Do you still?”

“What do you mean?”

Wally knocked the ash off his cigarette.

“Well,” he said slowly, “suppose I were to dare you to get up and walk over to that table and look your fiancé in the eye and say, ‘Stop scowling at my back hair! I’ve a perfect right to be supping with an old friend!’—would you do it?”

“Is he?” said Jill, startled.

“Scowling? Can’t you feel it on the back of your head?” He drew thoughtfully at his cigarette. “If I were you I should stop that sort of thing at the source. It’s a habit that can’t be discouraged in a husband too early. Scowling is the civilized man’s substitute for wife-beating.”

Jill moved uncomfortably in her chair. Her quick temper resented his tone. There was a hostility, a hardly veiled contempt in his voice which stung her. Derek was sacred. Whoever criticized him, presumed. Wally, a few minutes before a friend and an agreeable companion, seemed to her to have changed. He was once more the boy whom she had disliked in the old days. There was a gleam in her eyes which should have warned him, but he went on.

“I should imagine that this Derek of yours is not one of our leading sunbeams. Well, I suppose he could hardly be, if that’s his mother and there is anything in heredity.”

“Please don’t criticize Derek,” said Jill coldly.

“I was only saying …”

“Never mind. I don’t like it.”

A slow flush crept over Wally’s face. He made no reply, and there fell between them a silence that was like a shadow. Jill sipped her coffee miserably. She was regretting that little spurt of temper. She wished she could have recalled the words. Not that it was the actual words that had torn asunder this gossamer thing, the friendship which they had begun to weave like some fragile web: it was her manner, the manner of the princess rebuking an underling. She knew that, if she had struck him, she could not have offended Wally more deeply. There are some men whose ebullient natures enable them to rise unscathed from the worst snub. Wally, her intuition told her, was not that kind of man.

There was only one way of mending the matter. In these clashes of human temperaments, these sudden storms that spring up out of a clear sky, it is possible sometimes to repair the damage, if the psychological moment is resolutely seized, by talking rapidly and with detachment on neutral topics. Words have made the rift, and words alone can bridge it. But neither Jill nor her companion could find words, and the silence lengthened grimly. When Wally spoke, it was in the level tones of a polite stranger.

“Your friends have gone.”

His voice was the voice in which, when she went on railway journeys, fellow-travellers in the carriage enquired of Jill if she would prefer the window up or down. It had the effect of killing her regrets and feeding her resentment. She was a girl who never refused a challenge, and she set herself to be as frigidly polite and aloof as he.

“Really?” she said. “When did they leave?”

“A moment ago.” The lights gave the warning flicker that announces the arrival of the hour of closing. In the momentary darkness they both rose. Wally scrawled his name across the check which the waiter had insinuated upon his attention. “I suppose we had better be moving?”

They crossed the room in silence. Everybody was moving in the same direction. The broad stairway leading to the lobby was crowded with chattering supper-parties. The lights had gone up again.

At the cloak-room Wally stopped.

“I see Underhill waiting up there,” he said casually, “To take you home, I suppose. Shall we say good-night? I’m staying in the hotel.”

Jill glanced towards the head of the stairs. Derek was there. He was alone. Lady Underhill presumably had gone up to her room in the elevator.

Wally was holding out his hand. His face was stolid, and his eyes avoided hers.

“Good-bye,” he said.

“Good-bye,” said Jill.

She felt curiously embarrassed. At this last moment hostility had weakened, and she was conscious of a desire to make amends. She and this man had been through much together that night, much that was perilous and much that was pleasant. A sudden feeling of remorse came over her.

“You’ll come and see us, won’t you?” she said a little wistfully. “I’m sure my uncle would like to meet you again.”

“It’s very good of you,” said Wally, “but I’m afraid I shall be going back to America at any moment now.”

Pique, that ally of the devil, regained its slipping grip upon Jill.

“Oh? I’m sorry,” she said indifferently. “Well, goodbye, then.”

“Good-bye.”

“I hope you have a pleasant voyage.”

“Thanks.”

He turned into the cloak-room, and Jill went up the stairs to join Derek. She felt angry and depressed, full of a sense of the futility of things. People flashed into one’s life and out again. Where was the sense of it?

Derek had been scowling, and Derek still scowled. His eyebrows were formidable, and his mouth smiled no welcome at Jill as she approached him. The evening, portions of which Jill had found so enjoyable, had contained no pleasant portions for Derek. Looking back over a lifetime whose events had been almost uniformly agreeable, he told himself that he could not recall another day which had gone so completely awry. It had started with the fog. He hated fog. Then had come that meeting with his mother at Charing Cross, which had been enough to upset him by itself. After that, rising to a crescendo of unpleasantness, the day had provided that appalling situation at the Albany, the recollection of which still made him tingle; and there had followed the silent dinner, the boredom of the early part of the play, the fire at the theatre, the undignified scramble for the exits, and now this discovery of the girl whom he was engaged to marry supping at the Savoy with a fellow he didn’t remember ever having seen in his life. All these things combined to induce in Derek a mood bordering on ferocity. His birth and income, combining to make him one of the spoiled children of the world, had fitted him ill for such a series of catastrophes.

Breeding counts. Had he belonged to a lower order of society, Derek would probably have seized Jill by the throat and started to choke her. Being what he was, he merely received her with frozen silence and led her out to the waiting taxi-cab. It was only when the cab had started on its journey that he found relief in speech.

“Well,” he said, mastering with difficulty an inclination to raise his voice to a shout, “perhaps you will kindly explain?”

Jill had sunk back against the cushions of the cab. The touch of his body against hers always gave her a thrill, half pleasurable, half frightening. She had never met anybody who affected her in this way as Derek did. She moved a little closer, and felt for his hand. But, as she touched it, it retreated—coldly. Her heart sank. It was like being cut in public by somebody very dignified.

“Derek, darling!” Her lips trembled. Others had seen this side of Derek Underhill frequently, for he was a man who believed in keeping the world in its place, but she never. To her he had always been the perfect gracious knight. A little too perfect, perhaps, a trifle too gracious, possibly, but she had been too deeply in love to notice that. “Don’t be cross!”

The English language is the richest in the world, and yet somehow in moments when words count most we generally choose the wrong ones. The adjective “cross” as a description of his Jove-like wrath that consumed his whole being jarred upon Derek profoundly. It was as though Prometheus, with the vultures tearing his liver, had been asked if he were piqued.

“Cross!”

The cab rolled on. Lights from lamp-posts flashed in at the windows. It was a pale, anxious little face that they lit up when they shone upon Jill.

“I can’t understand you,” said Derek at last. Jill noticed that he had not yet addressed her by her name. He was speaking straight out in front of him as if he were soliloquizing. “I simply cannot understand you. After what happened before dinner tonight, for you to cap everything by going off alone to supper at a restaurant, where half the people in the room must have known you, with a man …”

“You don’t understand!”

“Exactly! I said I did not understand.” The feeling of having scored a point made Derek feel a little better. “I admit it. Your behavior is incomprehensible. Where did you meet this fellow?”

“I met him at the theatre. He was the author of the play.”

“The man you told me you had been talking to? The fellow who scraped acquaintance with you between the acts?”

“But I found out he was an old friend. I mean, I knew him when I was a child.”

“You didn’t tell me that,”

“I only found it out later.”

“After he had invited you to supper! It’s maddening!” cried Derek, the sense of his wrongs surging back over him. “What do you suppose my mother thought? She asked me who the man with you was. I had to say I didn’t know! What do you suppose she thought?”

It is to be doubted whether anything else in the world could have restored the fighting spirit to Jill’s cowering soul at that moment: but the reference to Lady Underhill achieved this miracle. That deep mutual antipathy which is so much more common than love at first sight had sprung up between the two at the instant of their meeting. The circumstances of that meeting had caused it to take root and grow. To Jill Derek’s mother was by this time not so much a fellow human being whom she disliked as a something, a sort of force, that made for her unhappiness. She was a menace and a loathing.

“If your mother had asked me that question,” she retorted with spirit “I should have told her that he was the man who got me safely out of the theatre after you …” She checked herself. She did not want to say the unforgiveable thing. “You see,” she said, more quietly, “you had disappeared. …”

“My mother is an old woman,” said Derek stiffly. “Naturally I had to look after her. I called to you to follow.”

“Oh, I understand. I’m simply trying to explain what happened. I was there all alone, and Wally Mason …”

“Wally!” Derek uttered a short laugh, almost a bark. “It got to Christian names, eh?”

Jill set her teeth.

“I told you I knew him as a child. I always called him Wally then.”

“I beg your pardon. I had forgotten.”

“He got me out through the pass-door onto the stage and through the stage-door.”

Derek was feeling cheated. He had the uncomfortable sensation that comes to men who grandly contemplate mountains and … see them dwindle to mole-hills. The apparently outrageous had shown itself in explanation nothing so out-of-the-way after all. He seized upon the single point in Jill’s behavior that still constituted a grievance.

“There was no need for you to go to supper with the man!” Jove-like wrath had ebbed away to something deplorably like a querulous grumble. “You should have gone straight home. You must have known how anxious I would be about you.”

“Well, really, Derek, dear! You didn’t seem so very anxious! You were having supper yourself quite cosily.”

The human mind is curiously constituted. It is worthy of record that, despite his mother’s obvious disapproval of his engagement, despite all the occurrences of this dreadful day, it was not till she made this remark that Derek Underhill first admitted to himself that, intoxicate his senses as she might, there was a possibility that Jill Mariner was not the ideal wife for him. The idea came and went more quickly than breath upon a mirror. It passed, but it had been. There are men who fear repartee in a wife more keenly than a sword. Derek was one of these. Like most men of single outlook, whose dignity is their most precious possession, he winced from an edged tongue.

“My mother was greatly upset,” he replied coldly. “I thought a cup of soup would do her good. And, as for being anxious about you, I telephoned to your home to ask if you had come in.”

“And when,” thought Jill, “they told you I hadn’t, you went off to supper!”

She did not speak the words. If she had an edged tongue, she had also the control of it. She had no wish to wound Derek. Whole-hearted in everything she did, she loved him with her whole heart. There might be specks upon her idol—that its feet might be clay she could never believe—but they mattered nothing. She loved him.

“I’m so sorry, dear,” she said. “So awfully sorry! I’ve been a bad girl, haven’t I?”

She felt for his hand again, and this time he allowed it to remain stiffly in her grasp. It was like being grudgingly recognized by somebody very dignified who had his doubts about you but reserved judgment.

The cab drew up at the door of the house in Ovington Square which Jill’s Uncle Christopher had settled upon as a suitable address for a gentleman of his standing. (“In a sense, my dear child I admit, it is Brompton Road, but it opens into Lennox Gardens, which makes it to all intents and purposes Sloane Street”) Jill put up her face to be kissed, like a penitent child.

“I’ll never be naughty again!”

For a flickering instant Derek hesitated. The drive, long as it was, had been too short wholly to restore his equanimity. Then the sense of her nearness, her sweetness, the faint perfume of her hair, and her eyes, shining softly in the darkness so close to his own, overcame him. He crushed her to him.

Jill disappeared into the house with a happy laugh. It had been a terrible day, but it had ended well.

“The Albany,” said Derek to the cabman.

He leaned back against the cushions. His senses were in a whirl. The cab rolled on. Presently his exalted mood vanished as quickly as it had come. Jill absent always affected him differently from Jill present. He was not a man of strong imagination, and the stimulus of her waned when she was not with him. Long before the cab reached the Albany the frown was back on his face.

Arriving at the Albany, he found Freddie Rooke lying on his spine in a deep arm-chair. His slippered feet were on the mantelpiece, and he was restoring his wasted tissues with a strong whisky-and-soda. One of the cigars which Parker, the valet, had stamped with the seal of his approval was in the corner of his mouth. The Sporting Times, with a perusal of which he had been soothing his fluttered nerves, had fallen on the floor beside the chair. He had finished reading, and was now gazing peacefully at the ceiling, his mind a perfect blank. There was nothing the matter with Freddie.

“Hullo, old thing,” he observed as Derek entered. “So you buzzed out of the fiery furnace all right? I was wondering how you had got along. How are you feeling? I’m not the man I was! These things get the old system all stirred up! I’ll do anything in reason to oblige and help things along and all that, but to be called on at a moment’s notice to play Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego rolled into one, without rehearsal or make-up, is a bit too thick! No, young feller-me-lad! If theatre-fires are going to be the fashion this season, the Last of the Rookes will sit quietly at home and play solitaire. Mix yourself a drink of something, old man, or something of that kind. By the way, your jolly old mater. All right? Not even singed? Fine! Make a long arm and gather in a cigar.”

And Freddie, having exerted himself to play the host in a suitable manner, wedged himself more firmly into his chair and blew a cloud of smoke.

Derek sat down. He lit a cigar, and stared silently at the fire. From the mantelpiece Jill’s photograph smiled down, but he did not look at it. Presently his attitude began to weigh upon Freddie. Freddie had had a trying evening. What he wanted just now was merry prattle, and his friend did not seem disposed to contribute his share. He removed his feet from the mantelpiece, and wriggled himself sideways, so that he could see Derek’s face. Its gloom touched him. Apart from his admiration for Derek, he was a warm-hearted young man, and sympathized with affliction when it presented itself to his notice.

“Something on your mind, old bean?” he enquired delicately.

Derek did not answer for a moment. Then he reflected that, little as he esteemed the other’s mentality, he and Freddie had known each other a long time, and that it would be a relief to confide in some one. And Freddie, moreover, was an old friend of Jill and the man who had introduced him to her.

“Yes,” he said.

“I’m listening, old top,” said Freddie. “Release the film.”

Derek drew at his cigar, and watched the smoke as it curled to the ceiling.

“It’s about Jill.”

Freddie signified his interest by wriggling still further sideways.

“Jill, eh?”

“Freddie, she’s so damned impulsive!”

Freddie nearly rolled out of his chair. This, he took it, was what writing-chappies called a coincidence.

“Rummy you should say that,” he ejaculated. “I was telling her exactly the same thing myself only this evening.” He hesitated. “I fancy I can see what you’re driving at, old thing. The watchword is ‘What ho, the mater!’ yes, no? You’ve begun to get a sort of idea that if Jill doesn’t watch her step, she’s apt to sink pretty low in the betting, what? I know exactly what you mean! You and I know all right that Jill’s a topper. But one can see that to your mater she might seem a bit different. I mean to say, your jolly old mater only judging by first impressions, and the meeting not having come off quite as scheduled … I say, old man,” he broke off, “fearfully sorry and all that about that business. You know what I mean! Wouldn’t have had it happen for the world. I take it the mater was a trifle peeved? Not to say perturbed and chagrined? I seemed to notice at dinner.”

“She was furious, of course. She did not refer to the matter when we were alone together, but there was no need to. I knew what she was thinking.”

Derek threw away his cigar. Freddie noted this evidence of an overwrought soul—the thing was only a quarter smoked, and it was a dashed good brand, mark you—with concern.

“The whole thing,” he conceded, “was a bit unfortunate.”

Derek began to pace the room.

“Freddie!”

“On the spot, old man!”

“Something’s got to be done!”

“Absolutely!” Freddie nodded solemnly. He had taken this matter greatly to heart. Derek was his best friend, and he had always been extremely fond of him. It hurt him to see things going wrong. “I’ll tell you what, old bean. Let me handle this binge for you.”

“You?”

“Me! The Final Rooke!” He jumped up, and leaned against the mantelpiece. “I’m the lad to do it. I’ve known Jill for years. She’ll listen to me. I’ll talk to her like a Dutch uncle and make her understand the general scheme of things. I’ll take her out to tea tomorrow and slang her in no uncertain voice! Leave the whole thing to me, laddie!”

Derek considered.

“It might do some good,” he said.

“Good?” said Freddie. “It’s it, dear boy! It’s a wheeze! You toddle off to bed and have a good sleep. I’ll fix the whole thing for you!”

There are streets in London into which the sun seems never to penetrate. Some of these are in fashionable quarters, and it is to be supposed that their inhabitants find an address which looks well on note-paper a sufficient compensation for the gloom that goes with it. The majority, however, are in the mean neighborhoods of the great railway termini, and appear to offer no compensation whatever. They are lean, furtive streets, gray as the January sky with a sort of arrested decay. They smell of cabbage and are much prowled over by vagrom cats. At night they are empty and dark, and a stillness broods on them, broken only by the cracked tingle of an occasional piano playing one of the easier hymns, a form of music to which the dwellers in the dingy houses are greatly addicted. By day they achieve a certain animation through the intermittent appearance of women in aprons, who shake rugs out of the front doors or, emerging from areas, go down to the public-house on the corner with jugs to fetch the supper-beer. In almost every ground-floor window there is a card announcing that furnished lodgings may be had within. You will find these streets by the score if you leave the main thoroughfares and take a short cut on your way to Euston, to Paddington, or to Waterloo. But the dingiest and deadliest and most depressing lie round about Victoria. And Daubeny Street, Pimlico, is one of the worst of them all.

On the afternoon following the events recorded, a girl was dressing in the ground-floor room of Number Nine, Daubeny Street. A tray bearing the remains of a late breakfast stood on the rickety table beside a bowl of wax flowers. From beneath the table peered the green cover of a copy of Variety. A gray parrot in a cage by the window cracked seed and looked out into the room with a satirical eye. He had seen all this so many times before,—Nelly Bryant arraying herself in her smartest clothes to go out and besiege agents in their offices off the Strand. It happened every day. In an hour or two she would come back as usual, say “Oh, Gee!” in a tired sort of voice, and then Bill the parrot’s day proper would begin. He was a bird who liked the sound of his own voice, and he never got the chance of a really sustained conversation till Nelly returned in the evening.

“Who cares?” said Bill, and cracked another seed.

If rooms are an indication of the characters of their occupants, Nelly Bryant came well out of the test of her surroundings. Nothing can make a London furnished room much less horrible than it intends to be, but Nelly had done her best. The furniture, what there was of it, was of that lodging-house kind which resembles nothing else in the world. But a few little touches here and there, a few instinctively tasteful alterations in the general scheme of things, had given the room almost a cosy air. Later on, with the gas lit, it would achieve something approaching homeiness. Nelly, like many another nomad, had taught herself to accomplish a good deal with poor material. On the road in America, she had sometimes made even a bedroom in a small hotel tolerably comfortable, than which there is no greater achievement. Oddly, considering her life, she had a genius for domesticity.

Today, not for the first time, Nelly was feeling unhappy. The face that looked back at her out of the mirror at which she was arranging her most becoming hat was weary. It was only a moderately pretty face, but loneliness and underfeeding had given it a wistful expression that had charm. Unfortunately, it was not the sort of charm which made a great appeal to the stout, whisky-nourished men who sat behind paper-littered tables, smoking cigars, in the rooms marked “Private” in the offices of theatrical agents. Nelly had been out of a “shop” now for many weeks,—ever since, in fact, “Follow the Girl” had finished its long ran at the Regal Theatre.

“Follow the Girl,” an American musical comedy, had come over from New York with an American company, of which Nelly had been a humble unit, and, after playing a year in London and some weeks in the number one towns, had returned to New York. It did not cheer Nelly up in the long evenings in Daubeny Street to reflect that, if she had wished, she could have gone home with the rest of the company. A mad impulse had seized her to try her luck in London, and here she was now, marooned.

“Who cares?” said Bill.

For a bird who enjoyed talking he was a little limited in his remarks and apt to repeat himself.

“I do, you poor fish!” said Nelly, completing her maneuvers with the hat and turning to the cage. “It’s all right for you—you have a swell time with nothing to do but sit there and eat seed—but how do you suppose I enjoy tramping around, looking for work and never finding any?”

She picked up her gloves. “Oh, well!” she said. “Wish me luck!”

“Good-bye, boy!” said the parrot, clinging to the bars.

Nelly thrust a finger into the cage and scratched his head.

“Anxious to get rid of me, aren’t you? Well, so long.”

“Good-bye, boy!”

“All right, I’m going. Be good!”

“Woof-woof-woof!” barked Bill the parrot, not committing himself to any promises.

For some moments after Nelly had gone he remained hunched on his perch, contemplating the infinite. Then he sauntered along to the seed-box and took some more light nourishment. He always liked to spread his meals out, to make them last longer. A drink of water to wash the food down, and he returned to the middle of the cage, where he proceeded to conduct a few intimate researches with his beak under his left wing. After which he mewed like a cat, and relapsed into silent meditation once more. He closed his eyes and pondered on his favorite problem—Why was he a parrot? This was always good for an hour or so, and it was three o’clock before he had come to his customary decision that he didn’t know. Then, exhausted by brain-work and feeling a trifle hipped by the silence of the room, he looked about him for some way of jazzing existence up a little. It occurred to him that if he barked again it might help.

“Woof-woof-woof!”

Good as far as it went, but it did not go far enough. It was not real excitement. Something rather more dashing seemed to him to be indicated. He hammered for a moment or two on the floor of his cage, ate a mouthful of the newspaper there, and stood with his head on one side, chewing thoughtfully. It didn’t taste as good as usual. He suspected Nelly of having changed his Daily Mail for the Daily Express or something. He swallowed the piece of paper, and was struck by the thought that a little climbing exercise might be what his soul demanded. (You hang on by your beak and claws and work your way up to the roof. It sounds tame, but it’s something to do.) He tried it. And, as he gripped the door of the cage, it swung open. Bill the parrot now perceived that this was going to be one of those days. He had not had a bit of luck like this for months.

For awhile he sat regarding the open door. Unless excited by outside influences, he never did anything in a hurry. Then proceeding cautiously, he passed out into the room. He had been out there before, but always chaperoned by Nelly. This was something quite different. It was an adventure. He hopped onto the window-sill. There was a ball of yellow wool there, but he had lunched and could eat nothing. He cast around in his mind for something to occupy him, and perceived suddenly that the world was larger than he had supposed. Apparently there was a lot of it outside the room. How long this had been going on, he did not know, but obviously it was a thing to be investigated. The window was open at the bottom, and just outside the window were what he took to be the bars of another and larger cage. As a matter of fact they were the railings which afforded a modest protection to Number Nine. They ran the length of the house, and were much used by small boys as a means of rattling sticks. One of these stick-rattlers passed as Bill stood there looking down. The noise startled him for a moment, then he seemed to come to the conclusion that this sort of thing was to be expected if you went out into the great world and that a parrot who intended to see life must not allow himself to be deterred by trifles. He crooned a little, and finally, stepping in a stately way over the window-sill, with his toes turned in at right angles, caught at the top of the railing with his beak, and proceeded to lower himself. Arrived at the level of the street, he stood looking out.

A dog trotted up, spied him, and came to sniff.

“Good-bye, boy!” said Bill chattily.

The dog was taken aback. Hitherto, in his limited experience, birds had been birds and men men. Here was a blend of the two. What was to be done about it? He barked tentatively, then, finding that nothing disastrous ensued, pushed his nose between two of the bars and barked again. Any one who knew Bill could have told him that he was asking for it, and he got it. Bill leaned forward and nipped his nose. The dog started back with a howl of agony. He was learning something new every minute.

“Woof-woof-woof!” said Bill sardonically.

He perceived trousered legs, four of them, and, cocking his eye upwards, saw that two men of the lower orders stood before him. They were gazing down at him in the stolid manner peculiar to the proletariat of London in the presence of the unusual. For some minutes they stood drinking him in, then one of them gave judgment.

“It’s a parrot!” He removed a pipe from his mouth and pointed with the stem. “A perishin’ parrot, that is, Erb.”

“Ah!” said Erb, a man of few words.

“A parrot,” proceeded the other. He was seeing clearer into the matter every moment. “That’s a parrot, that is, Erb. My brother Joe’s wife’s sister ’ad one of ’em. Come from abroad, they do. My brother Joe’s wife’s sister ’ad one of ’em. Red-’aired gel she was. Married a feller down at the Docks. She ’ad one of ’em. Parrots they’re called.”

He bent down for a closer inspection, and inserted a finger through the railings. Erb abandoned his customary taciturnity and spoke words of warning.

“Tike care ’e don’t sting yer, ’Enry!”

Henry seemed wounded.

“Woddyer mean sting me? I know all abart parrots, I do. My brother Joe’s wife’s sister ’ad one of ’em. They don’t ’urt yer, not if you’re kind to ’em. You know yer pals when you see ’em, don’t yer, mate?” he went on, addressing Bill, who was contemplating the finger with one half-closed eye.

“Good-bye, boy,” said the parrot, evading the point.

“Jear that?” cried Henry delightedly. “Goo’-bye, boy!’ ’Uman they are!”

“’E’ll ’ave a piece out of yer finger,” warned Erb, the suspicious.

“Wot, ’im!” Henry’s voice was indignant. He seemed to think that his reputation as an expert on parrots had been challenged. “’E wouldn’t ’ave no piece out of my finger.”

“Bet yer a narf-pint ’e would ’ave a piece out of yer finger,” persisted the skeptic.

“No blinkin’ parrot’s goin’ to ’ave no piece of no finger of mine! My brother Joe’s wife’s sister’s parrot never ’ad no piece out of no finger of mine!” He extended the finger further and waggled it enticingly beneath Bill’s beak. “Cheerio, matey!” he said winningly. “Polly want a nut?”

Whether it was mere indolence or whether the advertised docility of that other parrot belonging to Henry’s brother’s wife’s sister had caused him to realize that there was a certain standard of good conduct for his species one cannot say: but for awhile Bill merely contemplated temptation with a detached eye.

“See!” said Henry.

“Woof-woof-woof!” said Bill.

“Wow-Wow-Wow!” yapped the dog, suddenly returning to the scene and going on with the argument at the point where he had left off.

The effect on Bill was catastrophic. Ever a high-strung bird, he lost completely the repose which stamps the caste of Vere de Vere and the better order of parrot. His nerves were shocked, and, as always under such conditions, his impulse was to bite blindly. He bit, and Henry—one feels sorry for Henry: he was a well-meaning man—leaped back with a loud howl.

“That’ll be ’arf a pint,” said Erb, always the business man.

There was a lull in the rapid action. The dog, mumbling softly to himself, had moved away again and was watching affairs from the edge of the sidewalk. Erb, having won his point, was silent once more. Henry sucked his finger. Bill, having met the world squarely and shown it what was what, stood where he was, whistling nonchalantly.

Henry removed his finger from his mouth. “Lend me the loan of that stick of yours, Erb,” he said tensely.

Erb silently yielded up the stout stick which was his inseparable companion. Henry, a vastly different man from the genial saunterer of a moment ago, poked wildly through the railings. Bill, panic-stricken now and wishing for nothing better than to be back in his cosy cage, shrieked loudly for help. And Freddie Rooke, running the corner with Jill, stopped dead and turned pale.

“Good God!” said Freddie.

In pursuance of his overnight promise to Derek, Freddie Rooke had got in touch with Jill through the medium of the telephone immediately after breakfast, and had arranged to call at Ovington Square in the afternoon. Arrived there, he found Jill with a telegram in her hand. Her Uncle Christopher, who had been enjoying a breath of sea-air down at Brighton, was returning by an afternoon train, and Jill had suggested that Freddie should accompany her to Victoria, pick up Uncle Chris, and escort him home. Freddie, whose idea had been a tête-à-tête involving a brotherly lecture on impetuosity, had demurred but had given way in the end; and they had set out to walk to Victoria together. Their way had lain through Daubeny Street, and they turned the corner just as the brutal onslaught on the innocent Henry had occurred. Bill’s shrieks, which were of an appalling timbre, brought them to a halt.

“What is it?” cried Jill.

“It sounds like a murder!”

“Nonsense!”

“I don’t know, you know this is the sort of street chappies are murdering people in all the time.”

They caught sight of the group in front of them, and were reassured. Nobody could possibly be looking so aloof and distrait as Erb, if there were a murder going on.

“It’s a bird!”

“It’s a jolly old parrot. See it? Just inside the railings.”

A red-hot wave of rage swept over Jill. Whatever her defects,—and already this story has shown her far from perfect,—she had the excellent quality of loving animals and blazing into fury when she saw them ill-treated. At least three draymen were going about London with burning ears as the result of what she had said to them on discovering them abusing their patient horses. Zoologically, Bill the parrot was not an animal, but he counted as one with Jill, and she sped down Daubeny Street to his rescue,—Freddie, spatted and hatted and trousered as became the man of fashion, following disconsolately, ruefully aware that he did not look his best sprinting like that. But Jill was cutting out a warm pace, and he held his hat on with one neatly-gloved hand and did what he could to keep up.

Jill reached the scene of battle, and, stopping, eyed Henry with a baleful glare. We, who have seen Henry in his calmer moments and know him for the good fellow he was, are aware that he was more sinned against than sinning. If there is any spirit of justice in us, we are pro-Henry. In his encounter with Bill the parrot, Henry undoubtedly had right on his side. His friendly overtures, made in the best spirit of kindliness, had been repulsed. He had been severely bitten. And he had lost half a pint of beer to Erb. As impartial judges we have no other course before us than to wish Henry luck and bid him go to it. But Jill, who had not seen the opening stages of the affair, thought far otherwise. She merely saw in Henry a great brute of a man poking at a defenceless bird with a stick.

She turned to Freddie, who had come up at a gallop and was wondering why the deuce this sort of thing happened to him out of a city of six millions.

“Make him stop, Freddie!”

“Oh, I say you know, what!”

“Can’t you see he’s hurting the poor thing? Make him leave off! Brute!” she added to Henry (for whom one’s heart bleeds), as he jabbed once again at his adversary.

Freddie stepped reluctantly up to Henry, and tapped him on the shoulder. Freddie was one of those men who have a rooted idea that a conversation of this sort can only be begun by a tap on the shoulder.

“Look here, you know, you can’t do this sort of thing, you know!” said Freddie.

Henry raised a scarlet face.

“’Oo are you?” he demanded.

This attack from the rear, coming on top of his other troubles, tried his restraint sorely.

“Well—” Freddie hesitated. It seemed silly to offer the fellow one of his cards. “Well, as a matter of fact, my name’s Rooke …”

“And who,” pursued Henry, “arsked you to come shoving your ugly mug in ’ere?”

“Well, if you put it that way …”

“’E comes messing abart,” said Henry complainingly, addressing the universe, “and interfering in what don’t concern ’im and mucking around and interfering and messing abart. … Why,” he broke off in a sudden burst of eloquence, “I could eat two of you for a relish wiv me tea, even if you ’ave got white spats!”

Here Erb, who had contributed nothing to the conversation, remarked “Ah!” and expectorated on the sidewalk. The point, one gathers, seemed to Erb well taken. A neat thrust, was Erb’s verdict.

“Just because you’ve got white spats,” proceeded Henry, on whose sensitive mind these adjuncts of the costume of the well-dressed man about town seemed to have made a deep and unfavorable impression, “you think you can come mucking around and messing abart and interfering and mucking around. This bird’s bit me in the finger, and ’ere’s the finger, if you don’t believe me—and I’m going to twist ’is ruddy neck, if all the perishers with white spats in London come messing abart and mucking around, so you take them white spats of yours ’ome and give ’em to the old woman to cook for your Sunday dinner!”

And Henry, having cleansed his stuff’d bosom of that perilous stuff which weighs upon the heart, shoved the stick energetically once more through the railings.

Jill darted forward. Always a girl who believed that, if you want a thing well done, you must do it yourself, she had applied to Freddie for assistance merely as a matter of form. All the time she had felt that Freddie was a broken reed, and such he had proved himself. Freddie’s policy in this affair was obviously to rely on the magic of speech, and any magic his speech might have had was manifestly offset by the fact that he was wearing white spats and that Henry, apparently, belonged to some sort of league or society which had for its main object the discouragement of white spats. It was plainly no good leaving the conduct of the campaign to Freddie. Whatever was to be done must be done by herself. She seized the stick and wrenched it out of Henry’s hand.

“Woof-woof-woof!” said Bill the parrot.

No dispassionate auditor could have failed to detect the nasty ring of sarcasm. It stung Henry. He was not normally a man who believed in violence to the gentler sex outside a clump on the head of his missus when the occasion seemed to demand it: but now he threw away the guiding principles of a lifetime and turned on Jill like a tiger.

“Gimme that stick!”

“Get back!”

“Here, I say, you know!” said Freddie.

Henry, now thoroughly overwrought, made a rush at Jill: and Jill, who had a straight eye, hit him accurately on the side of the head.

“Goo!” said Henry, and sat down.

And then, from behind Jill, a voice spoke.

“What’s all this?”

A stout policeman had manifested himself from empty space.

“This won’t do!” said the policeman.

Erb, who had been a silent spectator of the fray, burst into speech. “She ’it ’im!”

The policeman looked at Jill. He was an officer of many years’ experience in the Force, and time had dulled in him that respect for good clothes which he had brought with him from Little-Sudbury-in-the-Wold in the days of his novitiate. Jill was well-dressed, but, in the stirring epoch of the Suffrage disturbances, the policeman had been kicked on the shins and even bitten by ladies of an equally elegant exterior. Hearts, the policeman knew, just as pure and fair may beat in Belgrave Square as in the lowlier air of Seven Dials, but you have to pinch them just the same when they disturb the peace. His gaze, as it fell upon Jill, red-handed as it were with the stick still in her grasp, was stern.

“Your name, please, and address, miss?” he said.

A girl in blue with a big hat had come up, and was standing staring open-mouthed at the group. At the sight of her Bill the parrot uttered a shriek of welcome. Nelly Bryant had returned, and everything would now be all right again.

“Mariner,” said Jill, pale and bright-eyed. “I live at Number Twenty-two, Ovington Square.”

“And yours, sir?”

“Mine? Oh, ah, yes. I see what you mean. Rooke, you know. F. L. Rooke. I live at the Albany and all that sort of thing.”

The policeman made an entry in his note-book. “Officer,” cried Jill, “this man was trying to kill that parrot and I stopped him. …”

“Can’t help that, miss. You ’adn’t no right to hit a man with a stick. You’ll ’ave to come along.”

“But, I say, you know!” Freddie was appalled. This sort of thing had happened to him before, but only on Boat-Race Night at the Empire, where it was expected of a chappie. “I mean to say!”

“And you too, sir. You’re both in it.”

“But …”

“Oh, come along, Freddie,” said Jill quietly. “It’s perfectly absurd, but it’s no use making a fuss.”

“That,” said the policeman cordially, “is the right spirit!”.

Lady Underhill paused for breath. She had been talking long and vehemently. She and Derek were sitting in Freddie Rooke’s apartment at the Albany, and the subject of her monologue was Jill. Derek had been expecting the attack, and had wondered why it had not come before. All through supper on the previous night, even after the discovery that Jill was supping at a near-by table with a man who was a stranger to her son, Lady Underhill had preserved a grim reticence with regard to her future daughter-in-law. But today she had spoken her mind with all the energy which comes of suppression. She had relieved herself with a flow of words of all the pent-up hostility that had been growing within her since that first meeting in this same room. She had talked rapidly, for she was talking against time. The Town Council of the principal city in Derek’s constituency in the north of England had decided that tomorrow morning should witness the laying of the foundation stone of their new Town Hall, and Derek as the sitting member was to preside at the celebration. Already Parker had been dispatched to telephone for a cab to take him to the station, and at any moment their conversation might be interrupted. So Lady Underhill made the most of what little time she had.

Derek had listened gloomily, scarcely rousing himself to reply. His mother would have been gratified, could she have known how powerfully her arguments were working on him. That little imp of doubt which had vexed him in the cab as he drove home from Ovington Square had not died in the night. It had grown and waxed more formidable. And, now, aided by this ally from without, it had become a colossus, straddling his soul. Derek looked frequently at the clock, and cursed the unknown cabman whose delay was prolonging the scene. Something told him that only flight could serve him now. He never had been able to withstand his mother in one of her militant moods. She seemed to numb his faculties. Other members of his family had also noted this quality in Lady Underhill, and had commented on it bitterly in the smoking-rooms of distant country-houses at the hour when men meet to drink the final whisky-and-soda and unburden their souls.

Lady Underhill, having said all she had to say, recovered her breath and began to say it again. Frequent iteration was one of her strongest weapons. As her brother Edwin, who was fond of homely imagery, had often observed, she could talk the hind-leg off a donkey.

“You must be mad, Derek, to dream of handicapping yourself at this vital stage of your career with a wife who not only will not be a help to you, but must actually be a ruinous handicap. I am not blaming you for imagining yourself in love in the first place, though I really should have thought that a man of your strength and character would … However, as I say, I am not blaming you for that. Superficially, no doubt, this girl might be called attractive. I do not admire the type myself, but I suppose she has that quality—in my time we should have called it boldness—which seems to appeal to the young men of today. I could imagine her fascinating a weak-minded imbecile like your friend Mr Rooke. But that you … Still, there is no need to go into that. What I am trying to point out is that in your position, with a career like yours in front of you,—it’s quite certain that in a year or two you will be offered some really big and responsible position—you would be insane to tie yourself to a girl who seems to have been allowed to run perfectly wild, whose uncle is a swindler …”

“She can’t be blamed for her uncle.”

“… Who sups alone with strange men in public restaurants. …”

“I explained that.”

“You may have explained it. You certainly did not excuse it or make it a whit less outrageous. You cannot pretend that you really imagine that an engaged girl is behaving with perfect correctness when she allows a man she has only just met to take her to supper at the Savoy, even if she did know him slightly years and years ago. It is very idyllic to suppose that a childhood acquaintance excuses every breach of decorum, but I was brought up to believe otherwise. I don’t wish to be vulgar, but what it amounts to is that this girl was having supper—supper! In my days girls were in bed at supper-time!—with a strange man who picked her up at a theatre!”

Derek shifted uneasily. There was a part of his mind which called upon him to rise up and challenge the outrageous phrase and demand that it be taken back. But he remained silent. The imp-colossus was too strong for him. She is quite right, said the imp. That is an unpleasant but accurate description of what happened. He looked at the clock again, and wished for the hundredth time that the cab would come. Jill’s photograph smiled at him from beside the clock. He looked away, for, when he found his eyes upon it, he had an odd sensation of baseness, as if he were playing some one false who loved and trusted him.

“If you were an ordinary man like hundreds of the idle young men one meets in London, I would have nothing to say. I dislike the girl intensely, but I would not interfere in what would be your own private business. No doubt there are plenty of sets in society where it matters very little what sort of a woman a man marries. But if you have a career, especially in politics, you know as well as I do that a suitable wife means everything. You are a public figure even now. In a few years you will be a very big public figure. That means that your wife will have every eye upon her. And what will she be? A minx!” said Lady Underhill viciously.

Once more Derek stirred uneasily, and once more he remained silent. A gleam came into Lady Underhill’s black eyes. All her life she had been a fighter, and experience had taught her to perceive when she was winning. She blessed the dilatory cabman.

“Well, I am not going to say any more,” she said, getting up and buttoning her glove. “I will leave you to think it over. All I will say is that, though I only met her yesterday, I can assure you that I am quite confident that this girl is just the sort of harum-scarum, so-called ‘modern’ girl who is sure some day to involve herself in a really serious scandal. I don’t want her to be in a position to drag you into it as well. Yes, Parker, what is it? Is Sir Derek’s cab here?”

The lantern-jawed Parker had entered softly, and was standing deferentially in the doorway. There was no emotion on his face beyond the vague sadness which a sense of what was correct made him always wear like a sort of mask when in the presence of those of superior station.

“The cab will be at the door very shortly, m’lady. If you please, Sir Derek, a policeman has come with a message.”

“A policeman?”

“With a message from Mr Rooke.”

“What do you mean?”

“I have had a few words of conversation with the constable, sir,” said Parker sadly, “and I understand from him that Mr Rooke and Miss Mariner have been arrested.”

“Arrested! What are you talking about?”

“Mr Rooke desired the officer to ask you to be good enough to step round and bail them out!”

The gleam in Lady Underhill’s eye became a flame, but she controlled her voice.

“Why were Miss Mariner and Mr Rooke arrested, Parker?”

“As far as I can gather, m’lady, Miss Mariner struck a man in the street with a stick, and they took both her and Rooke to the Chelsea Police Station.”

Lady Underhill glanced at Derek, who was looking into the fire.

“This is a little awkward, Derek,” she said suavely. “If you go to the police-station, you will miss your train.”

“I fancy, m’lady, it would be sufficient if Sir Derek were to dispatch me with a check for ten pounds.”

“Very well. Tell the policeman to wait a moment.”

“Very good, m’lady.”

Derek roused himself with an effort. His face was drawn and gloomy. He sat down at the writing-table, and took out his check-book. There was silence for a moment, broken only by the scratching of the pen. Parker took the check and left the room.

“Now, perhaps,” said Lady Underhill, “you will admit that I was right!” She spoke in almost an awed voice, for this occurrence at just this moment seemed to her very like a direct answer to prayer. “You can’t hesitate now! You must free yourself from this detestable entanglement!”

Derek rose without speaking. He took his coat and hat from where they lay on a chair.

“Derek! You will! Say you will!”

Derek put on his coat.

“Derek!”

“For heaven’s sake, leave me alone, mother. I want to think.”

“Very well. I will leave you to think it over, then.” Lady Underhill moved to the door. At the door she paused for a moment, and seemed about to speak again, but her mouth closed resolutely. She was a shrewd woman, and knew that the art of life is to know when to stop talking. What words have accomplished, too many words can undo.

“Good-bye.”

“Good-bye, mother.”

“I’ll see you when you get back?”

“Yes. No. I don’t know. I’m not certain when I shall return. I may go away for a bit.”

The door closed behind Lady Underhill. Derek sat down again at the writing-table. He wrote a few words on a sheet of paper, then tore it up. His eye travelled to the mantelpiece. Jill’s photograph smiled happily down at him. He turned back to the writing-table, took out a fresh piece of paper, thought for a few moments, and began to write again.

The door opened softly.

“The cab is at the door, Sir Derek,” said Parker.

Derek addressed an envelope, and got up.

“All right. Thanks. Oh, Parker, stop at a district-messenger office on your way to the police-station, and have this sent off at once.”

“Very good, Sir Derek,” said Parker.

Derek’s eyes turned once more to the mantelpiece. He stood looking for an instant, then walked quickly out of the room.

A taxi-cab stopped at the door of number twenty-two Ovington Square. Freddie Rooke emerged, followed by Jill. While Freddie paid the driver, Jill sniffed the afternoon air happily. It had turned into a delightful day. A westerly breeze, springing up in the morning, had sent the thermometer up with a run and broken the cold spell which had been gripping London. It was one of those afternoons which intrude on the bleakness of winter with a false but none the less agreeable intimation that Spring is on its way. The sidewalks were wet underfoot, and the gutters ran with thawed snow. The sun shone exhilaratingly from a sky the color of a hedge-sparrow’s egg.

“Doesn’t everything smell lovely, Freddie,” said Jill, “after our prison-life!”

“Topping!”

“Fancy getting out so quickly! Whenever I’m arrested, I must always make a point of having a rich man with me. I shall never tease you about that fifty-pound note again.”

“Fifty-pound note?”

“It certainly came in handy today!”

She was opening the door with her latch-key, and missed the sudden sagging of Freddie’s jaw, the sudden clutch at his breast-pocket, and the look of horror and anguish that started into his eyes. Freddie was appalled. Finding himself at the police-station penniless with the exception of a little loose change, he had sent that message to Derek, imploring assistance, as the only alternative to spending the night in a cell, with Jill in another. He had realized that there was a risk of Derek taking the matter hardly, and he had not wanted to get Jill into trouble, but there seemed nothing else to do. If they remained where they were overnight, the thing would get into the papers, and that would be a thousand times worse. And if he applied for aid to Ronny Devereux or Algy Martyn or anybody like that all London would know about it next day. So Freddie, with misgivings, had sent the message to Derek, and now Jill’s words had reminded him that there was no need to have done so. Years ago he had read somewhere or heard somewhere about some chappie who always buzzed around with a sizeable banknote stitched into his clothes, and the scheme had seemed to him ripe to a degree. You never knew when you might find yourself short of cash and faced by an immediate call for the ready. He had followed the chappie’s example. And now, when the crisis had arrived, he had forgotten—absolutely forgotten!—that he had the dashed thing on his person at all.

He followed Jill into the house, groaning in spirit, but thankful that she had taken it for granted that he had secured their release in the manner indicated. He did not propose to disillusion her. It would be time enough to take the blame when the blame came along. Probably old Derek would simply be amused and laugh at the whole bally affair like a sportsman. Freddie cheered up considerably at the thought.

Jill was talking to the parlormaid whose head had popped up over the banisters flanking the stairs that led to the kitchen.

“Major Selby hasn’t arrived yet, miss.”

“That’s odd. I suppose he must have taken a later train.”

“There’s a lady in the drawing-room, miss, waiting to see him. She didn’t give any name. She said she would wait till the major came. She’s been waiting a goodish while.”

“All right, Jane. Thanks. Will you bring up tea.”

They walked down the hall. The drawing-room was on the ground floor, a long, dim room that would have looked like a converted studio but for the absence of bright light. A girl was sitting at the far end by the fireplace. She rose: as they entered.

“How do you do?” said Jill. “I’m afraid my uncle has not come back yet …”

“Say!” cried the visitor. “You did get out quick!”

Jill was surprised. She had no recollection of ever having seen the other before. Her visitor was a rather pretty girl, with a sort of jaunty way of carrying herself which made a piquant contrast to her tired eyes and wistful face. Jill took an immediate liking to her. She looked so forlorn and pathetic.

“My name’s Nelly Bryant,” said the girl. “That parrot belongs to me.”

“Oh, I see.”

“I heard you say to the cop that you lived here, so I came along to tell your folks what had happened, so that they could do something. The maid said that your uncle was expected any minute, so I waited.”

“That was awfully good of you.”

“Dashed good,” said Freddie.

“Oh, no! Honest, I don’t know how to thank you for what you did. You don’t know what a pal Bill is to me. It would have broken me all up if that plug-ugly had killed him.”

“But what a shame you had to wait so long.”

“I liked it.”

Nelly Bryant looked about the room wistfully. This was the sort of room she sometimes dreamed about. She loved its subdued light and the pulpy cushions on the sofa.

“You’ll have some tea before you go, won’t you?” said Jill, switching on the lights.

“It’s very kind of you.”

“Why, hullo!” said Freddie. “By Jove! I say! We’ve met before, what?”

“Why, so we have!”

“That lunch at Oddy’s that young Threepwood gave, what?”

“I wonder you remember.”

“Oh, I remember. Quite a time ago, eh? Miss Bryant was in that show, ‘Follow the Girl,’ Jill, at the Regal.”

“Oh, yes. I remember you took me to see it.”

“Dashed odd meeting again like this!” said Freddie. “Really rummy!”

Jane, the parlormaid, entering with tea, interrupted his comments.

“You’re American, then?” said Jill, interested. “The whole company came from New York, didn’t they?”

“Yes.”

“I’m half American myself, you know. I used to live in New York when I was very small, but I’ve almost forgotten what it was like. I remember a sort of over-head railway that made an awful noise …”

“The Elevated!” murmured Nelly devoutly. A wave of homesickness seemed to choke her for a moment.

“And the air. Like champagne. And a very blue sky.”

“Yes,” said Nelly in a small voice.

“I shouldn’t half mind popping over New York for a bit,” said Freddie, unconscious of the agony he was inflicting. “I’ve met some very sound sportsmen who came from there. You don’t know a fellow named Williamson, do you?”

“I don’t believe I do.”

“Or Oakes?”

“No.”

“That’s rummy! Oakes has lived in New York for years.”

“So have about seven million other people,” interposed Jill. “Don’t be silly, Freddie. How would you like somebody to ask of you if you knew a man named Jenkins in London?”

“I do know a man named Jenkins in London,” replied Freddie triumphantly.

Jill poured out a cup of tea for her visitor, and looked at the clock.

“I wonder where Uncle Chris has got to,” she said. “He ought to be here by now. I hope he hasn’t got into any mischief among the wild stock-brokers down at Brighton.”

Freddie laid down his cup on the table and uttered a loud snort.

“Oh, Freddie, darling!” said Jill remorsefully. “I forgot! Stock-brokers are a painful subject, aren’t they!” She turned to Nelly. “There’s been an awful slump on the Stock Exchange today, and he got—what was the word, Freddie?”

“Nipped!” said Freddie with gloom.

“Nipped!”

“Nipped like the dickens!”

“Nipped like the dickens!” Jill smiled at Nelly. “He had forgotten all about it in the excitement of being a jailbird, and I went and reminded him.”

Freddie sought sympathy from Nelly.

“A silly ass at the club named Jimmy Monroe told me to take a flutter in some rotten thing called Amalgamated Dyes. You know how it is, when you’re feeling devilish fit and cheery and all that after dinner, and somebody sidles up to you and slips his little hand in yours and tells you to do some fool thing. You’re so dashed nappy you simply say ‘Right-ho, old bird! Make it so!’ That’s the way I got had!”

Jill laughed unfeelingly.

“It will do you good, Freddie. It’ll stir you up and prevent you being so silly again. Besides, you know you’ll hardly notice it. You’ve much too much money as it is.”

“It’s not the money. It’s the principle of the thing. I hate looking a frightful chump.”

“Well, you needn’t tell anybody. We’ll keep it a secret. In fact, we’ll start at once, for I hear Uncle Chris outside. Let us dissemble. We are observed!… Hullo, Uncle Chris!”

She ran down the room, as the door opened, and kissed the tall, soldierly man who entered.

“Well, Jill, my dear.”

“How late you are. I was expecting you hours ago.”

“I had to call on my broker.”

“Hush! Hush!”

“What’s the matter?”

“Nothing, nothing. … We’ve got visitors. You know Freddie Rooke, of course?”

“How are you, Freddie, my boy?”

“Cheerio!” said Freddie. “Pretty fit?”

“And Miss Bryant,” said Jill.

“How do you do?” said Uncle Chris in the bluff, genial way which, in his younger days, had charmed many a five-pound note out of the pockets of his fellow-men and many a soft glance out of the eyes of their sisters, their cousins, and their aunts.

“Come and have some tea,” said Jill. “You’re just in time.”

Nelly had subsided shyly into the depths of her big armchair. Somehow she felt a better and a more important girl since Uncle Chris had addressed her. Most people felt like that after encountering Jill’s Uncle Christopher. Uncle Chris had a manner. It was not precisely condescending, and yet it was not the manner of an equal. He treated you as an equal, true, but all the time you were conscious of the fact that it was extraordinarily good of him to do so. Uncle Chris affected the rank and file of his fellow-men much as a genial knight of the Middle Ages would have affected a scurvy knave or varlet if he had cast aside social distinctions for awhile and hobnobbed with the latter in a tavern. He never patronized, but the mere fact that he abstained from patronizing seemed somehow impressive.

To this impressiveness his appearance contributed largely. He was a fine, upstanding man, who looked less than his forty-nine years in spite of an ominous thinning of the hair which he tended and brushed so carefully. He had a firm chin, a mouth that smiled often and pleasantly beneath the closely-clipped moustache, and very bright blue eyes which met yours in a clear, frank, honest gaze. Though he had served in his youth in India, he had none of the Anglo-Indian’s sun-scorched sallowness. His complexion was fresh and sanguine. He looked as if he had just stepped out of a cold tub,—a misleading impression, for Uncle Chris detested cold water and always took his morning bath as hot as he could get it.

It was his clothes, however, which, even more than his appearance, fascinated the populace. There is only one tailor in London, as distinguished from the ambitious mechanics who make coats and trousers, and Uncle Chris was his best customer. Similarly, London is full of young fellows trying to get along by the manufacture of foot-wear, but there is only one boot-maker in the true meaning of the word,—the one who supplied Uncle Chris. And, as for hats, while it is no doubt a fact that you can get at plenty of London shops some sort of covering for your head which will keep it warm, the only hatter—using the term in its deeper sense—is the man who enjoyed the patronage of Major Christopher Selby. From foot to head, in short, from furthest South to extremest North, Uncle Chris was perfect. He was an ornament to his surroundings. The Metropolis looked better for him. One seems to picture London as a mother with a horde of untidy children, children with made-up ties, children with wrinkled coats and baggy trouser-legs, sighing to herself as she beheld them, then cheering up and murmuring with a touch of restored complacency, “Ah, well, I still have Uncle Chris!”

“Miss Bryant is American, Uncle Chris,” said Jill.

Uncle Chris spread his shapely legs before the fire, and glanced down kindly at Nelly.

“Indeed?” He took a cup of tea and stirred it. “I was in America as a young man.”

“Whereabouts?” asked Nelly eagerly.

“Oh, here and there and everywhere. I travelled considerably.”

“That’s how it is with me,” said Nelly, overcoming her diffidence as she warmed to the favorite topic. “I guess I know most every town in every State, from New York to the last one-night stand. It’s a great old country, isn’t it?”

“It is!” said Uncle Chris. “I shall be returning there very shortly.” He paused meditatively. “Very shortly indeed.”

Nelly bit her lip. It seemed to be her fate today to meet people who were going to America.

“When did you decide to do that?” asked Jill.

She had been looking at him, puzzled. Years of association with Uncle Chris had enabled her to read his moods quickly, and she was sure that there was something on his mind. It was not likely that the others had noticed it, for his manner was as genial and urbane as ever. But something about him, a look in his eyes that came and went, an occasional quick twitching of his mouth, told her that all was not well. She was a little troubled, but not greatly. Uncle Chris was not the sort of man to whom grave tragedies happened. It was probably some mere trifle which she could smooth out for him in five minutes, once they were alone together. She reached out and patted his sleeve affectionately. She was fonder of Uncle Chris than of anyone in the world except Derek.

“The thought,” said Uncle Chris, “came to me this morning, as I read my morning paper while breakfasting. It has grown and developed during the day. At this moment you might almost call it an obsession. I am very fond of America. I spent several happy years there. On that occasion, I set sail for the land of promise, I admit, somewhat reluctantly. Of my own free will I might never have made the expedition. But the general sentiment seemed so strongly in favor of my doing so that I yielded to what I might call a public demand. The willing hands for my nearest and dearest were behind me, pushing, and I did not resist them. I have never regretted it. America is a part of every young man’s education. You ought to go there, Freddie.”

“Rummily enough,” said Freddie, “I was saying just before you came in that I had half a mind to pop over. Only it’s rather a bally fag, starting. Getting your luggage packed and all that sort of thing.”

Nelly, whose luggage consisted of one small trunk, heaved a silent sigh. Mingling with the idle rich carried its penalties.

“America,” said Uncle Chris, “taught me poker, for which I can never be sufficiently grateful. Also an exotic pastime styled Craps,—or, alternatively, ‘rolling the bones’—which in those days was a very present help in time of trouble. At Craps, I fear, my hand in late years had lost much of its cunning. I have had little opportunity of practising. But as a young man I was no mean exponent of the art. Let me see,” said Uncle Chris meditatively. “What was the precise ritual? Ah! I have it, ‘Come, little seven!’”

“‘Come, eleven!’” exclaimed Nelly excitedly.

“‘Baby …’ I feel convinced that in some manner the word baby entered into it.”

“‘Baby needs new shoes!’”

“‘Baby needs new shoes!’ Precisely!”

“It sounds to me,” said Freddie, “dashed silly.”

“Oh, no!” cried Nelly reproachfully.

“Well, what I mean to say is, there’s no sense in it, don’t you know.”

“It is a noble pursuit,” said Uncle Chris firmly. “Worthy of the great nation that has produced it. No doubt, when I return to America, I shall have opportunities of recovering my lost skill.”

“You aren’t returning to America,” said Jill. “You’re going to stay safe at home like a good little uncle. I’m not going to have you running wild all over the world at your age.”

“Age?” declaimed Uncle Chris. “What is my age? At the present moment I feel in the neighborhood of twenty-one, and Ambition is tapping me on the shoulder and whispering ‘Young man, go West!’ The years are slipping away from me, my dear Jill,—slipping so quickly that in a few minutes you will be wondering why my nurse does not come to fetch me. The wanderlust is upon me. I gaze around me at all this prosperity in which I am lapped,” said Uncle Chris, eyeing the arm-chair severely, “all this comfort and luxury which swaddles me, and I feel staggered. I want activity. I want to be braced!”

“You would hate it,” said Jill composedly. “You know you’re the laziest old darling in the world.”

“Exactly what I am endeavoring to point out. I am lazy. Or, I was till this morning.”

“Something very extraordinary must have happened this morning. I can see that.”

“I wallowed in gross comfort. I was what Shakespeare calls a ‘fat and greasy citizen’!”

“Please, Uncle Chris!” protested Jill. “Not while I’m eating buttered toast!”

“But now I am myself again.”

“That’s splendid.”

“I have heard the beat of the off-shore wind,” chanted Uncle Chris, “and the thresh of the deep-sea rain. I have heard the song—How long! how long! Pull out on the trail again!”

“He can also recite ‘Gunga Din,’” said Jill to Nelly. “I really must apologize for all this. He’s usually as good as gold.”

“I believe I know how he feels,” said Nelly softly.

“Of course you do. You and I, Miss Bryant, are of the gipsies of the world. We are not vegetables like young Rooke here.”

“Eh, what?” said the vegetable, waking from a reverie. He had been watching Nelly’s face. Its wistfulness attracted him.

“We are only happy,” proceeded Uncle Chris, “when we are wandering.”

“You should see Uncle Chris wander to his club in the morning,” said Jill. “He trudges off in a taxi, singing wild gipsy songs, absolutely defying fatigue.”

“That,” said Uncle Chris, “is a perfectly justified slur. I shudder at the depths to which prosperity has caused me to sink.” He expanded his chest. “I shall be a different man in America. America would make a different man of you, Freddie.”

“I’m all right, thanks!” said that easily satisfied young man.

Uncle Chris turned to Nelly, pointing dramatically.

“Young woman, go West! Return to your bracing home, and leave this enervating London! You …”

Nelly got up abruptly. She could endure no more.

“I believe I’ll have to be going now,” she said. “Bill misses me if I’m away long. Good-bye. Thank you ever so much for what you did.”

“It was awfully kind of you to come round,” said Jill.

“Good-bye, Major Selby.”

“Good-bye.”

“Good-bye, Mr Rooke.”

Freddie awoke from another reverie.

“Eh? Oh, I say, half a jiffy. I think I may as well be toddling along myself. About time I was getting back to dress for dinner and all that. See you home, may I, and then I’ll get a taxi at Victoria. Toodle-oo, everybody.”

Freddie escorted Nelly through the hall and opened the front door for her. The night was cool and cloudy, and there was still in the air that odd, rejuvenating suggestion of Spring. A wet fragrance came from the dripping trees.

“Topping evening!” said Freddie conversationally.

“Yes.”

They walked through the square in silence. Freddie shot an appreciative glance at his companion. Freddie, as he would have admitted frankly, was not much of a lad for the modern girl. The modern girl, he considered, was too dashed rowdy and exuberant for a chappie of peaceful tastes. Now, this girl, on the other hand, had all the earmarks of being something of a topper. She had a soft voice. Rummy accent and all that, but nevertheless a soft and pleasing voice. She was mild and unaggressive, and these were qualities which Freddie esteemed. Freddie, though this was a thing he would not have admitted, was afraid of girls, the sort of girls he had to take down to dinner and dance with and so forth. They were too dashed clever, and always seemed to be waiting for a chance to score off a fellow. This one was not like that. Not a bit. She was gentle and quiet and what not.

It was at this point that it came home to him how remarkably quiet she was. She had not said a word for the last five minutes. He was just about to break the silence, when, as they passed under a street lamp, he perceived that she was crying,—crying very softly to herself, like a child in the dark.

“Good God!” said Freddie, appalled. There were two things in life with which he felt totally unable to cope,—crying girls and dog-fights. The glimpse he had caught of Nelly’s face froze him into a speechlessness which lasted until they reached Daubeny Street and stopped at her door.

“Good-bye,” said Nelly.

“Good-bye-ee!” said Freddie mechanically. “That’s to say, I mean to say, half a second!” he added quickly. He faced her nervously, with one hand on the grimy railings. This wanted looking into. When it came to girls trickling to and fro in the public streets, weeping, well, it was pretty rotten and something had to be done about it. “What’s up?” he demanded.

“It’s nothing. Good-bye.”

“But, my dear old soul,” said Freddie, clutching the railing for moral support, “it is something. It must be! You might not think it, to look at me, but I’m really rather a dashed shrewd chap, and I can see there’s something up. Why not give me the jolly old scenario and see if we can’t do something?”

Nelly moved as if to turn to the door, then stopped. She was thoroughly ashamed of herself.

“I’m a fool!”

“No, no!”

“Yes, I am. I don’t often act this way, but, oh, gee! hearing you all talking like that about going to America, just as if it was the easiest thing in the world, only you couldn’t be bothered to do it, kind of got me going. And to think I could be there right now if I wasn’t a bonehead!”

“A bonehead?”

“A simp. I’m all right as far up as the string of near-pearls, but above that I’m reinforced concrete.”

Freddie groped for her meaning.

“Do you mean you’ve made a bloomer of some kind?”

“I pulled the worst kind of bone. I stopped on in London when the rest of the company went back home, and now I’ve got to stick.”

“Rush of jolly old professional engagement, what?”

Nelly laughed bitterly.

“You’re a bad guesser. No, they haven’t started to fight over me yet. I’m at liberty, as they say in the Era.”

“But, my dear old thing,” said Freddie earnestly, “if you’ve got nothing to keep you in England, why not pop back to America? I mean to say, home-sickness is the most dashed blighted thing in the world. There’s nothing gives one the pip to such an extent. Why, dash it, I remember staying with an old aunt of mine up in Scotland the year before last and not being able to get away for three weeks or so, and I raved—absolutely gibbered—for a sight of the merry old metrop. Sometimes I’d wake up in the night, thinking I was back at the Albany, and, by Jove, when I found I wasn’t I howled like a dog! You take my tip, old soul, and pop back on the next boat.”

“Which line?”

“How do you mean, which line? Oh, I see, you mean which line? Well … well … I’ve never been on any of them, so it’s rather hard to say. But I hear the Cunard well spoken of, and then again some chappies swear by the White Star. But I should imagine you can’t go far wrong, whichever you pick. They’re all pretty ripe, I fancy.”

“Which of them is giving free trips? That’s the point.”

“Eh? Oh!” Her meaning dawned upon Freddie. He regarded her with deep consternation. Life had treated him so kindly that he had almost forgotten that there existed a class which had not as much money as himself. Sympathy welled up beneath his perfectly fitting waistcoat. It was a purely disinterested sympathy. The fact that Nelly was a girl and in many respects a dashed pretty girl did not affect him. What mattered was that she was hard up. The thought hurt Freddie like a blow. He hated the idea of anyone being hard up.

“I say!” he said. “Are you broke?”

Nelly laughed.

“Am I! If dollars were doughnuts, I wouldn’t even have the hole in the middle.”

Freddie was stirred to his depths. Except for the beggars in the streets, to whom he gave shillings, he had not met anyone for years who had not plenty of money. He had friends at his clubs who frequently claimed to be unable to lay their hands on a bally penny, but the bally penny they wanted to lay their hands on generally turned out to be a couple of thousand pounds for a new car.

“Good God!” he said.

There was a pause. Then, with a sudden impulse, he began to fumble in his breast-pocket. Rummy how things worked out for the best, however scaly they might seem at the moment. Only an hour or so ago he had been kicking himself for not having remembered that fifty-pound note, tacked onto the lining of his coat, when it would have come in handy at the police-station. He now saw that Providence had had the matter well in hand. If he had remembered it and coughed it up to the constabulary then, he wouldn’t have had it now. And he needed it now. A mood of quixotic generosity had surged upon him. With swift fingers he jerked the note free from its moorings and displayed it like a conjurer exhibiting a rabbit.

“My dear old thing,” he said, “I can’t stand it! I absolutely cannot stick it at any price! I really must insist on your trousering this. Positively!”

Nelly Bryant gazed at the note with wide eyes. She was stunned. She took it limply, and looked at it under the dim light of the gas-lamp over the door.

“I couldn’t!” she cried.

“Oh, but really! You must!”

“But this is a fifty-pound!”

“Absolutely! It will take you back to New York, what? You asked which line was giving free trips. The Freddie Rooke Line, by Jove, sailings every Wednesday and Saturday! I mean, what!”

“But I can’t take two hundred and fifty dollars from you!”

“Oh, rather. Of course you can.”

There was another pause.

“You’ll think—” Nelly’s pale face flushed. “You’ll think I told you all about myself just—just because I wanted to …”

“To make a touch? Absolutely not! Kid yourself of the jolly old superstition entirely. You see before you, old thing, a chappie who knows more about borrowing money than any man in London. I mean to say, I’ve had my ear bitten more often than anyone, I should think. There are sixty-four ways of making a touch—I’ve had them all worked on me by divers blighters here and there—and I can tell any of them with my eyes shut. I know you weren’t dreaming of any such thing.”

The note crackled musically in Nelly’s hand.

“I don’t know what to say!”

“That’s all right.”

“I don’t see why … Gee! I wish I could tell you what I think of you!”

Freddie laughed amusedly.

“Do you know,” he said, “that’s exactly what the beaks—the masters, you know,—used to say to me at school.”

“Are you sure you can spare it?”

“Oh, rather.”

Nelly’s eyes shone in the light of the lamp.

“I’ve never met anyone like you before. I don’t know how …”

Freddie shuffled nervously. Being thanked always made him feel pretty rotten.

“Well, I think I’ll be popping,” he said. “Got to get back and dress and all that. Awfully glad to have seen you, and all that sort of rot.”

Nelly unlocked the door with her latchkey, and stood on the step.

“I’ll buy a fur-wrap,” she said, half to herself.

“Great wheeze! I should!”

“And some nuts for Bill!”

“Bill?”

“The parrot.”

“Oh, the jolly old parrot! Rather! Well, cheerio!”

“Good-bye … You’ve been awfully good to me.”

“Oh, no,” said Freddie uncomfortably. “Any time you’re passing … !”

“Awfully good … Well, good-bye.”

“Toodle-oo!”

“Maybe we’ll meet again some day.”

“I hope so. Absolutely!”

There was a little scurry of feet. Something warm and soft pressed for an instant against Freddie’s cheek, and, as he stumbled back, Nelly Bryant skipped up the steps and vanished through the door.

“Good God!”

Freddie felt his cheek. He was aware of an odd mixture of embarrassment and exhilaration.

From the area below a slight cough sounded. Freddie turned sharply. A maid in a soiled cap, worn coquettishly over one ear, was gazing intently up through the railings. Their eyes met. Freddie turned a warm pink. It seemed to him that the maid had the air of one about to giggle.

“Damn!” said Freddie softly, and hurried off down the street. He wondered whether he had made a frightful ass of himself, spraying bank-notes all over the place like that to comparative strangers. Then a vision came to him of Nelly’s eyes as they had looked at him in the lamp-light, and he decided—no, absolutely not. Rummy as the gadget might appear, it had been the right thing to do. It was a binge of which he thoroughly approved. A good egg!

Jill, when Freddie and Nelly left the room, had seated herself on a low stool, and sat, looking thoughtfully into the fire. She was wondering if she had been mistaken in supposing that Uncle Chris was worried about something. This restlessness of his, this desire for movement, was strange in him. Hitherto he had been like a dear old cosy cat, revelling in the comfort which he had just denounced so eloquently. She watched him as he took up his favorite stand in front of the fire.

“Nice girl,” said Uncle Chris. “Who was she?”

“Somebody Freddie met,” said Jill diplomatically. There was no need to worry Uncle Chris with details of the afternoon’s happenings.

“Very nice girl.” Uncle Chris took out his cigar-case. “No need to ask if I may, thank goodness.” He lit a cigar. “Do you remember, Jill, years ago, when you were quite small, how I used to blow smoke in your face?”

Jill smiled.

“Of course I do. You said that you were training me for marriage. You said that there were no happy marriages except where the wife didn’t mind the smell of tobacco. Well, it’s lucky, as a matter of fact, for Derek smokes all the time.”

Uncle Chris took up his favorite stand against the fireplace.

“You’re very fond of Derek, aren’t you, Jill?”

“Of course I am. You are, too, aren’t you?”

“Fine chap. Very fine chap. Plenty of money, too. It’s a great relief,” said Uncle Chris, puffing vigorously. “A thundering relief.” He looked over Jill’s head down the room. “It’s fine to think of you happily married, dear, with everything in the world that you want.”

Uncle Chris’ gaze wandered down to where Jill sat. A slight mist affected his eyesight. Jill had provided a solution for the great problem of his life. Marriage had always appalled him, but there was this to be said for it, that married people had daughters. He had always wanted a daughter, a smart girl he could take out and be proud of; and fate had given him Jill at precisely the right age. A child would have bored Uncle Chris—he was fond of children, but they made the deuce of a noise and regarded jam as an external ornament—but a delightful little girl of fourteen was different. Jill and he had been very close to each other since her mother had died, a year after the death of her father, and had left her in his charge. He had watched her grow up with a joy that had a touch of bewilderment in it—she seemed to grow so quickly—and had been fonder and prouder of her at every stage of her tumultuous career.

“You’re a dear,” said Jill. She stroked the trouser-leg that was nearest. “How do you manage to get such a wonderful crease? You really are a credit to me!”

There was a momentary silence. A shade of embarrassment made itself noticeable in Uncle Chris’ frank gaze. He gave a little cough, and pulled at his mustache.

“I wish I were, my dear,” he said soberly. “I wish I were. I’m afraid I’m a poor sort of fellow, Jill.”

Jill looked up.

“What do you mean?”

“A poor sort of fellow,” repeated Uncle Chris. “Your mother was foolish to trust you to me. Your father had more sense. He always said I was a wrong’un.”

Jill got up quickly. She was certain now that she had been right, and that there was something on her uncle’s mind.

“What’s the matter, Uncle Chris? Something’s happened. What is it?”

Uncle Chris turned to knock the ash off his cigar. The movement gave him time to collect himself for what lay before him. He had one of those rare volatile natures which can ignore the blows of fate so long as their effects are not brought home by visible evidence of disaster. He lived in the moment, and, though matters had been as bad at breakfast-time as they were now, it was not till now, when he confronted Jill, that he had found his cheerfulness affected by them. He was a man who hated ordeals, and one faced him now. Until this moment he had been able to detach his mind from a state of affairs which would have weighed unceasingly upon another man. His mind was a telephone which he could cut off at will, when the voice of Trouble wished to speak. The time would arrive, he had been aware, when he would have to pay attention to that voice, but so far he had refused to listen. Now it could be evaded no longer.

“Jill.”

“Yes?”

Uncle Chris paused again, searching for the best means of saying what had to be said.

“Jill, I don’t know if you understand about these things, but there was what is called a slump on the Stock Exchange this morning. In other words …”

Jill laughed.

“Of course I know all about that,” she said. “Poor Freddie wouldn’t talk about anything else till I made him. He was terribly blue when he got here this afternoon. He said he had got ‘nipped’ in Amalgamated Dyes. He had lost about two hundred pounds, and was furious with a friend of his who had told him to buy margins.”

Uncle Chris cleared his throat.

“Jill, I’m afraid I’ve got bad news for you. I bought Amalgamated Dyes, too.” He worried his mustache. “I lost heavily, very heavily.”

“How naughty of you! You know you oughtn’t to gamble.”

“Jill, you must be brave. I—I—well, the fact is—it’s no good beating about the bush—I lost everything! Everything!”

“Everything?”

“Everything! It’s all gone! All fooled away. It’s a terrible business. This house will have to go.”

“But—but doesn’t the house belong to me?”

“I was your trustee, dear.” Uncle Chris smoked furiously. “Thank heaven you’re going to marry a rich man!”

Jill stood looking at him, perplexed. Money, as money, had never entered into her life. There were things one wanted, which had to be paid for with money, but Uncle Chris had always looked after that. She had taken them for granted.

“I don’t understand,” she said.

And then suddenly she realized that she did, and a great wave of pity for Uncle Chris flooded over her. He was such an old dear. It must be horrible for him to have to stand there, telling her all this. She felt no sense of injury, only the discomfort of having to witness the humiliation of her oldest friend. Uncle Chris was bound up inextricably with everything in her life that was pleasant. She could remember him, looking exactly the same, only with a thicker and wavier crop of hair, playing with her patiently and unwearied for hours in the hot sun, a cheerful martyr. She could remember sitting up with him when she came home from her first grown-up dance, drinking cocoa and talking and talking and talking till the birds outside sang the sun high up into the sky and it was breakfast-time. She could remember theatres with him, and jolly little suppers afterwards; expeditions into the country, with lunches at queer old inns; days on the river, days at Hurlingham, days at Lords’, days at the Academy. He had always been the same, always cheerful, always kind. He was Uncle Chris, and he would always be Uncle Chris, whatever he had done or whatever he might do. She slipped her arm in his and gave it a squeeze.

“Poor old thing!” she said.

Uncle Chris had been looking straight out before him with those fine blue eyes of his. There had been just a touch of sternness in his attitude. A stranger, coming into the room at that moment, would have said that here was a girl trying to coax her blunt, straightforward, military father into some course of action of which his honest nature disapproved. He might have been posing for a statue of Rectitude. As Jill spoke, he seemed to cave in.

“Poor old thing?” he repeated limply.

“Of course you are! And stop trying to look dignified and tragic! Because it doesn’t suit you. You’re much too well dressed.”

“But, my dear, you don’t understand! You haven’t realized!”

“Yes, I do. Yes, I have!”

“I’ve spent all your money—your money!”

“I know! What does it matter?”

“What does it matter! Jill, don’t you hate me?”

“As if anyone could hate an old darling like you!”

Uncle Chris threw away his cigar, and put his arms round Jill. For a moment a dreadful fear came to her that he was going to cry. She prayed that he wouldn’t cry. It would be too awful. It would be a memory of which she could never rid herself. She felt as though he were someone extraordinarily young and unable to look after himself, someone she must soothe and protect.

“Jill,” said Uncle Chris, choking, “you’re—you’re—you’re a little warrior!”

Jill kissed him, and moved away. She busied herself with some flowers, her back turned. The tension had been relieved, and she wanted to give him time to recover his poise. She knew him well enough to be sure that, sooner or later, the resiliency of his nature would assert itself. He could never remain long in the depths.

The silence had the effect of making her think more clearly than in the first rush of pity she had been able to do. She was able now to review the matter as it affected herself. It had not been easy to grasp, the blunt fact that she was penniless, that all this comfort which surrounded her was no longer her own. For an instant a kind of panic seized her. There was a bleakness about the situation which made one gasp. It was like icy water dashed in the face. Realization had almost the physical pain of life returning to a numbed limb. Her hands shook as she arranged the flowers, and she had to bite her lip to keep herself from crying out.

She fought panic eye to eye, and beat it down. Uncle Chris, swiftly recovering by the fireplace, never knew that the fight had taken place. He was feeling quite jovial again now that the unpleasant business of breaking the news was over, and was looking on the world with the eye of a debonair gentleman-adventurer. As far as he was concerned, he told himself, this was the best thing that could have happened. He had been growing old and sluggish in prosperity. He needed a fillip. The wits by which he had once lived so merrily had been getting blunt in their easy retirement. He welcomed the opportunity of matching them once more against the world. He was remorseful as regarded Jill, but the optimist in him, never crushed for long, told him that Jill would be all right. She would step from the sinking ship to the safe refuge of Derek Underhill’s wealth and position, while he went out to seek a new life. Uncle Chris’ blue eyes gleamed with a new fire as he pictured himself in this new life. He felt like a hunter setting out on a hunting expedition. There were always adventures and the spoils of war for the man with brains to find them and gather them in. But it was a mercy that Jill had Derek. …

Jill was thinking of Derek, too. Panic had fled, and a curious exhilaration had seized upon her. If Derek wanted her now, it would be because his love was the strongest thing in the world. She would come to him like the beggar-maid to Cophetua.

Uncle Chris broke the silence with a cough. At the sound of it, Jill smiled again. She knew it for what it was, a sign that he was himself again.

“Tell me, Uncle Chris,” she said, “just how bad is it? When you said everything was gone, did you really mean everything, or were you being melodramatic? Exactly how do we stand?”

“It’s dashed hard to say, my dear. I expect we shall find there are a few hundreds left. Enough to see you through till you get married. After that it won’t matter.” Uncle Chris flicked a particle of dust off his coat-sleeve. Jill could not help feeling that the action was symbolical of his attitude towards life. He flicked away life’s problems with just the same airy carelessness. “You mustn’t worry about me, my dear. I shall be all right. I have made my way in the world before, and I can do it again. I shall go to America and try my luck there. Amazing how many opportunities there are in America. Really, as far as I am concerned, this is the best thing that could have happened. I have been getting abominably lazy. If I had gone on living my present life for another year or two, why, dash it! I honestly believe I should have succumbed to some sort of senile decay. Positively I should have got fatty degeneration of the brain! This will be the making of me.”

Jill sat down on the lounge and laughed till there were tears in her eyes. Uncle Chris might be responsible for this disaster, but he was certainly making it endurable. However greatly he might be deserving of censure, from the standpoint of the sterner morality, he made amends. If he brought the whole world crashing in chaos about one’s ears, at least he helped one to smile among the ruins.

“Did you ever read ‘Candide’, Uncle Chris?”

“‘Candide’?” Uncle Chris shook his head. He was not a great reader, except of the sporting press.

“It’s a book by Voltaire. There’s a character in it called Doctor Pangloss, who thought that everything was for the best in this best of all possible worlds.”

Uncle Chris felt a touch of embarrassment. It occurred to him that he had been betrayed by his mercurial temperament into an attitude which, considering the circumstances, was perhaps a trifle too jubilant. He gave his mustache a pull, and reverted to the minor key.

“Oh, you mustn’t think that I don’t appreciate the terrible, the criminal thing I have done! I blame myself,” said Uncle Chris cordially, flicking another speck of dust off his sleeve. “I blame myself bitterly. Your mother ought never to have made me your trustee, my dear. But she always believed in me, in spite of everything, and this is how I have repaid her.” He blew his nose to cover a not unmanly emotion. “I wasn’t fitted for the position. Never become a trustee, Jill. It’s the devil, is trust money. However much you argue with yourself, you can’t—dash it, you simply can’t believe that it’s not your own, to do as you like with. There it sits, smiling at you, crying ‘Spend me! Spend me!’ and you find yourself dipping—dipping—till one day there’s nothing left to dip for—only a far-off rustling—the ghosts of dead bank-notes. That’s how it was with me. The process was almost automatic. I hardly knew it was going on. Here a little—there a little. It was like snow melting on a mountain-top. And one morning—all gone!” Uncle Chris drove the point home with a gesture. “I did what I could. When I found that there were only a few hundreds left, for your sake I took a chance. All heart and no head! There you have Christopher Selby in a nutshell! A man at the club—a fool named—I’ve forgotten his damn name—recommended Amalgamated Dyestuffs as a speculation. Monroe, that was his name, Jimmy Monroe. He talked about the future of British Dyes now that Germany was out of the race, and … well, the long and short of it was that I took his advice and bought on margin. Bought like the devil. And this morning Amalgamated Dyestuffs went all to blazes. There you have the whole story!”

“And now,” said Jill, “comes the sequel!”

“The sequel?” said Uncle Chris breezily. “Happiness, my dear, happiness! Wedding bells and—and all that sort of thing!” He straddled the hearth-rug manfully, and swelled his chest out. He would permit no pessimism on this occasion of rejoicing. “You don’t suppose that the fact of your having lost your money—that is to say—er—of my having lost your money—will affect a splendid young fellow like Derek Underhill? I know him better than to think that! I’ve always liked him. He’s a man you can trust! Besides,” he added reflectively, “there’s no need to tell him! Till after the wedding, I mean. It won’t be hard to keep up appearances here for a month or so.”

“Of course I must tell him!”

“You think it wise?”

“I don’t know about it being wise. It’s the only thing to do. I must see him tonight. Oh, I forgot. He was going away this afternoon for a day or two.”

“Capital! It will give you time to think it over.”

“I don’t want to think it over. There’s nothing to think about.”

“Of course, yes, of course. Quite so.”

“I shall write him a letter.”

“Write, eh?”

“It’s easier to put what one wants to say in a letter.”

“Letters,” began Uncle Chris, and stopped as the door opened. Jane the parlormaid entered, carrying a salver. “For me?” asked Uncle Chris.

“For Miss Jill, sir.”

Jill took the note off the salver.

“It’s from Derek.”

“There’s a messenger-boy waiting, miss,” said Jane. “He wasn’t told if there was an answer.”

“If the note is from Derek,” said Uncle Chris, “it’s not likely to want an answer. You said he left town today.”

Jill opened the envelope.

“Is there an answer, miss?” asked Jane, after what she considered a suitable interval. She spoke tenderly. She was a great admirer of Derek, and considered it a pretty action on his part to send notes like this when he was compelled to leave London.

“Any answer, Jill?”

Jill seemed to rouse herself. She had turned oddly pale.

“No, no answer, Jane.”

“Thank you, miss,” said Jane, and went off to tell cook that in her opinion Jill was lacking in heart. “It might have been a bill instead of a love-letter,” said Jane to the cook with indignation, “the way she read it. I like people to have a little feeling!”

Jill sat turning the letter over and over in her fingers. Her face was very white. There seemed to be a big, heavy, leaden something inside her. A cold hand clutched her throat. Uncle Chris, who at first had noticed nothing untoward, now began to find the silence sinister.

“No bad news, I hope, dear?”

Jill turned the letter between her fingers.

“Jill, is it bad news?”

“Derek has broken off the engagement,” said Jill in a dull voice. She let the note fall to the floor, and sat with her chin in her hands.

“What!” Uncle Chris leaped from the hearth-rug, as though the fire had suddenly scorched him. “What did you say?”

“He’s broken it off.”

“The hound!” cried Uncle Chris. “The blackguard! The—the—I never liked that man! I never trusted him!” He fumed for a moment. “But—but—it isn’t possible. How can he have heard about what’s happened? He couldn’t know. It’s—it’s—it isn’t possible!”

“He doesn’t know. It has nothing to do with that.”

“But …” Uncle Chris stooped to where the note lay. “May I … ?”

“Yes, you can read it if you like.”

Uncle Chris produced a pair of reading-glasses, and glared through them at the sheet of paper as though it were some loathsome insect.

“The hound! The cad! If I were a younger man,” shouted Uncle Chris, smiting the letter violently, “if I were … Jill! My dear little Jill!”

He plunged down on his knees beside her, as she buried her face in her hands and began to sob.

“My little girl! Damn that man! My dear little girl! The cad! The devil! My own darling little girl! I’ll thrash him within an inch of his life!”

The clock on the mantelpiece ticked away the minutes. Jill got up. Her face was wet and quivering, but her mouth had set in a brave line.

“Jill, dear!”

She let his hand close over hers.

“Everything’s happening all at once this afternoon, Uncle Chris, isn’t it!” She smiled a twisted smile. “You look so funny! Your hair’s all rumpled, and your glasses are over on one side!”

Uncle Chris breathed heavily through his nose.

“When I meet that man …” he began portentously.

“Oh, what’s the good of bothering! It’s not worth it! Nothing’s worth it!” Jill stopped, and faced him, her hands clenched. “Let’s get away! Let’s get right away! I want to get right away, Uncle Chris! Take me away! Anywhere! Take me to America with you! I must get away!”

Uncle Chris raised his right hand, and shook it. His reading-glasses, hanging from his left ear, bobbed drunkenly.

“We’ll sail by the next boat! The very next boat, dammit! I’ll take care of you, dear. I’ve been a blackguard to you, my little girl. I’ve robbed you, and swindled you. But I’ll make up for it, by George! I’ll make up for it! I’ll give you a new home, as good as this, if I die for it. There’s nothing I won’t do! Nothing! By Jove!” shouted Uncle Chris, raising his voice in a red-hot frenzy of emotion, “I’ll work! Yes, by Gad, if it comes right down to it, I’ll work!”

He brought his fist down with a crash on the table where Derek’s flowers stood in their bowl. The bowl leaped in the air and tumbled over, scattering the flowers on the floor.

In the lives of each one of us, as we look back and review them in retrospect, there are certain desert wastes from which memory winces like some tired traveller faced with a dreary stretch of road. Even from the security of later happiness we cannot contemplate them without a shudder. Time robs our sorrows of their sharp vividness, but the horror of those blank, gray days never wholly passes. It remains for ever at the back of our consciousness to remind us that, though we may have struggled through it to the heights, there is an abyss. We may dwell, like the Pilgrim, on the Delectable Mountains, but we never forget the Slough of Despond. Years afterwards, Jill could not bring herself to think of that brief but age-long period which lay between the evening when she read Derek’s letter and the morning when, with the wet sea-wind in her face and the cry of the wheeling sea-gulls in her ears, she stood on the deck of the liner that was taking her to the land where she could begin a new life. It brooded behind her like a great, dank cloud, shutting out the sunshine.

The conditions of modern life are singularly inimical to swift and dramatic action when we wish to escape from surroundings that have become intolerable. In the old days, your hero would leap on his charger and ride out into the sunset. Now, he is compelled to remain for a week or so to settle his affairs,—especially if he is an Uncle Chris—and has got those affairs into such a tangle that hardened lawyers knit their brows at the sight of them. It took one of the most competent firms in the metropolis four days to produce some sort of order in the confusion resulting from Major Selby’s financial operations; and during those days Jill existed in a state of being which could be defined as living only in that she breathed and ate and comported herself outwardly like a girl and not a ghost.

Boards announcing that the house was for sale appeared against the railings through which Jane the parlormaid conducted her daily conversations with the tradesmen. Strangers roamed the rooms eyeing and appraising the furniture. Uncle Chris, on whom disaster had had a quickening and vivifying effect, was everywhere at once, an impressive figure of energy. One may be wronging Uncle Chris, but to the eye of the casual observer he seemed in these days of trial to be having the time of his life.

Jill varied the monotony of sitting in her room—which was the only place in the house where one might be sure of not encountering a furniture-broker’s man with a note-book and pencil—by taking long walks. She avoided as far as possible the small area which had once made up the whole of London for her, but even so she was not always successful in escaping from old acquaintances. Once, cutting through Lennox Gardens on her way to that vast, desolate King’s Road which stretches its length out into regions unknown to those whose London is the West End, she happened upon Freddie Rooke, who had been paying a call in his best hat and a pair of white spats which would have cut his friend Henry to the quick. It was not an enjoyable meeting. Freddie, keenly alive to the awkwardness of the situation, was scarlet and incoherent; and Jill, who desired nothing less than to talk with one so intimately connected in her mind with all that she had lost, was scarcely more collected. They parted without regret. The only satisfaction that came to Jill from the encounter was the knowledge that Derek was still out of town. He had wired for his things, said Freddie and had retreated further north. Freddie, it seemed, had been informed of the broken engagement by Lady Underhill in an interview which appeared to have left a lasting impression on his mind. Of Jill’s monetary difficulties he had heard nothing.

After this meeting, Jill felt a slight diminution of the oppression which weighed upon her. She could not have borne to have come unexpectedly upon Derek, and, now that there was no danger of that, she found life a little easier. The days passed somehow, and finally there came the morning when, accompanied by Uncle Chris—voluble and explanatory about the details of what he called “getting everything settled”—she rode in a taxi to take the train for Southampton. Her last impression of London was of rows upon rows of mean houses, of cats wandering in back-yards among groves of home-washed underclothing, and a smoky grayness which gave way, as the train raced on, to the clearer gray of the suburbs and the good green and brown of the open country.

Then the bustle and confusion of the liner; the calm monotony of the journey, when one came on deck each morning to find the vessel so manifestly in the same spot where it had been the morning before that it was impossible to realize how many hundred miles of ocean had really been placed behind one; and finally the Ambrose Channel lightship and the great bulk of New York rising into the sky like a city of fairyland, heartening yet sinister, at once a welcome and a menace.

“There you are, my dear!” said Uncle Chris indulgently, as though it were a toy he had made for her with his own hands. “New York!”

They were standing on the boat-deck, leaning over the rail. Jill caught her breath. For the first time since disaster had come upon her she was conscious of a rising of her spirits. It is impossible to behold the huge buildings which fringe the harbor of New York without a sense of expectancy and excitement. There had remained in Jill’s mind from childhood memories a vague picture of what she now saw, but it had been feeble and inadequate. The sight of this towering city seemed somehow to blot out everything that had gone before. The feeling of starting afresh was strong upon her.

Uncle Chris, the old traveller, was not emotionally affected. He smoked placidly and talked in a wholly earthy strain of grape-fruit and buckwheat cakes.

It was now, also for the first time, that Uncle Chris touched upon future prospects in a practical manner. On the voyage he had been eloquent but sketchy. With the land of promise within biscuit-throw and the tugs bustling about the great liner’s skirts like little dogs about their mistress, he descended to details.

“I shall get a room somewhere,” said Uncle Chris, “and start looking about me. I wonder if the old Holland House is still there. I fancy I heard they’d pulled it down. Capital place. I had a steak there in the year … But I expect they’ve pulled it down. But I shall find somewhere to go. I’ll write and tell you my address directly I’ve got one.”

Jill removed her gaze from the sky-line with a start.

“Write to me?”

“Didn’t I tell you about that?” said Uncle Chris cheerily,—avoiding her eye, however, for he had realized all along that it might be a little bit awkward breaking the news. “I’ve arranged that you shall go and stay for the time being down at Brookport—on Long Island, you know—over in that direction—with your Uncle Elmer. Daresay you’ve forgotten you have an Uncle Elmer, eh?” he went on quickly, as Jill was about to speak. “Your father’s brother. Used to be in business, but retired some years ago and goes in for amateur farming. Corn and—and corn,” said Uncle Chris. “All that sort of thing. You’ll like him. Capital chap! Never met him myself, but always heard,” said Uncle Chris, who had never to his recollection heard any comments upon Mr Elmer Mariner whatever, “that he was a splendid fellow. Directly we decided to sail, I cabled to him, and got an answer saying that he would be delighted to put you up. You’ll be quite happy there.”

Jill listened to this programme with dismay. New York was calling to her, and Brookport held out no attractions at all. She looked down over the side at the tugs puffing their way through the broken blocks of ice that reminded her of a cocoanut candy familiar to her childhood.

“But I want to be with you,” she protested.

“Impossible, my dear, for the present. I shall be very busy, very busy indeed for some weeks, until I have found my feet. Really, you would be in the way. He—er—travels the fastest who travels alone! I must be in a position to go anywhere and do anything at a moment’s notice. But always remember, my dear,” said Uncle Chris, patting her shoulder affectionately, “that I shall be working for you. I have treated you very badly, but I intend to make up for it. I shall not forget that whatever money I may make will really belong to you.” He looked at her benignly, like a monarch of finance who has ear-marked a million or two for the benefit of a deserving charity. “You shall have it all, Jill.”

He had so much the air of having conferred a substantial benefit upon her that Jill felt obliged to thank him. Uncle Chris had always been able to make people grateful for the phantom gold which he showered upon them. He was as lavish a man with the money he was going to get next week as ever borrowed a five-pound note to see him through till Saturday.

“What are you going to do, Uncle Chris?” asked Jill curiously. Apart from a nebulous idea that he intended to saunter through the city picking dollar-bills off the sidewalk, she had no inkling of his plans.

Uncle Chris toyed with his short mustache. He was not quite equal to a direct answer on the spur of the moment. He had a faith in his star. Something would turn up. Something always had turned up in the old days, and doubtless, with the march of civilization, opportunities had multiplied. Somewhere behind those tall buildings the Goddess of Luck awaited him, her hands full of gifts, but precisely what those gifts would be he was not in a position to say.

“I shall—ah—how shall I put it—?”

“Look round?” suggested Jill.

“Precisely,” said Uncle Chris gratefully. “Look round. I daresay you have noticed that I have gone out of my way during the voyage to make myself agreeable to our fellow-travellers? I had an object. Acquaintances begun on shipboard will often ripen into useful friendships ashore. When I was a young man I never neglected the opportunities which an ocean voyage affords. The offer of a book here, a steamer-rug there, a word of encouragement to a chatty bore in the smoke-room—these are small things, but they may lead to much. One meets influential people on a liner. You wouldn’t think it to look at him, but that man with the eye-glasses and the thin nose I was talking to just now is one of the richest men in Milwaukee!”

“But it’s not much good having rich friends in Milwaukee when you are in New York!”

“Exactly. There you have put your finger on the very point I have been trying to make. It will probably be necessary for me to travel. And for that I must be alone. I must be a mobile force. I should dearly like to keep you with me, but you can see for yourself that for the moment you would be an encumbrance. Later on, no doubt, when my affairs are more settled …”

“Oh, I understand. I’m resigned. But, oh dear! it’s going to be very dull down at Brookport.”

“Nonsense, nonsense! It’s a delightful spot.”

“Have you been there?”

“No! But of course everybody knows Brookport! Healthy, invigorating … Sure to be! The very name … You’ll be as happy as the days are long!”

“And how long the days will be!”

“Come, come! You mustn’t look on the dark side!”

“Is there another?” Jill laughed. “You are an old hum-bug, Uncle Chris. You know perfectly well what you’re condemning me to! I expect Brookport will be like a sort of Southend in winter. Oh, well, I’ll be brave. But do hurry and make a fortune, because I want to come to New York.”

“My dear,” said Uncle Chris solemnly, “if there is a dollar lying loose in this city, rest assured that I shall have it! And, if it’s not loose, I will detach it with the greatest possible speed. You have only known me in my decadence, an idle and unprofitable London clubman. I can assure you that, lurking beneath the surface, there is a business acumen given to few men …”

“Oh, if you are going to talk poetry,” said Jill, “I’ll leave you. Anyhow, I ought to be getting below and putting my things together. Subject for a historical picture,—The Belle of Brookport collecting a few simple necessaries before entering upon the conquest of America.”

If Jill’s vision of Brookport as a wintery Southend was not entirely fulfilled, neither was Uncle Chris’ picture of it as an earthly paradise. At the right time of the year, like most of the summer resorts on the south shore of Long Island, it is not without its attractions; but January is not the month which most people would choose for living in it. It presented itself to Jill on first acquaintance in the aspect of a wind-swept railroad station, dumped down far away from human habitation in the middle of a stretch of flat and ragged country that reminded her a little of parts of Surrey. The station was just a shed on a foundation of planks which lay flush with the rails. From this shed, as the train clanked in, there emerged a tall, shambling man in a weather-beaten overcoat. He had a clean-shaven, wrinkled face, and he looked doubtfully at Jill with small eyes. Something in his expression reminded Jill of her father, as a bad caricature of a public man will recall the original, she introduced herself.

“If you’re Uncle Elmer,” she said, “I’m Jill.”

The man held out a long hand. He did not smile. He was as bleak as the east wind that swept the platform.

“Glad to meet you again,” he said in a melancholy voice. It was news to Jill that they had met before. She wondered where. Her uncle supplied the information. “Last time I saw you, you were a kiddy in short frocks, running around and shouting to beat the band.” He looked up and down the platform. “I never heard a child make so much noise!”

“I’m quite quiet now,” said Jill encouragingly. The recollection of her infant revelry seemed to her to be distressing her relative.

It appeared, however, that it was not only this that was on his mind.

“If you want to drive home,” he said, “we’ll have to phone to the Durham House for a hack.” He brooded awhile, Jill remaining silent at his side, loath to break in upon whatever secret sorrow he was wrestling with. “That would be a dollar,” he went on. “They’re robbers in these parts! A dollar! And it’s not over a mile and a half. Are you fond of walking?”

Jill was a bright girl, and could take a hint.

“I love walking,” she said. She might have added that she preferred to do it on a day when the wind was not blowing quite so keenly from the East, but her uncle’s obvious excitement at the prospect of cheating the rapacity of the sharks at the Durham House restrained her. Her independent soul had not quite adjusted itself to the prospect of living on the bounty of her fellows, relatives though they were, and she was desirous of imposing as light a burden upon them as possible. “But how about my trunk?”

“The expressman will bring that up. Fifty cents!” said Uncle Elmer in a crushed way. The high cost of entertaining seemed to be afflicting this man deeply.

“Oh, yes,” said Jill. She could not see how this particular expenditure was to be avoided. Anxious as she was to make herself pleasant, she declined to consider carrying the trunk to their destination. “Shall we start, then?”

Mr Mariner led the way out into the ice-covered road. The wind welcomed them like a boisterous dog. For some minutes they proceeded in silence.

“Your aunt will be glad to see you,” said Mr Mariner at last in the voice with which one announces the death of a dear friend.

“It’s awfully kind of you to have me to stay with you,” said Jill. It is a human tendency to think, when crises occur, in terms of melodrama, and unconsciously she had begun to regard herself somewhat in the light of a heroine driven out into the world from the old home, with no roof to shelter her head. The promptitude with which these good people, who, though relatives, were after all complete strangers, had offered her a resting-place touched her. “I hope I shan’t be in the way.”

“Major Selby was speaking to me on the telephone just now,” said Mr Mariner, “and he said that you might be thinking of settling down in Brookport. I’ve some nice little places round here which you might like to look at. Rent or buy. It’s cheaper to buy. Brookport’s a growing place. It’s getting known as a summer resort. There’s a bungalow down on the shore I’d like to show you tomorrow. Stands in a nice large plot of ground, and if you bought it for twelve thousand you’d be getting a bargain.”

Jill was too astonished to speak. Plainly Uncle Chris had made no mention of the change in her fortunes, and this man looked on her as a girl of wealth. She could only think how typical this was of Uncle Chris. There was a sort of boyish impishness about him. She could see him at the telephone, suave and important. He would have hung up the receiver with a complacent smirk, thoroughly satisfied that he had done her an excellent turn.

“I put all my money into real estate when I came to live here,” went on Mr Mariner. “I believe in the place. It’s growing all the time.”

They had come to the outskirts of a straggling village. The lights in the windows gave a welcome suggestion of warmth, for darkness had fallen swiftly during their walk and the chill of the wind had become more biting. There was a smell of salt in the air now, and once or twice Jill had caught the low booming of waves on some distant beach. This was the Atlantic pounding the sandy shore of Fire Island. Brookport itself lay inside, on the lagoon called the Great South Bay.

“This is Brookport,” said Mr Mariner. “That’s Haydock’s grocery store there by the post-office. He charges sixty cents a pound for bacon, and I can get the same bacon by walking into Patchogue for fifty-seven!” He brooded awhile on the greed of man, as exemplified by the pirates of Brookport. “The very same bacon!” he said.

“How far is Patchogue?” asked Jill, feeling that some comment was required of her.

“Four miles,” said Mr Mariner.

They passed through the village, bearing to the right, and found themselves in a road bordered by large gardens in which stood big, dark houses. The spectacle of these stimulated Mr Mariner to something approaching eloquence. He quoted the price paid for each, the price asked, the price offered, the price that had been paid five years ago. The recital carried them on for another mile, in the course of which the houses became smaller and more scattered, and finally, when the country had become bare and desolate again, they turned down a narrow lane and came to a tall, gaunt house standing by itself in a field.

“This is Sandringham,” said Mr Mariner.

“What!” said Jill. “What did you say?”

“Sandringham. Where we live. I got the name from your father. I remember him telling me there was a place called that in England.”

“There is.” Jill’s voice bubbled. “The King lives there.”

“Is that so?” said Mr Mariner. “Well, I bet he doesn’t have the trouble with help that we have here. I have to pay our girl fifty dollars a month, and another twenty for the man who looks after the furnace and chops wood. They’re all robbers. And if you kick they quit on you!”

Jill endured Sandringham for ten days; and, looking back on that period of her life later, she wondered how she did it. The sense of desolation which had gripped her on the station platform increased rather than diminished as she grew accustomed to her surroundings. The east wind died away, and the sun shone fitfully with a suggestion of warmth, but her uncle’s bleakness appeared to be a static quality, independent of weather conditions. Her aunt, a faded woman with a perpetual cold in the head, did nothing to promote cheerfulness. The rest of the household consisted of a gloomy child, “Tibby,” aged eight; a spaniel, probably a few years older, and an intermittent cat, who, when he did put in an appearance, was the life and soul of the party, but whose visits to his home were all too infrequent for Jill. Thomas was a genial animal, whose color-scheme, like a Whistler picture, was an arrangement in black and white. He had green eyes and a purr like a racing automobile. But his social engagements in the neighborhood kept him away much of the time. He was the popular and energetic secretary of the local cats’ debating society. One could hear him at night sometimes reading the minutes in a loud, clear voice; after which the debate was considered formally open.

Each day was the same as the last, almost to the final detail. Sometimes Tibby would be naughty at breakfast, sometimes at lunch; while Rover, the spaniel, a great devotee of the garbage-can, would occasionally be sick at mid-day instead of after the evening meal. But, with these exceptions, there was a uniformity about the course of life in the Mariner household which began to prey on Jill’s nerves as early as the third day.

The picture which Mr Mariner had formed in his mind of Jill as a wealthy young lady with a taste for house property continued as vivid as ever. It was his practice each morning to conduct her about the neighborhood, introducing her to the various houses in which he had sunk most of the money which he had made in business. Mr Mariner’s life centered around Brookport real estate, and the embarrassed Jill was compelled to inspect sitting-rooms, bathrooms, kitchens, and master’s bedrooms till the sound of a key turning in a lock gave her a feeling of nervous exhaustion. Most of her uncle’s houses were converted farmhouses and, as one unfortunate purchaser had remarked, not so darned converted at that. The days she spent at Brookport remained in Jill’s memory as a smell of dampness and chill and closeness.

“You want to buy,” said Mr Mariner every time he shut a front-door behind them. “Not rent. Buy. Then, if you don’t want to live here, you can always rent in the summer.”

It seemed incredible to Jill that the summer would ever come. Winter held Brookport in its grip. For the first time in her life she was tasting real loneliness. She wandered over the snow-patched fields down to the frozen bay, and found the intense stillness, punctuated only by the occasional distant gunshot of some optimist trying for duck, oppressive rather than restful. She looked on the weird beauty of the ice-bound marshes which glittered red and green and blue in the sun with unseeing eyes; for her isolation was giving her time to think, and thought was a torment.

On the eighth day came a letter from Uncle Chris,—a cheerful, even rollicking letter. Things were going well with Uncle Chris, it seemed. As was his habit, he did not enter into details, but he wrote in a spacious way of large things to be, of affairs that were coming out right, of prosperity in sight. As tangible evidence of success, he enclosed a present of twenty dollars, for Jill to spend in the Brookport shops.

The letter arrived by the morning mail, and two hours later Mr Mariner took Jill by one of his usual overland routes to see a house nearer the village than most of those which she had viewed. Mr Mariner had exhausted the supply of cottages belonging to himself, and this one was the property of an acquaintance. There would be an agent’s fee for him in the deal, if it went through, and Mr Mariner was not a man who despised money in small quantities.

There was a touch of hopefulness in his gloom this morning, like the first intimation of sunshine after a wet day. He had been thinking the thing over, and had come to the conclusion that Jill’s unresponsiveness when confronted with the houses she had already seen was due to the fact that she had loftier ideas than he had supposed. Something a little more magnificent than the twelve thousand dollar places he had shown her was what she desired. This house stood on a hill looking down on the bay, in several acres of ground. It had its private landing-stage and bath-house, its dairy, its sleeping-porches,—everything, in fact, that a sensible girl could want. Mr Mariner could not bring himself to suppose that he would fail again today.

“They’re asking a hundred and five thousand,” he said, “but I know they’d take a hundred thousand. And, if it was a question of cash down, they would go even lower. It’s a fine house. You could entertain there. Mrs Bruggenheim rented it last summer, and wanted to buy, but she wouldn’t go above ninety thousand. If you want it, you’d better make up your mind quick. A place like this is apt to be snapped up in a hurry.”

Jill could endure it no longer.

“But, you see,” she said gently, “all I have in the world is twenty dollars!”

There was a painful pause. Mr Mariner shot a swift glance at her in the hope of discovering that she had spoken humorously, but was compelled to decide that she had not. His face under normal conditions always achieved the maximum gloom possible for any face, so he gave no outward sign of the shock which had shattered his mental poise; but he expressed his emotion by walking nearly a mile without saying a word. He was stunned. He had supported himself up till now by the thought that, frightful as the expense of entertaining Jill as a guest might be, the outlay was a good sporting speculation if she intended buying house-property in the neighbourhood. The realization that he was down to the extent of a week’s breakfasts, lunches, and dinners, with nothing to show for it, appalled him. There had been a black morning some years before when Mr. Mariner had given a waiter a ten-dollar bill in mistake for a one. As he had felt then, on discovering his error when it was too late to retrieve it, so did he feel now.

“Twenty dollars!” he exclaimed, at the end of the mile.

“Twenty dollars,” said Jill,

“But your father was a rich man.” Mr. Mariner’s voice was high and plaintive. “He made a fortune over here before he went to England.”

“It’s all gone. I got nipped,” said Jill, who was finding a certain amount of humor in the situation, “in Amalgamated Dyes.”

“Amalgamated Dyes?”

“They’re something,” explained Jill, “that people get nipped in.”

Mr Mariner digested this.

“You speculated?” he gasped.

“Yes.”

“You shouldn’t have been allowed to do it,” said Mr Mariner warmly. “Major Selby—your uncle ought to have known better than to allow you.”

“Yes, oughtn’t he,” said Jill demurely.

There was another silence, lasting for about a quarter of a mile.

“Well, it’s a bad business,” said Mr Mariner.

“Yes,” said Jill. “I’ve felt that myself.”

The result of this conversation was to effect a change in the atmosphere of Sandringham. The alteration in the demeanor of people of parsimonious habit, when they discover that the guest they are entertaining is a pauper and not, as they had supposed, an heiress, is subtle but well-marked. In most cases, more well-marked than subtle. Nothing was actually said, but there are thoughts that are almost as audible as words. A certain suspense seemed to creep into the air, as happens when a situation has been reached which is too poignant to last. Greek Tragedy affects the reader with the same sense of over-hanging doom. Things, we feel, cannot go on as they are.

That night, after dinner, Mrs Mariner asked Jill to read to her.

“Print tries my eyes so, dear,” said Mrs Mariner. It was a small thing, but it had the significance of that little cloud that arose out of the sea like a man’s hand. Jill appreciated the portent. She was, she perceived, to make herself useful.

“Of course I will,” she said cordially. “What would you me to read?”

She hated reading aloud. It always made her throat sore, and her eye skipped to the end of each page and took the interest out of it long before the proper time. But she proceeded bravely, for her conscience was troubling her. Her sympathy was divided equally between these unfortunate people who had been saddled with an undesired visitor and herself who had been placed in a position at which every independent nerve in her rebelled. Even as a child she had loathed being under obligations to strangers or those whom she did not love.

“Thank you, dear,” said Mrs Mariner, when Jill’s voice had roughened to a weary croak. “You read so well.” She wrestled ineffectually with her handkerchief against the cold in the head from which she always suffered. “It would be nice if you would do it every night, don’t you think? You have no idea how tired print makes my eyes.”

On the following morning after breakfast, at the hour when she had hitherto gone house-hunting with Mr Mariner, the child Tibby, of whom up till now she had seen little except at meals, presented himself to her, coated and shod for the open and regarding her with a dull and phlegmatic gaze.

“Ma says will you please take me for a nice walk!”

Jill’s heart sank. She loved children, but Tibby was not an ingratiating child. He was a Mr Mariner in little. He had the family gloom. It puzzled Jill sometimes why this branch of the family should look on life with so jaundiced an eye. She remembered her father as a cheerful man, alive to the small humors of life.

“All right, Tibby. Where shall we go?”

“Ma says we must keep on the roads and I mustn’t slide.”

Jill was thoughtful during the walk. Tibby, who was no conversationalist, gave her every opportunity for meditation. She perceived that in the space of a few hours she had sunk in the social scale. If there was any difference between her position and that of a paid nurse and companion, it lay in the fact that she was not paid. She looked about her at the grim countryside, gave a thought to the chill gloom of the house to which she was about to return, and her heart sank.

Nearing home, Tibby vouchsafed his first independent observation.

“The hired man’s quit!”

“Has he?”

“Yep. Quit this morning.”

It had begun to snow. They turned and made their way back to the house. The information she had received did not cause Jill any great apprehension. It was hardly likely that her new duties would include the stoking of the furnace. That and cooking appeared to be the only acts about the house which were outside her present sphere of usefulness.

“He killed a rat once in the wood-shed with an axe,” said Tibby chattily. “Yessir! Chopped it right in half, and it bled!”

“Look at the pretty snow falling on the trees,” said Jill faintly.

At breakfast next morning, Mrs Mariner having sneezed, made a suggestion.

“Tibby, darling, wouldn’t it be nice if you and cousin Jill played a game of pretending you were pioneers in the Far West?”

“What’s a pioneer?” enquired Tibby, pausing in the middle of an act of violence on a plate of oatmeal.

“The pioneers were the early settlers in this country, dear. You have read about them in your history book. They endured a great many hardships, for life was very rough for them, with no railroads or anything. I think it would be a nice game to play this morning.”

Tibby looked at Jill. There was doubt in his eye. Jill returned his gaze sympathetically. One thought was in both their minds.

“There is a string to this!” said Tibby’s eye.

“Exactly what I think!” said Jill’s.

Mrs Mariner sneezed again.

“You would have lots of fun,” she said.

“What’ud we do?” asked Tibby cautiously. He had been this way before. Only last Summer, on his mother’s suggestion that he should pretend he was a ship-wrecked sailor on a desert island, he had perspired through a whole afternoon cutting the grass in front of the house to make a ship-wrecked sailor’s simple bed.

“I know,” said Jill. “We’ll pretend we’re pioneers stormbound in their log cabin in the woods, and the wolves are howling outside, and they daren’t go out, so they make a lovely big fire and sit in front of it and read.”

“And eat candy,” suggested Tibby, warming to the idea.

“And eat candy,” agreed Jill.

Mrs Mariner frowned.

“I was going to suggest,” she said frostily, “that you shovelled the snow away from the front steps!”

“Splendid!” said Jill. “Oh, but I forgot. I want to go to the village first.”

“There will be plenty of time to do it when you get back.”

“All right. I’ll do it when I get back.”

It was a quarter of an hour’s walk to the village. Jill stopped at the post-office.

“Could you tell me,” she asked, “when the next train is to New York?”

“There’s one at ten-ten,” said the woman, behind the window. “You’ll have to hurry.”

“I’ll hurry!” said Jill.

Doctors, laying down the law in their usual confident way, tell us that the vitality of the human body is at its lowest at two o’clock in the morning: and that it is then, as a consequence, that the mind is least able to contemplate the present with equanimity, the future with fortitude, and the past without regret. Every thinking man, however, knows that this is not so. The true zero hour, desolate, gloom-ridden, and specter-haunted, occurs immediately before dinner while we are waiting for that cocktail. It is then that, stripped for a brief moment of our armor of complacency and self-esteem, we see ourselves as we are,—frightful chumps in a world where nothing goes right; a gray world in which, hoping to click, we merely get the raspberry; where, animated by the best intentions, we nevertheless succeed in perpetrating the scaliest bloomers and landing our loved ones neck-deep in the gumbo.

So reflected Freddie Rooke, that priceless old bean, sitting disconsolately in an arm-chair at the Drones Club about two weeks after Jill’s departure from England, waiting for his friend Algy Martyn to trickle in and give him dinner.

Surveying Freddie, as he droops on his spine in the yielding leather, one is conscious of one’s limitations as a writer. Gloom like his calls for the pen of a master. Zola could have tackled it nicely. Gorky might have made a stab at it. Dostoievsky would have handled it with relish. But for oneself the thing is too vast. One cannot wangle it. It intimidates. It would have been bad enough in any case, for Algy Martyn was late as usual and it always gave Freddie the pip to have to wait for dinner: but what made it worse was the fact that the Drones was not one of Freddie’s clubs and so, until the blighter Algy arrived, it was impossible for him to get his cocktail. There he sat, surrounded by happy, laughing young men, each grasping a glass of the good old mixture-as-before, absolutely unable to connect. Some of them, casual acquaintances, had nodded to him, waved, and gone on lowering the juice,—a spectacle which made Freddie feel much as the wounded soldier would have felt if Sir Philip Sidney, instead of offering him the cup of water, had placed it to his own lips and drained it with a careless “Cheerio!” No wonder Freddie experienced the sort of abysmal soul-sadness which afflicts one of Tolstoi’s Russian peasants when, after putting in a heavy day’s work strangling his father, beating his wife, and dropping the baby into the city reservoir, he turns to the cupboard, only to find the vodka-bottle empty.

Freddie gave himself up to despondency: and, as always in these days when he was mournful, he thought of Jill. Jill’s sad case was a continual source of mental anguish to him. From the first he had blamed himself for the breaking-off of her engagement with Derek. If he had not sent the message to Derek from the police-station, the latter would never have known about their arrest, and all would have been well. And now, a few days ago, had come the news of her financial disaster, with its attendant complications.

It had descended on Freddie like a thunderbolt through the medium of Ronny Devereux.

“I say,” Ronny had said, “have you heard the latest? Your pal, Underhill, has broken off his engagement with Jill Mariner.”

“I know; rather rotten, what!”

“Rotten? I should say so! It isn’t done. I mean to say, chap can’t chuck a girl just because she’s lost her money. Simply isn’t on the board, old man!”

“Lost her money? What do you mean?”

Ronny was surprised. Hadn’t Freddie heard? Yes, absolute fact. He had it from the best authority. Didn’t know how it had happened and all that, but Jill Mariner had gone completely bust; Underhill had given her the miss-in-baulk; and the poor girl had legged it, no one knew where. Oh, Freddie had met her and she had told him she was going to America? Well, then, legged it to America. But the point was that the swine Underhill had handed her the mitten just because she was broke, and that was what Ronny thought so bally rotten. Broker a girl is, Ronny meant to say, more a fellow should stick to her.

“But—” Freddie rushed to his hero’s defence. “But it wasn’t that at all. Something quite different. I mean, Derek didn’t even know Jill had lost her money. He broke the engagement because …” Freddie stopped short. He didn’t want everybody to know of that rotten arrest business, as they infallibly would if he confided in Ronny Devereux. Sort of thing he would never hear the last of. “He broke it off because of something quite different.”

“Oh, yes!” said Ronny skeptically.

“But he did, really!”

Ronny shook his head.

“Don’t you believe it, old son. Don’t you believe it. Stands to reason it must have been because the poor girl was broke. You wouldn’t have done it and I wouldn’t have done it, but Underhill did, and that’s all there is to it. I mean, a tick’s a tick, and there’s nothing more to say. Well, I know he’s been a pal of yours, Freddie, but, next time I meet him, by Jove, I’ll cut him dead. Only I don’t know him to speak to, dash it!” concluded Ronny regretfully.

Ronny’s news had upset Freddie. Derek had returned to the Albany a couple of days ago, moody and silent. They had lunched together at the Bachelors, and Freddie had been pained at the attitude of his fellow clubmen. Usually, when he lunched at the Bachelors, his table became a sort of social center. Cheery birds would roll up to pass the time of day, and festive old eggs would toddle over to have coffee and so forth, and all that sort of thing. Jolly! On this occasion nobody had rolled, and all the eggs present had taken their coffee elsewhere. There was an uncomfortable chill in the atmosphere of which Freddie had been acutely conscious, though Derek had not appeared to notice it. The thing had only come home to Derek yesterday at the Albany, when the painful episode of Wally Mason had occurred. It was this way:

“Hullo, Freddie, old top! Sorry to have kept you waiting.”

Freddie looked up from his broken meditations, to find that his host had arrived.

“Hullo!”

“A quick bracer,” said Algy Martyn, “and then the jolly old food-stuffs. It’s pretty late, I see. Didn’t notice how time was slipping.”

Over the soup, Freddie was still a prey to gloom. For once the healing gin-and-vermouth had failed to do its noble work. He sipped sombrely, so sombrely as to cause comment from his host.

“Pipped?” enquired Algy solicitously.

“Pretty pipped,” admitted Freddie.

“Backed a loser?”

“No.”

“Something wrong with the old tum?”

“No. … Worried.”

“Worried?”

“About Derek.”

“Derek? Who’s … ? Oh, you mean Underhill?”

“Yes.”

Algy Martyn chased an elusive piece of carrot about his soup plate, watching it interestedly as it slid coyly from the spoon.

“Oh?” he said, with sudden coolness. “What about him?”

Freddie was too absorbed in his subject to notice the change in his friend’s tone.

“A dashed unpleasant thing,” he said, “happened yesterday morning at my place. I was just thinking about going out to lunch, when the door-bell rang and Parker said a chappie of the name of Mason would like to see me. I didn’t remember any Mason, but Parker said the chappie said he knew me when I was a kid. So he loosed him into the room, and it turned out to be a fellow I used to know years ago down in Worcestershire. I didn’t know him from Adam at first, but gradually the old bean got to work, and I placed him. Wally Mason his name was. Rummily enough, he had spoken to me at the Leicester that night when the fire was, but not being able to place him, I had given him the miss somewhat. You know how it is. Chappie you’ve never been introduced to says something to you in a theatre, and you murmur something and sheer off. What?”

“Absolutely,” agreed Algy Martyn. He thoroughly approved of Freddie’s code of etiquette. Sheer off. Only thing to do.

“Well, anyhow, now that he had turned up again and told me who he was, I began to remember. We had been kids together, don’t you know. (What’s this? Salmon? Oh, right ho.) So I buzzed about and did the jovial host, you know; gave him a drink and a toofer, and all that sort of thing; and talked about the dear old days and what not. And so forth, if you follow me. Then he brought the conversation round to Jill. Of course he knew Jill at the same time when he knew me, down in Worcestershire, you see. We were all pretty pally in those days, if you see what I mean. Well, this man Mason, it seems, had heard somewhere about Jill losing her money, and he wanted to know if it was true. I said absolutely. Hadn’t heard any details, but Ronny had told me and Ronny had had it from some one who had stable information and all that sort of thing. ‘Dashed shame, isn’t it!’ I said. ‘She’s gone to America, you know.’ ‘I didn’t know,’ he said. ‘I understood she was going to be married quite soon.’ Well, of course, I told him that that was off. He didn’t say anything for a bit, then he said ‘Off?’ I said ‘Off.’ ‘Did she break it off?’ asked the chappie. ‘Well, no,’ I said. ‘As a matter of fact Derek broke it off.’ He said ‘Oh!’ (What? Oh yes, a bit of pheasant will be fine.) Where was I? Oh, yes. He said ‘Oh!’ Now, before this, I ought to tell you, this chappie Mason had asked me to come out and have a bit of lunch. I had told him I was lunching with Derek, and he said ‘Right ho,’ or words to that effect, ‘Bring him along.’ Derek had been out for a stroll, you see, and we were waiting for him to come in. Well, just at this point or juncture, if you know what I mean, in he came, and I said ‘Oh, what ho!’ and introduced Wally Mason. ‘Oh, do you know Underhill?’ I said, or something like that. You know the sort of thing. And then …”

Freddie broke off and drained his glass. The recollection of that painful moment had made him feverish. Social difficulties always did.

“Then what?” enquired Algy Martyn.

“Well, it, was pretty rotten. Derek held out his hand, as a chappie naturally would, being introduced to a strange chappie, and Wally Mason, giving it an absolute miss, went on talking to me just as if we were alone, you know. Look here. Here was I, where this knife is. Derek over here—this fork—with his hand out. Mason here—this bit of bread. Mason looks at his watch, and says ‘I’m sorry, Freddie, but I find I’ve an engagement for lunch. So long!’ and biffed out, without apparently knowing Derek was on the earth. I mean …” Freddie reached for his glass, “What I mean is, it was dashed embarrassing. I mean, cutting a fellow dead in my rooms. I don’t know when I’ve felt so rotten!”

Algy Martyn delivered judgment with great firmness.

“Chappie was perfectly right!”

“No, but I mean …”

“Absolutely correct-o,” insisted Algy sternly. “Underhill can’t dash about all over the place giving the girl he’s engaged to the mitten because she’s broke, and expect no notice to be taken of it. If you want to know what I think, old man, your pal Underhill—I can’t imagine what the deuce you see in him, but, school together and so forth, makes a difference, I suppose,—I say, if you want to know what I think, Freddie, the blighter Underhill would be well advised either to leg it after Jill and get her to marry him or else lie low for a goodish while till people have forgotten the thing. I mean to say, fellows like Ronny and I and Dick Wimpole and Archie Studd and the rest of our lot,—well, we all knew Jill and thought she was a topper and had danced with her here and there and seen her about and all that, and naturally we feel pretty strongly about the whole dashed business. Underhill isn’t in our particular set, but we all know most of the people he knows, and we talk about this business, and the thing gets about, and there you are! My sister, who was a great pal of Jill’s, swears that all the girls she knows mean to cut Underhill. I tell you, Freddie, London’s going to get pretty hot for him if he doesn’t do something dashed quick and with great rapidity!”

“But you haven’t got the story right, old thing!”

“How not?”

“Well, I mean you think and Ronny thinks and all the rest of you think that Derek broke off the engagement because of the money. It wasn’t that at all.”

“What was it, then?”

“Well … Well, look here, it makes me seem a fearful ass and all that, but I’d better tell you. Jill and I were going down one of those streets near Victoria and a blighter was trying to slay a parrot …”

“Parrot-shooting’s pretty good in those parts, they tell me,” interjected Algy satirically.

“Don’t interrupt, old man. This parrot had got out of one of the houses, and a fellow was jabbing at it with a stick, and Jill—you know what she’s like; impulsive, I mean, and all that—Jill got hold of the stick and biffed him with some vim, and a policeman rolled up and the fellow made a fuss and the policeman took Jill and me off to chokey. Well, like an ass, I sent round to Derek to bail us out, and that’s how he heard of the thing. Apparently he didn’t think a lot of it, and the result was that he broke off the engagement.”

Algy Martin had listened to this recital with growing amazement.

“He broke it off because of that?”

“Yes.”

“What absolute rot!” said Algy Martyn. “I don’t believe a word of it!”

“I say, old man!”

“I don’t believe a word of it,” repeated Algy firmly. “And nobody else will either. It’s dashed good of you, Freddie, to cook up a yarn like that to try and make things look better for the blighter, but it won’t work. Such a damn silly story, too!” said Algy with some indignation.

“But it’s true!”

“What’s the use, Freddie, between old pals?” said Algy protestingly. “You know perfectly well that Underhill’s a cootie of the most pronounced order, and that, when he found out that Jill hadn’t any money, he chucked her.”

“But why should Derek care whether Jill was well off or not? He’s got enough money of his own.”

“Nobody,” said Algy judicially, “has got enough money of his own. Underhill thought he was marrying a girl with a sizeable chunk of the ready, and, when the fuse blew out, he decided it wasn’t good enough. For Heaven’s sake don’t let’s talk any more about the blighter. It gives me a pain to think of him.”

And Algy Martyn, suppressing every effort which Freddie made to reopen the subject, turned the conversation to more general matters.

Freddie returned to the Albany in a state of gloom and uneasiness. Algy’s remarks, coming on top of the Wally Mason episode, had shaken him. The London in which he and Derek moved and had their being is nothing but a village, and it was evident that village gossip was hostile to Derek. People were talking about him. Local opinion had decided that he had behaved badly. Already one man had cut him. Freddie blenched at a sudden vision of street-fulls of men, long Piccadillys of men, all cutting him, one after the other. Something had got to be done. He was devoted to Derek. This sort of thing was as bad as being cut himself. Whatever Freddie’s limitations in the matter of brain, he had a large heart and an infinite capacity for faithfulness in his friendships.

The subject was not an easy one to broach to his somewhat forbidding friend, as he discovered when the latter arrived about half an hour later. Derek had been attending the semi-annual banquet of the Worshipful Dry-Salters Company down in the City, understudying one of the speakers, a leading member of Parliament, who had been unable to appear; and he was still in the grip of that feeling of degraded repletion which city dinners induce. The dry-salters, on these occasions when they cast off for a night the cares and anxieties of dry-salting, do their guests well, and Derek had that bloated sense of foreboding which comes to a man whose stomach is not his strong point after twelve courses and a multitude of mixed wines. A goose, qualifying for the role of a pot of pate de foies gras, probably has exactly the same jaundiced outlook.

Yet, unfavorably disposed as, judging by his silence and the occasional moody grunts he uttered, he appeared to be to a discussion of his private affairs, it seemed to Freddie impossible that the night should be allowed to pass without some word spoken on the subject. He thought of Ronny and what Ronny had said, of Algy and what Algy had said, of Wally Mason and how Wally had behaved in this very room; and he nerved himself to the task.

“Derek, old top.”

A grunt.

“I say, Derek, old bean.”

Derek roused himself, and looked gloomily across the room to where he stood, warming his legs at the blaze.

“Well?”

Freddie found a difficulty in selecting words. A ticklish business, this. One that might well have disconcerted a diplomat. Freddie was no diplomat, and the fact enabled him to find a way in the present crisis. Equipped by nature with an amiable tactlessness and a happy gift of blundering, he charged straight at the main point, and landed on it like a circus elephant alighting on a bottle.

“I say, you know, about Jill!”

He stooped to rub the backs of his legs, on which the fire was playing with a little too fierce a glow, and missed his companion’s start and the sudden thickening of his bushy eyebrows.

“Well?” said Derek again.

Freddie nerved himself to proceed. A thought flashed across his mind that Derek was looking exactly like Lady Underhill. It was the first time he had seen the family resemblance quite so marked.

“Ronny Devereux was saying …” faltered Freddie.

“Damn Ronny Devereux!”

“Oh, absolutely! But …”

“Ronny Devereux! Who the devil is Ronny Devereux?”

“Why, old man, you’ve heard me speak of him, haven’t you? Pal of mine. He came down to the station with Algy and me to meet your mater that morning.”

“Oh, that fellow? And he has been saying something about … ?”

“It isn’t only Ronny, you know,” Freddie hastened to interject. “Algy Martyn’s talking about it, too. And lots of other fellows. And Algy’s sister and a lot of people. They’re all saying …”

“What are they saying?”

Freddie bent down and chafed the back of his legs. He simply couldn’t look at Derek while he had that Lady Underhill expression on the old map. Rummy he had never noticed before how extraordinarily like his mother he was. Freddie was conscious of a faint sense of grievance. He could not have put it into words, but what he felt was that a fellow had no right to go about looking like Lady Underhill.

“What are they saying?” repeated Derek grimly.

“Well …” Freddie hesitated. “That it’s a bit tough … On Jill, you know.”

“They think I behaved badly?”

“Well … Oh, well, you know!”

Derek smiled a ghastly smile. This was not wholly due to mental disturbance. The dull heaviness which was the legacy of the Dry-Salters’ dinner had begun to change to something more actively unpleasant. A sub-motive of sharp pain had begun to run through it, flashing in and out like lightning through a thunder-cloud. He felt sullen and vicious.

“I wonder,” he said with savage politeness, “if, when you chat with your friends, you would mind choosing some other topic than my private affairs.”

“Sorry, old man. But they started it, don’t you know.”

“And, if you feel you’ve got to discuss me, kindly keep it to yourself. Don’t come and tell me what your damned friends said to each other and to you and what you said to them, because it bores me. I’m not interested. I don’t value their opinions as much as you seem to.” Derek paused, to battle in silence with the imperious agony within him. “It was good of you to put me up here,” he went on, “but I think I won’t trespass on your hospitality any longer. Perhaps you’ll ask Parker to pack my things tomorrow.” Derek moved, as majestically as an ex-guest of the Worshipful Company of Dry-Salters may, in the direction of the door. “I shall go to the Savoy.”

“Oh, I say, old man! No need to do that.”

“Good night.”

“But, I say …”

“And you can tell your friend Devereux that, if he doesn’t stop poking his nose into my private business, I’ll pull it off.”

“Well,” said Freddie doubtfully, “of course I don’t suppose you know, but … Ronny’s a pretty hefty bird. He boxed for Cambridge in the light-weights the last year he was up, you know. He …”

Derek slammed the door. Freddie was alone. He stood rubbing his legs for some minutes, a rueful expression on his usually cheerful face. Freddie hated rows. He liked everything to jog along smoothly. What a rotten place the world was these days! Just one thing after another. First, poor old Jill takes the knock and disappears. He would miss her badly. What a good sort! What a pal! And now—gone. Biffed off. Next, Derek. Together, more or less, ever since Winchester, and now—bing!…

Freddie heaved a sigh, and reached out for the Sporting Times, his never-failing comfort in times of depression. He lit another cigar and curled up in one of the arm-chairs. He was feeling tired. He had been playing squash all the afternoon, a game at which he was exceedingly expert and to which he was much addicted.

Time passed. The paper slipped to the floor. A cold cigar followed it. From the depths of the chair came a faint snore …

A hand on his shoulder brought Freddie with a jerk troubled dreams. Derek was standing beside him. A tousled Derek, apparently in pain.

“Freddie!”

“Hullo!”

A spasm twisted Derek’s face.

“Have you got any pepsin?”

Derek uttered a groan. What a mocker of our petty human dignity is this dyspepsia, bringing low the haughtiest of us, less than love itself a respecter of persons. This was a different Derek from the man who had stalked stiffly from the room two hours before. His pride had been humbled upon the rack.

“Pepsin?”

Freddie blinked, the mists of sleep floating gently before his eyes. He could not quite understand what his friend was asking for. It had sounded just like pepsin, and he didn’t believe there was such a word.

“Yes. I’ve got the most damned attack of indigestion.”

The mists of sleep rolled away from Freddie. He was awake again, and became immediately helpful. These were the occasions when the Last of the Rookes was a good man to have at your side. It was Freddie who suggested that Derek should recline in the arm-chair which he had vacated; Freddie who nipped round the corner to the all-night chemist’s and returned with a magic bottle guaranteed to relieve an ostrich after a surfeit of soda-water bottles; Freddie who mixed and administered the dose.

His ministrations were rewarded. Presently the agony seemed to pass. Derek recovered.

One would say that Derek became himself again, but that the mood of gentle remorse which came upon him as he lay in the arm-chair was one so foreign to his nature. Freddie had never seen him so subdued. He was like a convalescent child. Between them, the all-night chemist and the Dry-Salters seemed to have wrought a sort of miracle. These temporary softenings of personality frequently follow city dinners. The time to catch your Dry-Salter in angelic mood is the day after the semi-annual banquet. Go to him then and he will give you his watch and chain.

“Freddie,” said Derek.

They were sitting over the dying fire. The clock on the mantelpiece, beside which Jill’s photograph had stood, pointed to ten minutes past two. Derek spoke in a low, soft voice. Perhaps the doctors are right after all, and two o’clock is the hour at which our self-esteem deserts us, leaving in its place regret for past sins, good resolutions for future behavior.

“What do Algy Martyn and the others say about … you know?”

Freddie hesitated. Pity to start all that again.

“Oh, I know,” went on Derek. “They say I behaved like a cad.”

“Oh, well …”

“They are quite right. I did.”

“Oh, I shouldn’t say that, you know. Faults on both sides and all that sort of rot.”

“I did!” Derek stared into the fire. Scattered all over London at that moment, probably, a hundred worshipful Dry-Salters were equally sleepless and subdued, looking wide-eyed into black pasts. “Is it true she has gone to America, Freddie?”

“She told me she was going.”

“What a fool I’ve been!”

The clock ticked on through the silence. The fire sputtered faintly, then gave a little wheeze, like a very old man. Derek rested his chin on his hands, gazing into the ashes.

“I wish to God I could go over there and find her.”

“Why don’t you?”

“How can I? There may be an election coming on at any moment. I can’t stir.”

Freddie leaped from his seat. The suddenness of the action sent a red-hot corkscrew of pain through Derek’s head.

“What the devil’s the matter?” he demanded irritably. Even the gentle mood which comes with convalescence after a City Dinner is not guaranteed to endure against this sort of thing.

“I’ve got an idea, old bean!”

“Well, there’s no need to dance, is there?”

“I’ve nothing to keep me here, you know. What’s the matter with my popping over to America and finding Jill?” Freddie tramped the floor, aglow. Each beat of his foot jarred Derek, but he made no complaint.

“Could you?” he asked eagerly.

“Of course I could. I was saying only the other day that I had half a mind to buzz over. It’s a wheeze! I’ll get on the next boat and charge over in the capacity of a jolly old ambassador. Have her back in no time. Leave it to me, old thing! This is where I come out strong!”

New York welcomed Jill, as she came out of the Pennsylvania Station into Seventh Avenue, with a whirl of powdered snow that touched her cheek like a kiss, the cold, bracing kiss one would expect from this vivid city. She stood at the station entrance, a tiny figure beside the huge pillars, looking round her with eager eyes. A wind was whipping down the avenue. The sky was a clear, brilliant tent of the brightest blue. Energy was in the air, and hopefulness. She wondered if Mr Elmer Mariner ever came to New York. It was hard to see how even his gloom would contrive to remain unaffected by the exhilaration of the place.

Yes, New York looked good … good and exciting, with all the taxi-cabs rattling in at the dark tunnel beside her, with all the people hurrying in and hurrying out, with all this medley of street-cars and sky-signs and crushed snow and drays and horses and policemen, and that vast hotel across the street, towering to heaven like a cliff. It even smelt good. She remembered an old picture in Punch, of two country visitors standing on the step of their railway carriage at a London terminus, one saying ecstatically to other: “Don’t speak! Just sniff! Doesn’t it smell of the Season!” She knew exactly how they had felt, and she approved of their attitude. That was the right way to behave on being introduced to a great metropolis. She stood and sniffed reverently. But for the presence of the hurrying crowds, she could almost have imitated the example of that king who kissed the soil of his country on landing from his ship.

She took Uncle Chris’ letter from her bag. He had written from an address on East Fifty-seventh Street. There would be just time to catch him before he went out to lunch. She hailed a taxi-cab which was coming out of the station.

It was a slow ride, halted repeatedly by congestion of the traffic, but a short one for Jill. She was surprised at herself, a Londoner of long standing, for feeling so provincial and being so impressed. But London was far away. It belonged to a life that seemed years ago and a world from which she had parted for ever. Moreover, this was undeniably a stupendous city through which her taxi-cab was carrying her. At Times Square the stream of the traffic plunged into a whirlpool, swinging out of Broadway to meet the rapids which poured in from east, west, and north. On Fifth Avenue all the automobiles in the world were gathered together. On the sidewalks, pedestrians, muffled against the nipping chill of the crisp air, hurried to and fro. And, above, that sapphire sky spread a rich velvet curtain which made the tops of the buildings stand out like the white minarets of some eastern city of romance.

The cab drew up in front of a stone apartment house; and Jill, getting out, passed under an awning through a sort of mediaeval courtyard, gay with potted shrubs, to an inner door. She was impressed. The very atmosphere was redolent of riches, and she wondered how in the world Uncle Chris had managed to acquire wealth on this scale in the extremely short space of time which had elapsed since his landing. There bustled past her an obvious millionaire—or, more probably, a greater monarch of finance who looked down upon mere millionaires and out of the goodness of his heart tried to check a tendency to speak patronisingly to them. He was concealed to the eyebrows in a fur coat, and, reaching the sidewalk, was instantly absorbed in a large limousine. Two expensive-looking ladies followed him. Jill began to feel a little dazed. Evidently the tales one heard of fortunes accumulated overnight in this magic city were true, and one of them must have fallen to the lot of Uncle Chris. For nobody to whom money was a concern could possibly afford to live in a place like this. If Crœsus and the Count of Monte Cristo had applied for lodging there, the authorities would probably have looked on them a little doubtfully at first and hinted at the desirability of a month’s rent in advance.

In a glass case behind the inner door, reading a newspaper and chewing gum, sat a dignified old man in the rich uniform of a general in the Guatemalan army. He was a brilliant spectacle. He wore no jewelry, but this, no doubt, was due to a private distaste for display. As there was no one else of humbler rank at hand from whom Jill could solicit an introduction and the privilege of an audience, she took the bold step of addressing him directly.

“I want to see Major Selby, please.”

The Guatemalan general arrested for a moment the rhythmic action of his jaws, lowered his paper and looked at her with raised eyebrows. At first Jill thought that he was registering haughty contempt, then she saw what she had taken for scorn was surprise.

“Major Selby?”

“Major Selby.”

“No Major Selby living here.”

“Major Christopher Selby.”

“Not here,” said the associate of ambassadors and the pampered pet of Guatemala’s proudest beauties. “Never heard of him in my life!”

Jill had read works of fiction in which at certain crises everything had “seemed to swim” in front of the heroine’s eyes, but never till this moment had she experienced that remarkable sensation herself. The Savior of Guatemala did not actually swim, perhaps, but he certainly flickered. She had to blink to restore his prismatic outlines to their proper sharpness. Already the bustle and noise of New York had begun to induce in her that dizzy condition of unreality which one feels in dreams, and this extraordinary statement added the finishing touch.

Perhaps the fact that she had said “please” to him when she opened the conversation touched the heart of the hero of a thousand revolutions. Dignified and beautiful as he was to the eye of the stranger, it is unpleasant to have to record that he lived in a world which rather neglected the minor courtesies of speech. People did not often say “please” to him. “Here!” “Hi!” and “Gosh darn you!” yes; but seldom “please.” He seemed to approve of Jill, for he shifted his chewing-gum to a position which facilitated speech, and began to be helpful.

“What was the name again?”

“Selby.”

“Howja spell it?”

“S-e-l-b-y.”

“S-e-l-b-y. Oh, Selby?”

“Yes, Selby.”

“What was the first name?”

“Christopher.”

“Christopher?”

“Yes, Christopher.”

“Christopher Selby? No one of that name living here.”

“But there must be.”

The veteran shook his head with an indulgent smile.

“You want Mr Sipperley,” he said tolerantly. In Guatemala these mistakes are always happening. “Mr George Sipperley. He’s on the fourth floor. What name shall I say?”

He had almost reached the telephone when Jill stopped him. This is an age of just-as-good substitutes, but she refused to accept any unknown Sipperley as a satisfactory alternative for Uncle Chris.

“I don’t want Mr Sipperley. I want Major Selby.”

“Howja spell it once more?”

“S-e-l-b-y.”

“S-e-l-b-y. No one of that name living here. Mr. Sipperley—”—he spoke in a wheedling voice, as if determined, in spite of herself, to make Jill see what was in her best interests—“Mr Sipperley’s on the fourth floor. Gentleman in the real estate business,” he added insinuatingly. “He’s got blond hair and a Boston bull-dog.”

“He may be all you say, and he may have a dozen bulldogs …”

“Only one. Jack his name is.”

“… But he isn’t the right man. It’s absurd. Major Selby wrote to me from this address. This is Eighteen East Fifty-seventh Street?”

“This is Eighteen East Fifty-seventh Street,” conceded the other cautiously.

“I’ve got his letter here.” She opened her bag, and gave an exclamation of dismay. “It’s gone!”

“Mr Sipperley used to have a friend staying with him last Fall. A Mr Robertson. Dark-complected man with a mustache.”

“I took it out to look at the address, and I was sure I put it back. I must have dropped it.”

“There’s a Mr Rainsby on the seventh floor. He’s a broker down on Wall Street. Short man with an impediment in his speech.”

Jill snapped the clasp of her bag.

“Never mind,” she said. “I must have made a mistake. I was quite sure that this was the address, but it evidently isn’t. Thank you so much. I’m so sorry to have bothered you.”

She walked away, leaving the Terror of Paraguay and all points west speechless: for people who said “Thank you so much” to him were even rarer than those who said “please.” He followed her with an affectionate eye till she was out of sight, then, restoring his chewing-gum to circulation, returned to the perusal of his paper. A momentary suggestion presented itself to his mind that what Jill had really wanted was Mr Willoughby on the eighth floor, but it was too late to say so now: and soon, becoming absorbed in the narrative of a spirited householder in Kansas who had run amuck with a hatchet and slain six, he dismissed the matter from his mind.

Jill walked back to Fifth Avenue, crossed it, and made her way thoughtfully along the breezy street which, flanked on one side by the Park and on the other by the green-roofed Plaza Hotel and the apartment houses of the wealthy, ends in the humbler and more democratic spaces of Columbus Circle. She perceived that she was in that position, familiar to melodrama, of being alone in a great city. The reflection brought with it a certain discomfort. The bag that dangled from her wrist contained all the money she had in the world, the very broken remains of the twenty dollars which Uncle Chris had sent her at Brookport. She had nowhere to go, nowhere to sleep, and no immediately obvious means of adding to her capital. It was a situation which she had not foreseen when she set out to walk to Brookport station.

She pondered over the mystery of Uncle Chris’ disappearance, and found no solution. The thing was inexplicable. She was as sure of the address he had given in his letter as she was of anything in the world. Yet at that address nothing had been heard of him. His name was not even known. These were deeper waters than Jill was able to fathom.

She walked on, aimlessly. Presently she came to Columbus Circle, and, crossing Broadway at the point where that street breaks out into an eruption of automobile stores, found herself suddenly hungry, opposite a restaurant whose entire front was a sheet of plate glass. On the other side of this glass, at marble-topped tables, apparently careless of their total lack of privacy, sat the impecunious, lunching, their every mouthful a spectacle for the passer-by. It reminded Jill of looking at fishes in an aquarium. In the center of the window, gazing out in a distrait manner over piles of apples and grape-fruit, a white-robed ministrant at a stove juggled ceaselessly with buckwheat cakes. He struck the final note in the candidness of the establishment, a priest whose ritual contained no mysteries. Spectators with sufficient time on their hands to permit them to stand and watch were enabled to witness a New York mid-day meal in every stage of its career, from its protoplasmic beginnings as a stream of yellowish-white liquid poured on top of the stove to its ultimate Nirvana in the interior of the luncher in the form of an appetising cake. It was a spectacle which no hungry girl could resist. Jill went in, and, as she made her way among the tables, a voice spoke her name.

“Miss Mariner!”

Jill jumped, and thought for a moment that the thing must have been an hallucination. It was impossible that anybody in the place should have called her name. Except for Uncle Chris, wherever he might be, she knew no one in New York. Then the voice spoke again, competing valiantly with a clatter of crockery so uproarious as to be more like something solid than a mere sound.

“I couldn’t believe it was you!”

A girl in blue had risen from the nearest table, and was staring at her in astonishment, Jill recognized her instantly. Those big, pathetic eyes, like a lost child’s, were unmistakable. It was the parrot girl, the girl whom she and Freddie Rooke had found in the drawing-room, at Ovington Square that afternoon when the foundations of the world had given way and chaos had begun.

“Good gracious!” cried Jill. “I thought you were in London!”

That feeling of emptiness and panic, the result of her interview with the Guatemalan general at the apartment house, vanished magically. She sat down at this unexpected friend’s table with a light heart.

“Whatever are you doing in New York?” asked the girl. “I never knew you meant to come over.”

“It was a little sudden. Still, here I am. And I’m starving. What are those things you’re eating?”

“Buckwheat cakes.”

“Oh, yes. I remember Uncle Chris talking about them on the boat. I’ll have some.”

“But when did you come over?”

“I landed about ten days ago. I’ve been down at a place called Brookport on Long Island. How funny running into you like this!”

“I was surprised that you remembered me.”

“I’ve forgotten your name,” admitted Jill frankly. “But that’s nothing. I always forget names.”

“My name’s Nelly Bryant.”

“Of course. And you’re on the stage, aren’t you?”

“Yes. I’ve just got work with Goble and Cohn. … Hullo, Phil!”

A young man with a lithe figure and smooth black hair brushed straight back from his forehead had paused at the table on his way to the cashier’s desk.

“Hello, Nelly.”

“I didn’t know you lunched here.”

“Don’t often. Been rehearsing with Joe up at the Century Roof, and had a quarter of an hour to get a bite. Can I sit down?”

“Sure. This is my friend, Miss Mariner.”

The young man shook hands with Jill, flashing an approving glance at her out of his dark, restless eyes.

“Pleased to meet you.”

“This is Phil Brown,” said Nelly. “He plays the straight for Joe Widgeon. They’re the best jazz-and-hokum team on the Keith Circuit.”

“Oh, hush!” said Mr Brown modestly. “You always were a great little booster, Nelly.”

“Well, you know you are! Weren’t you held over at the Palace last time! Well, then!”

“That’s true,” admitted the young man. “Maybe we didn’t gool ’em, eh? Stop me on the street and ask me! Only eighteen bows second house Saturday!”

Jill was listening, fascinated.

“I can’t understand a word,” she said. “It’s like another language.”

“You’re from the other side, aren’t you?” asked Mr Brown.

“She only landed a week ago,” said Nelly.

“I thought so from the accent,” said Mr Brown. “So our talk sort of goes over the top, does it? Well, you’ll learn American soon, if you stick around.”