On a fine day in the spring, summer, or early autumn, there are few
spots more delightful than the terrace in front of our Golf Club. It is
a vantage-point peculiarly fitted to the man of philosophic mind: for
from it may be seen that varied, never-ending pageant, which men call
Golf, in a number of its aspects. To your right, on the first tee,
stand the cheery optimists who are about to make their opening drive,
happily conscious that even a topped shot will trickle a measurable
distance down the steep hill. Away in the valley, directly in front of
you, is the lake hole, where these same optimists will be converted to
pessimism by the wet splash of a new ball. At your side is the ninth
green, with its sinuous undulations which have so often wrecked the
returning traveller in sight of home. And at various points within your
line of vision are the third tee, the sixth tee, and the sinister
bunkers about the eighth green–none of them lacking in food for the
reflective mind.

It is on this terrace that the Oldest Member sits, watching the younger
generation knocking at the divot. His gaze wanders from Jimmy
Fothergill’s two-hundred-and-twenty-yard drive down the hill to the
silver drops that flash up in the sun, as young Freddie Woosley’s
mashie-shot drops weakly into the waters of the lake. Returning, it
rests upon Peter Willard, large and tall, and James Todd, small and
slender, as they struggle up the fair-way of the ninth.

*       *       *       *       *

Love (says the Oldest Member) is an emotion which your true golfer
should always treat with suspicion. Do not misunderstand me. I am not
saying that love is a bad thing, only that it is an unknown quantity. I
have known cases where marriage improved a man’s game, and other cases
where it seemed to put him right off his stroke. There seems to be no
fixed rule. But what I do say is that a golfer should be cautious. He
should not be led away by the first pretty face. I will tell you a
story that illustrates the point. It is the story of those two men who
have just got on to the ninth green–Peter Willard and James Todd.

There is about great friendships between man and man (said the Oldest
Member) a certain inevitability that can only be compared with the
age-old association of ham and eggs. No one can say when it was that
these two wholesome and palatable food-stuffs first came together, nor
what was the mutual magnetism that brought their deathless partnership
about. One simply feels that it is one of the things that must be so.
Similarly with men. Who can trace to its first beginnings the love of
Damon for Pythias, of David for Jonathan, of Swan for Edgar? Who can
explain what it was about Crosse that first attracted Blackwell? We
simply say, “These men are friends,” and leave it at that.

In the case of Peter Willard and James Todd, one may hazard the guess
that the first link in the chain that bound them together was the fact
that they took up golf within a few days of each other, and contrived,
as time went on, to develop such equal form at the game that the most
expert critics are still baffled in their efforts to decide which is
the worse player. I have heard the point argued a hundred times without
any conclusion being reached. Supporters of Peter claim that his
driving off the tee entitles him to an unchallenged pre-eminence among
the world’s most hopeless foozlers–only to be discomfited later when
the advocates of James show, by means of diagrams, that no one has ever
surpassed their man in absolute incompetence with the spoon. It is one
of those problems where debate is futile.

Few things draw two men together more surely than a mutual inability to
master golf, coupled with an intense and ever-increasing love for the
game. At the end of the first few months, when a series of costly
experiments had convinced both Peter and James that there was not a
tottering grey-beard nor a toddling infant in the neighbourhood whose
downfall they could encompass, the two became inseparable. It was
pleasanter, they found, to play together, and go neck and neck round
the eighteen holes, than to take on some lissome youngster who could
spatter them all over the course with one old ball and a cut-down cleek
stolen from his father; or some spavined elder who not only rubbed it
into them, but was apt, between strokes, to bore them with personal
reminiscences of the Crimean War. So they began to play together early
and late. In the small hours before breakfast, long ere the first faint
piping of the waking caddie made itself heard from the caddie-shed,
they were half-way through their opening round. And at close of day,
when bats wheeled against the steely sky and the “pro’s” had stolen
home to rest, you might see them in the deepening dusk, going through
the concluding exercises of their final spasm. After dark, they visited
each other’s houses and read golf books.

If you have gathered from what I have said that Peter Willard and James
Todd were fond of golf, I am satisfied. That is the impression I
intended to convey. They were real golfers, for real golf is a thing of
the spirit, not of mere mechanical excellence of stroke.

It must not be thought, however, that they devoted too much of their
time and their thoughts to golf–assuming, indeed, that such a thing is
possible. Each was connected with a business in the metropolis; and
often, before he left for the links, Peter would go to the trouble and
expense of ringing up the office to say he would not be coming in that
day; while I myself have heard James–and this not once, but
frequently–say, while lunching in the club-house, that he had half a
mind to get Gracechurch Street on the ‘phone and ask how things were
going. They were, in fact, the type of men of whom England is
proudest–the back-bone of a great country, toilers in the mart,
untired businessmen, keen red-blooded men of affairs. If they played a
little golf besides, who shall blame them?

So they went on, day by day, happy and contented. And then the Woman
came into their lives, like the Serpent in the Links of Eden, and
perhaps for the first time they realized that they were not one
entity–not one single, indivisible Something that made for topped
drives and short putts–but two individuals, in whose breasts Nature
had implanted other desires than the simple ambition some day to do the
dog-leg hole on the second nine in under double figures. My friends
tell me that, when I am relating a story, my language is inclined at
times a little to obscure my meaning; but, if you understand from what
I have been saying that James Todd and Peter Willard both fell in love
with the same woman–all right, let us carry on. That is precisely what
I was driving at.

I have not the pleasure of an intimate acquaintance with Grace
Forrester. I have seen her in the distance, watering the flowers in her
garden, and on these occasions her stance struck me as graceful. And
once, at a picnic, I observed her killing wasps with a teaspoon, and
was impressed by the freedom of the wrist-action of her back-swing.
Beyond this, I can say little. But she must have been attractive, for
there can be no doubt of the earnestness with which both Peter and
James fell in love with her. I doubt if either slept a wink the night
of the dance at which it was their privilege first to meet her.

The next afternoon, happening to encounter Peter in the bunker near the
eleventh green, James said:

“That was a nice girl, that Miss What’s-her-name.”

And Peter, pausing for a moment from his trench-digging, replied:

“Yes.”

And then James, with a pang, knew that he had a rival, for he had not
mentioned Miss Forrester’s name, and yet Peter had divined that it was
to her that he had referred.

Love is a fever which, so to speak, drives off without wasting time on
the address. On the very next morning after the conversation which I
have related, James Todd rang Peter Willard up on the ‘phone and
cancelled their golf engagements for the day, on the plea of a sprained
wrist. Peter, acknowledging the cancellation, stated that he himself
had been on the point of ringing James up to say that he would be
unable to play owing to a slight headache. They met at tea-time at Miss
Forrester’s house. James asked how Peter’s headache was, and Peter said
it was a little better. Peter inquired after James’s sprained wrist,
and was told it seemed on the mend. Miss Forrester dispensed tea and
conversation to both impartially.

They walked home together. After an awkward silence of twenty minutes,
James said:

“There is something about the atmosphere–the aura, shall I say?–that
emanates from a good woman that makes a man feel that life has a new, a
different meaning.”

Peter replied:

“Yes.”

When they reached James’s door, James said:

“I won’t ask you in tonight, old man. You want to go home and rest and
cure that headache.”

“Yes,” said Peter.

There was another silence. Peter was thinking that, only a couple of
days before, James had told him that he had a copy of Sandy MacBean’s
“How to Become a Scratch Man Your First Season by Studying Photographs”
coming by parcel-post from town, and they had arranged to read it aloud
together. By now, thought Peter, it must be lying on his friend’s
table. The thought saddened him. And James, guessing what was in
Peter’s mind, was saddened too. But he did not waver. He was in no mood
to read MacBean’s masterpiece that night. In the twenty minutes of
silence after leaving Miss Forrester he had realized that “Grace”
rhymes with “face”, and he wanted to sit alone in his study and write
poetry. The two men parted with a distant nod. I beg your pardon? Yes,
you are right. Two distant nods. It was always a failing of mine to
count the score erroneously.

It is not my purpose to weary you by a minute recital of the happenings
of each day that went by. On the surface, the lives of these two men
seemed unchanged. They still played golf together, and during the round
achieved towards each other a manner that, superficially, retained all
its ancient cheeriness and affection. If–I should say–when, James
topped his drive, Peter never failed to say “Hard luck!” And when–or,
rather, if Peter managed not to top his, James invariably said “Great!”
But things were not the same, and they knew it.

It so happened, as it sometimes will on these occasions, for Fate is a
dramatist who gets his best effects with a small cast, that Peter
Willard and James Todd were the only visible aspirants for the hand of
Miss Forrester. Right at the beginning young Freddie Woosley had seemed
attracted by the girl, and had called once or twice with flowers and
chocolates, but Freddie’s affections never centred themselves on one
object for more than a few days, and he had dropped out after the first
week. From that time on it became clear to all of us that, if Grace
Forrester intended to marry anyone in the place, it would be either
James or Peter; and a good deal of interest was taken in the matter by
the local sportsmen. So little was known of the form of the two men,
neither having figured as principal in a love-affair before, that even
money was the best you could get, and the market was sluggish. I think
my own flutter of twelve golf-balls, taken up by Percival Brown, was
the most substantial of any of the wagers. I selected James as the
winner. Why, I can hardly say, unless that he had an aunt who
contributed occasional stories to the “Woman’s Sphere”. These things
sometimes weigh with a girl. On the other hand, George Lucas, who had
half-a-dozen of ginger-ale on Peter, based his calculations on the fact
that James wore knickerbockers on the links, and that no girl could
possibly love a man with calves like that. In short, you see, we really
had nothing to go on.

Nor had James and Peter. The girl seemed to like them both equally.
They never saw her except in each other’s company. And it was not until
one day when Grace Forrester was knitting a sweater that there seemed a
chance of getting a clue to her hidden feelings.

When the news began to spread through the place that Grace was knitting
this sweater there was a big sensation. The thing seemed to us
practically to amount to a declaration.

That was the view that James Todd and Peter Willard took of it, and
they used to call on Grace, watch her knitting, and come away with
their heads full of complicated calculations. The whole thing hung on
one point–to wit, what size the sweater was going to be. If it was
large, then it must be for Peter; if small, then James was the lucky
man. Neither dared to make open inquiries, but it began to seem almost
impossible to find out the truth without them. No masculine eye can
reckon up purls and plains and estimate the size of chest which the
garment is destined to cover. Moreover, with amateur knitters there
must always be allowed a margin for involuntary error. There were many
cases during the war where our girls sent sweaters to their sweethearts
which would have induced strangulation in their young brothers. The
amateur sweater of those days was, in fact, practically tantamount to
German propaganda.

Peter and James were accordingly baffled. One evening the sweater would
look small, and James would come away jubilant; the next it would have
swollen over a vast area, and Peter would walk home singing. The
suspense of the two men can readily be imagined. On the one hand, they
wanted to know their fate; on the other, they fully realized that
whoever the sweater was for would have to wear it. And, as it was a
vivid pink and would probably not fit by a mile, their hearts quailed
at the prospect.

In all affairs of human tension there must come a breaking point. It
came one night as the two men were walking home.

“Peter,” said James, stopping in mid-stride. He mopped his forehead.
His manner had been feverish all the evening.

“Yes?” said Peter.

“I can’t stand this any longer. I haven’t had a good night’s rest for
weeks. We must find out definitely which of us is to have that
sweater.”

“Let’s go back and ask her,” said Peter.

So they turned back and rang the bell and went into the house and
presented themselves before Miss Forrester.

“Lovely evening,” said James, to break the ice.

“Superb,” said Peter.

“Delightful,” said Miss Forrester, looking a little surprised at
finding the troupe playing a return date without having booked it in
advance.

“To settle a bet,” said James, “will you please tell us who–I should
say, whom–you are knitting that sweater for?”

“It is not a sweater,” replied Miss Forrester, with a womanly candour
that well became her. “It is a sock. And it is for my cousin Juliet’s
youngest son, Willie.”

“Good night,” said James.

“Good night,” said Peter.

“Good night,” said Grace Forrester.

It was during the long hours of the night, when ideas so often come to
wakeful men, that James was struck by an admirable solution of his and
Peter’s difficulty. It seemed to him that, were one or the other to
leave Woodhaven, the survivor would find himself in a position to
conduct his wooing as wooing should be conducted. Hitherto, as I have
indicated, neither had allowed the other to be more than a few minutes
alone with the girl. They watched each other like hawks. When James
called, Peter called. When Peter dropped in, James invariably popped
round. The thing had resolved itself into a stalemate.

The idea which now came to James was that he and Peter should settle
their rivalry by an eighteen-hole match on the links. He thought very
highly of the idea before he finally went to sleep, and in the morning
the scheme looked just as good to him as it had done overnight.

James was breakfasting next morning, preparatory to going round to
disclose his plan to Peter, when Peter walked in, looking happier than
he had done for days.

“‘Morning,” said James.

“‘Morning,” said Peter.

Peter sat down and toyed absently with a slice of bacon.

“I’ve got an idea,” he said.

“One isn’t many,” said James, bringing his knife down with a jerk-shot
on a fried egg. “What is your idea?”

“Got it last night as I was lying awake. It struck me that, if either
of us was to clear out of this place, the other would have a fair
chance. You know what I mean–with Her. At present we’ve got each other
stymied. Now, how would it be,” said Peter, abstractedly spreading
marmalade on his bacon, “if we were to play an eighteen-hole match, the
loser to leg out of the neighbourhood and stay away long enough to give
the winner the chance to find out exactly how things stood?”

James started so violently that he struck himself in the left eye with
his fork.

“That’s exactly the idea I got last night, too.”

“Then it’s a go?”

“It’s the only thing to do.”

There was silence for a moment. Both men were thinking. Remember, they
were friends. For years they had shared each other’s sorrows, joys, and
golf-balls, and sliced into the same bunkers.

Presently Peter said:

“I shall miss you.”

“What do you mean, miss me?”

“When you’re gone. Woodhaven won’t seem the same place. But of course
you’ll soon be able to come back. I sha’n't waste any time proposing.”

“Leave me your address,” said James, “and I’ll send you a wire when you
can return. You won’t be offended if I don’t ask you to be best man at
the wedding? In the circumstances it might be painful to you.”

Peter sighed dreamily.

“We’ll have the sitting-room done in blue. Her eyes are blue.”

“Remember,” said James, “there will always be a knife and fork for you
at our little nest. Grace is not the woman to want me to drop my
bachelor friends.”

“Touching this match,” said Peter. “Strict Royal and Ancient rules, of
course?”

“Certainly.”

“I mean to say–no offence, old man–but no grounding niblicks in
bunkers.”

“Precisely. And, without hinting at anything personal, the ball shall
be considered holed-out only when it is in the hole, not when it stops
on the edge.”

“Undoubtedly. And–you know I don’t want to hurt your feelings–missing
the ball counts as a stroke, not as a practice-swing.”

“Exactly. And–you’ll forgive me if I mention it–a player whose ball
has fallen in the rough, may not pull up all the bushes within a radius
of three feet.”

“In fact, strict rules.”

“Strict rules.”

They shook hands without more words. And presently Peter walked out,
and James, with a guilty look over his shoulder, took down Sandy
MacBean’s great work from the bookshelf and began to study the
photograph of the short approach-shot showing Mr. MacBean swinging from
Point A, through dotted line B-C, to Point D, his head the while
remaining rigid at the spot marked with a cross. He felt a little
guiltily that he had stolen a march on his friend, and that the contest
was as good as over.

*       *       *       *       *

I cannot recall a lovelier summer day than that on which the great
Todd-Willard eighteen-hole match took place. It had rained during the
night, and now the sun shone down from a clear blue sky on to turf that
glistened more greenly than the young grass of early spring.
Butterflies flitted to and fro; birds sang merrily. In short, all
Nature smiled. And it is to be doubted if Nature ever had a better
excuse for smiling–or even laughing outright; for matches like that
between James Todd and Peter Willard do not occur every day.

Whether it was that love had keyed them up, or whether hours of study
of Braid’s “Advanced Golf” and the Badminton Book had produced a
belated effect, I cannot say; but both started off quite reasonably
well. Our first hole, as you can see, is a bogey four, and James was
dead on the pin in seven, leaving Peter, who had twice hit the United
Kingdom with his mashie in mistake for the ball, a difficult putt for
the half. Only one thing could happen when you left Peter a difficult
putt; and James advanced to the lake hole one up, Peter, as he
followed, trying to console himself with the thought that many of the
best golfers prefer to lose the first hole and save themselves for a
strong finish.

Peter and James had played over the lake hole so often that they had
become accustomed to it, and had grown into the habit of sinking a ball
or two as a preliminary formality with much the same stoicism displayed
by those kings in ancient and superstitious times who used to fling
jewellery into the sea to propitiate it before they took a voyage. But
today, by one of those miracles without which golf would not be golf,
each of them got over with his first shot–and not only over, but dead
on the pin. Our “pro.” himself could not have done better.

I think it was at this point that the two men began to go to pieces.
They were in an excited frame of mind, and this thing unmanned them.
You will no doubt recall Keats’s poem about stout Cortez staring with
eagle eyes at the Pacific while all his men gazed at each other with a
wild surmise, silent upon a peak in Darien. Precisely so did Peter
Willard and James Todd stare with eagle eyes at the second lake hole,
and gaze at each other with a wild surmise, silent upon a tee in
Woodhaven. They had dreamed of such a happening so often and woke to
find the vision false, that at first they could not believe that the
thing had actually occurred.

“I got over!” whispered James, in an awed voice.

“So did I!” muttered Peter.

“In one!”

“With my very first!”

They walked in silence round the edge of the lake, and holed out. One
putt was enough for each, and they halved the hole with a two. Peter’s
previous record was eight, and James had once done a seven. There are
times when strong men lose their self-control, and this was one of
them. They reached the third tee in a daze, and it was here that
mortification began to set in.

The third hole is another bogey four, up the hill and past the tree
that serves as a direction-post, the hole itself being out of sight. On
his day, James had often done it in ten and Peter in nine; but now they
were unnerved. James, who had the honour, shook visibly as he addressed
his ball. Three times he swung and only connected with the ozone; the
fourth time he topped badly. The discs had been set back a little way,
and James had the mournful distinction of breaking a record for the
course by playing his fifth shot from the tee. It was a low, raking
brassey-shot, which carried a heap of stones twenty feet to the right
and finished in a furrow. Peter, meanwhile, had popped up a lofty ball
which came to rest behind a stone.

It was now that the rigid rules governing this contest began to take
their toll. Had they been playing an ordinary friendly round, each
would have teed up on some convenient hillock and probably been past
the tree with their second, for James would, in ordinary circumstances,
have taken his drive back and regarded the strokes he had made as a
little preliminary practice to get him into midseason form. But today
it was war to the niblick, and neither man asked nor expected quarter.
Peter’s seventh shot dislodged the stone, leaving him a clear field,
and James, with his eleventh, extricated himself from the furrow. Fifty
feet from the tree James was eighteen, Peter twelve; but then the
latter, as every golfer does at times, suddenly went right off his
game. He hit the tree four times, then hooked into the sand-bunkers to
the left of the hole. James, who had been playing a game that was
steady without being brilliant, was on the green in twenty-six, Peter
taking twenty-seven. Poor putting lost James the hole. Peter was down
in thirty-three, but the pace was too hot for James. He missed a
two-foot putt for the half, and they went to the fourth tee all square.

The fourth hole follows the curve of the road, on the other side of
which are picturesque woods. It presents no difficulties to the expert,
but it has pitfalls for the novice. The dashing player stands for a
slice, while the more cautious are satisfied if they can clear the
bunker that spans the fairway and lay their ball well out to the left,
whence an iron shot will take them to the green. Peter and James
combined the two policies. Peter aimed to the left and got a slice, and
James, also aiming to the left, topped into the bunker. Peter,
realizing from experience the futility of searching for his ball in the
woods, drove a second, which also disappeared into the jungle, as did
his third. By the time he had joined James in the bunker he had played
his sixth.

It is the glorious uncertainty of golf that makes it the game it is.
The fact that James and Peter, lying side by side in the same bunker,
had played respectively one and six shots, might have induced an
unthinking observer to fancy the chances of the former. And no doubt,
had he not taken seven strokes to extricate himself from the pit, while
his opponent, by some act of God, contrived to get out in two, James’s
chances might have been extremely rosy. As it was, the two men
staggered out on to the fairway again with a score of eight apiece.
Once past the bunker and round the bend of the road, the hole becomes
simple. A judicious use of the cleek put Peter on the green in
fourteen, while James, with a Braid iron, reached it in twelve. Peter
was down in seventeen, and James contrived to halve. It was only as he
was leaving the hole that the latter discovered that he had been
putting with his niblick, which cannot have failed to exercise a
prejudicial effect on his game. These little incidents are bound to
happen when one is in a nervous and highly-strung condition.

The fifth and sixth holes produced no unusual features. Peter won the
fifth in eleven, and James the sixth in ten. The short seventh they
halved in nine. The eighth, always a tricky hole, they took no
liberties with, James, sinking a long putt with his twenty-third, just
managing to halve. A ding-dong race up the hill for the ninth found
James first at the pin, and they finished the first nine with James one
up.

As they left the green James looked a little furtively at his
companion.

“You might be strolling on to the tenth,” he said. “I want to get a few
balls at the shop. And my mashie wants fixing up. I sha’n't be long.”

“I’ll come with you,” said Peter.

“Don’t bother,” said James. “You go on and hold our place at the tee.”

I regret to say that James was lying. His mashie was in excellent
repair, and he still had a dozen balls in his bag, it being his prudent
practice always to start out with eighteen. No! What he had said was
mere subterfuge. He wanted to go to his locker and snatch a few minutes
with Sandy MacBean’s “How to Become a Scratch Man”. He felt sure that
one more glance at the photograph of Mr. MacBean driving would give him
the mastery of the stroke and so enable him to win the match. In this I
think he was a little sanguine. The difficulty about Sandy MacBean’s
method of tuition was that he laid great stress on the fact that the
ball should be directly in a line with a point exactly in the centre of
the back of the player’s neck; and so far James’s efforts to keep his
eye on the ball and on the back of his neck simultaneously had produced
no satisfactory results.

*       *       *       *       *

It seemed to James, when he joined Peter on the tenth tee, that the
latter’s manner was strange. He was pale. There was a curious look in
his eye.

“James, old man,” he said.

“Yes?” said James.

“While you were away I have been thinking. James, old man, do you
really love this girl?”

James stared. A spasm of pain twisted Peter’s face.

“Suppose,” he said in a low voice, “she were not all you–we–think she
is!”

“What do you mean?”

“Nothing, nothing.”

“Miss Forrester is an angel.”

“Yes, yes. Quite so.”

“I know what it is,” said James, passionately. “You’re trying to put me
off my stroke. You know that the least thing makes me lose my form.”

“No, no!”

“You hope that you can take my mind off the game and make me go to
pieces, and then you’ll win the match.”

“On the contrary,” said Peter. “I intend to forfeit the match.”

James reeled.

“What!”

“I give up.”

“But–but—-” James shook with emotion. His voice quavered. “Ah!” he
cried. “I see now: I understand! You are doing this for me because I am
your pal. Peter, this is noble! This is the sort of thing you read
about in books. I’ve seen it in the movies. But I can’t accept the
sacrifice.”

“You must!”

“No, no!”

“I insist!”

“Do you mean this?”

“I give her up, James, old man. I–I hope you will be happy.”

“But I don’t know what to say. How can I thank you?”

“Don’t thank me.”

“But, Peter, do you fully realize what you are doing? True, I am one
up, but there are nine holes to go, and I am not right on my game
today. You might easily beat me. Have you forgotten that I once took
forty-seven at the dog-leg hole? This may be one of my bad days. Do you
understand that if you insist on giving up I shall go to Miss Forrester
tonight and propose to her?”

“I understand.”

“And yet you stick to it that you are through?”

“I do. And, but the way, there’s no need for you to wait till tonight.
I saw Miss Forrester just now outside the tennis court. She’s alone.”

James turned crimson.

“Then I think perhaps—-”

“You’d better go to her at once.”

“I will.” James extended his hand. “Peter, old man, I shall never
forget this.”

“That’s all right.”

“What are you going to do?”

“Now, do you mean? Oh, I shall potter round the second nine. If you
want me, you’ll find me somewhere about.”

“You’ll come to the wedding, Peter?” said James, wistfully.

“Of course,” said Peter. “Good luck.”

He spoke cheerily, but, when the other had turned to go, he stood
looking after him thoughtfully. Then he sighed a heavy sigh.

*       *       *       *       *

James approached Miss Forrester with a beating heart. She made a
charming picture as she stood there in the sunlight, one hand on her
hip, the other swaying a tennis racket.

“How do you do?” said James.

“How are you, Mr. Todd? Have you been playing golf?”

“Yes.”

“With Mr. Willard?”

“Yes. We were having a match.”

“Golf,” said Grace Forrester, “seems to make men very rude. Mr. Willard
left me without a word in the middle of our conversation.”

James was astonished.

“Were you talking to Peter?”

“Yes. Just now. I can’t understand what was the matter with him. He
just turned on his heel and swung off.”

“You oughtn’t to turn on your heel when you swing,” said James; “only
on the ball of the foot.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“Nothing, nothing. I wasn’t thinking. The fact is, I’ve something on my
mind. So has Peter. You mustn’t think too hardly of him. We have been
playing an important match, and it must have got on his nerves. You
didn’t happen by any chance to be watching us?”

“No.”

“Ah! I wish you had seen me at the lake-hole. I did it one under par.”

“Was your father playing?”

“You don’t understand. I mean I did it in one better than even the
finest player is supposed to do it. It’s a mashie-shot, you know. You
mustn’t play too light, or you fall in the lake; and you mustn’t play
it too hard, or you go past the hole into the woods. It requires the
nicest delicacy and judgment, such as I gave it. You might have to wait
a year before seeing anyone do it in two again. I doubt if the ‘pro.’
often does it in two. Now, directly we came to this hole today, I made
up my mind that there was going to be no mistake. The great secret of
any shot at golf is ease, elegance, and the ability to relax. The
majority of men, you will find, think it important that their address
should be good.”

“How snobbish! What does it matter where a man lives?”

“You don’t absolutely follow me. I refer to the waggle and the stance
before you make the stroke. Most players seem to fix in their minds the
appearance of the angles which are presented by the position of the
arms, legs, and club shaft, and it is largely the desire to retain
these angles which results in their moving their heads and stiffening
their muscles so that there is no freedom in the swing. There is only
one point which vitally affects the stroke, and the only reason why
that should be kept constant is that you are enabled to see your ball
clearly. That is the pivotal point marked at the base of the neck, and
a line drawn from this point to the ball should be at right angles to
the line of flight.”

James paused for a moment for air, and as he paused Miss Forrester
spoke.

“This is all gibberish to me,” she said.

“Gibberish!” gasped James. “I am quoting verbatim from one of the best
authorities on golf.”

Miss Forrester swung her tennis racket irritably.

“Golf,” she said, “bores me pallid. I think it is the silliest game
ever invented!”

The trouble about telling a story is that words are so feeble a means
of depicting the supreme moments of life. That is where the artist has
the advantage over the historian. Were I an artist, I should show James
at this point falling backwards with his feet together and his eyes
shut, with a semi-circular dotted line marking the progress of his
flight and a few stars above his head to indicate moral collapse. There
are no words that can adequately describe the sheer, black horror that
froze the blood in his veins as this frightful speech smote his ears.

He had never inquired into Miss Forrester’s religious views before, but
he had always assumed that they were sound. And now here she was
polluting the golden summer air with the most hideous blasphemy. It
would be incorrect to say that James’s love was turned to hate. He did
not hate Grace. The repulsion he felt was deeper than mere hate. What
he felt was not altogether loathing and not wholly pity. It was a blend
of the two.

There was a tense silence. The listening world stood still. Then,
without a word, James Todd turned and tottered away.

*       *       *       *       *

Peter was working moodily in the twelfth bunker when his friend
arrived. He looked up with a start. Then, seeing that the other was
alone, he came forward hesitatingly.

“Am I to congratulate you?”

James breathed a deep breath.

“You are!” he said. “On an escape!”

“She refused you?”

“She didn’t get the chance. Old man, have you ever sent one right up
the edge of that bunker in front of the seventh and just not gone in?”

“Very rarely.”

“I did once. It was my second shot, from a good lie, with the light
iron, and I followed well through and thought I had gone just too far,
and, when I walked up, there was my ball on the edge of the bunker,
nicely teed up on a chunk of grass, so that I was able to lay it dead
with my mashie-niblick, holing out in six. Well, what I mean to say is,
I feel now as I felt then–as if some unseen power had withheld me in
time from some frightful disaster.”

“I know just how you feel,” said Peter, gravely.

“Peter, old man, that girl said golf bored her pallid. She said she
thought it was the silliest game ever invented.” He paused to mark the
effect of his words. Peter merely smiled a faint, wan smile. “You don’t
seem revolted,” said James.

“I am revolted, but not surprised. You see, she said the same thing to
me only a few minutes before.”

“She did!”

“It amounted to the same thing. I had just been telling her how I did
the lake-hole today in two, and she said that in her opinion golf was a
game for children with water on the brain who weren’t athletic enough
to play Animal Grab.”

The two men shivered in sympathy.

“There must be insanity in the family,” said James at last.

“That,” said Peter, “is the charitable explanation.”

“We were fortunate to find it out in time.”

“We were!”

“We mustn’t run a risk like that again.”

“Never again!”

“I think we had better take up golf really seriously. It will keep us
out of mischief.”

“You’re quite right. We ought to do our four rounds a day regularly.”

“In spring, summer, and autumn. And in winter it would be rash not to
practise most of the day at one of those indoor schools.”

“We ought to be safe that way.”

“Peter, old man,” said James, “I’ve been meaning to speak to you about
it for some time. I’ve got Sandy MacBean’s new book, and I think you
ought to read it. It is full of helpful hints.”

“James!”

“Peter!”

Silently the two men clasped hands. James Todd and Peter Willard were
themselves again.

*       *       *       *       *

And so (said the Oldest Member) we come back to our original
starting-point–to wit, that, while there is nothing to be said
definitely against love, your golfer should be extremely careful how he
indulges in it. It may improve his game or it may not. But, if he finds
that there is any danger that it may not–if the object of his
affections is not the kind of girl who will listen to him with cheerful
sympathy through the long evenings, while he tells her, illustrating
stance and grip and swing with the kitchen poker, each detail of the
day’s round–then, I say unhesitatingly, he had better leave it alone.
Love has had a lot of press-agenting from the oldest times; but there
are higher, nobler things than love. A woman is only a woman, but a
hefty drive is a slosh.

When Jack Wilton first came to Marois Bay, none of us dreamed that he
was a man with a hidden sorrow in his life. There was something about
the man which made the idea absurd, or would have made it absurd if he
himself had not been the authority for the story. He looked so
thoroughly pleased with life and with himself. He was one of those men
whom you instinctively label in your mind as ’strong’. He was so
healthy, so fit, and had such a confident, yet sympathetic, look about
him that you felt directly you saw him that here was the one person you
would have selected as the recipient of that hard-luck story of yours.
You felt that his kindly strength would have been something to lean on.

As a matter of fact, it was by trying to lean on it that Spencer Clay
got hold of the facts of the case; and when young Clay got hold of
anything, Marois Bay at large had it hot and fresh a few hours later;
for Spencer was one of those slack-jawed youths who are
constitutionally incapable of preserving a secret.

Within two hours, then, of Clay’s chat with Wilton, everyone in the
place knew that, jolly and hearty as the new-comer might seem, there
was that gnawing at his heart which made his outward cheeriness simply
heroic.

Clay, it seems, who is the worst specimen of self-pitier, had gone to
Wilton, in whom, as a new-comer, he naturally saw a fine fresh
repository for his tales of woe, and had opened with a long yarn of
some misfortune or other. I forget which it was; it might have been any
one of a dozen or so which he had constantly in stock, and it is
immaterial which it was. The point is that, having heard him out very
politely and patiently, Wilton came back at him with a story which
silenced even Clay. Spencer was equal to most things, but even he could
not go on whining about how he had foozled his putting and been snubbed
at the bridge-table, or whatever it was that he was pitying himself
about just then, when a man was telling him the story of a wrecked
life.

‘He told me not to let it go any further,’ said Clay to everyone he
met, ‘but of course it doesn’t matter telling you. It is a thing he
doesn’t like to have known. He told me because he said there was
something about me that seemed to extract confidences–a kind of
strength, he said. You wouldn’t think it to look at him, but his life
is an absolute blank. Absolutely ruined, don’t you know. He told me the
whole thing so simply and frankly that it broke me all up. It seems
that he was engaged to be married a few years ago, and on the wedding
morning–absolutely on the wedding morning–the girl was taken suddenly
ill, and–’

‘And died?’

‘And died. Died in his arms. Absolutely in his arms, old top.’

‘What a terrible thing!’

‘Absolutely. He’s never got over it. You won’t let it go any further,
will you old man?’

And off sped Spencer, to tell the tale to someone else.

       *       *       *       *       *

Everyone was terribly sorry for Wilton. He was such a good fellow, such
a sportsman, and, above all, so young, that one hated the thought that,
laugh as he might, beneath his laughter there lay the pain of that
awful memory. He seemed so happy, too. It was only in moments of
confidence, in those heart-to-heart talks when men reveal their deeper
feelings, that he ever gave a hint that all was not well with him. As,
for example, when Ellerton, who is always in love with someone, backed
him into a corner one evening and began to tell him the story of his
latest affair, he had hardly begun when such a look of pain came over
Wilton’s face that he ceased instantly. He said afterwards that the
sudden realization of the horrible break he was making hit him like a
bullet, and the manner in which he turned the conversation practically
without pausing from love to a discussion of the best method of getting
out of the bunker at the seventh hole was, in the circumstances, a
triumph of tact.

Marois Bay is a quiet place even in the summer, and the Wilton tragedy
was naturally the subject of much talk. It is a sobering thing to get a
glimpse of the underlying sadness of life like that, and there was a
disposition at first on the part of the community to behave in his
presence in a manner reminiscent of pall-bearers at a funeral. But
things soon adjusted themselves. He was outwardly so cheerful that it
seemed ridiculous for the rest of us to step softly and speak with
hushed voices. After all, when you came to examine it, the thing was
his affair, and it was for him to dictate the lines on which it should
be treated. If he elected to hide his pain under a bright smile and a
laugh like that of a hyena with a more than usually keen sense of
humour, our line was obviously to follow his lead.

We did so; and by degrees the fact that his life was permanently
blighted became almost a legend. At the back of our minds we were aware
of it, but it did not obtrude itself into the affairs of every day. It
was only when someone, forgetting, as Ellerton had done, tried to
enlist his sympathy for some misfortune of his own that the look of
pain in his eyes and the sudden tightening of his lips reminded us that
he still remembered.

Matters had been at this stage for perhaps two weeks when Mary Campbell
arrived.

Sex attraction is so purely a question of the taste of the individual
that the wise man never argues about it. He accepts its vagaries as
part of the human mystery, and leaves it at that. To me there was no
charm whatever about Mary Campbell. It may have been that, at the
moment, I was in love with Grace Bates, Heloise Miller, and Clarice
Wembley–for at Marois Bay, in the summer, a man who is worth his salt
is more than equal to three love affairs simultaneously–but anyway,
she left me cold. Not one thrill could she awake in me. She was small
and, to my mind, insignificant. Some men said that she had fine eyes.
They seemed to me just ordinary eyes. And her hair was just ordinary
hair. In fact, ordinary was the word that described her.

But from the first it was plain that she seemed wonderful with Wilton,
which was all the more remarkable, seeing that he was the one man of us
all who could have got any girl in Marois Bay that he wanted. When a
man is six foot high, is a combination of Hercules and Apollo, and
plays tennis, golf, and the banjo with almost superhuman vim, his path
with the girls of a summer seaside resort is pretty smooth. But, when
you add to all these things a tragedy like Wilton’s, he can only be
described as having a walk-over.

Girls love a tragedy. At least, most girls do. It makes a man
interesting to them. Grace Bates was always going on about how
interesting Wilton was. So was Heloise Miller. So was Clarice Wembley.
But it was not until Mary Campbell came that he displayed any real
enthusiasm at all for the feminine element of Marois Bay. We put it
down to the fact that he could not forget, but the real reason, I now
know, was that he considered that girls were a nuisance on the links
and in the tennis-court. I suppose a plus two golfer and a Wildingesque
tennis-player, such as Wilton was, does feel like that. Personally, I
think that girls add to the fun of the thing. But then, my handicap is
twelve, and, though I have been playing tennis for many years, I doubt
if I have got my first serve–the fast one–over the net more than half
a dozen times.

But Mary Campbell overcame Wilton’s prejudices in twenty-four hours. He
seemed to feel lonely on the links without her, and he positively egged
her to be his partner in the doubles. What Mary thought of him we did
not know. She was one of those inscrutable girls.

And so things went on. If it had not been that I knew Wilton’s story, I
should have classed the thing as one of those summer love-affairs to
which the Marois Bay air is so peculiarly conducive. The only reason
why anyone comes away from a summer at Marois Bay unbetrothed is
because there are so many girls that he falls in love with that his
holiday is up before he can, so to speak, concentrate.

But in Wilton’s case this was out of the question. A man does not get
over the sort of blow he had had, not, at any rate, for many years: and
we had gathered that his tragedy was comparatively recent.

I doubt if I was ever more astonished in my life than the night when he
confided in me. Why he should have chosen me as a confidant I cannot
say. I am inclined to think that I happened to be alone with him at the
psychological moment when a man must confide in somebody or burst; and
Wilton chose the lesser evil.

I was strolling along the shore after dinner, smoking a cigar and
thinking of Grace Bates, Heloise Miller, and Clarice Wembley, when I
happened upon him. It was a beautiful night, and we sat down and drank
it in for a while. The first intimation I had that all was not well
with him was when he suddenly emitted a hollow groan.

The next moment he had begun to confide.

‘I’m in the deuce of a hole,’ he said. ‘What would you do in my
position?’

‘Yes?’ I said.

‘I proposed to Mary Campbell this evening.’

‘Congratulations.’

‘Thanks. She refused me.’

‘Refused you!’

‘Yes–because of Amy.’

It seemed to me that the narrative required footnotes.

‘Who is Amy?’ I said.

‘Amy is the girl–’

‘Which girl?’

‘The girl who died, you know. Mary had got hold of the whole story. In
fact, it was the tremendous sympathy she showed that encouraged me to
propose. If it hadn’t been for that, I shouldn’t have had the nerve.
I’m not fit to black her shoes.’

Odd, the poor opinion a man always has–when he is in love–of his
personal attractions. There were times when I thought of Grace Bates,
Heloise Miller, and Clarice Wembley, when I felt like one of the beasts
that perish. But then, I’m nothing to write home about, whereas the
smallest gleam of intelligence should have told Wilton that he was a
kind of Ouida guardsman.

‘This evening I managed somehow to do it. She was tremendously nice
about it–said she was very fond of me and all that–but it was quite
out of the question because of Amy.’

‘I don’t follow this. What did she mean?’

‘It’s perfectly clear, if you bear in mind that Mary is the most
sensitive, spiritual, highly strung girl that ever drew breath,’ said
Wilton, a little coldly. ‘Her position is this: she feels that, because
of Amy, she can never have my love completely; between us there would
always be Amy’s memory. It would be the same as if she married a
widower.’

‘Well, widowers marry.’

‘They don’t marry girls like Mary.’

I couldn’t help feeling that this was a bit of luck for the widowers;
but I didn’t say so. One has always got to remember that opinions
differ about girls. One man’s peach, so to speak, is another man’s
poison. I have met men who didn’t like Grace Bates, men who, if Heloise
Miller or Clarice Wembley had given them their photographs, would have
used them to cut the pages of a novel.

‘Amy stands between us,’ said Wilton.

I breathed a sympathetic snort. I couldn’t think of anything noticeably
suitable to say.

‘Stands between us,’ repeated Wilton. ‘And the damn silly part of the
whole thing is that there isn’t any Amy. I invented her.’

‘You–what!’

‘Invented her. Made her up. No, I’m not mad. I had a reason. Let me
see, you come from London, don’t you?’

‘Yes.’

‘Then you haven’t any friends. It’s different with me. I live in a
small country town, and everyone’s my friend. I don’t know what it is
about me, but for some reason, ever since I can remember, I’ve been
looked on as the strong man of my town, the man who’s all right.
Am I making myself clear?’

‘Not quite.’

‘Well, what I am trying to get at is this. Either because I’m a strong
sort of fellow to look at, and have obviously never been sick in my
life, or because I can’t help looking pretty cheerful, the whole of
Bridley-in-the-Wold seems to take it for granted that I can’t possibly
have any troubles of my own, and that I am consequently fair game for
anyone who has any sort of worry. I have the sympathetic manner, and
they come to me to be cheered up. If a fellow’s in love, he makes a
bee-line for me, and tells me all about it. If anyone has had a
bereavement, I am the rock on which he leans for support. Well, I’m a
patient sort of man, and, as far as Bridley-in-the-Wold is concerned, I
am willing to play the part. But a strong man does need an occasional
holiday, and I made up my mind that I would get it. Directly I got here
I saw that the same old game was going to start. Spencer Clay swooped
down on me at once. I’m as big a draw with the Spencer Clay type of
maudlin idiot as catnip is with a cat. Well, I could stand it at home,
but I was hanged if I was going to have my holiday spoiled. So I
invented Amy. Now do you see?’

‘Certainly I see. And I perceive something else which you appear to
have overlooked. If Amy doesn’t exist–or, rather, never did exist–she
cannot stand between you and Miss Campbell. Tell her what you have told
me, and all will be well.’

He shook his head.

‘You don’t know Mary. She would never forgive me. You don’t know what
sympathy, what angelic sympathy, she has poured out on me about Amy. I
can’t possibly tell her the whole thing was a fraud. It would make her
feel so foolish.’

‘You must risk it. At the worst, you lose nothing.’

He brightened a little.

‘No, that’s true,’ he said. ‘I’ve half a mind to do it.’

‘Make it a whole mind,’ I said, ‘and you win out.’

I was wrong. Sometimes I am. The trouble was, apparently, that I didn’t
know Mary. I am sure Grace Bates, Heloise Miller, or Clarice Wembley
would not have acted as she did. They might have been a trifle stunned
at first, but they would soon have come round, and all would have been
joy. But with Mary, no. What took place at the interview I do not know;
but it was swiftly perceived by Marois Bay that the Wilton-Campbell
alliance was off. They no longer walked together, golfed together, and
played tennis on the same side of the net. They did not even speak to
each other.

      *      *      *      *      *

The rest of the story I can speak of only from hearsay. How it became
public property, I do not know. But there was a confiding strain in
Wilton, and I imagine he confided in someone, who confided in someone
else. At any rate, it is recorded in Marois Bay’s unwritten archives,
from which I now extract it.

      *      *      *      *      *

For some days after the breaking-off of diplomatic relations, Wilton
seemed too pulverized to resume the offensive. He mooned about the
links by himself, playing a shocking game, and generally comported
himself like a man who has looked for the escape of gas with a lighted
candle. In affairs of love the strongest men generally behave with the
most spineless lack of resolution. Wilton weighed thirteen stone, and
his muscles were like steel cables; but he could not have shown less
pluck in this crisis in his life if he had been a poached egg. It was
pitiful to see him.

Mary, in these days, simply couldn’t see that he was on the earth. She
looked round him, above him, and through him, but never at him; which
was rotten from Wilton’s point of view, for he had developed a sort of
wistful expression–I am convinced that he practised it before the
mirror after his bath–which should have worked wonders, if only he
could have got action with it. But she avoided his eye as if he had
been a creditor whom she was trying to slide past on the street.

She irritated me. To let the breach widen in this way was absurd.
Wilton, when I said as much to him, said that it was due to her
wonderful sensitiveness and highly strungness, and that it was just one
more proof to him of the loftiness of her soul and her shrinking horror
of any form of deceit. In fact, he gave me the impression that, though
the affair was rending his vitals, he took a mournful pleasure in
contemplating her perfection.

Now one afternoon Wilton took his misery for a long walk along the
seashore. He tramped over the sand for some considerable time, and
finally pulled up in a little cove, backed by high cliffs and dotted
with rocks. The shore around Marois Bay is full of them.

By this time the afternoon sun had begun to be too warm for comfort,
and it struck Wilton that he could be a great deal more comfortable
nursing his wounded heart with his back against one of the rocks than
tramping any farther over the sand. Most of the Marois Bay scenery is
simply made as a setting for the nursing of a wounded heart. The cliffs
are a sombre indigo, sinister and forbidding; and even on the finest
days the sea has a curious sullen look. You have only to get away from
the crowd near the bathing-machines and reach one of these small coves
and get your book against a rock and your pipe well alight, and you can
simply wallow in misery. I have done it myself. The day when Heloise
Miller went golfing with Teddy Bingley I spent the whole afternoon in
one of these retreats. It is true that, after twenty minutes of
contemplating the breakers, I fell asleep; but that is bound to happen.

It happened to Wilton. For perhaps half an hour he brooded, and then
his pipe fell from his mouth and he dropped off into a peaceful
slumber. And time went by.

It was a touch of cramp that finally woke him. He jumped up with a
yell, and stood there massaging his calf. And he had hardly got rid of
the pain, when a startled exclamation broke the primeval stillness; and
there, on the other side of the rock, was Mary Campbell.

Now, if Wilton had had any inductive reasoning in his composition at
all, he would have been tremendously elated. A girl does not creep out
to a distant cove at Marois Bay unless she is unhappy; and if Mary
Campbell was unhappy she must be unhappy about him; and if she was
unhappy about him all he had to do was to show a bit of determination
and get the whole thing straightened out. But Wilton, whom grief had
reduced to the mental level of an oyster, did not reason this out; and
the sight of her deprived him of practically all his faculties,
including speech. He just stood there and yammered.

‘Did you follow me here, Mr Wilton?’ said Mary, very coldly.

He shook his head. Eventually he managed to say that he had come there
by chance, and had fallen asleep under the rock. As this was exactly
what Mary had done, she could not reasonably complain. So that
concluded the conversation for the time being. She walked away in the
direction of Marois Bay without another word, and presently he lost
sight of her round a bend in the cliffs.

His position now was exceedingly unpleasant. If she had such a distaste
for his presence, common decency made it imperative that he should give
her a good start on the homeward journey. He could not tramp along a
couple of yards in the rear all the way. So he had to remain where he
was till she had got well off the mark. And as he was wearing a thin
flannel suit, and the sun had gone in, and a chilly breeze had sprung
up, his mental troubles were practically swamped in physical
discomfort.

Just as he had decided that he could now make a move, he was surprised
to see her coming back.

Wilton really was elated at this. The construction he put on it was
that she had relented and was coming back to fling her arms round his
neck. He was just bracing himself for the clash, when he caught her
eye, and it was as cold and unfriendly as the sea.

‘I must go round the other way,’ she said. ‘The water has come up too
far on that side.’

And she walked past him to the other end of the cove.

The prospect of another wait chilled Wilton to the marrow. The wind had
now grown simply freezing, and it came through his thin suit and roamed
about all over him in a manner that caused him exquisite discomfort. He
began to jump to keep himself warm.

He was leaping heavenwards for the hundredth time, when, chancing to
glance to one side, he perceived Mary again returning. By this time his
physical misery had so completely overcome the softer emotions in his
bosom that his only feeling now was one of thorough irritation. It was
not fair, he felt, that she should jockey at the start in this way and
keep him hanging about here catching cold. He looked at her, when she
came within range, quite balefully.

‘It is impossible,’ she said, ‘to get round that way either.’

One grows so accustomed in this world to everything going smoothly,
that the idea of actual danger had not yet come home to her. From where
she stood in the middle of the cove, the sea looked so distant that the
fact that it had closed the only ways of getting out was at the moment
merely annoying. She felt much the same as she would have felt if she
had arrived at a station to catch a train and had been told that the
train was not running.

She therefore seated herself on a rock, and contemplated the ocean.
Wilton walked up and down. Neither showed any disposition to exercise
that gift of speech which places Man in a class of his own, above the
ox, the ass, the common wart-hog, and the rest of the lower animals. It
was only when a wave swished over the base of her rock that Mary broke
the silence.

‘The tide is coming in‘ she faltered.

She looked at the sea with such altered feelings that it seemed a
different sea altogether.

There was plenty of it to look at. It filled the entire mouth of the
little bay, swirling up the sand and lashing among the rocks in a
fashion which made one thought stand out above all the others in her
mind–the recollection that she could not swim.

‘Mr Wilton!’

Wilton bowed coldly.

‘Mr Wilton, the tide. It’s coming IN.’

Wilton glanced superciliously at the sea.

‘So,’ he said, ‘I perceive.’

‘But what shall we do?’

Wilton shrugged his shoulders. He was feeling at war with Nature and
Humanity combined. The wind had shifted a few points to the east, and
was exploring his anatomy with the skill of a qualified surgeon.

‘We shall drown,’ cried Miss Campbell. ‘We shall drown. We shall drown.
We shall drown.’

All Wilton’s resentment left him. Until he heard that pitiful wail his
only thoughts had been for himself.

‘Mary!’ he said, with a wealth of tenderness in his voice.

She came to him as a little child comes to its mother, and he put his
arm around her.

‘Oh, Jack!’

‘My darling!’

‘I’m frightened!’

‘My precious!’

It is in moments of peril, when the chill breath of fear blows upon our
souls, clearing them of pettiness, that we find ourselves.

She looked about her wildly.

‘Could we climb the cliffs?’

‘I doubt it.’

‘If we called for help–’

‘We could do that.’

They raised their voices, but the only answer was the crashing of the
waves and the cry of the sea-birds. The water was swirling at their
feet, and they drew back to the shelter of the cliffs. There they stood
in silence, watching.

‘Mary,’ said Wilton in a low voice, ‘tell me one thing.’

‘Yes, Jack?’

‘Have you forgiven me?’

‘Forgiven you! How can you ask at a moment like this? I love you with
all my heart and soul.’

He kissed her, and a strange look of peace came over his face.

‘I am happy.’

‘I, too.’

A fleck of foam touched her face, and she shivered.

‘It was worth it,’ he said quietly. ‘If all misunderstandings are
cleared away and nothing can come between us again, it is a small price
to pay–unpleasant as it will be when it comes.’

‘Perhaps–perhaps it will not be very unpleasant. They say that
drowning is an easy death.’

‘I didn’t mean drowning, dearest. I meant a cold in the head.’

‘A cold in the head!’

He nodded gravely.

‘I don’t see how it can be avoided. You know how chilly it gets these
late summer nights. It will be a long time before we can get away.’

She laughed a shrill, unnatural laugh.

‘You are talking like this to keep my courage up. You know in your
heart that there is no hope for us. Nothing can save us now. The water
will come creeping–creeping–’

‘Let it creep! It can’t get past that rock there.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘It can’t. The tide doesn’t come up any farther. I know, because I was
caught here last week.’

For a moment she looked at him without speaking. Then she uttered a cry
in which relief, surprise, and indignation were so nicely blended that
it would have been impossible to say which predominated.

He was eyeing the approaching waters with an indulgent smile.

‘Why didn’t you tell me?’ she cried.

‘I did tell you.’

‘You know what I mean. Why did you let me go on thinking we were in
danger, when–’

‘We were in danger. We shall probably get pneumonia.’

‘Isch!’

‘There! You’re sneezing already.’

‘I am not sneezing. That was an exclamation of disgust.’

‘It sounded like a sneeze. It must have been, for you’ve every reason
to sneeze, but why you should utter exclamations of disgust I cannot
imagine.’

‘I’m disgusted with you–with your meanness. You deliberately tricked
me into saying–’

‘Saying–’

She was silent.

‘What you said was that you loved me with all your heart and soul. You
can’t get away from that, and it’s good enough for me.’

‘Well, it’s not true any longer.’

‘Yes, it is,’ said Wilton, comfortably; ‘bless it.’

‘It is not. I’m going right away now, and I shall never speak to you
again.’

She moved away from him, and prepared to sit down.

‘There’s a jelly-fish just where you’re going to sit,’ said Wilton.

‘I don’t care.’

‘It will. I speak from experience, as one on whom you have sat so
often.’

‘I’m not amused.’

‘Have patience. I can be funnier than that.’

‘Please don’t talk to me.’

‘Very well.’

She seated herself with her back to him. Dignity demanded reprisals, so
he seated himself with his back to her; and the futile ocean raged
towards them, and the wind grew chillier every minute.

Time passed. Darkness fell. The little bay became a black cavern,
dotted here and there with white, where the breeze whipped the surface
of the water.

Wilton sighed. It was lonely sitting there all by himself. How much
jollier it would have been if–

A hand touched his shoulder, and a voice spoke–meekly.

‘Jack, dear, it–it’s awfully cold. Don’t you think if we were
to–snuggle up–’

He reached out and folded her in an embrace which would have aroused
the professional enthusiasm of Hackenschmidt and drawn guttural
congratulations from Zbysco. She creaked, but did not crack, beneath
the strain.

‘That’s much nicer,’ she said, softly. ‘Jack, I don’t think the tide’s
started even to think of going down yet.’

‘I hope not,’ said Wilton.

It is possible that, at about the time at which this story opens, you
may have gone into the Hotel Belvoir for a hair-cut. Many people did;
for the young man behind the scissors, though of a singularly gloomy
countenance, was undoubtedly an artist in his line. He clipped
judiciously. He left no ridges. He never talked about the weather. And
he allowed you to go away unburdened by any bottle of hair-food.

It is possible, too, that, being there, you decided that you might as
well go the whole hog and be manicured at the same time.

It is not unlikely, moreover, that when you had got over the first
shock of finding your hands so unexpectedly large and red, you felt
disposed to chat with the young lady who looked after that branch of
the business. In your genial way you may have permitted a note of gay
(but gentlemanly) badinage to creep into your end of the dialogue.

In which case, if you had raised your eyes to the mirror, you would
certainly have observed a marked increase of gloom in the demeanour of
the young man attending to your apex. He took no official notice of the
matter. A quick frown. A tightening of the lips. Nothing more. Jealous
as Arthur Welsh was of all who inflicted gay badinage, however
gentlemanly, on Maud Peters, he never forgot that he was an artist.
Never, even in his blackest moments, had he yielded to the temptation
to dig the point of the scissors the merest fraction of an inch into a
client’s skull.

But Maud, who saw, would understand. And, if the customer was an
observant man, he would notice that her replies at that juncture became
somewhat absent, her smile a little mechanical.

       *       *       *       *       *

Jealousy, according to an eminent authority, is the ‘hydra of
calamities, the sevenfold death’. Arthur Welsh’s was all that and a bit
over. It was a constant shadow on Maud’s happiness. No fair-minded girl
objects to a certain tinge of jealousy. Kept within proper bounds, it
is a compliment; it makes for piquancy; it is the gin in the
ginger-beer of devotion. But it should be a condiment, not a fluid.

It was the unfairness of the thing which hurt Maud. Her conscience was
clear. She knew girls–several girls–who gave the young men with whom
they walked out ample excuse for being perfect Othellos. If she had
ever flirted on the open beach with the baritone of the troupe of
pierrots, like Jane Oddy, she could have excused Arthur’s attitude. If,
like Pauline Dicey, she had roller-skated for a solid hour with a
black-moustached stranger while her fiance floundered in Mug’s Alley
she could have understood his frowning disapprovingly. But she was not
like Pauline. She scorned the coquetries of Jane. Arthur was the centre
of her world, and he knew it. Ever since the rainy evening when he had
sheltered her under his umbrella to her Tube station, he had known
perfectly well how things were with her. And yet just because, in a
strictly business-like way, she was civil to her customers, he must
scowl and bite his lip and behave generally as if it had been brought
to his notice that he had been nurturing a serpent in his bosom. It was
worse than wicked–it was unprofessional.

She remonstrated with him.

‘It isn’t fair,’ she said, one morning when the rush of customers had
ceased and they had the shop to themselves.

Matters had been worse than usual that morning. After days of rain and
greyness the weather had turned over a new leaf. The sun glinted among
the bottles of Unfailing Lotion in the window, and everything in the
world seemed to have relaxed and become cheerful. Unfortunately,
everything had included the customers. During the last few days they
had taken their seats in moist gloom, and, brooding over the prospect
of coming colds in the head, had had little that was pleasant to say to
the divinity who was shaping their ends. But today it had been
different. Warm and happy, they had bubbled over with gay small-talk.

‘It isn’t fair,’ she repeated.

Arthur, who was stropping a razor and whistling tunelessly, raised his
eyebrows. His manner was frosty.

‘I fail to understand your meaning,’ he said.

‘You know what I mean. Do you think I didn’t see you frowning when I
was doing that gentleman’s nails?’

The allusion was to the client who had just left–a jovial individual
with a red face, who certainly had made Maud giggle a good deal. And
why not? If a gentleman tells really funny stories, what harm is there
in giggling? You had to be pleasant to people. If you snubbed
customers, what happened? Why, sooner or later, it got round to the
boss, and then where were you? Besides, it was not as if the red-faced
customer had been rude. Write down on paper what he had said to her,
and nobody could object to it. Write down on paper what she had said to
him, and you couldn’t object to that either. It was just Arthur’s
silliness.

She tossed her head.

‘I am gratified,’ said Arthur, ponderously–in happier moments Maud
had admired his gift of language; he read a great deal: encyclopedias
and papers and things–’I am gratified to find that you had time to
bestow a glance on me. You appeared absorbed.’

Maud sniffed unhappily. She had meant to be cold and dignified
throughout the conversation, but the sense of her wrongs was beginning
to be too much for her. A large tear splashed on to her tray of
orange-sticks. She wiped it away with the chamois leather.

‘It isn’t fair,’ she sobbed. ‘It isn’t. You know I can’t help it if
gentlemen talk and joke with me. You know it’s all in the day’s work.
I’m expected to be civil to gentlemen who come in to have their hands
done. Silly I should look sitting as if I’d swallowed a poker. I
do think you might understand, Arthur, you being in the
profession yourself.’

He coughed.

‘It isn’t so much that you talk to them as that you seem to like–’

He stopped. Maud’s dignity had melted completely. Her face was buried
in her arms. She did not care if a million customers came in, all at
the same time.

‘Maud!’

She heard him moving towards her, but she did not look up. The next
moment his arms were round her, and he was babbling.

And a customer, pushing open the door unnoticed two minutes later,
retired hurriedly to get shaved elsewhere, doubting whether Arthur’s
mind was on his job.

For a time this little thunderstorm undoubtedly cleared the air. For a
day or two Maud was happier than she ever remembered to have been.
Arthur’s behaviour was unexceptionable. He bought her a wrist-watch–
light brown leather, very smart. He gave her some chocolates to eat in
the Tube. He entertained her with amazing statistics, culled from the
weekly paper which he bought on Tuesdays. He was, in short, the perfect
lover. On the second day the red-faced man came in again. Arthur joined
in the laughter at his stories. Everything seemed ideal.

It could not last. Gradually things slipped back into the old routine.
Maud, looking up from her work, would see the frown and the bitten lip.
She began again to feel uncomfortable and self-conscious as she worked.
Sometimes their conversation on the way to the Tube was almost formal.

It was useless to say anything. She had a wholesome horror of being one
of those women who nagged; and she felt that to complain again would
amount to nagging. She tried to put the thing out of her mind, but it
insisted on staying there. In a way she understood his feelings. He
loved her so much, she supposed, that he hated the idea of her
exchanging a single word with another man. This, in the abstract, was
gratifying; but in practice it distressed her. She wished she were some
sort of foreigner, so that nobody could talk to her. But then they
would look at her, and that probably would produce much the same
results. It was a hard world for a girl.

And then the strange thing happened. Arthur reformed. One might almost
say that he reformed with a jerk. It was a parallel case to those
sudden conversions at Welsh revival meetings. On Monday evening he had
been at his worst. On the following morning he was a changed man. Not
even after the original thunderstorm had he been more docile. Maud
could not believe that first. The lip, once bitten, was stretched in a
smile. She looked for the frown. It was not there.

Next day it was the same; and the day after that. When a week had gone
by, and still the improvement was maintained, Maud felt that she might
now look upon it as permanent. A great load seemed to have been taken
off her mind. She revised her views on the world. It was a very good
world, quite one of the best, with Arthur beaming upon it like a sun.

A number of eminent poets and essayists, in the course of the last few
centuries, have recorded, in their several ways, their opinion that one
can have too much of a good thing. The truth applies even to such a
good thing as absence of jealousy. Little by little Maud began to grow
uneasy. It began to come home to her that she preferred the old Arthur,
of the scowl and the gnawed lip. Of him she had at least been sure.
Whatever discomfort she may have suffered from his spirited imitations
of Othello, at any rate they had proved that he loved her. She would
have accepted gladly an equal amount of discomfort now in exchange for
the same certainty. She could not read this new Arthur. His thoughts
were a closed book. Superficially, he was all that she could have
wished. He still continued to escort her to the Tube, to buy her
occasional presents, to tap, when conversing, the pleasantly
sentimental vein. But now these things were not enough. Her heart was
troubled. Her thoughts frightened her. The little black imp at the back
of her mind kept whispering and whispering, till at last she was forced
to listen. ‘He’s tired of you. He doesn’t love you any more. He’s tired
of you.’

       *       *       *       *       *

It is not everybody who, in times of mental stress, can find ready to
hand among his or her personal acquaintances an expert counsellor,
prepared at a moment’s notice to listen with sympathy and advise with
tact and skill. Everyone’s world is full of friends, relatives, and
others, who will give advice on any subject that may be presented to
them; but there are crises in life which cannot be left to the amateur.
It is the aim of a certain widely read class of paper to fill this
void.

Of this class Fireside Chat was one of the best-known
representatives. In exchange for one penny its five hundred thousand
readers received every week a serial story about life in highest
circles, a short story packed with heart-interest, articles on the
removal of stains and the best method of coping with the cold mutton,
anecdotes of Royalty, photographs of peeresses, hints on dress, chats
about baby, brief but pointed dialogues between Blogson and Snogson,
poems, Great Thoughts from the Dead and Brainy, half-hours in the
editor’s cosy sanctum, a slab of brown paper, and–the journal’s
leading feature–Advice on Matters of the Heart. The weekly
contribution of the advice specialist of Fireside Chat, entitled
‘In the Consulting Room, by Dr Cupid’, was made up mainly of Answers to
Correspondents. He affected the bedside manner of the kind, breezy old
physician; and probably gave a good deal of comfort. At any rate, he
always seemed to have plenty of cases on his hands.

It was to this expert that Maud took her trouble. She had been a
regular reader of the paper for several years; and had, indeed,
consulted the great man once before, when he had replied favourably to
her query as to whether it would be right for her to accept caramels
from Arthur, then almost a stranger. It was only natural that she
should go to him now, in an even greater dilemma. The letter was not
easy to write, but she finished it at last; and, after an anxious
interval, judgement was delivered as follows:

‘Well, well, well! Bless my soul, what is all this? M. P. writes me:

‘I am a young lady, and until recently was very, very happy, except
that my fiance, though truly loving me, was of a very jealous
disposition, though I am sure I gave him no cause. He would scowl when
I spoke to any other man, and this used to make me unhappy. But for
some time now he has quite changed, and does not seem to mind at all,
and though at first this made me feel happy, to think that he had got
over his jealousy, I now feel unhappy because I am beginning to be
afraid that he no longer cares for me. Do you think this is so, and
what ought I to do?’

‘My dear young lady, I should like to be able to reassure you; but it
is kindest sometimes, you know, to be candid, however it may hurt. It
has been my experience that, when jealousy flies out of the window,
indifference comes in at the door. In the old days a knight would joust
for the love of a ladye, risking physical injury rather than permit
others to rival him in her affections. I think, M. P., that you should
endeavour to discover the true state of your fiance’s feelings. I do
not, of course, advocate anything in the shape of unwomanly behaviour,
of which I am sure, my dear young lady, you are incapable; but I think
that you should certainly try to pique your fiance, to test him. At
your next ball, for instance, refuse him a certain number of dances, on
the plea that your programme is full. At garden-parties, at-homes, and
so on, exhibit pleasure in the society and conversation of other
gentlemen, and mark his demeanour as you do so. These little tests
should serve either to relieve your apprehensions, provided they are
groundless, or to show you the truth. And, after all, if it is the
truth, it must be faced, must it not, M. P.?’

Before the end of the day Maud knew the whole passage by heart. The
more her mind dwelt on it, the more clearly did it seem to express what
she had felt but could not put into words. The point about jousting
struck her as particularly well taken. She had looked up ‘joust’ in the
dictionary, and it seemed to her that in these few words was contained
the kernel of her trouble. In the old days, if any man had attempted to
rival him in her affections (outside business hours), Arthur would
undoubtedly have jousted–and jousted with the vigour of one who means
to make his presence felt. Now, in similar circumstances, he would
probably step aside politely, as who should say, ‘After you, my dear
Alphonse.’

There was no time to lose. An hour after her first perusal of Dr
Cupid’s advice, Maud had begun to act upon it. By the time the first
lull in the morning’s work had come, and there was a chance for private
conversation, she had invented an imaginary young man, a shadowy
Lothario, who, being introduced into her home on the previous Sunday by
her brother Horace, had carried on in a way you wouldn’t believe,
paying all manner of compliments.

‘He said I had such white hands,’ said Maud.

Arthur nodded, stropping a razor the while. He appeared to be bearing
the revelations with complete fortitude. Yet, only a few weeks before,
a customer’s comment on this same whiteness had stirred him to his
depths.

‘And this morning–what do you think? Why, he meets me as bold as you
please, and gives me a cake of toilet soap. Like his impudence!’

She paused, hopefully.

‘Always useful, soap,’ said Arthur, politely sententious.

‘Lovely it was,’ went on Maud, dully conscious of failure, but
stippling in like an artist the little touches which give atmosphere
and verisimilitude to a story. ‘All scented. Horace will tease me about
it, I can tell you.’

She paused. Surely he must–Why, a sea-anemone would be torn with
jealousy at such a tale.

Arthur did not even wince. He was charming about it. Thought it very
kind of the young fellow. Didn’t blame him for being struck by the
whiteness of her hands. Touched on the history of soap, which he
happened to have been reading up in the encyclopedia at the free
library. And behaved altogether in such a thoroughly gentlemanly
fashion that Maud stayed awake half the night, crying.

       *       *       *       *       *

If Maud had waited another twenty-four hours there would have been no
need for her to have taxed her powers of invention, for on the
following day there entered the shop and her life a young man who was
not imaginary–a Lothario of flesh and blood. He made his entry with
that air of having bought most of the neighbouring property which
belongs exclusively to minor actors, men of weight on the Stock
Exchange, and American professional pugilists.

Mr ‘Skipper’ Shute belonged to the last-named of the three classes. He
had arrived in England two months previously for the purpose of holding
a conference at eight-stone four with one Joseph Edwardes, to settle a
question of superiority at that weight which had been vexing the
sporting public of two countries for over a year. Having successfully
out-argued Mr Edwardes, mainly by means of strenuous work in the
clinches, he was now on the eve of starting on a lucrative music-hall
tour with his celebrated inaudible monologue. As a result of these
things he was feeling very, very pleased with the world in general, and
with Mr Skipper Shute in particular. And when Mr Shute was pleased with
himself his manner was apt to be of the breeziest.

He breezed into the shop, took a seat, and, having cast an experienced
eye at Maud, and found her pleasing, extended both hands, and observed,
‘Go the limit, kid.’

At any other time Maud might have resented being addressed as ‘kid’ by
a customer, but now she welcomed it. With the exception of a slight
thickening of the lobe of one ear, Mr Shute bore no outward signs of
his profession. And being, to use his own phrase, a ’swell dresser’, he
was really a most presentable young man. Just, in fact, what Maud
needed. She saw in him her last hope. If any faint spark of his ancient
fire still lingered in Arthur, it was through Mr Shute that it must be
fanned.

She smiled upon Mr Shute. She worked on his robust fingers as if it
were an artistic treat to be permitted to handle them. So carefully did
she toil that she was still busy when Arthur, taking off his apron and
putting on his hat, went out for his twenty-minutes’ lunch, leaving
them alone together.

The door had scarcely shut when Mr Shute bent forward.

‘Say!’

He sank his voice to a winning whisper.

‘You look good to muh,’ he said, gallantly.

‘The idea!’ said Maud, tossing her head.

‘On the level,’ Mr Shute assured her.

Maud laid down her orange-sticks.

‘Don’t be silly,’ she said. ‘There–I’ve finished.’

‘I’ve not,’ said Mr Shute. ‘Not by a mile. Say!’

‘Well?’

‘What do you do with your evenings?’

‘I go home.’

‘Sure. But when you don’t? It’s a poor heart that never rejoices. Don’t
you ever whoop it up?’

‘Whoop it up?’

‘The mad whirl,’ explained Mr Shute. ‘Ice-cream soda and buck-wheat
cakes, and a happy evening at lovely Luna Park.’

‘I don’t know where Luna Park is.’

‘What did they teach you at school? It’s out in that direction,’ said
Mr Shute, pointing over his shoulder. ‘You go straight on about three
thousand miles till you hit little old New York; then you turn to the
right. Say, don’t you ever get a little treat? Why not come along to
the White City some old evening? This evening?’

‘Mr Welsh is taking me to the White City tonight.’

‘And who is Mr Welsh?’

‘The gentleman who has just gone out.’

‘Is that so? Well, he doesn’t look a live one, but maybe it’s just
because he’s had bad news today. You never can tell.’ He rose.
‘Farewell, Evelina, fairest of your sex. We shall meet again; so keep a
stout heart.’

And, taking up his cane, straw hat, and yellow gloves, Mr Shute
departed, leaving Maud to her thoughts.

She was disappointed. She had expected better results. Mr Shute had
lowered with ease the record for gay badinage, hitherto held by the
red-faced customer; yet to all appearances there had been no change in
Arthur’s manner. But perhaps he had scowled (or bitten his lip), and
she had not noticed it. Apparently he had struck Mr Shute, an unbiased
spectator, as gloomy. Perhaps at some moment when her eyes had been on
her work–She hoped for the best.

Whatever his feelings may have been during the afternoon, Arthur was
undeniably cheerful that evening. He was in excellent spirits. His
light-hearted abandon on the Wiggle-Woggle had been noted and commented
upon by several lookers-on. Confronted with the Hairy Ainus, he had
touched a high level of facetiousness. And now, as he sat with her
listening to the band, he was crooning joyously to himself in
accompaniment to the music, without, it would appear, a care in the
world.

Maud was hurt and anxious. In a mere acquaintance this blithe attitude
would have been welcome. It would have helped her to enjoy her evening.
But from Arthur at that particular moment she looked for something
else. Why was he cheerful? Only a few hours ago she had been–yes,
flirting with another man before his very eyes. What right had he to be
cheerful? He ought to be heated, full of passionate demands for an
explanation–a flushed, throaty thing to be coaxed back into a good
temper and then forgiven–all this at great length–for having been in
a bad one. Yes, she told herself, she had wanted certainty one way or
the other, and here it was. Now she knew. He no longer cared for her.

She trembled.

‘Cold?’ said Arthur. ‘Let’s walk. Evenings beginning to draw in now.
Lum-da-diddley-ah. That’s what I call a good tune. Give me something
lively and bright. Dumty-umpty-iddley-ah. Dum tum–’

‘Funny thing–’ said Maud, deliberately.

‘What’s a funny thing?’

‘The gentleman in the brown suit whose hands I did this afternoon–’

‘He was,’ agreed Arthur, brightly. ‘A very funny thing.’

Maud frowned. Wit at the expense of Hairy Ainus was one thing–at her
own another.

‘I was about to say,’ she went on precisely, ‘that it was a funny
thing, a coincidence, seeing that I was already engaged, that the
gentleman in the brown suit whose hands I did this afternoon should
have asked me to come here, to the White City, with him tonight.’

For a moment they walked on in silence. To Maud it seemed a hopeful
silence. Surely it must be the prelude to an outburst.

‘Oh!’ he said, and stopped.

Maud’s heart gave a leap. Surely that was the old tone?

A couple of paces, and he spoke again.

‘I didn’t hear him ask you.’

His voice was disappointingly level.

‘He asked me after you had gone out to lunch.’

‘It’s a nuisance,’ said Arthur, cheerily, ‘when things clash like that.
But perhaps he’ll ask you again. Nothing to prevent you coming here
twice. Well repays a second visit, I always say. I think–’

‘You shouldn’t,’ said a voice behind him. ‘It hurts the head. Well,
kid, being shown a good time?’

The possibility of meeting Mr Shute had not occurred to Maud. She had
assumed that, being aware that she would be there with another, he
would have stayed away. It may, however, be remarked that she did not
know Mr Shute. He was not one of your sensitive plants. He smiled
pleasantly upon her, looking very dapper in evening dress and a silk
hat that, though a size too small for him, shone like a mirror.

Maud hardly knew whether she was glad or sorry to see him. It did not
seem to matter much now either way. Nothing seemed to matter much, in
fact. Arthur’s cheery acceptance of the news that she received
invitations from others had been like a blow, leaving her numb and
listless.

She made the introductions. The two men eyed each other.

‘Pleased to meet you,’ said Mr Shute.

‘Weather keeps up,’ said Arthur.

And from that point onward Mr Shute took command.

It is to be assumed that this was not the first time that Mr Shute had
made one of a trio in these circumstances, for the swift dexterity with
which he lost Arthur was certainly not that of a novice. So smoothly
was it done that it was not until she emerged from the Witching Waves,
guided by the pugilist’s slim but formidable right arm, that Maud
realized that Arthur had gone.

She gave a little cry of dismay. Secretly she was beginning to be
somewhat afraid of Mr Shute. He was showing signs of being about to
step out of the role she had assigned to him and attempt something on a
larger scale. His manner had that extra touch of warmth which makes all
the difference.

‘Oh! He’s gone!’ she cried.

‘Sure,’ said Mr Shute. ‘He’s got a hurry-call from the Uji Village.
The chief’s cousin wants a hair-cut.’

‘We must find him. We must.’

‘Surest thing you know,’ said Mr Shute. ‘Plenty of time.’

‘We must find him.’

Mr Shute regarded her with some displeasure.

‘Seems to be ace-high with you, that dub,’ he said.

‘I don’t understand you.’

‘My observation was,’ explained Mr Shute, coldly, ‘that, judging from
appearances, that dough-faced lemon was Willie-boy, the first and only
love.’

Maud turned on him with flaming cheeks.

‘Mr Welsh is nothing to me! Nothing! Nothing!’ she cried.

She walked quickly on.

‘Then, if there’s a vacancy, star-eyes,’ said the pugilist at her side,
holding on a hat which showed a tendency to wobble, ‘count me in.
Directly I saw you–see here, what’s the idea of this road-work? We
aren’t racing–’

Maud slowed down.

‘That’s better. As I was saying, directly I saw you, I said to myself,
“That’s the one you need. The original candy kid. The–”‘

His hat lurched drunkenly as he answered the girl’s increase of speed.
He cursed it in a brief aside.

‘That’s what I said. “The original candy kid.” So–’

He shot out a restraining hand. ‘Arthur!’ cried Maud. ‘Arthur!’

‘It’s not my name’ breathed Mr Shute, tenderly. ‘Call me Clarence.’

Considered as an embrace, it was imperfect. At these moments a silk
hat a size too small handicaps a man. The necessity of having to be
careful about the nap prevented Mr Shute from doing himself complete
justice. But he did enough to induce Arthur Welsh, who, having sighted
the missing ones from afar, had been approaching them at a walking
pace, to substitute a run for the walk, and arrive just as Maud
wrenched herself free.

Mr Shute took off his hat, smoothed it, replaced it with extreme care,
and turned his attention to the new-comer.

‘Arthur!’ said Maud.

Her heart gave a great leap. There was no mistaking the meaning in the
eye that met hers. He cared! He cared!

‘Arthur!’

He took no notice. His face was pale and working. He strode up to Mr
Shute.

‘Well?’ he said between his teeth.

An eight-stone-four champion of the world has many unusual experiences
in his life, but he rarely encounters men who say ‘Well?’ to him
between their teeth. Mr Shute eyed this freak with profound wonder.

‘I’ll teach you to–to kiss young ladies!’

Mr Shute removed his hat again and gave it another brush. This gave him
the necessary time for reflection.

‘I don’t need it,’ he said. ‘I’ve graduated.’

‘Put them up!’ hissed Arthur.

Almost a shocked look spread itself over the pugilist’s face. So might
Raphael have looked if requested to draw a pavement-picture.

‘You aren’t speaking to ME?’ he said, incredulously.

‘Put them up!’

Maud, trembling from head to foot, was conscious of one overwhelming
emotion. She was terrified–yes. But stronger than the terror was the
great wave of elation which swept over her. All her doubts had
vanished. At last, after weary weeks of uncertainty, Arthur was about
to give the supreme proof. He was going to joust for her.

A couple of passers-by had paused, interested, to watch developments.
You could never tell, of course. Many an apparently promising row never
got any farther than words. But, glancing at Arthur’s face, they
certainly felt justified in pausing. Mr Shute spoke.

‘If it wasn’t,’ he said, carefully, ‘that I don’t want trouble with the
Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, I’d–’

He broke off, for, to the accompaniment of a shout of approval from the
two spectators, Arthur had swung his right fist, and it had taken him
smartly on the side of the head.

Compared with the blows Mr Shute was wont to receive in the exercise of
his profession, Arthur’s was a gentle tap. But there was one
circumstance which gave it a deadliness all its own. Achilles had his
heel. Mr Shute’s vulnerable point was at the other extremity. Instead
of countering, he uttered a cry of agony, and clutched wildly with both
hands at his hat.

He was too late. It fell to the ground and bounded away, with its
proprietor in passionate chase. Arthur snorted and gently chafed his
knuckles.

There was a calm about Mr Shute’s demeanour as, having given his
treasure a final polish and laid it carefully down, he began to advance
on his adversary, which was more than ominous. His lips were a thin
line of steel. The muscles stood out over his jaw-bones. Crouching in
his professional manner, he moved forward softly, like a cat.

And it was at this precise moment, just as the two spectators,
reinforced now by eleven other men of sporting tastes, were
congratulating themselves on their acumen in having stopped to watch,
that Police-Constable Robert Bryce, intruding fourteen stones of bone
and muscle between the combatants, addressed to Mr Shute these
memorable words: ”Ullo, ‘ullo! ‘Ullo, ‘ullo, ‘ul-lo!’

Mr Shute appealed to his sense of justice.

‘The mutt knocked me hat off.’

‘And I’d do it again,’ said Arthur, truculently.

‘Not while I’m here you wouldn’t, young fellow,’ said Mr Bryce, with
decision. ‘I’m surprised at you,’ he went on, pained. ‘And you look a
respectable young chap, too. You pop off.’

A shrill voice from the crowd at this point offered the constable all
cinematograph rights if he would allow the contest to proceed.

‘And you pop off, too, all of you,’ continued Mr Bryce. ‘Blest if I
know what kids are coming to nowadays. And as for you,’ he said,
addressing Mr Shute, ‘all you’ve got to do is to keep that face of
yours closed. That’s what you’ve got to do. I’ve got my eye on you,
mind, and if I catch you a-follerin’ of him’–he jerked his thumb over
his shoulder at Arthur’s departing figure–’I'll pinch you. Sure as
you’re alive.’ He paused. ‘I’d have done it already,’ he added,
pensively, ‘if it wasn’t me birthday.’

       *       *       *       *       *

Arthur Welsh turned sharply. For some time he had been dimly aware that
somebody was calling his name.

‘Oh, Arthur!’

She was breathing quickly. He could see the tears in her eyes.

‘I’ve been running. You walked so fast.’

He stared down at her gloomily.

‘Go away,’ he said. ‘I’ve done with you.’

She clutched at his coat.

‘Arthur, listen–listen! It’s all a mistake. I thought you–you didn’t
care for me any more, and I was miserable, and I wrote to the paper and
asked what should I do, and they said I ought to test you and try and
make you jealous, and that that would relieve my apprehensions. And I
hated it, but I did it, and you didn’t seem to care till now. And you
know that there’s nobody but you.’

‘You–The paper? What?’ he stammered.

‘Yes, yes, yes. I wrote to Fireside Chat, and Dr Cupid said that
when jealousy flew out of the window indifference came in at the door,
and that I must exhibit pleasure in the society of other gentlemen and
mark your demeanour. So I–Oh!’

Arthur, luckier than Mr Shute, was not hampered by a too small silk
hat.

It was a few moments later, as they moved slowly towards the
Flip-Flap–which had seemed to both of them a fitting climax for
the evening’s emotions–that Arthur, fumbling in his waist-coat pocket,
produced a small slip of paper.

‘What’s that?’ Maud asked.

‘Read it,’ said Arthur. ‘It’s from Home Moments, in answer to a
letter I sent them. And,’ he added with heat, ‘I’d like to have five
minutes alone with the chap who wrote it.’

And under the electric light Maud read

ANSWERS TO CORRESPONDENTS

By the Heart Specialist

Arthur W.–Jealousy, Arthur W., is not only the most wicked, but the
most foolish of passions. Shakespeare says:

  It is the green-eyed monster, which doth mock
  The meat it feeds on.

You admit that you have frequently caused great distress to the young
lady of your affections by your exhibition of this weakness. Exactly.
There is nothing a girl dislikes or despises more than jealousy. Be a
man, Arthur W. Fight against it. You may find it hard at first, but
persevere. Keep a smiling face. If she seems to enjoy talking to other
men, show no resentment. Be merry and bright. Believe me, it is the
only way.

In the crowd that strolled on the Promenade des Etrangers, enjoying the
morning sunshine, there were some who had come to Roville for their
health, others who wished to avoid the rigours of the English spring,
and many more who liked the place because it was cheap and close to
Monte Carlo.

None of these motives had brought George Albert Balmer. He was there
because, three weeks before, Harold Flower had called him a vegetable.

What is it that makes men do perilous deeds? Why does a man go over
Niagara Falls in a barrel? Not for his health. Half an hour with a
skipping-rope would be equally beneficial to his liver. No; in nine
cases out of ten he does it to prove to his friends and relations that
he is not the mild, steady-going person they have always thought him.
Observe the music-hall acrobat as he prepares to swing from the roof by
his eyelids. His gaze sweeps the house. ‘It isn’t true,’ it seems to
say. ‘I’m not a jelly-fish.’

It was so with George Balmer.

In London at the present moment there exist some thousands of
respectable, neatly-dressed, mechanical, unenterprising young men,
employed at modest salaries by various banks, corporations, stores,
shops, and business firms. They are put to work when young, and they
stay put. They are mussels. Each has his special place on the rock, and
remains glued to it all his life.

To these thousands George Albert Balmer belonged. He differed in no
detail from the rest of the great army. He was as respectable, as
neatly-dressed, as mechanical, and as unenterprising. His life was
bounded, east, west, north, and south, by the Planet Insurance Company,
which employed him; and that there were other ways in which a man might
fulfil himself than by giving daily imitations behind a counter of a
mechanical figure walking in its sleep had never seriously crossed his
mind.

On George, at the age of twenty-four, there descended, out of a dear
sky, a legacy of a thousand pounds.

Physically, he remained unchanged beneath the shock. No trace of hauteur
crept into his bearing. When the head of his department, calling his
attention to a technical flaw in his work of the previous afternoon,
addressed him as ‘Here, you–young what’s-your-confounded-name!’ he
did not point out that this was no way to speak to a gentleman of
property. You would have said that the sudden smile of Fortune had
failed to unsettle him.

But all the while his mind, knocked head over heels, was lying in a
limp heap, wondering what had struck it.

To him, in his dazed state, came Harold Flower. Harold, messenger to the
Planet Insurance Company and one of the most assiduous money-borrowers
in London, had listened to the office gossip about the legacy as if to
the strains of some grand, sweet anthem. He was a bibulous individual
of uncertain age, who, in the intervals of creeping about his duties,
kept an eye open for possible additions to his staff of creditors. Most
of the clerks at the Planet had been laid under contribution by him in
their time, for Harold had a way with him that was good for threepence
any pay-day, and it seemed to him that things had come to a sorry pass
if he could not extract something special from Plutocrat Balmer in his
hour of rejoicing.

Throughout the day he shadowed George, and, shortly before closing-time,
backed him into a corner, tapped him on the chest, and requested the
temporary loan of a sovereign.

In the same breath he told him that he was a gentleman, that a
messenger’s life was practically that of a blanky slave, and that a
young man of spirit who wished to add to his already large fortune
would have a bit on Giant Gooseberry for the City and Suburban. He then
paused for a reply.

Now, all through the day George had been assailed by a steady stream of
determined ear-biters. Again and again he had been staked out as an
ore-producing claim by men whom it would have been impolitic to rebuff.
He was tired of lending, and in a mood to resent unauthorized demands.
Harold Flower’s struck him as particularly unauthorized. He said so.

It took some little time to convince Mr Flower that he really meant it,
but, realizing at last the grim truth, he drew a long breath and spoke.

‘Ho!’ he said. ‘Afraid you can’t spare it, can’t you? A gentleman comes
and asks you with tack and civility for a temp’y loan of about ‘arf
nothing, and all you do is to curse and swear at him. Do you know what
I call you–you and your thousand quid? A tuppenny millionaire, that’s
what I call you. Keep your blooming money. That’s all I ask.
Keep it. Much good you’ll get out of it. I know your sort.
You’ll never have any pleasure of it. Not you. You’re the careful sort.
You’ll put it into Consols, you will, and draw your three-ha’pence
a year. Money wasn’t meant for your kind. It don’t mean nothing
to you. You ain’t got the go in you to appreciate it. A vegetable–that’s
all you are. A blanky little vegetable. A blanky little gor-blimey
vegetable. I seen turnips with more spirit in ‘em that what you’ve got.
And Brussels sprouts. Yes, and parsnips.’

It is difficult to walk away with dignity when a man with a hoarse
voice and a watery eye is comparing you to your disadvantage with a
parsnip, and George did not come anywhere near achieving the feat. But
he extricated himself somehow, and went home brooding.

Mr Flower’s remarks rankled particularly because it so happened that
Consols were the identical investment on which he had decided. His
Uncle Robert, with whom he lived as a paying guest, had strongly
advocated them. Also they had suggested themselves to him
independently.

But Harold Flower’s words gave him pause. They made him think. For two
weeks and some days he thought, flushing uncomfortably whenever he met
that watery but contemptuous eye. And then came the day of his annual
vacation, and with it inspiration. He sought out the messenger, whom
till now he had carefully avoided.

‘Er–Flower,’ he said.

‘Me lord?’

‘I am taking my holiday tomorrow. Will you forward my letters? I will
wire you the address. I have not settled on my hotel yet. I am popping
over’–he paused–’I am popping over,’ he resumed, carelessly, ‘to
Monte.’

‘To who?’ inquired Mr Flower.

‘To Monte. Monte Carlo, you know.’

Mr Flower blinked twice rapidly, then pulled himself together.

‘Yus, I don’t think!’ he said.

And that settled it.

The George who strolled that pleasant morning on the Promenade des
Strangers differed both externally and internally from the George who
had fallen out with Harold Flower in the offices of the Planet
Insurance Company. For a day after his arrival he had clung to the garb
of middle-class England. On the second he had discovered that this was
unpleasantly warm and, worse, conspicuous. At the Casino Municipale
that evening he had observed a man wearing an arrangement in bright
yellow velvet without attracting attention. The sight had impressed
him. Next morning he had emerged from his hotel in a flannel suit so
light that it had been unanimously condemned as impossible by his Uncle
Robert, his Aunt Louisa, his Cousins Percy, Eva, and Geraldine, and his
Aunt Louisa’s mother, and at a shop in the Rue Lasalle had spent twenty
francs on a Homburg hat. And Roville had taken it without blinking.

Internally his alteration had been even more considerable. Roville was
not Monte Carlo (in which gay spot he had remained only long enough to
send a picture post-card to Harold Flower before retiring down the
coast to find something cheaper), but it had been a revelation to him.
For the first time in his life he was seeing colour, and it intoxicated
him. The silky blueness of the sea was startling. The pure white of the
great hotels along the promenade and the Casino Municipale fascinated
him. He was dazzled. At the Casino the pillars were crimson and cream,
the tables sky-blue and pink. Seated on a green-and-white striped chair
he watched a revue, of which from start to finish he understood
but one word–’out’, to wit–absorbed in the doings of a red-moustached
gentleman in blue who wrangled in rapid French with a black-moustached
gentleman in yellow, while a snow-white commere and a compere
in a mauve flannel suit looked on at the brawl.

It was during that evening that there flitted across his mind the first
suspicion he had ever had that his Uncle Robert’s mental outlook was a
little limited.

And now, as he paced the promenade, watching the stir and bustle of the
crowd, he definitely condemned his absent relative as a narrow-minded
chump.

If the brown boots which he had polished so assiduously in his bedroom
that morning with the inside of a banana-skin, and which now gleamed
for the first time on his feet, had a fault, it was that they were a
shade tight. To promenade with the gay crowd, therefore, for any length
of time was injudicious; and George, warned by a red-hot shooting
sensation that the moment had arrived for rest, sank down gracefully on
a seat, to rise at once on discovering that between him and it was
something oblong with sharp corners.

It was a book–a fat new novel. George drew it out and inspected it.
There was a name inside–Julia Waveney.

George, from boyhood up, had been raised in that school of thought
whose watchword is ‘Findings are keepings’, and, having ascertained
that there was no address attached to the name, he was on the point, I
regret to say, of pouching the volume, which already he looked upon as
his own, when a figure detached itself from the crowd, and he found
himself gazing into a pair of grey and, to his startled conscience,
accusing eyes.

‘Oh, thank you! I was afraid it was lost.’

She was breathing quickly, and there was a slight flush on her face.
She took the book from George’s unresisting hand and rewarded him with
a smile.

‘I missed it, and I couldn’t think where I could have left it. Then I
remembered that I had been sitting here. Thank you so much.’

She smiled again, turned, and walked away, leaving George to reckon up
all the social solecisms he had contrived to commit in the space of a
single moment. He had remained seated, he reminded himself, throughout
the interview; one. He had not raised his hat, that fascinating Homburg
simply made to be raised with a debonair swish under such conditions;
two. Call it three, because he ought to have raised it twice. He had
gaped like a fool; four. And, five, he had not uttered a single word of
acknowledgement in reply to her thanks.

Five vast bloomers in under a minute I What could she have thought of
him? The sun ceased to shine. What sort of an utter outsider could she
have considered him? An east wind sprang up. What kind of a Cockney
bounder and cad could she have taken him for? The sea turned to an oily
grey; and George, rising, strode back in the direction of his hotel in
a mood that made him forget that he had brown boots on at all.

His mind was active. Several times since he had come to Roville he had
been conscious of a sensation which he could not understand, a vague,
yearning sensation, a feeling that, splendid as everything was in this
paradise of colour, there was nevertheless something lacking. Now he
understood. You had to be in love to get the full flavour of these
vivid whites and blues. He was getting it now. His mood of dejection
had passed swiftly, to be succeeded by an exhilaration such as he had
only felt once in his life before, about half-way through a dinner
given to the Planet staff on a princely scale by a retiring general
manager.

He was exalted. Nothing seemed impossible to him. He would meet the
girl again on the promenade, he told himself, dashingly renew the
acquaintance, show her that he was not the gaping idiot he had
appeared. His imagination donned its seven-league boots. He saw himself
proposing–eloquently–accepted, married, living happily ever after.

It occurred to him that an excellent first move would be to find out
where she was staying. He bought a paper and turned to the list of
visitors. Miss Waveney. Where was it. He ran his eye down the column.

And then, with a crash, down came his air-castles in hideous ruin.

‘Hotel Cercle de la Mediterranee. Lord Frederick Weston. The Countess
of Southborne and the Hon. Adelaide Liss. Lady Julia Waveney–’

He dropped the paper and hobbled on to his hotel. His boots had begun
to hurt him again, for he no longer walked on air.

       *       *       *       *       *

At Roville there are several institutions provided by the municipality
for the purpose of enabling visitors temporarily to kill thought. Chief
among these is the Casino Municipale, where, for a price, the sorrowful
may obtain oblivion by means of the ingenious game of boule.
Disappointed lovers at Roville take to boule as in other places
they might take to drink. It is a fascinating game. A wooden-faced high
priest flicks a red india-rubber ball into a polished oaken bowl, at
the bottom of which are holes, each bearing a number up to nine. The
ball swings round and round like a planet, slows down, stumbles among
the holes, rests for a moment in the one which you have backed, then
hops into the next one, and you lose. If ever there was a pastime
calculated to place young Adam Cupid in the background, this is it.

To the boule tables that night fled George with his hopeless
passion. From the instant when he read the fatal words in the paper he
had recognized its hopelessness. All other obstacles he had been
prepared to overcome, but a title–no. He had no illusions as to his
place in the social scale. The Lady Julias of this world did not marry
insurance clerks, even if their late mother’s cousin had left them a
thousand pounds. That day-dream was definitely ended. It was a thing of
the past–all over except the heartache.

By way of a preliminary sip of the waters of Lethe, before beginning
the full draught, he placed a franc on number seven and lost. Another
franc on six suffered the same fate. He threw a five-franc cart-wheel
recklessly on evens. It won.

It was enough. Thrusting his hat on the back of his head and wedging
himself firmly against the table, he settled down to make a night of
it.

There is nothing like boule for absorbing the mind. It was some
time before George became aware that a hand was prodding him in the
ribs. He turned, irritated. Immediately behind him, filling the
landscape, were two stout Frenchmen. But, even as he searched his brain
for words that would convey to them in their native tongue his
disapproval of this jostling, he perceived that they, though stout and
in a general way offensive, were in this particular respect guiltless.
The prodding hand belonged to somebody invisible behind them. It was
small and gloved, a woman’s hand. It held a five-franc piece.

Then in a gap, caused by a movement in the crowd, he saw the face of
Lady Julia Waveney.

She smiled at him.

‘On eight, please, would you mind?’ he heard her say, and then the
crowd shifted again and she disappeared, leaving him holding the coin,
his mind in a whirl.

The game of boule demands undivided attention from its devotees.
To play with a mind full of other matters is a mistake. This mistake
George made. Hardly conscious of what he was doing, he flung the coin
on the board. She had asked him to place it on eight, and he thought
that he had placed it on eight. That, in reality, blinded by emotion,
he had placed it on three was a fact which came home to him neither
then nor later.

Consequently, when the ball ceased to roll and a sepulchral voice
croaked the news that eight was the winning number, he fixed on the
croupier a gaze that began by being joyful and expectant and ended, the
croupier remaining entirely unresponsive, by being wrathful.

He leaned towards him.

‘Monsieur,’ he said. ‘Moi! J’ai jete cinq francs sur huit!’

The croupier was a man with a pointed moustache and an air of having
seen all the sorrow and wickedness that there had ever been in the
world. He twisted the former and permitted a faint smile to deepen the
melancholy of the latter, but he did not speak.

George moved to his side. The two stout Frenchmen had strolled off,
leaving elbow-room behind them.

He tapped the croupier on the shoulder.

‘I say,’ he said. ‘What’s the game? J’ai jete cinq francs sur
huit, I tell you, moi!‘

A forgotten idiom from the days of boyhood and French exercises came to
him.

‘Moi qui parle,’ he added.

‘Messieurs, faites vos jeux,’ crooned the croupier, in a
detached manner.

To the normal George, as to most Englishmen of his age, the one
cardinal rule in life was at all costs to avoid rendering himself
conspicuous in public. Than George normal, no violet that ever hid
itself in a mossy bank could have had a greater distaste for scenes.
But tonight he was not normal. Roville and its colour had wrought a
sort of fever in his brain. Boule had increased it. And love had
caused it to rage. If this had been entirely his own affair it is
probable that the croupier’s frigid calm would have quelled him and he
would have retired, fermenting but baffled. But it was not his own
affair. He was fighting the cause of the only girl in the world. She
had trusted him. Could he fail her? No, he was dashed if he could. He
would show her what he was made of. His heart swelled within him. A
thrill permeated his entire being, starting at his head and running out
at his heels. He felt tremendous–a sort of blend of Oliver Cromwell, a
Berserk warrior, and Sir Galahad.

‘Monsieur,’ he said again. ‘Hi! What about it?’

This time the croupier did speak.

‘C’est fini,’ he said; and print cannot convey the pensive scorn
of his voice. It stung George, in his exalted mood, like a blow.
Finished, was it? All right, now he would show them. They had asked for
it, and now they should get it. How much did it come to? Five francs
the stake had been, and you got seven times your stake. And you got
your stake back. He was nearly forgetting that. Forty francs in all,
then. Two of those gold what-d’you-call’ems, in fact. Very well, then.

He leaned forward quickly across the croupier, snatched the lid off the
gold tray, and removed two louis.

It is a remarkable fact in life that the scenes which we have rehearsed
in our minds never happen as we have pictured them happening. In the
present case, for instance, it had been George’s intention to handle
the subsequent stages of this little dispute with an easy dignity. He
had proposed, the money obtained, to hand it over to its rightful
owner, raise his hat, and retire with an air, a gallant champion of the
oppressed. It was probably about one-sixteenth of a second after his
hand had closed on the coins that he realized in the most vivid manner
that these were not the lines on which the incident was to develop,
and, with all his heart, he congratulated himself on having discarded
those brown boots in favour of a worn but roomy pair of gent’s Oxfords.

For a moment there was a pause and a silence of utter astonishment,
while the minds of those who had witnessed the affair adjusted
themselves to the marvel, and then the world became full of starting
eyes, yelling throats, and clutching hands. From all over the casino
fresh units swarmed like bees to swell the crowd at the centre of
things. Promenaders ceased to promenade, waiters to wait. Elderly
gentlemen sprang on to tables.

But in that momentary pause George had got off the mark. The table at
which he had been standing was the one nearest to the door, and he had
been on the door side of it. As the first eyes began to start, the
first throats to yell, and the first hands to clutch, he was passing
the counter of the money-changer. He charged the swing-door at full
speed, and, true to its mission, it swung. He had a vague glimpse from
the corner of his eye of the hat-and-cloak counter, and then he was in
the square with the cold night breeze blowing on his forehead and the
stars winking down from the blue sky.

A paper-seller on the pavement, ever the man of business, stepped
forward and offered him the Paris edition of the Daily Mail,
and, being in the direct line of transit, shot swiftly into the road
and fell into a heap, while George, shaken but going well, turned off
to the left, where there seemed to be rather more darkness than
anywhere else.

And then the casino disgorged the pursuers.

To George, looking hastily over his shoulder, there seemed a thousand
of them. The square rang with their cries. He could not understand
them, but gathered that they were uncomplimentary. At any rate, they
stimulated a little man in evening dress strolling along the pavement
towards him, to become suddenly animated and to leap from side to side
with outstretched arms.

Panic makes Harlequin three-quarters of us all. For one who had never
played Rugby football George handled the situation well. He drew the
defence with a feint to the left, then, swerving to the right, shot
past into the friendly darkness. From behind came the ringing of feet
and an evergrowing din.

It is one of the few compensations a fugitive pursued by a crowd enjoys
that, while he has space for his manoeuvres, those who pursue are
hampered by their numbers. In the little regiment that pounded at his
heels it is probable that there were many faster runners than George.
On the other hand, there were many slower, and in the early stages of
the chase these impeded their swifter brethren. At the end of the first
half-minute, therefore, George, not sparing himself, had drawn well
ahead, and for the first time found leisure for connected thought.

His brain became preternaturally alert, so that when, rounding a
corner, he perceived entering the main road from a side-street in front
of him a small knot of pedestrians, he did not waver, but was seized
with a keen spasm of presence of mind. Without pausing in his stride,
he pointed excitedly before him, and at the same moment shouted the
words, ‘La! La! Vite! Vite!‘

His stock of French was small, but it ran to that, and for his purpose
it was ample. The French temperament is not stolid. When the French
temperament sees a man running rapidly and pointing into the middle
distance and hears him shouting, ‘La! La! Vite! Vite!‘ it does
not stop to make formal inquiries. It sprints like a mustang. It did so
now, with the happy result that a moment later George was racing down
the road, the centre and recognized leader of an enthusiastic band of
six, which, in the next twenty yards, swelled to eleven.

Five minutes later, in a wine-shop near the harbour, he was sipping the
first glass of a bottle of cheap but comforting vin ordinaire
while he explained to the interested proprietor, by means of a mixture
of English, broken French, and gestures that he had been helping to
chase a thief, but had been forced by fatigue to retire prematurely for
refreshment. The proprietor gathered, however, that he had every
confidence in the zeal of his still active colleagues.

It is convincing evidence of the extent to which love had triumphed
over prudence in George’s soul that the advisability of lying hid in
his hotel on the following day did not even cross his mind. Immediately
after breakfast, or what passed for it at Roville, he set out for the
Hotel Cercle de la Mediterranee to hand over the two louis to their
owner.

Lady Julia, he was informed on arrival, was out. The porter, politely
genial, advised monsieur to seek her on the Promenade des Etrangers.

She was there, on the same seat where she had left the book.

‘Good morning,’ he said.

She had not seen him coming, and she started at his voice. The flush
was back on her face as she turned to him. There was a look of
astonishment in the grey eyes.

He held out the two louis.

‘I couldn’t give them to you last night,’ he said.

A horrible idea seized him. It had not occurred to him before.

‘I say,’ he stammered–’I say, I hope you don’t think I had run off
with your winnings for good! The croupier wouldn’t give them up, you
know, so I had to grab them and run. They came to exactly two louis.
You put on five francs, you know, and you get seven times your stake.
I–’

An elderly lady seated on the bench, who had loomed from behind a
parasol towards the middle of these remarks, broke abruptly into
speech.

‘Who is this young man?’

George looked at her, startled. He had hardly been aware of her
presence till now. Rapidly he diagnosed her as a mother–or aunt. She
looked more like an aunt. Of course, it must seem odd to her, his
charging in like this, a perfect stranger, and beginning to chat with
her daughter, or niece, or whatever it was. He began to justify
himself.

‘I met your–this young lady’–something told him that was not the
proper way to put it, but hang it, what else could he say?–’at the
casino last night.’

He stopped. The effect of his words on the elderly lady was remarkable.
Her face seemed to turn to stone and become all sharp points. She
stared at the girl.

‘So you were gambling at the casino last night?’ she said.

She rose from the seat, a frozen statue of displeasure.

‘I shall return to the hotel. When you have arranged your financial
transactions with your–friend, I should like to speak to you. You will
find me in my room.’

George looked after her dumbly.

The girl spoke, in a curiously strained voice, as if she were speaking
to herself.

‘I don’t care,’ she said. ‘I’m glad.’

George was concerned.

‘I’m afraid your mother is offended, Lady Julia.’

There was a puzzled look in her grey eyes as they met his. Then they
lit up. She leaned back in the seat and began to laugh, softly at
first, and then with a note that jarred on George. Whatever the humour
of the situation–and he had not detected it at present–this mirth, he
felt, was unnatural and excessive.

She checked herself at length, and a flush crept over her face.

‘I don’t know why I did that,’ she said, abruptly. ‘I’m sorry. There
was nothing funny in what you said. But I’m not Lady Julia, and I have
no mother. That was Lady Julia who has just gone, and I am nothing more
important than her companion.’

‘Her companion!’

‘I had better say her late companion. It will soon be that. I had
strict orders, you see, not to go near the casino without her–and I
went.’

‘Then–then I’ve lost you your job–I mean, your position! If it hadn’t
been for me she wouldn’t have known. I–’

‘You have done me a great service,’ she said. ‘You have cut the painter
for me when I have been trying for months to muster up the courage to
cut it for myself. I don’t suppose you know what it is to get into a
groove and long to get out of it and not have the pluck. My brother has
been writing to me for a long time to join him in Canada. And I hadn’t
the courage, or the energy, or whatever it is that takes people out of
grooves. I knew I was wasting my life, but I was fairly happy–at
least, not unhappy; so–well, there it was. I suppose women are like
that.’

‘And now–?’

‘And now you have jerked me out of the groove. I shall go out to Bob by
the first boat.’

He scratched the concrete thoughtfully with his stick.

‘It’s a hard life out there,’ he said.

‘But it is a life.’

He looked at the strollers on the promenade. They seemed very far
away–in another world.

‘Look here,’ he said, hoarsely, and stopped. ‘May I sit down?’ he
asked, abruptly. ‘I’ve got something to say, and I can’t say it when
I’m looking at you.’

He sat down, and fastened his gaze on a yacht that swayed at anchor
against the cloudless sky.

‘Look here,’ he said. ‘Will you marry me?’

He heard her turn quickly, and felt her eyes upon him. He went on
doggedly.

‘I know,’ he said, ‘we only met yesterday. You probably think I’m mad.’

‘I don’t think you’re mad,’ she said, quietly. ‘I only think you’re too
quixotic. You’re sorry for me and you are letting a kind impulse carry
you away, as you did last night at the casino. It’s like you.’

For the first time he turned towards her.

‘I don’t know what you suppose I am,’ he said, ‘but I’ll tell you. I’m
a clerk in an insurance office. I get a hundred a year and ten days’
holiday. Did you take me for a millionaire? If I am, I’m only a
tuppenny one. Somebody left me a thousand pounds a few weeks ago.
That’s how I come to be here. Now you know all about me. I don’t know
anything about you except that I shall never love anybody else. Marry
me, and we’ll go to Canada together. You say I’ve helped you out of
your groove. Well, I’ve only one chance of getting out of mine, and
that’s through you. If you won’t help me, I don’t care if I get out of
it or not. Will you pull me out?’

She did not speak. She sat looking out to sea, past the many-coloured
crowd.

He watched her face, but her hat shaded her eyes and he could read
nothing in it.

And then, suddenly, without quite knowing how it had got there, he
found that her hand was in his, and he was clutching it as a drowning
man clutches a rope.

He could see her eyes now, and there was a message in them that set his
heart racing. A great content filled him. She was so companionable,
such a friend. It seemed incredible to him that it was only yesterday
that they had met for the first time.

‘And now,’ she said, ‘would you mind telling me your name?’

       *       *       *       *       *

The little waves murmured as they rolled lazily up the beach. Somewhere
behind the trees in the gardens a band had begun to play. The breeze,
blowing in from the blue Mediterranean, was charged with salt and
happiness. And from a seat on the promenade, a young man swept the
crowd with a defiant gaze.

‘It isn’t true,’ it seemed to say. ‘I’m not a jelly-fish.’

Once upon a time there was erected in Longacre Square, New York, a
large white statue, labelled ‘Our City’, the figure of a woman in
Grecian robes holding aloft a shield. Critical citizens objected to it
for various reasons, but its real fault was that its symbolism was
faulty. The sculptor should have represented New York as a conjuror in
evening dress, smiling blandly as he changed a rabbit into a bowl of
goldfish. For that, above all else, is New York’s speciality. It
changes.

Between 1 May, when she stepped off the train, and 16 May, when she
received Eddy Moore’s letter containing the information that he had
found her a post as stenographer in the office of Joe Rendal, it had
changed Mary Hill quite remarkably.

Mary was from Dunsterville, which is in Canada. Emigrations from
Dunsterville were rare. It is a somnolent town; and, as a rule, young
men born there follow in their father’s footsteps, working on the
paternal farm or helping in the paternal store. Occasionally a daring
spirit will break away, but seldom farther than Montreal. Two only of
the younger generation, Joe Rendal and Eddy Moore, had set out to make
their fortunes in New York; and both, despite the gloomy prophecies of
the village sages, had prospered.

Mary, third and last emigrant, did not aspire to such heights. All she
demanded from New York for the present was that it should pay her a
living wage, and to that end, having studied by stealth typewriting and
shorthand, she had taken the plunge, thrilling with excitement and the
romance of things; and New York had looked at her, raised its eyebrows,
and looked away again. If every city has a voice, New York’s at that
moment had said ‘Huh!’ This had damped Mary. She saw that there were
going to be obstacles. For one thing, she had depended so greatly on
Eddy Moore, and he had failed her. Three years before, at a church
festival, he had stated specifically that he would die for her. Perhaps
he was still willing to do that–she had not inquired–but, at any
rate, he did not see his way to employing her as a secretary. He had
been very nice about it. He had smiled kindly, taken her address, and
said he would do what he could, and had then hurried off to meet a man
at lunch. But he had not given her a position. And as the days went by
and she found no employment, and her little stock of money dwindled,
and no word came from Eddy, New York got to work and changed her
outlook on things wonderfully. What had seemed romantic became merely
frightening. What had been exciting gave her a feeling of dazed
helplessness.

But it was not until Eddy’s letter came that she realized the
completeness of the change. On 1 May she would have thanked Eddy
politely for his trouble, adding, however, that she would really prefer
not to meet poor Joe again. On 16 May she welcomed him as something
Heaven-sent. The fact that she was to be employed outweighed a
thousand-fold the fact that her employer was to be Joe.

It was not that she disliked Joe. She was sorry for him.

She remembered Joe, a silent, shambling youth, all hands, feet, and
shyness, who had spent most of his spare time twisting his fingers and
staring adoringly at her from afar. The opinion of those in the social
whirl of Dunsterville had been that it was his hopeless passion for her
that had made him fly to New York. It would be embarrassing meeting him
again. It would require tact to discourage his silent worshipping
without wounding him more deeply. She hated hurting people.

But, even at the cost of that, she must accept the post. To refuse
meant ignominious retreat to Dunsterville, and from that her pride
revolted. She must revisit Dunsterville in triumph or not at all.

Joe Rendal’s office was in the heart of the financial district,
situated about half-way up a building that, to Mary, reared amidst the
less impressive architecture of her home-town, seemed to reach nearly
to the sky. A proud-looking office-boy, apparently baffled and
mortified by the information that she had an appointment, took her
name, and she sat down, filled with a fine mixed assortment of
emotions, to wait.

For the first time since her arrival in New York she felt almost easy
in her mind. New York, with its shoving, jostling, hurrying crowds; a
giant fowl-run, full of human fowls scurrying to and fro; clucking,
ever on the look-out for some desired morsel, and ever ready to swoop
down and snatch it from its temporary possessor, had numbed her. But
now she felt a slackening of the strain. New York might be too much for
her, but she could cope with Joe.

The haughty boy returned. Mr Rendal was disengaged. She rose and went
into an inner room, where a big man was seated at a desk.

It was Joe. There was no doubt about that. But it was not the Joe she
remembered, he of the twisted ringers and silent stare. In his case,
New York had conjured effectively. He was better-looking, better-dressed,
improved in every respect. In the old days one had noticed the hands
and feet and deduced the presence of Joe somewhere in the background.
Now they were merely adjuncts. It was with a rush of indignation that
Mary found herself bucolic and awkward. Awkward with Joe! It was an
outrage.

His manner heightened the feeling. If he had given the least sign of
embarrassment she might have softened towards him. He showed no
embarrassment whatever. He was very much at his ease. He was cheerful.
He was even flippant.

‘Welcome to our beautiful little city,’ he said.

Mary was filled with a helpless anger. What right had he to ignore the
past in this way, to behave as if her presence had never reduced him to
pulp?

‘Won’t you sit down?’ he went on. ‘It’s splendid, seeing you again,
Mary. You’re looking very well. How long have you been in New York?
Eddy tells me you want to be taken on as a secretary. As it happens,
there is a vacancy for just that in this office. A big, wide vacancy,
left by a lady who departed yester-day in a shower of burning words and
hairpins. She said she would never return, and between ourselves, that
was the right guess. Would you mind letting me see what you can do?
Will you take this letter down?’

Certainly there was something compelling about this new Joe. Mary took
the pencil and pad which he offered–and she took them meekly. Until
this moment she had always been astonished by the reports which
filtered through to Dunsterville of his success in the big city. Of
course, nobody had ever doubted his perseverance; but it takes
something more than perseverance to fight New York fairly and squarely,
and win. And Joe had that something. He had force. He was sure of
himself.

‘Read it please,’ he said, when he had finished dictating. ‘Yes, that’s
all right. You’ll do.’

For a moment Mary was on the point of refusing. A mad desire gripped
her to assert herself, to make plain her resentment at this revolt of
the serf. Then she thought of those scuttling, clucking crowds, and her
heart failed her.

‘Thank you,’ she said, in a small voice.

As she spoke the door opened.

‘Well, well, well!’ said Joe. ‘Here we all are! Come in, Eddy. Mary
has just been showing me what she can do.’

If time had done much for Joe, it had done more for his fellow-emigrant,
Eddy Moore. He had always been good-looking and–according to local
standards–presentable. Tall, slim, with dark eyes that made you catch
your breath when they looked into yours, and a ready flow of speech,
he had been Dunsterville’s prize exhibit. And here he was with all his
excellence heightened and accentuated by the polish of the city. He
had filled out. His clothes were wonderful. And his voice, when he
spoke, had just that same musical quality.

‘So you and Joe have fixed it up? Capital! Shall we all go and lunch
somewhere?’

‘Got an appointment,’ said Joe. ‘I’m late already. Be here at two
sharp, Mary.’ He took up his hat and went out.

The effect of Eddy’s suavity had been to make Mary forget the position
in which she now stood to Joe. Eddy had created for the moment quite an
old-time atmosphere of good fellowship. She hated Joe for shattering
this and reminding her that she was his employee. Her quick flush was
not lost on Eddy.

‘Dear old Joe is a little abrupt sometimes,’ he said. ‘But–’

‘He’s a pig!’ said Mary, defiantly.

‘But you mustn’t mind it. New York makes men like that.’

‘It hasn’t made you–not to me, at any rate. Oh, Eddy,’ she cried,
impulsively, ‘I’m frightened. I wish I had never come here. You’re the
only thing in this whole city that isn’t hateful.’

‘Poor little girl!’ he said. ‘Never mind. Let me take you and give you
some lunch. Come along.’

Eddy was soothing. There was no doubt of that. He stayed her with
minced chicken and comforted her with soft shelled crab. His voice was
a lullaby, lulling her Joe-harassed nerves to rest.

They discussed the dear old days. A carper might have said that Eddy
was the least bit vague on the subject of the dear old days. A carper
might have pointed out that the discussion of the dear old days, when
you came to analyse it, was practically a monologue on Mary’s part,
punctuated with musical ‘Yes, yes’s’ from her companion. But who cares
what carpers think? Mary herself had no fault to find. In the roar of
New York Dunsterville had suddenly become very dear to her, and she
found in Eddy a sympathetic soul to whom she could open her heart.

‘Do you remember the old school, Eddy, and how you and I used to walk
there together, you carrying my dinner-basket and helping me over
the fences?’

‘Yes, yes.’

‘And we’d gather hickory-nuts and persimmons?’

‘Persimmons, yes,’ murmured Eddy.

‘Do you remember the prizes the teacher gave the one who got best marks
in the spelling class? And the treats at Christmas, when we all got
twelve sticks of striped peppermint candy? And drawing the water out of
the well in that old wooden bucket in the winter, and pouring it out in
the playground and skating on it when it froze? And wasn’t it cold in
the winter, too! Do you remember the stove in the schoolroom? How we
used to crowd round it!’

‘The stove, yes,’ said Eddy, dreamily. ‘Ah, yes, the stove. Yes, yes.
Those were the dear old days!’ Mary leaned her elbows on the table and
her chin on her hands, and looked across at him with sparkling eyes.

‘Oh, Eddy,’ she said, ‘you don’t know how nice it is to meet someone
who remembers all about those old times! I felt a hundred million miles
from Dunsterville before I saw you, and I was homesick. But now it’s
all different.’

‘Poor little Mary!’

‘Do you remember–?’

He glanced at his watch with some haste.

‘It’s two o’clock,’ he said. ‘I think we should be going.’

Mary’s face fell.

‘Back to that pig, Joe! I hate him. And I’ll show him that I do!’

Eddy looked almost alarmed.

‘I–I shouldn’t do that,’ he said. ‘I don’t think I should do that.
It’s only his manner at first. You’ll get to like him better. He’s an
awfully good fellow really, Joe. And if you–er–quarrelled with him
you might find it hard–what I mean is, it’s not so easy to pick up
jobs in New York, I shouldn’t like to think of you, Mary,’ he added,
tenderly, ‘hunting for a job–tired–perhaps hungry–’

Mary’s eyes filled with tears.

‘How good you are, Eddy!’ she said. ‘And I’m horrid, grumbling when I
ought to be thanking you for getting me the place. I’ll be nice to
him–if I can–as nice as I can.’

‘That’s right. Do try. And we shall be seeing quite a lot of each
other. We must often lunch together.’

Mary re-entered the office not without some trepidation. Two hours ago
it would have seemed absurd to be frightened of Joe, but Eddy had
brought it home to her again how completely she was dependent on her
former serf’s good-will. And he had told her to be back at two sharp,
and it was now nearly a quarter past.

The outer office was empty. She went on into the inner room.

She had speculated as she went on Joe’s probable attitude. She had
pictured him as annoyed, even rude. What she was not prepared for was
to find him on all fours, grunting and rooting about in a pile of
papers. She stopped short.

‘What are you doing?’ she gasped.

‘I can’t think what you meant,’ he said. ‘There must be some mistake.
I’m not even a passable pig. I couldn’t deceive a novice.’

He rose and dusted his knees.

‘Yet you seemed absolutely certain in the restaurant just now. Did you
notice that you were sitting near to a sort of jungle of potted palms?
I was lunching immediately on the other side of the forest.’

Mary drew herself up and fixed him with an eye that shone with rage and
scorn.

‘Eavesdropper!’ she cried.

‘Not guilty,’ he said, cheerfully. ‘I hadn’t a notion that you were
there till you shouted, “That pig Joe, I hate him!” and almost directly
afterwards I left.’

‘I did not shout.’

‘My dear girl, you cracked a wine-glass at my table. The man I was
lunching with jumped clean out of his seat and swallowed his cigar. You
ought to be more careful!’

Mary bit her lip.

‘And now, I suppose, you are going to dismiss me?’

‘Dismiss you? Not much. The thing has simply confirmed my high opinion
of your qualifications. The ideal secretary must have two qualities:
she must be able to sec. and she must think her employer a pig. You
fill the bill. Would you mind taking down this letter?’

       *       *       *       *       *

Life was very swift and stimulating for Mary during the early days of
her professional career. The inner workings of a busy broker’s office
are always interesting to the stranger. She had never understood how
business men made their money, and she did not understand now; but it
did not take her long to see that if they were all like Joe Rendal they
earned it. There were days of comparative calm. There were days that
were busy. And there were days that packed into the space of a few
hours the concentrated essence of a music-hall knock-about sketch, an
earthquake, a football scrummage, and the rush-hour on the Tube; when
the office was full of shouting men, when strange figures dived in and
out and banged doors like characters in an old farce, and Harold, the
proud office-boy, lost his air of being on the point of lunching with a
duke at the club and perspired like one of the proletariat. On these
occasions you could not help admiring Joe, even if you hated him. When
a man is doing his own job well, it is impossible not to admire him.
And Joe did his job well, superlatively well. He was everywhere. Where
others trotted, he sprang. Where others raised their voices, he yelled.
Where others were in two places at once, he was in three and moving
towards a fourth.

These upheavals had the effect on Mary of making her feel curiously
linked to the firm. On ordinary days work was work, but on these
occasions of storm and stress it was a fight, and she looked on every
member of the little band grouped under the banner of J. Rendal as a
brother-in-arms. For Joe, while the battle raged, she would have done
anything. Her resentment at being under his orders vanished completely.
He was her captain, and she a mere unit in the firing line. It was a
privilege to do what she was told. And if the order came sharp and
abrupt, that only meant that the fighting was fierce and that she was
all the more fortunate in being in a position to be of service.

The reaction would come with the end of the fight. Her private
hostilities began when the firm’s ceased. She became an ordinary
individual again, and so did Joe. And to Joe, as an ordinary
individual, she objected. There was an indefinable something in his
manner which jarred on her. She came to the conclusion that it was
principally his insufferable good-humour. If only he would lose his
temper with her now and then, she felt he would be bearable. He lost it
with others. Why not with her? Because, she told herself bitterly, he
wanted to show her that she mattered so little to him that it was not
worth while quarrelling with her; because he wanted to put her in the
wrong, to be superior. She had a perfect right to hate a man who
treated her in that way.

She compared him, to his disadvantage, with Eddy. Eddy, during these
days, continued to be more and more of a comfort. It rather surprised
her that he found so much time to devote to her. When she had first
called on him, on her arrival in the city, he had given her the
impression–more, she admitted, by his manner than his words–that she
was not wanted. He had shown no disposition to seek her company. But
now he seemed always to be on hand. To take her out to lunch appeared
to be his chief hobby.

One afternoon Joe commented on it, with that air of suppressing an
indulgent smile which Mary found so trying.

‘I saw you and Eddy at Stephano’s just now,’ he said, between sentences
of a letter which he was dictating. ‘You’re seeing a great deal of
Eddy, aren’t you?’

‘Yes,’ said Mary. ‘He’s very kind. He knows I’m lonely.’ She paused.
‘He hasn’t forgotten the old days,’ she said, defiantly.

Joe nodded.

‘Good old Eddy!’ he said.

There was nothing in the words to make Mary fire up, but much in the
way they were spoken, and she fired up accordingly.

‘What do you mean?’ she cried.

‘Mean?’ queried Joe.

‘You’re hinting at something. If you have anything to say against Eddy,
why don’t you say it straight out?’

‘It’s a good working rule in life never to say anything straight out.
Speaking in parables, I will observe that, if America was a monarchy
instead of a republic and people here had titles, Eddy would be a
certainty for first Earl of Pearl Street.’

Dignity fought with curiosity in Mary for a moment. The latter won.

‘I don’t know what you mean! Why Pearl Street?’

‘Go and have a look at it.’

Dignity recovered its ground. Mary tossed her head.

‘We are wasting a great deal of time,’ she said, coldly. ‘Shall I take
down the rest of this letter?’

‘Great idea!’ said Joe, indulgently. ‘Do.’

       *       *       *       *       *

A policeman, brooding on life in the neighbourhood of City Hall Park
and Broadway that evening, awoke with a start from his meditations to
find himself being addressed by a young lady. The young lady had large
grey eyes and a slim figure. She appealed to the aesthetic taste of the
policeman.

‘Hold to me, lady,’ he said, with gallant alacrity. ‘I’ll see yez
acrost.’

‘Thank you, I don’t want to cross,’ she said. ‘Officer!’

The policeman rather liked being called ‘Officer’.

‘Ma’am?’ he beamed.

‘Officer, do you know a street called Pearl Street?’

‘I do that, ma’am.’

She hesitated. ‘What sort of street is it?’

The policeman searched in his mind for a neat definition.

‘Darned crooked, miss,’ he said.

He then proceeded to point the way, but the lady had gone.

It was a bomb in a blue dress that Joe found waiting for him at the
office next morning. He surveyed it in silence, then raised his hands
over his head,

‘Don’t shoot,’ he said. ‘What’s the matter?’

‘What right had you to say that about Eddy? You know what I mean–about
Pearl Street.’

Joe laughed.

‘Did you take a look at Pearl Street?’

Mary’s anger blazed out.

‘I didn’t think you could be so mean and cowardly,’ she cried. ‘You
ought to be ashamed to talk about people behind their backs,
when–when–besides, if he’s what you say, how did it happen that
you engaged me on his recommendation?’

He looked at her for an instant without replying. ‘I’d have engaged
you,’ he said, ‘on the recommendation of a syndicate of forgers and
three-card-trick men.’

He stood fingering a pile of papers on the desk.

‘Eddy isn’t the only person who remembers the old days, Mary,’ he said
slowly.

She looked at him, surprised. There was a note in his voice that she
had not heard before. She was conscious of a curious embarrassment and
a subtler feeling which she could not analyse. But before she could
speak, Harold, the office-boy, entered the room with a card, and the
conversation was swept away on a tidal wave of work.

       *       *       *       *       *

Joe made no attempt to resume it. That morning happened to be one of
the earthquake, knock-about-sketch mornings, and conversation, what
there was of it, consisted of brief, strenuous remarks of a purely
business nature.

But at intervals during the day Mary found herself returning to his
words. Their effect on her mind puzzled her. It seemed to her that
somehow they caused things to alter their perspective. In some way Joe
had become more human. She still refused to believe that Eddy was not
all that was chivalrous and noble, but her anger against Joe for his
insinuations had given way to a feeling of regret that he should have
made them. She ceased to look on him as something wantonly malevolent,
a Thersites recklessly slandering his betters. She felt that there must
have been a misunderstanding somewhere and was sorry for it.

Thinking it over, she made up her mind that it was for her to remove
this misunderstanding. The days which followed strengthened the
decision; for the improvement in Joe was steadily maintained. The
indefinable something in his manner which had so irritated her had
vanished. It had been, when it had existed, so nebulous that words were
not needed to eliminate it. Indeed, even now she could not say exactly
in what it had consisted. She only knew that the atmosphere had
changed. Without a word spoken on either side it seemed that peace had
been established between them, and it amazed her what a difference it
made. She was soothed and happy, and kindly disposed to all men, and
every day felt more strongly the necessity of convincing Joe and Eddy
of each other’s merits, or, rather, of convincing Joe, for Eddy, she
admitted, always spoke most generously of the other.

For a week Eddy did not appear at the office. On the eighth day,
however, he rang her up on the telephone, and invited her to lunch.

Later in the morning Joe happened to ask her out to lunch.

‘I’m so sorry,’ said Mary; ‘I’ve just promised Eddy. He wants me to
meet him at Stephano’s, but–’ She hesitated. ‘Why shouldn’t we all
lunch together?’ she went on, impulsively.

She hurried on. This was her opening, but she felt nervous. The subject
of Eddy had not come up between them since that memorable conversation
a week before, and she was uncertain of her ground.

‘I wish you liked Eddy, Joe,’ she said. ‘He’s very fond of you, and it
seems such a shame that–I mean–we’re all from the same old town,
and–oh, I know I put it badly, but–’

‘I think you put it very well,’ said Joe; ‘and if I could like a man to
order I’d do it to oblige you. But–well, I’m not going to keep harping
on it. Perhaps you’ll see through Eddy yourself one of these days.’

A sense of the hopelessness of her task oppressed Mary. She put on her
hat without replying, and turned to go.

At the door some impulse caused her to glance back, and as she did so
she met his eye, and stood staring. He was looking at her as she had so
often seen him look three years before in Dunsterville–humbly,
appealingly, hungrily.

He took a step forward. A sort of panic seized her. Her fingers were on
the door-handle. She turned it, and the next moment was outside.

She walked slowly down the street. She felt shaken. She had believed so
thoroughly that his love for her had vanished with his shyness and
awkwardness in the struggle for success in New York. His words, his
manner–everything had pointed to that. And now–it was as if those
three years had not been. Nothing had altered, unless it were–herself.

Had she altered? Her mind was in a whirl. This thing had affected her like
some physical shock. The crowds and noises of the street bewildered her.
If only she could get away from them and think quietly–

And then she heard her name spoken, and looked round, to see Eddy.

‘Glad you could come,’ he said. ‘I’ve something I want to talk to you
about. It’ll be quiet at Stephano’s.’

She noticed, almost unconsciously, that he seemed nervous. He was
unwontedly silent. She was glad of it. It helped her to think.

He gave the waiter an order, and became silent again, drumming with
his fingers on the cloth. He hardly spoke till the meal was over and
the coffee was on the table. Then he leant forward.

‘Mary,’ he said, ‘we’ve always been pretty good friends, haven’t we?’

His dark eyes were looking into hers. There was an expression in them
that was strange to her. He smiled, but it seemed to Mary that there
was effort behind the smile.

‘Of course we have, Eddy,’ she said. He touched her hand.

‘Dear little Mary!’ he said, softly.

He paused for a moment.

‘Mary,’ he went on, ‘you would like to do me a good turn? You would,
wouldn’t you, Mary?’

‘Why, Eddy, of course!’

He touched her hand again. This time, somehow, the action grated on
her. Before, it had seemed impulsive, a mere spontaneous evidence
of friendship. Now there was a suggestion of artificiality,–of
calculation. She drew back a little in her chair. Deep down in her
some watchful instinct had sounded an alarm. She was on guard.

He drew in a quick breath.

‘It’s nothing much. Nothing at all. It’s only this. I–I–Joe will be
writing a letter to a man called Weston on Thursday–Thursday
remember. There won’t be anything in it–nothing of importance–nothing
private–but–I–I want you to mail me a copy of it, Mary. A–a copy
of–’

She was looking at him open-eyed. Her face was white and shocked.

‘For goodness’ sake,’ he said, irritably, ‘don’t look like that. I’m
not asking you to commit murder. What’s the matter with you? Look here,
Mary; you’ll admit you owe me something, I suppose? I’m the only man in
New York that’s ever done anything for you. Didn’t I get you your job?
Well, then, it’s not as if I were asking you to do anything dangerous,
or difficult, or–’

She tried to speak, but could not. He went on rapidly. He did not look
at her. His eyes wandered past her, shifting restlessly.

‘Look here,’ he said; ‘I’ll be square with you. You’re in New York to
make money. Well, you aren’t going to make it hammering a typewriter.
I’m giving you your chance. I’m going to be square with you. Let me see
that letter, and–’

His voice died away abruptly. The expression on his face changed. He
smiled, and this time the effort was obvious.

‘Halloa, Joe!’ he said.

Mary turned. Joe was standing at her side. He looked very large and
wholesome and restful.

‘I don’t want to intrude,’ he said; ‘but I wanted to see you, Eddy, and
I thought I should catch you here. I wrote a letter to Jack Weston
yesterday–after I got home from the office–and one to you; and
somehow I managed to post them in the wrong envelopes. It doesn’t
matter much, because they both said the same thing.’

‘The same thing?’

‘Yes; I told you I should be writing to you again on Thursday, to tip
you something good that I was expecting from old Longwood. Jack Weston
has just rung me up on the ‘phone to say that he got a letter that
doesn’t belong to him. I explained to him and thought I’d drop in here
and explain to you. Why, what’s your hurry, Eddy?’

Eddy had risen from his seat.

‘I’m due back at the office,’ he said, hoarsely.

‘Busy man! I’m having a slack day. Well, good-bye. I’ll see Mary back.’

Joe seated himself in the vacant chair.

‘You’re looking tired,’ he said. ‘Did Eddy talk too much?’

‘Yes, he did … Joe, you were right.’

‘Ah–Mary!’ Joe chuckled. ‘I’ll tell you something I didn’t tell Eddy.
It wasn’t entirely through carelessness that I posted those letters in
the wrong envelopes. In fact, to be absolutely frank, it wasn’t through
carelessness at all. There’s an old gentleman in Pittsburgh by the name
of John Longwood, who occasionally is good enough to inform me of some
of his intended doings on the market a day or so before the rest of the
world knows them, and Eddy has always shown a strong desire to get
early information too. Do you remember my telling you that your
predecessor at the office left a little abruptly? There was a reason. I
engaged her as a confidential secretary, and she overdid it. She
confided in Eddy. From the look on your face as I came in I gathered
that he had just been proposing that you should perform a similar act
of Christian charity. Had he?’

Mary clenched her hands.

‘It’s this awful New York!’ she cried. ‘Eddy was never like that in
Dunsterville.’

‘Dunsterville does not offer quite the same scope,’ said Joe.

‘New York changes everything,’ Mary returned. ‘It has changed Eddy–it
has changed you.’

He bent towards her and lowered his voice.

‘Not altogether,’ he said. ‘I’m just the same in one way. I’ve tried to
pretend I had altered, but it’s no use. I give it up. I’m still just
the same poor fool who used to hang round staring at you in
Dunsterville.’

A waiter was approaching the table with the air, which waiters
cultivate, of just happening by chance to be going in that direction.
Joe leaned farther forward, speaking quickly.

‘And for whom,’ he said, ‘you didn’t care a single, solitary snap of
your fingers, Mary.’

She looked up at him. The waiter hovered, poising for his swoop.
Suddenly she smiled.

‘New York has changed me too, Joe,’ she said.

‘Mary!’ he cried.

‘Ze pill, sare,’ observed the waiter.

Joe turned.

‘Ze what!’ he exclaimed. ‘Well, I’m hanged! Eddy’s gone off and left me
to pay for his lunch! That man’s a wonder! When it comes to brain-work,
he’s in a class by himself.’ He paused. ‘But I have the luck,’ he said.

Well-meaning chappies at the club sometimes amble up to me and tap me
on the wishbone, and say “Reggie, old top,”–my name’s Reggie
Pepper–”you ought to get married, old man.” Well, what I mean to say
is, it’s all very well, and I see their point and all that sort of
thing; but it takes two to make a marriage, and to date I haven’t met a
girl who didn’t seem to think the contract was too big to be taken on.

Looking back, it seems to me that I came nearer to getting over the
home-plate with Ann Selby than with most of the others. In fact, but
for circumstances over which I had no dashed control, I am inclined to
think that we should have brought it off. I’m bound to say that, now
that what the poet chappie calls the first fine frenzy has been on the
ice for awhile and I am able to consider the thing calmly, I am deuced
glad we didn’t. She was one of those strong-minded girls, and I hate to
think of what she would have done to me.

At the time, though, I was frightfully in love, and, for quite a while
after she definitely gave me the mitten, I lost my stroke at golf so
completely that a child could have given me a stroke a hole and got
away with it. I was all broken up, and I contend to this day that I was
dashed badly treated.

Let me give you what they call the data.

One day I was lunching with Ann, and was just proposing to her as
usual, when, instead of simply refusing me, as she generally did, she
fixed me with a thoughtful eye and kind of opened her heart.

“Do you know, Reggie, I am in doubt.”

“Give me the benefit of it,” I said. Which I maintain was pretty good
on the spur of the moment, but didn’t get a hand. She simply ignored
it, and went on.

“Sometimes,” she said, “you seem to me entirely vapid and brainless; at
other times you say or do things which suggest that there are
possibilities in you; that, properly stimulated and encouraged, you
might overcome the handicap of large private means and do something
worthwhile. I wonder if that is simply my imagination?” She watched me
very closely as she spoke.

“Rather not. You’ve absolutely summed me up. With you beside me,
stimulating and all that sort of rot, don’t you know, I should show a
flash of speed which would astonish you.”

“I wish I could be certain.”

“Take a chance on it.”

She shook her head.

“I must be certain. Marriage is such a gamble. I have just been staying
with my sister Hilda and her husband—-”

“Dear old Harold Bodkin. I know him well. In fact, I’ve a standing
invitation to go down there and stay as long as I like. Harold is one
of my best pals. Harold is a corker. Good old Harold is—-”

“I would rather you didn’t eulogize him, Reggie. I am extremely angry
with Harold. He is making Hilda perfectly miserable.”

“What on earth do you mean? Harold wouldn’t dream of hurting a fly.
He’s one of those dreamy, sentimental chumps who—-”

“It is precisely his sentimentality which is at the bottom of the whole
trouble. You know, of course, that Hilda is not his first wife?”

“That’s right. His first wife died about five years ago.”

“He still cherishes her memory.”

“Very sporting of him.”

“Is it! If you were a girl, how would you like to be married to a man
who was always making you bear in mind that you were only number two in
his affections; a man whose idea of a pleasant conversation was a
string of anecdotes illustrating what a dear woman his first wife was.
A man who expected you to upset all your plans if they clashed with
some anniversary connected with his other marriage?”

“That does sound pretty rotten. Does Harold do all that?”

“That’s only a small part of what he does. Why, if you will believe me,
every evening at seven o’clock he goes and shuts himself up in a little
room at the top of the house, and meditates.”

“What on earth does he do that for?”

“Apparently his first wife died at seven in the evening. There is a
portrait of her in the room. I believe he lays flowers in front of it.
And Hilda is expected to greet him on his return with a happy smile.”

“Why doesn’t she kick?”

“I have been trying to persuade her to, but she won’t. She just
pretends she doesn’t mind. She has a nervous, sensitive temperament,
and the thing is slowly crushing her. Don’t talk to me of Harold.”

Considering that she had started him as a topic, I thought this pretty
unjust. I didn’t want to talk of Harold. I wanted to talk about myself.

“Well, what has all this got to do with your not wanting to marry me?”
I said.

“Nothing, except that it is an illustration of the risks a woman runs
when she marries a man of a certain type.”

“Great Scott! You surely don’t class me with Harold?”

“Yes, in a way you are very much alike. You have both always had large
private means, and have never had the wholesome discipline of work.”

“But, dash it, Harold, on your showing, is an absolute nut. Why should
you think that I would be anything like that?”

“There’s always the risk.”

A hot idea came to me.

“Look here, Ann,” I said, “Suppose I pull off some stunt which only a
deuced brainy chappie could get away with? Would you marry me then?”

“Certainly. What do you propose to do?”

“Do! What do I propose to do! Well, er, to be absolutely frank, at the
moment I don’t quite know.”

“You never will know, Reggie. You’re one of the idle rich, and your
brain, if you ever had one, has atrophied.”

Well, that seemed to me to put the lid on it. I didn’t mind a
heart-to-heart talk, but this was mere abuse. I changed the subject.

“What would you like after that fish?” I said coldly.

You know how it is when you get an idea. For awhile it sort of simmers
inside you, and then suddenly it sizzles up like a rocket, and there
you are, right up against it. That’s what happened now. I went away
from that luncheon, vaguely determined to pull off some stunt which
would prove that I was right there with the gray matter, but without
any clear notion of what I was going to do. Side by side with this in
my mind was the case of dear old Harold. When I wasn’t brooding on the
stunt, I was brooding on Harold. I was fond of the good old lad, and I
hated the idea of his slowly wrecking the home purely by being a chump.
And all of a sudden the two things clicked together like a couple of
chemicals, and there I was with a corking plan for killing two birds
with one stone–putting one across that would startle and impress Ann,
and at the same time healing the breach between Harold and Hilda.

My idea was that, in a case like this, it’s no good trying opposition.
What you want is to work it so that the chappie quits of his own
accord. You want to egg him on to overdoing the thing till he gets so
that he says to himself, “Enough! Never again!” That was what was going
to happen to Harold.

When you’re going to do a thing, there’s nothing like making a quick
start. I wrote to Harold straight away, proposing myself for a visit.
And Harold wrote back telling me to come right along.

Harold and Hilda lived alone in a large house. I believe they did a
good deal of entertaining at times, but on this occasion I was the only
guest. The only other person of note in the place was Ponsonby, the
butler.

Of course, if Harold had been an ordinary sort of chappie, what I had
come to do would have been a pretty big order. I don’t mind many
things, but I do hesitate to dig into my host’s intimate private
affairs. But Harold was such a simple-minded Johnnie, so grateful for a
little sympathy and advice, that my job wasn’t so very difficult.

It wasn’t as if he minded talking about Amelia, which was his first
wife’s name. The difficulty was to get him to talk of anything else. I
began to understand what Ann meant by saying it was tough on Hilda.

I’m bound to say the old boy was clay in my hands. People call me a
chump, but Harold was a super-chump, and I did what I liked with him.
The second morning of my visit, after breakfast, he grabbed me by the
arm.

“This way, Reggie. I’m just going to show old Reggie Amelia’s portrait,
dear.”

There was a little room all by itself on the top floor. He explained to
me that it had been his studio. At one time Harold used to do a bit of
painting in an amateur way.

“There!” he said, pointing at the portrait. “I did that myself, Reggie.
It was away being cleaned when you were here last. It’s like dear
Amelia, isn’t it?”

I suppose it was, in a way. At any rate, you could recognize the
likeness when you were told who it was supposed to be.

He sat down in front of it, and gave it the thoughtful once-over.

“Do you know, Reggie, old top, sometimes when I sit here, I feel as if
Amelia were back again.”

“It would be a bit awkward for you if she was.”

“How do you mean?”

“Well, old lad, you happen to be married to someone else.”

A look of childlike enthusiasm came over his face.

“Reggie, I want to tell you how splendid Hilda is. Lots of other women
might object to my still cherishing Amelia’s memory, but Hilda has been
so nice about it from the beginning. She understands so thoroughly.”

I hadn’t much breath left after that, but I used what I had to say:
“She doesn’t object?”

“Not a bit,” said Harold. “It makes everything so pleasant.”

When I had recovered a bit, I said, “What do you mean by everything?”

“Well,” he said, “for instance, I come up here every evening at seven
and–er–think for a few minutes.”

“A few minutes?!”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, a few minutes isn’t long.”

“But I always have my cocktail at a quarter past.”

“You could postpone it.”

“And Ponsonby likes us to start dinner at seven-thirty.”

“What on earth has Ponsonby to do with it?”

“Well, he likes to get off by nine, you know. I think he goes off and
plays bowls at the madhouse. You see, Reggie, old man, we have to study
Ponsonby a little. He’s always on the verge of giving notice–in fact,
it was only by coaxing him on one or two occasions that we got him to
stay on–and he’s such a treasure that I don’t know what we should do
if we lost him. But, if you think that I ought to stay longer—-?”

“Certainly I do. You ought to do a thing like this properly, or not at
all.”

He sighed.

“It’s a frightful risk, but in future we’ll dine at eight.”

It seemed to me that there was a suspicion of a cloud on Ponsonby’s
shining morning face, when the news was broken to him that for the
future he couldn’t unleash himself on the local bowling talent as early
as usual, but he made no kick, and the new order of things began.

My next offensive movement I attribute to a flash of absolute genius. I
was glancing through a photograph album in the drawing-room before
lunch, when I came upon a face which I vaguely remembered. It was one
of those wide, flabby faces, with bulging eyes, and something about it
struck me as familiar. I consulted Harold, who came in at that moment.

“That?” said Harold. “That’s Percy.” He gave a slight shudder.
“Amelia’s brother, you know. An awful fellow. I haven’t seen him for
years.”

Then I placed Percy. I had met him once or twice in the old days, and I
had a brainwave. Percy was everything that poor old Harold disliked
most. He was hearty at breakfast, a confirmed back-slapper, and a man
who prodded you in the chest when he spoke to you.

“You haven’t seen him for years!” I said in a shocked voice.

“Thank heaven!” said Harold devoutly.

I put down the photograph album, and looked at him in a deuced serious
way. “Then it’s high time you asked him to come here.”

Harold blanched. “Reggie, old man, you don’t know what you are saying.
You can’t remember Percy. I wish you wouldn’t say these things, even in
fun.”

“I’m not saying it in fun. Of course, it’s none of my business, but you
have paid me the compliment of confiding in me about Amelia, and I feel
justified in speaking. All I can say is that, if you cherish her memory
as you say you do, you show it in a very strange way. How you can
square your neglect of Percy with your alleged devotion to Amelia’s
memory, beats me. It seems to me that you have no choice. You must
either drop the whole thing and admit that your love for her is dead,
or else you must stop this infernal treatment of her favorite brother.
You can’t have it both ways.”

He looked at me like a hunted stag. “But, Reggie, old man! Percy! He
asks riddles at breakfast.”

“I don’t care.”

“Hilda can’t stand him.”

“It doesn’t matter. You must invite him. It’s not a case of what you
like or don’t like. It’s your duty.”

He struggled with his feelings for a bit. “Very well,” he said in a
crushed sort of voice.

At dinner that night he said to Hilda: “I’m going to ask Amelia’s
brother down to spend a few days. It is so long since we have seen
him.”

Hilda didn’t answer at once. She looked at him in rather a curious sort
of way, I thought. “Very well, dear,” she said.

I was deuced sorry for the poor girl, but I felt like a surgeon. She
would be glad later on, for I was convinced that in a very short while
poor old Harold must crack under the strain, especially after I had put
across the coup which I was meditating for the very next evening.

It was quite simple. Simple, that is to say, in its working, but a
devilish brainy thing for a chappie to have thought out. If Ann had
really meant what she had said at lunch that day, and was prepared to
stick to her bargain and marry me as soon as I showed a burst of
intelligence, she was mine.

What it came to was that, if dear old Harold enjoyed meditating in
front of Amelia’s portrait, he was jolly well going to have all the
meditating he wanted, and a bit over, for my simple scheme was to lurk
outside till he had gone into the little room on the top floor, and
then, with the aid of one of those jolly little wedges which you use to
keep windows from rattling, see to it that the old boy remained there
till they sent out search parties.

There wasn’t a flaw in my reasoning. When Harold didn’t roll in at the
sound of the dinner gong, Hilda would take it for granted that he was
doing an extra bit of meditating that night, and her pride would stop
her sending out a hurry call for him. As for Harold, when he found that
all was not well with the door, he would probably yell with
considerable vim. But it was odds against anyone hearing him. As for
me, you might think that I was going to suffer owing to the probable
postponement of dinner. Not so, but far otherwise, for on the night I
had selected for the coup I was dining out at the neighboring inn with
my old college chum Freddie Meadowes. It is true that Freddie wasn’t
going to be within fifty miles of the place on that particular night,
but they weren’t to know that.

Did I describe the peculiar isolation of that room on the top floor,
where the portrait was? I don’t think I did. It was, as a matter of
fact, the only room in those parts, for, in the days when he did his
amateur painting, old Harold was strong on the artistic seclusion
business and hated noise, and his studio was the only room in use on
that floor.

In short, to sum up, the thing was a cinch.

Punctually at ten minutes to seven, I was in readiness on the scene.
There was a recess with a curtain in front of it a few yards from the
door, and there I waited, fondling my little wedge, for Harold to walk
up and allow the proceedings to start. It was almost pitch-dark, and
that made the time of waiting seem longer. Presently–I seemed to have
been there longer than ten minutes–I heard steps approaching. They
came past where I stood, and went on into the room. The door closed,
and I hopped out and sprinted up to it, and the next moment I had the
good old wedge under the wood–as neat a job as you could imagine. And
then I strolled downstairs, and toddled off to the inn.

I didn’t hurry over my dinner, partly because the browsing and sluicing
at the inn was really astonishingly good for a roadhouse and partly
because I wanted to give Harold plenty of time for meditation. I
suppose it must have been a couple of hours or more when I finally
turned in at the front door. Somebody was playing the piano in the
drawing room. It could only be Hilda who was playing, and I had doubts
as to whether she wanted company just then–mine, at any rate.

Eventually I decided to risk it, for I wanted to hear the latest about
dear old Harold, so in I went, and it wasn’t Hilda at all; it was Ann
Selby.

“Hello,” I said. “I didn’t know you were coming down here.” It seemed
so odd, don’t you know, as it hadn’t been more than ten days or so
since her last visit.

“Good evening, Reggie,” she said.

“What’s been happening?” I asked.

“How do you know anything has been happening?”

“I guessed it.”

“Well, you’re quite right, as it happens, Reggie. A good deal has been
happening.” She went to the door, and looked out, listening. Then she
shut it, and came back. “Hilda has revolted!”

“Revolted?”

“Yes, put her foot down–made a stand–refused to go on meekly putting
up with Harold’s insane behavior.”

“I don’t understand.”

She gave me a look of pity. “You always were so dense, Reggie. I will
tell you the whole thing from the beginning. You remember what I spoke
to you about, one day when we were lunching together? Well, I don’t
suppose you have noticed it–I know what you are–but things have been
getting steadily worse. For one thing, Harold insisted on lengthening
his visits to the top room, and naturally Ponsonby complained. Hilda
tells me that she had to plead with him to induce him to stay on. Then
the climax came. I don’t know if you recollect Amelia’s brother Percy?
You must have met him when she was alive–a perfectly unspeakable
person with a loud voice and overpowering manners. Suddenly, out of a
blue sky, Harold announced his intention of inviting him to stay. It
was the last straw. This afternoon I received a telegram from poor
Hilda, saying that she was leaving Harold and coming to stay with me,
and a few hours later the poor child arrived at my apartment.”

You mustn’t suppose that I stood listening silently to this speech.
Every time she seemed to be going to stop for breath I tried to horn in
and tell her all these things which had been happening were not mere
flukes, as she seemed to think, but parts of a deuced carefully planned
scheme of my own. Every time I’d try to interrupt, Ann would wave me
down, and carry on without so much as a semi-colon.

But at this point I did manage a word in. “I know, I know, I know! I
did it all. It was I who suggested to Harold that he should lengthen
the meditations, and insisted on his inviting Percy to stay.”

I had hardly got the words out, when I saw that they were not making
the hit I had anticipated. She looked at me with an expression of
absolute scorn, don’t you know.

“Well, really, Reggie,” she said at last, “I never have had a very high
opinion of your intelligence, as you know, but this is a revelation to
me. What motive you can have had, unless you did it in a spirit of pure
mischief—-” She stopped, and there was a glare of undiluted repulsion
in her eyes. “Reggie! I can’t believe it! Of all the things I loathe
most, a practical joker is the worst. Do you mean to tell me you did
all this as a practical joke?”

“Great Scott, no! It was like this—-”

I paused for a bare second to collect my thoughts, so as to put the
thing clearly to her. I might have known what would happen. She dashed
right in and collared the conversation.

“Well, never mind. As it happens, there is no harm done. Quite the
reverse, in fact. Hilda left a note for Harold telling him what she had
done and where she had gone and why she had gone, and Harold found it.
The result was that, after Hilda had been with me for some time, in he
came in a panic and absolutely grovelled before the dear child. It
seems incredible but he had apparently had no notion that his absurd
behavior had met with anything but approval from Hilda. He went on as
if he were mad. He was beside himself. He clutched his hair and stamped
about the room, and then he jumped at the telephone and called this
house and got Ponsonby and told him to go straight to the little room
on the top floor and take Amelia’s portrait down. I thought that a
little unnecessary myself, but he was in such a whirl of remorse that
it was useless to try and get him to be rational. So Hilda was
consoled, and he calmed down, and we all came down here in the
automobile. So you see—-”

At this moment the door opened, and in came Harold.

“I say–hello, Reggie, old man–I say, it’s a funny thing, but we can’t
find Ponsonby anywhere.”

There are moments in a chappie’s life, don’t you know, when Reason, so
to speak, totters, as it were, on its bally throne. This was one of
them. The situation seemed somehow to have got out of my grip. I
suppose, strictly speaking, I ought, at this juncture, to have cleared
my throat and said in an audible tone, “Harold, old top, I know
where Ponsonby is.” But somehow I couldn’t. Something seemed to keep
the words back. I just stood there and said nothing.

“Nobody seems to have seen anything of him,” said Harold. “I wonder
where he can have got to.”

Hilda came in, looking so happy I hardly recognized her. I remember
feeling how strange it was that anybody could be happy just then.

“I know,” she said. “Of course! Doesn’t he always go off to the
inn and play bowls at this time?”

“Why, of course,” said Harold. “So he does.”

And he asked Ann to play something on the piano. And pretty soon we had
settled down to a regular jolly musical evening. Ann must have played a
matter of two or three thousand tunes, when Harold got up.

“By the way,” he said. “I suppose he did what I told him about the
picture before he went out. Let’s go and see.”

“Oh, Harold, what does it matter?” asked Hilda.

“Don’t be silly, Harold,” said Ann.

I would have said the same thing, only I couldn’t say anything.

Harold wasn’t to be stopped. He led the way out of the room and
upstairs, and we all trailed after him. We had just reached the top
floor, when Hilda stopped, and said “Hark!”

It was a voice.

“Hi!” it said. “Hi!”

Harold legged it to the door of the studio. “Ponsonby?”

From within came the voice again, and I have never heard anything to
touch the combined pathos, dignity and indignation it managed to
condense into two words.

“Yes, sir?”

“What on earth are you doing in there?”

“I came here, sir, in accordance with your instructions on the
telephone, and—-”

Harold rattled the door. “The darned thing’s stuck.”

“Yes, sir.”

“How on earth did that happen?”

“I could not say, sir.”

“How can the door have stuck like this?” said Ann.

Somebody–I suppose it was me, though the voice didn’t sound familiar–
spoke. “Perhaps there’s a wedge under it,” said this chappie.

“A wedge? What do you mean?”

“One of those little wedges you use to keep windows from rattling,
don’t you know.”

“But why—-? You’re absolutely right, Reggie, old man, there is!”

He yanked it out, and flung the door open, and out came Ponsonby,
looking like Lady Macbeth.

“I wish to give notice, sir,” he said, “and I should esteem it a favor
if I might go to the pantry and procure some food, as I am extremely
hungry.”

And he passed from our midst, with Hilda after him, saying: “But,
Ponsonby! Be reasonable, Ponsonby!”

Ann Selby turned on me with a swish. “Reggie,” she said, “did you
shut Ponsonby in there?”

“Well, yes, as a matter of fact, I did.”

“But why?” asked Harold.

“Well, to be absolutely frank, old top, I thought it was you.”

“You thought it was me? But why–what did you want to lock me in for?”

I hesitated. It was a delicate business telling him the idea. And while
I was hesitating, Ann jumped in.

“I can tell you why, Harold. It was because Reggie belongs to that
sub-species of humanity known as practical jokers. This sort of thing
is his idea of humor.”

“Humor! Losing us a priceless butler,” said Harold. “If that’s your
idea of—-”

Hilda came back, pale and anxious. “Harold, dear, do come and help me
reason with Ponsonby. He is in the pantry gnawing a cold chicken, and
he only stops to say ‘I give notice.’”

“Yes,” said Ann. “Go, both of you. I wish to speak to Reggie alone.”

That’s how I came to lose Ann. At intervals during her remarks I tried
to put my side of the case, but it was no good. She wouldn’t listen.
And presently something seemed to tell me that now was the time to go
to my room and pack. Half an hour later I slid silently into the night.

Wasn’t it Shakespeare or somebody who said that the road to Hell–or
words to that effect–was paved with good intentions? If it was
Shakespeare, it just goes to prove what they are always saying about
him–that he knew a bit. Take it from one who knows, the old boy was
absolutely right.

In the smoking-room of the club-house a cheerful fire was burning, and
the Oldest Member glanced from time to time out of the window into the
gathering dusk. Snow was falling lightly on the links. From where he
sat, the Oldest Member had a good view of the ninth green; and
presently, out of the greyness of the December evening, there appeared
over the brow of the hill a golf-ball. It trickled across the green,
and stopped within a yard of the hole. The Oldest Member nodded
approvingly. A good approach-shot.

A young man in a tweed suit clambered on to the green, holed out with
easy confidence, and, shouldering his bag, made his way to the
club-house. A few moments later he entered the smoking-room, and
uttered an exclamation of rapture at the sight of the fire.

“I’m frozen stiff!”

He rang for a waiter and ordered a hot drink. The Oldest Member gave a
gracious assent to the suggestion that he should join him.

“I like playing in winter,” said the young man. “You get the course to
yourself, for the world is full of slackers who only turn out when the
weather suits them. I cannot understand where they get the nerve to
call themselves golfers.”

“Not everyone is as keen as you are, my boy,” said the Sage, dipping
gratefully into his hot drink. “If they were, the world would be a
better place, and we should hear less of all this modern unrest.”

“I am pretty keen,” admitted the young man.

“I have only encountered one man whom I could describe as keener. I
allude to Mortimer Sturgis.”

“The fellow who took up golf at thirty-eight and let the girl he was
engaged to marry go off with someone else because he hadn’t the time to
combine golf with courtship? I remember. You were telling me about him
the other day.”

“There is a sequel to that story, if you would care to hear it,” said
the Oldest Member.

“You have the honour,” said the young man. “Go ahead!”

*       *       *       *       *

Some people (began the Oldest Member) considered that Mortimer Sturgis
was too wrapped up in golf, and blamed him for it. I could never see
eye to eye with them. In the days of King Arthur nobody thought the
worse of a young knight if he suspended all his social and business
engagements in favour of a search for the Holy Grail. In the Middle
Ages a man could devote his whole life to the Crusades, and the public
fawned upon him. Why, then, blame the man of today for a zealous
attention to the modern equivalent, the Quest of Scratch! Mortimer
Sturgis never became a scratch player, but he did eventually get his
handicap down to nine, and I honour him for it.

The story which I am about to tell begins in what might be called the
middle period of Sturgis’s career. He had reached the stage when his
handicap was a wobbly twelve; and, as you are no doubt aware, it is
then that a man really begins to golf in the true sense of the word.
Mortimer’s fondness for the game until then had been merely tepid
compared with what it became now. He had played a little before, but
now he really buckled to and got down to it. It was at this point, too,
that he began once more to entertain thoughts of marriage. A profound
statistician in this one department, he had discovered that practically
all the finest exponents of the art are married men; and the thought
that there might be something in the holy state which improved a man’s
game, and that he was missing a good thing, troubled him a great deal.
Moreover, the paternal instinct had awakened in him. As he justly
pointed out, whether marriage improved your game or not, it was to Old
Tom Morris’s marriage that the existence of young Tommy Morris, winner
of the British Open Championship four times in succession, could be
directly traced. In fact, at the age of forty-two, Mortimer Sturgis was
in just the frame of mind to take some nice girl aside and ask her to
become a step-mother to his eleven drivers, his baffy, his twenty-eight
putters, and the rest of the ninety-four clubs which he had accumulated
in the course of his golfing career. The sole stipulation, of course,
which he made when dreaming his daydreams was that the future Mrs.
Sturgis must be a golfer. I can still recall the horror in his face
when one girl, admirable in other respects, said that she had never
heard of Harry Vardon, and didn’t he mean Dolly Vardon? She has since
proved an excellent wife and mother, but Mortimer Sturgis never spoke
to her again.

With the coming of January, it was Mortimer’s practice to leave England
and go to the South of France, where there was sunshine and crisp dry
turf. He pursued his usual custom this year. With his suit-case and his
ninety-four clubs he went off to Saint Brule, staying as he always did
at the Hotel Superbe, where they knew him, and treated with an amiable
tolerance his habit of practising chip-shots in his bedroom. On the
first evening, after breaking a statuette of the Infant Samuel in
Prayer, he dressed and went down to dinner. And the first thing he saw
was Her.

Mortimer Sturgis, as you know, had been engaged before, but Betty
Weston had never inspired the tumultuous rush of emotion which the mere
sight of this girl had set loose in him. He told me later that just to
watch her holing out her soup gave him a sort of feeling you get when
your drive collides with a rock in the middle of a tangle of rough and
kicks back into the middle of the fairway. If golf had come late in
life to Mortimer Sturgis, love came later still, and just as the golf,
attacking him in middle life, had been some golf, so was the love
considerable love. Mortimer finished his dinner in a trance, which is
the best way to do it at some hotels, and then scoured the place for
someone who would introduce him. He found such a person eventually and
the meeting took place.

*       *       *       *       *

She was a small and rather fragile-looking girl, with big blue eyes and
a cloud of golden hair. She had a sweet expression, and her left wrist
was in a sling. She looked up at Mortimer as if she had at last found
something that amounted to something. I am inclined to think it was a
case of love at first sight on both sides.

“Fine weather we’re having,” said Mortimer, who was a capital
conversationalist.

“Yes,” said the girl.

“I like fine weather.”

“So do I.”

“There’s something about fine weather!”

“Yes.”

“It’s–it’s–well, fine weather’s so much finer than weather that isn’t
fine,” said Mortimer.

He looked at the girl a little anxiously, fearing he might be taking
her out of her depth, but she seemed to have followed his train of
thought perfectly.

“Yes, isn’t it?” she said. “It’s so–so fine.”

“That’s just what I meant,” said Mortimer. “So fine. You’ve just hit
it.”

He was charmed. The combination of beauty with intelligence is so rare.

“I see you’ve hurt your wrist,” he went on, pointing to the sling.

“Yes. I strained it a little playing in the championship.”

“The championship?” Mortimer was interested. “It’s awfully rude of me,”
he said, apologetically, “but I didn’t catch your name just now.”

“My name is Somerset.”

Mortimer had been bending forward solicitously. He overbalanced and
nearly fell off his chair. The shock had been stunning. Even before he
had met and spoken to her, he had told himself that he loved this girl
with the stored-up love of a lifetime. And she was Mary Somerset! The
hotel lobby danced before Mortimer’s eyes.

The name will, of course, be familiar to you. In the early rounds of
the Ladies’ Open Golf Championship of that year nobody had paid much
attention to Mary Somerset. She had survived her first two matches, but
her opponents had been nonentities like herself. And then, in the third
round, she had met and defeated the champion. From that point on, her
name was on everybody’s lips. She became favourite. And she justified
the public confidence by sailing into the final and winning easily. And
here she was, talking to him like an ordinary person, and, if he could
read the message in her eyes, not altogether indifferent to his charms,
if you could call them that.

“Golly!” said Mortimer, awed.

*       *       *       *       *

Their friendship ripened rapidly, as friendships do in the South of
France. In that favoured clime, you find the girl and Nature does the
rest. On the second morning of their acquaintance Mortimer invited her
to walk round the links with him and watch him play. He did it a little
diffidently, for his golf was not of the calibre that would be likely
to extort admiration from a champion. On the other hand, one should
never let slip the opportunity of acquiring wrinkles on the game, and
he thought that Miss Somerset, if she watched one or two of his shots,
might tell him just what he ought to do. And sure enough, the opening
arrived on the fourth hole, where Mortimer, after a drive which
surprised even himself, found his ball in a nasty cuppy lie.

He turned to the girl.

“What ought I to do here?” he asked.

Miss Somerset looked at the ball. She seemed to be weighing the matter
in her mind.

“Give it a good hard knock,” she said.

Mortimer knew what she meant. She was advocating a full iron. The only
trouble was that, when he tried anything more ambitious than a
half-swing, except off the tee, he almost invariably topped. However,
he could not fail this wonderful girl, so he swung well back and took a
chance. His enterprise was rewarded. The ball flew out of the
indentation in the turf as cleanly as though John Henry Taylor had been
behind it, and rolled, looking neither to left nor to right, straight
for the pin. A few moments later Mortimer Sturgis had holed out one
under bogey, and it was only the fear that, having known him for so
short a time, she might be startled and refuse him that kept him from
proposing then and there. This exhibition of golfing generalship on her
part had removed his last doubts. He knew that, if he lived for ever,
there could be no other girl in the world for him. With her at his
side, what might he not do? He might get his handicap down to six–to
three–to scratch–to plus something! Good heavens, why, even the
Amateur Championship was not outside the range of possibility. Mortimer
Sturgis shook his putter solemnly in the air, and vowed a silent vow
that he would win this pearl among women.

Now, when a man feels like that, it is impossible to restrain him long.
For a week Mortimer Sturgis’s soul sizzled within him: then he could
contain himself no longer. One night, at one of the informal dances at
the hotel, he drew the girl out on to the moonlit terrace.

“Miss Somerset—-” he began, stuttering with emotion like an
imperfectly-corked bottle of ginger-beer. “Miss Somerset–may I call
you Mary?”

The girl looked at him with eyes that shone softly in the dim light.

“Mary?” she repeated. “Why, of course, if you like—-”

“If I like!” cried Mortimer. “Don’t you know that it is my dearest
wish? Don’t you know that I would rather be permitted to call you Mary
than do the first hole at Muirfield in two? Oh, Mary, how I have longed
for this moment! I love you! I love you! Ever since I met you I have
known that you were the one girl in this vast world whom I would die to
win! Mary, will you be mine? Shall we go round together? Will you fix
up a match with me on the links of life which shall end only when the
Grim Reaper lays us both a stymie?”

She drooped towards him.

“Mortimer!” she murmured.

He held out his arms, then drew back. His face had grown suddenly
tense, and there were lines of pain about his mouth.

“Wait!” he said, in a strained voice. “Mary, I love you dearly, and
because I love you so dearly I cannot let you trust your sweet life to
me blindly. I have a confession to make, I am not–I have not always
been”–he paused–”a good man,” he said, in a low voice.

She started indignantly.

“How can you say that? You are the best, the kindest, the bravest man I
have ever met! Who but a good man would have risked his life to save me
from drowning?”

“Drowning?” Mortimer’s voice seemed perplexed. “You? What do you mean?”

“Have you forgotten the time when I fell in the sea last week, and you
jumped in with all your clothes on—-”

“Of course, yes,” said Mortimer. “I remember now. It was the day I did
the long seventh in five. I got off a good tee-shot straight down the
fairway, took a baffy for my second, and—- But that is not the point.
It is sweet and generous of you to think so highly of what was the
merest commonplace act of ordinary politeness, but I must repeat, that
judged by the standards of your snowy purity, I am not a good man. I do
not come to you clean and spotless as a young girl should expect her
husband to come to her. Once, playing in a foursome, my ball fell in
some long grass. Nobody was near me. We had no caddies, and the others
were on the fairway. God knows—-” His voice shook. “God knows I
struggled against the temptation. But I fell. I kicked the ball on to a
little bare mound, from which it was an easy task with a nice
half-mashie to reach the green for a snappy seven. Mary, there have
been times when, going round by myself, I have allowed myself ten-foot
putts on three holes in succession, simply in order to be able to say I
had done the course in under a hundred. Ah! you shrink from me! You are
disgusted!”

“I’m not disgusted! And I don’t shrink! I only shivered because it is
rather cold.”

“Then you can love me in spite of my past?”

“Mortimer!”

She fell into his arms.

“My dearest,” he said presently, “what a happy life ours will be. That
is, if you do not find that you have made a mistake.”

“A mistake!” she cried, scornfully.

“Well, my handicap is twelve, you know, and not so darned twelve at
that. There are days when I play my second from the fairway of the next
hole but one, days when I couldn’t putt into a coal-hole with
‘Welcome!’ written over it. And you are a Ladies’ Open Champion. Still,
if you think it’s all right—-. Oh, Mary, you little know how I have
dreamed of some day marrying a really first-class golfer! Yes, that was
my vision–of walking up the aisle with some sweet plus two girl on my
arm. You shivered again. You are catching cold.”

“It is a little cold,” said the girl. She spoke in a small voice.

“Let me take you in, sweetheart,” said Mortimer. “I’ll just put you in
a comfortable chair with a nice cup of coffee, and then I think I
really must come out again and tramp about and think how perfectly
splendid everything is.”

*       *       *       *       *

They were married a few weeks later, very quietly, in the little
village church of Saint Brule. The secretary of the local golf-club
acted as best man for Mortimer, and a girl from the hotel was the only
bridesmaid. The whole business was rather a disappointment to Mortimer,
who had planned out a somewhat florid ceremony at St. George’s, Hanover
Square, with the Vicar of Tooting (a scratch player excellent at short
approach shots) officiating, and “The Voice That Breathed O’er St.
Andrews” boomed from the organ. He had even had the idea of copying the
military wedding and escorting his bride out of the church under an
arch of crossed cleeks. But she would have none of this pomp. She
insisted on a quiet wedding, and for the honeymoon trip preferred a
tour through Italy. Mortimer, who had wanted to go to Scotland to visit
the birthplace of James Braid, yielded amiably, for he loved her
dearly. But he did not think much of Italy. In Rome, the great
monuments of the past left him cold. Of the Temple of Vespasian, all he
thought was that it would be a devil of a place to be bunkered behind.
The Colosseum aroused a faint spark of interest in him, as he
speculated whether Abe Mitchell would use a full brassey to carry it.
In Florence, the view over the Tuscan Hills from the Torre Rosa,
Fiesole, over which his bride waxed enthusiastic, seemed to him merely
a nasty bit of rough which would take a deal of getting out if.

And so, in the fullness of time, they came home to Mortimer’s cosy
little house adjoining the links.

*       *       *       *       *

Mortimer was so busy polishing his ninety-four clubs on the evening of
their arrival that he failed to notice that his wife was preoccupied. A
less busy man would have perceived at a glance that she was distinctly
nervous. She started at sudden noises, and once, when he tried the
newest of his mashie-niblicks and broke one of the drawing-room
windows, she screamed sharply. In short her manner was strange, and, if
Edgar Allen Poe had put her into “The Fall Of the House of Usher”, she
would have fitted it like the paper on the wall. She had the air of one
waiting tensely for the approach of some imminent doom. Mortimer,
humming gaily to himself as he sand-papered the blade of his
twenty-second putter, observed none of this. He was thinking of the
morrow’s play.

“Your wrist’s quite well again now, darling, isn’t it?” he said.

“Yes. Yes, quite well.”

“Fine!” said Mortimer. “We’ll breakfast early–say at half-past
seven–and then we’ll be able to get in a couple of rounds before
lunch. A couple more in the afternoon will about see us through. One
doesn’t want to over-golf oneself the first day.” He swung the putter
joyfully. “How had we better play do you think? We might start with you
giving me a half.”

She did not speak. She was very pale. She clutched the arm of her chair
tightly till the knuckles showed white under the skin.

To anybody but Mortimer her nervousness would have been even more
obvious on the following morning, as they reached the first tee. Her
eyes were dull and heavy, and she started when a grasshopper chirruped.
But Mortimer was too occupied with thinking how jolly it was having the
course to themselves to notice anything.

He scooped some sand out of the box, and took a ball out of her bag.
His wedding present to her had been a brand-new golf-bag, six dozen
balls, and a full set of the most expensive clubs, all born in
Scotland.

“Do you like a high tee?” he asked.

“Oh, no,” she replied, coming with a start out of her thoughts.
“Doctors say it’s indigestible.”

Mortimer laughed merrily.

“Deuced good!” he chuckled. “Is that your own or did you read it in a
comic paper? There you are!” He placed the ball on a little hill of
sand, and got up. “Now let’s see some of that championship form of
yours!”

She burst into tears.

“My darling!”

Mortimer ran to her and put his arms round her. She tried weakly to
push him away.

“My angel! What is it?”

She sobbed brokenly. Then, with an effort, she spoke.

“Mortimer, I have deceived you!”

“Deceived me?”

“I have never played golf in my life! I don’t even know how to hold the
caddie!”

Mortimer’s heart stood still. This sounded like the gibberings of an
unbalanced mind, and no man likes his wife to begin gibbering
immediately after the honeymoon.

“My precious! You are not yourself!”

“I am! That’s the whole trouble! I’m myself and not the girl you
thought I was!”

Mortimer stared at her, puzzled. He was thinking that it was a little
difficult and that, to work it out properly, he would need a pencil and
a bit of paper.

“My name is not Mary!”

“But you said it was.”

“I didn’t. You asked if you could call me Mary, and I said you might,
because I loved you too much to deny your smallest whim. I was going on
to say that it wasn’t my name, but you interrupted me.”

“Not Mary!” The horrid truth was coming home to Mortimer. “You were not
Mary Somerset?”

“Mary is my cousin. My name is Mabel.”

“But you said you had sprained your wrist playing in the championship.”

“So I had. The mallet slipped in my hand.”

“The mallet!” Mortimer clutched at his forehead. “You didn’t say ‘the
mallet’?”

“Yes, Mortimer! The mallet!”

A faint blush of shame mantled her cheek, and into her blue eyes there
came a look of pain, but she faced him bravely.

“I am the Ladies’ Open Croquet Champion!” she whispered.

Mortimer Sturgis cried aloud, a cry that was like the shriek of some
wounded animal.

“Croquet!” He gulped, and stared at her with unseeing eyes. He was no
prude, but he had those decent prejudices of which no self-respecting
man can wholly rid himself, however broad-minded he may try to be.
“Croquet!”

There was a long silence. The light breeze sang in the pines above
them. The grasshoppers chirrupped at their feet.

She began to speak again in a low, monotonous voice.

“I blame myself! I should have told you before, while there was yet
time for you to withdraw. I should have confessed this to you that
night on the terrace in the moonlight. But you swept me off my feet,
and I was in your arms before I realized what you would think of me. It
was only then that I understood what my supposed skill at golf meant to
you, and then it was too late. I loved you too much to let you go! I
could not bear the thought of you recoiling from me. Oh, I was
mad–mad! I knew that I could not keep up the deception for ever, that
you must find me out in time. But I had a wild hope that by then we
should be so close to one another that you might find it in your heart
to forgive. But I was wrong. I see it now. There are some things that
no man can forgive. Some things,” she repeated, dully, “which no man
can forgive.”

She turned away. Mortimer awoke from his trance.

“Stop!” he cried. “Don’t go!”

“I must go.”

“I want to talk this over.”

She shook her head sadly and started to walk slowly across the sunlit
grass. Mortimer watched her, his brain in a whirl of chaotic thoughts.
She disappeared through the trees.

Mortimer sat down on the tee-box, and buried his face in his hands. For
a time he could think of nothing but the cruel blow he had received.
This was the end of those rainbow visions of himself and her going
through life side by side, she lovingly criticizing his stance and his
back-swing, he learning wisdom from her. A croquet-player! He was
married to a woman who hit coloured balls through hoops. Mortimer
Sturgis writhed in torment. A strong man’s agony.

The mood passed. How long it had lasted, he did not know. But suddenly,
as he sat there, he became once more aware of the glow of the sunshine
and the singing of the birds. It was as if a shadow had lifted. Hope
and optimism crept into his heart.

He loved her. He loved her still. She was part of him, and nothing that
she could do had power to alter that. She had deceived him, yes. But
why had she deceived him? Because she loved him so much that she could
not bear to lose him. Dash it all, it was a bit of a compliment.

And, after all, poor girl, was it her fault? Was it not rather the
fault of her upbringing? Probably she had been taught to play croquet
when a mere child, hardly able to distinguish right from wrong. No
steps had been taken to eradicate the virus from her system, and the
thing had become chronic. Could she be blamed? Was she not more to be
pitied than censured?

Mortimer rose to his feet, his heart swelling with generous
forgiveness. The black horror had passed from him. The future seemed
once more bright. It was not too late. She was still young, many years
younger than he himself had been when he took up golf, and surely, if
she put herself into the hands of a good specialist and practised every
day, she might still hope to become a fair player. He reached the house
and ran in, calling her name.

No answer came. He sped from room to room, but all were empty.

She had gone. The house was there. The furniture was there. The canary
sang in its cage, the cook in the kitchen. The pictures still hung on
the walls. But she had gone. Everything was at home except his wife.

Finally, propped up against the cup he had once won in a handicap
competition, he saw a letter. With a sinking heart he tore open the
envelope.

It was a pathetic, a tragic letter, the letter of a woman endeavouring
to express all the anguish of a torn heart with one of those
fountain-pens which suspend the flow of ink about twice in every three
words. The gist of it was that she felt she had wronged him; that,
though he might forgive, he could never forget; and that she was going
away, away out into the world alone.

Mortimer sank into a chair, and stared blankly before him. She had
scratched the match.

*       *       *       *       *

I am not a married man myself, so have had no experience of how it
feels to have one’s wife whizz off silently into the unknown; but I
should imagine that it must be something like taking a full swing with
a brassey and missing the ball. Something, I take it, of the same sense
of mingled shock, chagrin, and the feeling that nobody loves one, which
attacks a man in such circumstances, must come to the bereaved husband.
And one can readily understand how terribly the incident must have
shaken Mortimer Sturgis. I was away at the time, but I am told by those
who saw him that his game went all to pieces.

He had never shown much indication of becoming anything in the nature
of a first-class golfer, but he had managed to acquire one or two
decent shots. His work with the light iron was not at all bad, and he
was a fairly steady putter. But now, under the shadow of this tragedy,
he dropped right back to the form of his earliest period. It was a
pitiful sight to see this gaunt, haggard man with the look of dumb
anguish behind his spectacles taking as many as three shots sometimes
to get past the ladies’ tee. His slice, of which he had almost cured
himself, returned with such virulence that in the list of ordinary
hazards he had now to include the tee-box. And, when he was not
slicing, he was pulling. I have heard that he was known, when driving
at the sixth, to get bunkered in his own caddie, who had taken up his
position directly behind him. As for the deep sand-trap in front of the
seventh green, he spent so much of his time in it that there was some
informal talk among the members of the committee of charging him a
small weekly rent.

A man of comfortable independent means, he lived during these days on
next to nothing. Golf-balls cost him a certain amount, but the bulk of
his income he spent in efforts to discover his wife’s whereabouts. He
advertised in all the papers. He employed private detectives. He even,
much as it revolted his finer instincts, took to travelling about the
country, watching croquet matches. But she was never among the players.
I am not sure that he did not find a melancholy comfort in this, for it
seemed to show that, whatever his wife might be and whatever she might
be doing, she had not gone right under.

Summer passed. Autumn came and went. Winter arrived. The days grew
bleak and chill, and an early fall of snow, heavier than had been known
at that time of the year for a long while, put an end to golf. Mortimer
spent his days indoors, staring gloomily through the window at the
white mantle that covered the earth.

It was Christmas Eve.

*       *       *       *       *

The young man shifted uneasily on his seat. His face was long and
sombre.

“All this is very depressing,” he said.

“These soul tragedies,” agreed the Oldest Member, “are never very
cheery.”

“Look here,” said the young man, firmly, “tell me one thing frankly, as
man to man. Did Mortimer find her dead in the snow, covered except for
her face, on which still lingered that faint, sweet smile which he
remembered so well? Because, if he did, I’m going home.”

“No, no,” protested the Oldest Member. “Nothing of that kind.”

“You’re sure? You aren’t going to spring it on me suddenly?”

“No, no!”

The young man breathed a relieved sigh.

“It was your saying that about the white mantle covering the earth that
made me suspicious.”

The Sage resumed.

*       *       *       *       *

It was Christmas Eve. All day the snow had been falling, and now it lay
thick and deep over the countryside. Mortimer Sturgis, his frugal
dinner concluded–what with losing his wife and not being able to get
any golf, he had little appetite these days–was sitting in his
drawing-room, moodily polishing the blade of his jigger. Soon wearying
of this once congenial task, he laid down the club and went to the
front door to see if there was any chance of a thaw. But no. It was
freezing. The snow, as he tested it with his shoe, crackled crisply.
The sky above was black and full of cold stars. It seemed to Mortimer
that the sooner he packed up and went to the South of France, the
better. He was just about to close the door, when suddenly he thought
he heard his own name called.

“Mortimer!”

Had he been mistaken? The voice had sounded faint and far away.

“Mortimer!”

He thrilled from head to foot. This time there could be no mistake. It
was the voice he knew so well, his wife’s voice, and it had come from
somewhere down near the garden-gate. It is difficult to judge distance
where sounds are concerned, but Mortimer estimated that the voice had
spoken about a short mashie-niblick and an easy putt from where he
stood.

The next moment he was racing down the snow-covered path. And then his
heart stood still. What was that dark something on the ground just
inside the gate? He leaped towards it. He passed his hands over it. It
was a human body. Quivering, he struck a match. It went out. He struck
another. That went out, too. He struck a third, and it burnt with a
steady flame; and, stooping, he saw that it was his wife who lay there,
cold and stiff. Her eyes were closed, and on her face still lingered
that faint, sweet smile which he remembered so well.

*       *       *       *       *

The young man rose with a set face. He reached for his golf-bag.

“I call that a dirty trick,” he said, “after you promised–” The Sage
waved him back to his seat.

“Have no fear! She had only fainted.”

“You said she was cold.”

“Wouldn’t you be cold if you were lying in the snow?”

“And stiff.”

“Mrs. Sturgis was stiff because the train-service was bad, it being the
holiday-season, and she had had to walk all the way from the junction,
a distance of eight miles. Sit down and allow me to proceed.”

*       *       *       *       *

Tenderly, reverently Mortimer Sturgis picked her up and began to bear
her into the house. Half-way there, his foot slipped on a piece of ice
and he fell heavily, barking his shin and shooting his lovely burden
out on to the snow.

The fall brought her to. She opened her eyes.

“Mortimer, darling!” she said.

Mortimer had just been going to say something else, but he checked
himself.

“Are you alive?” he asked.

“Yes,” she replied.

“Thank God!” said Mortimer, scooping some of the snow out of the back
of his collar.

Together they went into the house, and into the drawing-room. Wife
gazed at husband, husband at wife. There was a silence.

“Rotten weather!” said Mortimer.

“Yes, isn’t it!”

The spell was broken. They fell into each other’s arms. And presently
they were sitting side by side on the sofa, holding hands, just as if
that awful parting had been but a dream.

It was Mortimer who made the first reference to it.

“I say, you know,” he said, “you oughtn’t to have nipped away like
that!”

“I thought you hated me!”

“Hated you! I love you better than life itself! I would sooner
have smashed my pet driver than have had you leave me!”

She thrilled at the words.

“Darling!”