HERE AND HEREAFTER

BY THE SAME AUTHOR

LINDLEY KAYS
THE GIFTED FAMILY
THE EXILES OF FALOO

HERE AND
HEREAFTER

BY

BARRY PAIN

METHUEN & CO. LTD.
36 ESSEX STREET W.C.
LONDON

First Published in 1911

CONTENTS

HERE AND HEREAFTER

MALA

I

It was Saturday night at the end of a hard week. I was just finishing my dinner when I was told that a man wished to see me at once in the surgery. The name, Tarn, was unknown to me.

I found a fair-haired man of thirty in a faded and frayed suit of mustard-colour, holding in his hand a broken straw hat. His face was rather fat and roundish; his build powerful but paunchy. The colour of face and hands showed open-air life and work. His manner was slow, apathetic, heavy. His speech was slow too, but it was the speech of an educated man, and the voice was curiously gentle.

"My wife's ill, doctor. Can you come?"

"I can. What's the matter with her, Mr Tarn?"

He explained. I do not regard child-bearing as illness, and told him so. I told him further that he ought to have made his arrangements and to have engaged a doctor and nurse beforehand.

"In her own country they do not regard it as illness either. The women there do not have doctor or nurse. She did not wish it. But, however, as she seemed to suffer—"

"Well, well. We'll get on. Where do you live?"

"Felonsdene."

"Eight miles away and right up on the downs. Phew! Can I get my car there?"

"Most of the way at any rate—we could always walk the rest."

"We'll chance it. I'll bring the car round. Shan't keep you a minute, Mr Tarn."

I kept him rather longer than that. There were the lamps to see to, and I had directions to give to my servants. I did not take my driver with me. He had been at work since eight in the morning. When I re-entered the surgery I found Tarn still standing in just the same pose and place, as if he had not moved a hair's-breadth since I left him.

"Ready now," I said, as I picked up my bag.

He took out a pinch of sovereigns from his waistcoat-pocket, seven or eight of them.

"Your fee, doctor," he said.

"That can wait until I've done my work. Come along. Shall I lend you an overcoat?"

He thanked me but refused it, saying that he was used to all weathers. The night was fairly warm too. He sat beside me on the front seat. The first six miles were easy enough along a good road, and I talked to him as I drove. I omit the professional part of our conversation—the questions which a doctor would naturally put on such an occasion.

"So your wife's a foreigner," I said. "What nationality?"

"She is a woman of colour—a negress."

It is true that all coloured people inspire me with a feeling of physical repulsion, and equally true that I can set all feelings of repulsion aside when there is work to be done.

"Ah!" I said. "And you live up at Felonsdene. To tell the truth, I didn't know anybody lived there. I remember the place—came on it two years ago or more when I was roaming over the downs. There was a farm-house all in ruins—and, let me see, was there a cottage? I didn't come upon anybody living there then. I remember that, because I was thirsty after my walk and couldn't get a drink."

"There was no one there then, and there is no cottage. We came last year. Part of the farm-house has been repaired."

"Well, you've struck about the loneliest spot in England. Who's your landlord?"

"Eh? It's mine—I bought it. Two acres and the farm-house. Had trouble to get it—a deal of trouble."

"And who's with your wife now?" I asked.

"Nobody. She's alone in the house."

"Well, that's not right," I said.

"We have no servants—do everything ourselves. The nearest house is a farmer's at Sandene, three miles away, and we've had no dealings with him. It couldn't be helped, and—she's different, you know. I was not long in coming to you. I caught the mail-cart as soon as I reached the road, and got a lift."

"Still, I'm thinking—how am I to get on?"

"You'll find I can do anything a woman can do, and do it better. I am more intelligent and I have no nerves. You must pull up at the next gate, doctor. We strike across the downs there."

We had done the six miles, mostly up hill, in twenty-one minutes. Now we turned through the gate, along a turf track deeply rutted. Luckily the weather had been dry for the last fortnight. We crawled up to the top of the crest and then along it for a mile. I saw lights ahead in a hollow below. A dog barked savagely.

"That Felonsdene?" I asked.

"That's it. The descent is bad."

When I got to it I found that it was very bad. I stopped the engines.

"If we break our necks we shan't be much use," I said. "I'll leave the car here. There's nobody to run away with it."

"Shall we take a lamp?" he asked.

"Better."

He picked up my bag, unhitched one lamp, and extinguished the other, while I spread the rug over the seats. His ordinary slowness was deceptive. When he was actually doing something he was remarkably quick without being hurried. He was quick too in seeing a mechanical device—that was clear from the way he handled the lamps. We began the brief descent, and the dog barked more furiously than ever.

"Is that dog loose?" I asked, as we neared the house.

"Yes," he said. "But he's educated. He'd kill a stranger who came alone; he won't touch you."

He gave a whistle and the barking stopped. The dog, an enormous black retriever, came running towards us; his eyes in the lamplight had a liquid trustfulness.

"Heel," said Tarn sharply, and the dog paced quietly behind him, taking no notice of me whatever.

We went through a yard surrounded by a wall of rough stone. By the light of the lamp I saw that the wall had been mended in places. There was a rough shed on the left, with crates and packing-cases under it. The front door was flush with the wall of the house. It was unlocked, and when Tarn opened it a bright light streamed out. Within was a small square hall, and I noticed that the light was incandescent gas.

Tarn saw that I had noticed it. "I put in a gas-plant," he said. "Will you come this way?"

He took me into a great living-room. I should think it was about forty feet by twenty. There was a big open fireplace at the further end of the room. The floor was flagged, without rugs or carpets. The walls were the same inside as out, rough stone and mortar; there were three small windows high up in the walls. The windows were newly glazed, the walls had been repaired. There was very little furniture—three wooden windsor chairs, a couple of deal tables, and some cupboards made from packing-cases. There was no attempt at ornament or decoration of any kind, and there was no disorder. The scanty furniture was precisely arranged, nothing was left lying about, and everything was scrupulously clean. The timbers of the pointed roof seemed to me to be new. The room was very brightly lit, with more gas jets (of the cheapest description) than were needed.

What struck me most was the smell of the place—a smoky, greenish, sub-acid, slightly aromatic smell. I wondered if it could come from the great logs that smouldered in the fireplace, before which the retriever now stretched himself.

"Queer smell here," I said. "What is it?"

"It comes," he said, "from the smoke of juniper leaves."

"You don't burn those in the fireplace, do you?"

"No. I—I don't think you'd understand."

The words were said gently, almost sadly, without offensive intention. But they annoyed me a little—I did not like to be told by this scarecrow that I could not understand.

"Very well," I said. "Now then, where's your wife?"

He pointed to a door at the further end of the room, on the right of the fireplace. "Through there," he said. "I—I don't know if you speak French."

"I do."

"Mala speaks French more easily than English. She lived for many years in Paris—was born there. You'll find in that room the things a chemist in Helmstone thought might be wanted. If you need anything else, or want my help in any way, I shall be here."

"Good," I said, and passed through the door he had indicated.

I must remember that I am not writing for doctors. All I need say of the case is that it was a good thing Tarn fetched me. It was a case where the intervention of a medical man was imperatively necessary. Otherwise all went perfectly well. The child was born in a little more than an hour after my arrival, a girl, healthy and vigorous, and as black as the ace of spades. Tarn did all that was required of him perfectly—quickly, but without noise or hurry, and with great intelligence.

Mala, his wife, seemed to me to be very young. She was a girl of splendid physique; her face, like the face of every negress, repelled me. She showed affection for her child, and expressed her intention of nursing it herself, of which she seemed capable. This was all natural—more natural than normal unfortunately—but all the time I was conscious that I was attending a woman of morbid psychology. When I left her asleep, it was to join a man of morbid psychology in the great living-room.

"All well?" asked Tarn, as I entered.

"Quite. Both asleep." My body was tired, and I dare say I ought to have been sleepy myself, but my mind was awake and alert. The unusual nature of the experience may account for it. I sat down and gave him some instructions and advice about his wife, to which he paid close attention.

"Must you come here again?" he asked. I thought it a question that might have been better expressed.

"Yes," I said. "I don't want to pile up the visits, but I must do what's wanted."

"I didn't mean that. I meant that unless you were coming again in any case, I should have to make arrangements for fetching you if the need arose."

I laughed. "Arrangements? Well, you've nobody to send but yourself?"

"There's the dog."

"But he doesn't know where I live."

"I was meaning to teach him that to-morrow. I'd better do it in any case—one never knows what may happen." He sighed profoundly.

"Teach him to fetch the doctor—eh? He must be a clever beggar. What do you call him?"

"He has no name. He's not a pet. You must take some refreshment before you go. Whisky?"

"Ah, a drop of whisky and a biscuit would be rather welcome. Thanks."

He brought out a jar of whisky, a gasogen of soda-water, and some large hard biscuits in their native tin.

"To your daughter's health," I said, as I raised my glass.

He suddenly put his glass down. "Farce," he said savagely. "But it's all farce—this—this fuss, She's born to die, isn't she? It's the common lot. She's hauled out of nothing by blind Chance, to be tossed back into nothing by blind Chance. Drink the health of the seaweed that the tide throws up on the shore and the tide sucks back again? No! Not I!"

The whole thing had been so strange that this outbreak did not particularly astonish me. "You'd be a happier man, Mr Tarn, and a more sensible man, if you would simply accept Nature as you find it. You can't alter it and you can't understand it. You're beating your head against a wall."

This ragged fellow took on an air of superiority that annoyed me. "Yes, yes," he said. "I've heard all that—and so often. It's the point of view of ordinary materialistic science. You are not a religious man."

"Certainly," I said, "I don't pretend that I know what I do not know. Nor am I fool enough, Mr Tarn, to complain of what from insufficient data I am unable to understand. Put in other words, I am neither an orthodox believer nor an atheist. Do I understand that you are a religious man yourself?"

"The religion of Mala and her people is mine."

"Really? You turn the tables on the missionaries. Well, the theological discussion is interesting but it is often interminable; and I have work to do to-morrow. I must be getting on."

"I will come with you as far as the car. But first, doctor, the dog must learn that you are welcome here and that he is never to harm you. Call him and give him a bit of biscuit."

I called him. He looked up from his place before the fire but did not move. Then Tarn made a movement with his hand, and the dog got up, shook himself, and walked slowly towards me. He went all round me, sniffing. I held out the biscuit to him, and he looked away to his master and whined. Tarn nodded, and the dog immediately took the food from my hand.

"Yes," said Tarn, as if answering what I was thinking, "he has never been allowed to take food from any hand but mine. He will never forget you. You can come here at any hour of the day or night now with perfect safety. It's—it's the freedom of the city."

As Tarn climbed with me up to the car, he spoke again on the subject of my fee. "I suppose I should not have offered it in advance," he said. "But it occurred to me that, as I never think about clothes, I looked very poor, and that the place where I have chosen to live also looked very poor. And you did not know me. As a matter of fact, I am bothered with far more money than I want."

"Ah!" I laughed. "I could do with a little worry of that sort."

As he fixed up the lamps he thanked me warmly for what I had done for Mala, and asked what time he might expect me on the morrow. I opened my pocket-book and looked at it by the light of the lamp. "Well, I've a light day to-morrow, barring accidents. I shall be here some time in the afternoon."

The drive home was accomplished without incident. I ran the car into the coach-house and went straight to bed. But for more than an hour I could not get to sleep. I was haunted by that man and his negress wife, building theories about them, trying to account for them. Just as I was dropping off I was awakened again by a smell of bitter smoke in my nostrils—the smell of burning juniper leaves. Then I recognised that the smell was a memory-illusion, and fell asleep in real earnest.

II

I got back from my Sunday morning round before one. Helmstone was rather full of visitors that day, and there were many cars before the big hotel in the Queen's Road. As my man was driving slowly through the traffic I saw, a hundred yards away, Tarn striding along, in the same shabby clothes, with his retriever at his heel. He turned down a side-street, and I saw no more of him. On inquiry I found that he had not called at my house. He had merely been there, as he said, to give the dog his lesson.

I am a bachelor. I lunched alone on cold beef and beer, and I read the Lancet. I intended to remain materialistic and scientific, and not to be infected by that air of mystery and morbidity which seemed to hang round Tarn and his negress wife at Felonsdene. I had not been in practice for ten years without coming on strange occurrences before, and they had all lost their strangeness when the facts had been filled in. My after-luncheon visit to Felonsdene was of course professional, but if I had any chance I meant to satisfy an ordinary lay curiosity as well.

I drove myself, and the track across the downs looked worse in daylight than it had done by night. Still it seemed reasonable to suppose that what the car had done then it could do now. I could see more clearly now what had been done in the way of repairs to that ruined and long-deserted farm-house. The pointed roof over the big room where I had sat the night before had been mended and made weather-tight. The chimney-stack was new, and so were the window-casements. Adjoining the big room was a building of irregular shape that might possibly have contained three or four other rooms, roofed with new corrugated iron. One or two outbuildings looked as if they had been newly constructed from old materials. But that part of the farm-house which had originally been two-storied had been left quite untouched. Half the roof of it was down, the windows were without glass, and one saw through them the broken stairs and torn wall-paper peeling off and flapping in the brisk March breeze. On the grass-field beyond the court-yard two good Alderney cows were grazing. Most of the land looked neglected; but Tarn had no help and had everything to do himself. An orchard of stunted and miserable-looking fruit trees was sheltered by a dip of the land from north and east.

The dog barked furiously when he heard my car, and before I began the climb down to the farm-house I picked up two or three flints with intent to use them if he went for me. But all signs of hostility vanished when he saw me. He did not leap and gambol for joy, but he thrust his nose into my hand and then walked just in front of me, wagging his tail, and looking back from time to time to see that I understood and was following him.

He led the way across the court-yard, through the open outer door, and across the hall to the door of the big room. He scratched at the door. From impatience I knocked and entered.

Tarn had fallen asleep before the fire in one of the windsor chairs. He was just rousing himself as I entered. He had taken off his coat and his heavy boots and wore felt slippers that had a home-made look. From the table beside him it appeared that he had lunched frugally on whisky, milk and hard biscuits.

"Sorry I was asleep," he said. "But the dog knew."

"Ah!" I said. "You'd a long walk this morning. I saw you at Helmstone."

"Yes. I told you."

"You should have come into my house for a rest. How's your wife getting on—had a good night?"

"It seems so. She has slept a long time. So has the child. I will find out if she will see you." He passed into the inner room.

If she had expressed any disinclination to see me I should have been extremely angry; also, I might have thought it right to disregard the disinclination. But Tarn reappeared almost directly and asked me to go in

I found that all was going as well as possible both with her and with the child. She really was a splendid animal, unhurt either by excessive work or—as many modern mothers are—by a rotten fashionable life. With me she was reticent, almost sullen in manner; yet she seemed docile and had carried out my orders. The only difficulty was, as I had expected, to get her to remain in bed. With her child she showed white teeth in ecstasies of maternal joy. Before I had finished with her I heard the rain pattering on the iron roof of her room.

I went back into the great living-room. It was rather dark there, for the sky was heavily clouded and the windows, placed high up, gave but little light. The table had been cleared, and Tarn was not there. I sat down to wait for him, and the dog got up from the fire and came over to me and laid his head on my knee. He was an enormous and very powerful brute, as much retriever as anything, but evidently with another strain in his composition. I felt quite safe with him now, talked to him and patted him—attentions which he received gravely, without resistance but without any signs of pleasure.

Presently Tarn came in from outside. His hair was wet with the rain.

"I've taken up a tarpaulin," he said, "and thrown it over your car, doctor."

"That's very good of you," I said. "I was just doubting if that rug of mine would be enough."

"It comes down heavily. You must remain here awhile, unless you have other patients whom you must see at once."

"No," I said. "This finishes my work for to-day, I hope. I always try to arrange for Sunday afternoon free, and I'm glad to accept your hospitality. No juniper smoke to-day."

"There has been—no occasion." He went on quickly to inquire about his wife and child. He was not a man who showed his emotions much, but he certainly left me with the impression that he was fond and proud of the child. He asked several questions about her as he went round the room, lighting the gas-jets. Then we sat before the log fire and lit our pipes.

"One's a little surprised to find gas in a place like this," I said.

"It makes less work than lamps. When one tries to be independent and do the work oneself that's a consideration. Besides, it gives more light, and people who live alone as we do need plenty of light. I'm afraid it must all seem rather puzzling."

"Well," I said, "I don't want to be curious."

"And I don't want to puzzle anybody, nor to enlighten anybody either. Still, you've done much for us—Mala says she would have died but for you. If you care for a very simple story you can have it."

"Just as you like," I said. "But I should imagine that your story would be interesting."

"I do not think so. A little more than a year ago I was in Paris. Mala was also there. I met her through a friend of mine. I brought her to England and married her. You know how such a marriage is regarded here—how a woman of colour is regarded in any case. Very well, Felonsdene was a place where we could live to ourselves."

He stopped, as if there had been no more to say.

"So far," I said, "you have told me precisely what one might have conjectured. How did it all happen? What were you doing in Paris—and Mala? Who was the friend? How did it come about?"

He spoke slowly, more to himself, as it seemed, than to me. "My friend was an English Catholic, an ex-priest, a religious man like myself. His mind gave way, and he is shut up in an asylum now. He took me to see Mala. Night after night. Sometimes it was miraculous—and sometimes nothing. When the performance went badly, the uncle beat her. We could stop that because it was only a question of money. I remember it all—settled after midnight at a café where we drank absinthe—the uncle with arms too long and very prognathous, like a dressed-up ape, pouncing on the bank-notes with hairy fingers and counting aloud in French, very bad French, not like Mala's. He was very old—a hundred years, he said—he cannot have been her uncle really. A great-uncle perhaps. He was not a religious man at all. He kept patting the pocket where the bank-notes were. We put him in a fiacre, because he was drunk. We were out of Paris that night—my friend, and Mala, and myself. Next morning we crossed the Channel, and next night there was a riot at the theatre because Mala did not appear. Did I say where we went in England? I am not used to speaking so much, and it confuses me."

I was afraid he would stop again. "I don't think you mentioned the exact name," I said.

"Wilsing, my friend's own place. High walls, and lonely gardens, but too many servants—they all looked questions at us. Gardeners would touch their caps and look round after we had passed—you can imagine it. It was while we were at Wilsing that I married Mala. And shortly afterwards my poor friend had to be taken away. You see, doctor, he was a very earnest man, and very religious. He had gone too far along a new road, and he was horribly frightened but could not go back. It was too much for him. Mala and I had to go away also, of course. I remember hotels that would not take us in. We have been followed in the streets by jeering crowds. Even when I had found Felonsdene there was endless trouble before I could buy it. No tenant could be found for it—there is some silly story that the place is haunted. Besides, the house was all in ruins, and too far from—from everything. And yet the owner would not sell."

He paused. "And in the end?" I asked.

"Oh, yes, I got it in the end. I tempted him. Here we have arranged life as we wish it to be, and we practise our religion without molestation. There are consolations."

"The consolations of religion," I suggested.

Suddenly he put down his pipe and stood up erect. He stretched an arm out clumsily towards me. His eyes flashed under the bright gas-jets, and his nostrils quivered. He spoke in a low voice but with the most intense emphasis. "You don't know what you're saying. In our religion there are no consolations. There is only propitiation, and again propitiation, and always propitiation—the sacrifice of more and more as the end draws nearer." He swept his arm round and pointed at the door of his wife's room. "What consolation is there from the Power that there—in there, where you have been—linked love with life only to link life with death again? What consolation from the Power that has closed and sealed the door of knowledge?"

He sat down and remained silent. I was beginning to form some conclusions.

"Then what consolations have you?"

"Linked to bitterness and yet something. For example—I have Mala."

"Your child also."

"Yes, the child too. For a little time perhaps."

There was again a pause. The rain had cleared now and I rose to go. "Mr Tarn," I said, "before I leave you I think it my duty as a doctor to tell you something."

"About Mala?" he asked eagerly.

"About yourself." He laughed contemptuously. "If you go on with your present manner of life I will not answer for the consequences. I think you are playing, and have been playing, a very dangerous game; the case of your own friend warns you how dangerous it is. This prolonged solitude is bad for you and bad for your wife. This pessimistic brooding over things you cannot understand—which you are pleased to call a religion—is worse still, especially if it is accompanied by any rites or ceremonies which might impress a morbid imagination. I'm not going to mince matters—if you don't give this up you'll lose your reason."

"What is it you want me to do?"

"Do not be so absurdly sensitive about the fact that you have married a negress. Be a man and not a baby. Go and live in some village and mix with your fellow-men. No novelty lasts more than three months. Before the end of that time your wife will excite no attention at all—the position will be accepted. And if you can't find any better religion than the dismal rubbish that is poisoning your mind at present, then have none at all. It will be better for you."

"It is impossible to take your advice," he said stolidly.

"Why?"

"Because Mala and I are as we were made. We won't argue it."

"Please yourself. I've done my duty. Good-bye, Mr Tarn."

He told me that he was coming with me to the road. The very thin skin of turf on the hard rock of the crest of the hill would be so greasy that the wheels of my car would go round ineffectively and refuse to bite without his weight on the back axle. At the rutty descent on the other side he would get off and walk by the car to lend a hand if the wheels sank too deep in the mud there. His predictions happened exactly, and I was very glad of his help. At the road he left me; up on the hill his dog guarded the tarpaulin and waited for his return.

Certainly, in some simple practical matters the man was still showing himself sane and shrewd enough.

I dined that night with a bachelor friend in Helmstone who has a good reference library and a vast fund of curious information. He told me to what Power the smell of burning juniper was supposed to be agreeable. He also informed me that Wilsing was the Herefordshire seat of the Earl of Deljeon.

"Poor beggar!" added my host.

"Deljeon?" I asked. "Why?"

"Oh, well—he's in an asylum, you know. And likely to stop there, so they say."

III

I happened in the course of the next week to hear of Tarn from another source.

Tarn had told me that his next neighbour was the farmer at Sandene, three miles away, and that they had had no dealings together. Now I knew little Perrot, the farmer at Sandene, very well. I had attended his robust and prolific wife on three natural occasions, I had seen the children through measles, I had done what I could for the chronic dyspepsia of his termagant aunt, I had looked after Perrot's knee when a horse kicked him. Perrot was a ferret-faced man, a hard man at a bargain and a very good man on a horse. Between farming and horse-coping he did very fairly well. He was the willing and abject slave of his wife and his numerous children. He was interested in medical matters, of which he had no knowledge whatever, and relished an occasional long word. So I was not surprised to receive a note from Perrot stating "our Gladys seems to have omphitis," that he would be glad if I could call, and that he was my obedient servant. Tommy, the brother of Gladys, took back my verbal answer that I would call that morning.

Sandene resembles Felonsdene in that both are hollows in the downs, and resembles it in no other respect. Sandene is approached by a definite and well-made road. Its farm-house and little group of cottages have a cheerful and human look. The inhabitants are busy folk, but they find time to whistle and to laugh. Gladys Perrot, I found, was suffering from a diet of which the nature and extent had been dictated by enthusiasm rather than by judgment. I was able to say definitely that she would soon recover.

Perrot came in from trouble with a chaff-cutter to have a few words with me.

"So it's not omphitis?" he said with an air of relief.

"I should say it was a slight bilious attack. But I don't know what omphitis is."

"All I can say is that my poor grandmother died of it. Buried thirty-six hours afterwards—had to be. Makes one careful. That's why I sent Tom down. He had cake at your place, he said. If he asked for it, I shall have to pay him, to learn him manners."

I acquitted Tom. "No," I said, "that was my old housekeeper—trying to make a job for me."

Perrot saluted the veteran joke heartily.

"I was up with your neighbours at Felonsdene the other day," I said.

"Ah!" said Perrot, grimly. "Man ill?"

"No. His wife's just got a baby."

"And you attended her. Very good of you. Vet's work I should have called that."

"You don't know them, do you?"

"Nor want. Not but what he and his dog did me a good turn once. If you like to take the message, sir, you can tell Tarn that Mr Perrot of Sandene would be glad to give him five sovereigns for that dog. So I would too, and not think twice about it."

"I'll tell him," I said. "What was the good turn?"

"I lost a couple of sheep. And that annoyed me, though they were marked and pretty sure to be brought back some time. Still I was annoyed that night, you ask the missus if I wasn't."

"Like a bear with a sore head," said Mrs Perrot cheerfully.

"Well, at half-past nine I was just on going up to bed, when there came a great barking outside and a scratching at the door. It wasn't one of my dogs, I knew, though you may be sure they very soon chipped in. I went out, and there were my two sheep and Tarn's big dog with them. Those sheep hadn't been hurried and scurried neither. They'd been brought in nicely. The dog wouldn't let me get near him. He was what might be called truculent, as some of the best of them are. He was away again before you could say knife."

"He's no sheep-dog," said Mrs Perrot. "Five pounds for the likes of him! What would you say if I talked like that?"

"To my mind," said Perrot, stolidly, "a sheep-dog is a dog that's clever and reliable at handling sheep, and I don't care what the breed is—I don't care if he's a poodle. Come to that, Tarn's dog looks like a cross between a retriever and a—a elephant. All the same, he'd be worth five sovereigns to me, and I'd back my judgment too. Tell you why. I expected there was somebody with the dog and I wanted to do the right thing—a drink for a master or sixpence for his man—and I gave a hulloa. There was nobody within call, for I went right out and looked. He'd been sent in by himself, and he'd made no mistake. That's no ordinary dog."

"No," I said, "he's not. I know him. He's rather a friend of mine."

"There—and the missus says he's more like some wild beast. Oh, they're all right when they've got to know you, dogs are."

Perrot followed me out to the car. "There's rather a queer thing," he said, "but I know the medical etiquette—doctors aren't supposed to talk."

"Well," I said, "they're often supposed to talk, but they don't do it."

"Then you can't tell me anything about that—I don't know what to call it—tabernacle, perhaps—at Felonsdene."

"I've seen nothing of the kind, nor heard of it either. What do you mean?"

Perrot could only tell me what Ball had told him. Ball was a labourer whom Perrot employed. Late in the previous October, on a Saturday morning, Ball had gone in to Helmstone to deliver a horse that Perrot had sold, and drew his wages before he went. He rode the horse in and was to walk back. The purchaser of the horse gave Ball a pint. A friend whom he met by chance gave Ball a quart. A few minutes later Ball gave himself another quart, because he could afford it, and started for home. A carter who gave him a lift told him that he was drunk, and though Ball did not accept the theory completely he thought there might be something to be said for it. It seemed better to him to roam the downs for a couple of hours before he faced the inquisitorial glance of Mrs Ball. When he reached Felonsdene he sat down to rest under some gorse near the crest of the downs before tackling the three miles home to Sandene. He fell asleep, and when he woke, shivering with cold, it was midnight. But he maintained that it was not the cold which woke him; it was music of a sort. There was a drum beating, not loud, but regularly. At intervals a woman's voice was heard singing. "Stopping short and then starting in again on it" was Ball's phrase to describe it. The sounds came from what looked like an outhouse; it had no windows, but light streamed out from the open door. And in the path of the light there was a grey smoke. He crept very quietly and cautiously down to a point from which he might see what was going on in there. The inside of the building was filled with the grey smoke, but through it he could see many lighted candles, candles as long as your arm, and a kneeling figure—he could not say whether it was man or woman—in a long red garment. The singing and drum-beating had stopped and all was quite still. Then Ball's foot slipped and sent stones rattling down. The next minute Ball was running for his life with, so he maintained, Tarn's dog after him.

As Ball got away, it may be believed that either the dog was chained, or that it was called off immediately by Tarn himself.

"I don't know what you make of it, sir, but it looks to me as if those Tarns were Romans," said Perrot.

"Mr Perrot," I said, "it doesn't do to take much notice of what a fuddled man thinks he sees."

"Perhaps not," said Perrot. "Anyway, it gave Ball a good scare—he's been teetotal ever since and talks of joining the Plymouth Brethren."

Within a brief period from that day my visits to Felonsdene ceased; there was no longer any reason for them. Tarn accepted all that the law required; he registered the birth of the child and he had her vaccinated. The devotion of Mala and himself to that child was beyond all question.

I repeated the very good advice which I had already given him, but he refused to follow it. I think he considered that he had already said too much, and he quite obviously attempted to minimise it. He said that perhaps he had expressed himself too strongly. It was quite possible for a small family to live happily and cheerfully together even in so desolate a spot as Felonsdene. There was plenty to do. Mala had her baby and the house to look after. He had the outdoor work. If he wanted to see what the rest of the world was doing, he could always go into Helmstone; there were plenty of hotels there where he could get a drink and a game of billiards. When I told him what Ball professed to have seen and heard he got rather angry. It was all a lie. Ball had never been near the place. But a few minutes afterwards he said: "I wish I'd let the dog get him."

It was all intended to be very reassuring. But it was not candid and it was vaguely disquieting. It occurred to me to pay a visit one night secretly to Felonsdene to see if I could make out what was going on. But my practice in Helmstone was too heavy to leave leisure for nocturnal expeditions of that sort; besides, it was no business of mine.

Tarn paid my bill—he wanted to pay twice as much—and I regarded the incident as closed. If I were called in again I thought it likely that it would be to certify the lunacy of either Tarn or his wife.

But the incident was reopened a little less than a year later, and not in the way that I had expected.

IV

In the following January I took a partner in my practice. This was a step which I had long contemplated. I was a bachelor, making far too much money for my simple needs and working far too hard in order to accomplish it. I also wanted time for my investigations into the cause and treatment of a certain disease; these investigations have nothing to do with the story of Mala and her husband and would not interest laymen. I have no excuse but vanity for adding that they subsequently brought me some reputation. My partner was a sound and able young man, much interested in his profession, and soon made himself liked and respected. My life became much easier and more comfortable.

In the March following, about four one morning, I was awakened by the barking of a dog in the street outside my house. Presently I heard him scratching at my door. I hurried down, switched on the lights, and opened the door. I had thought of damage to my paint and not of Tarn, of whom I had heard nothing for a long time. But it was Tarn's dog that lay on the pavement outside.

I supposed at first that somebody at Felonsdene was ill, and that the dog had been sent to fetch me. But the dog's appearance did not bear this out. He had evidently come much further than the distance from Felonsdene to my house. He got up when he saw me, but the poor brute was so exhausted that he could hardly stand, and he looked as if he had been starved for days. I called him into the house and got food for him; he ate ravenously. I waited to see if he would try to get out again, but he seemed perfectly content to remain where he was. Finally, he followed me upstairs to my own room, where he stretched himself on the hearth-rug and almost instantly fell asleep. I was just about to switch off the light and get back into my bed again when I noticed the shining brass plate on the dog's collar. I bent down and examined it. On the brass plate, neatly engraved, were my own name and address. It looked as if the dog were to be mine in future. But why? What had happened?

The dog established definitely his relations with the rest of my household next morning. He took no notice whatever of anybody who left him alone. But he would allow nobody but myself to touch him. Even my partner, who understood dogs and was fond of them, had to confess himself beaten. He was taking the round that morning, and I intended to walk up to Felonsdene with the dog. But the poor brute was still so stiff and footsore that I decided after all to take the car. He sat beside me, and I rather think that he knew where he was going. But he showed no excitement when the car stopped, and made no attempt to rush off to the farm-house. He followed me quietly down the hill.

A saddled horse was tethered in the court-yard, and the outer door was open. In the hall stood Mr Perrot with a penny note-book and a stumpy pencil in his hand. He looked up as he heard my step, and greeted me with his usual heartiness.

"This is a surprise, Mr Perrot," I said. "I didn't expect to find you here. I was looking for Tarn."

"Afraid you won't find him, sir. They all cleared out yesterday morning. I've bought this place."

"Bought it?"

"House and land, furniture and stock, everything except the dog and their clothes. It's a little speculation of mine, and looks like being a very good speculation too. I knew you were going to have the dog—he told me he meant him as a present to you, and according to Tarn I could never have done anything with him. Truculent—too truculent."

"I didn't know he was leaving. How did it come about?"

"Oh, he came round one morning three weeks ago, and asked me if I'd buy his place. I said I'd buy that or anything else if the price were right. And it was right enough because it was my own price; I came and went over everything and said what I'd give, and he never haggled. I paid my ten per cent. next day, and completed at the lawyer's in Helmstone afternoon before last."

"Tarn was there?"

"He was. What's more, we had a bottle of champagne wine at the Armada afterwards at his expense, and he drove me back to Sandene in his car."

"Car? I never knew he'd got one."

"Only had it two months, he said. It's a bigger one than yours, sir, and I expect he'll lose money on it. For he told me he shouldn't take it over to France with him, and they're bad things to sell. Yes, I felt like one of the gentlefolk that afternoon—drinking champagne wine and sitting in a motor-car. He must be a warmer man than ever I supposed."

"How was he looking?"

"Well, he was quiet, and yet he was a bit excited, if you know what I mean. He'd new clothes on—oh, quite the thing. It's my belief that he's come into money unexpected, and that he and the two niggers—the wife and baby—are off on a jaunt together."

I did not share Perrot's belief, but I said nothing.

"In France they're not too particular, so I'm told," said Perrot. "I daresay niggers go down better there than they do here."

"Did you see the woman and her baby when you were here?"

"No, they weren't shown, and I didn't ask for them. I don't think they were in the house when I came, for I went into each room. But they must have come in by another way before I left, for I heard them in the next room to us. What's more, the baby was laughing and the woman was sobbing."

"What was she crying about?"

Perrot laughed. "Why, women will cry for anything. Toothache perhaps. Maybe he'd been giving her a bit of a dressing-down."

I did not agree with Perrot's conclusions, but again I made no comment. Perrot had to get on his horse and ride back to Sandene. He confided to me that he'd got a tenant for Felonsdene already. Mrs Lane was going to live there with her married daughter and her son-in-law. Mrs Lane was Perrot's bad-tempered and dyspeptic aunt, and so far she had lived in Perrot's house at Sandene. "But I haven't got room for her any longer," said Perrot. "So she's taking her exeatus." I recommend exeatus to the philologist.

Perrot had ridden off, and I was half-way up the hill to my car, when the idea struck me that I should like to have a look at the building which had been used for the curious rites that Ball had described and I turned back again. I found the place; it stood apart from the house, and was boarded on the inside. That curious smell of bitter smoke still hung about it. At one end I could see that some sort of fitment had been removed, and there were splashes of candle-wax on the floor.

Coming out into the sunlight again, I noted that Tarn had done a little levelling and road-making to enable him to get his car into Felonsdene from the lower side of the hollow. This would give him a greater distance to go if he were driving to Helmstone, but by the shorter route which I had taken the approach was quite impracticable for a car.

And then, quite by chance, I noticed among the stunted trees of the orchard something white that at a little distance looked not unlike a big milestone. As I entered the orchard the dog whined and lay down. I supposed that he was tired and left him there. A nearer view showed me a column about three feet square and about four feet in height, neatly built up of rough lumps of chalk. On the top of the column were a pile of ashes and charred wood. It was then that its resemblance to a sacrificial altar, such as I had seen pictured in an old illustrated Bible, first struck me. Among the ashes something gleamed and sparkled. I fished it out with a bit of stick. It was a small circlet of soft gold, evidently not European work, and might have served as a child's bangle. And my disturbance of the ashes had shown me other things.

I found an old wine-case in one of the sheds, and in this I placed all that I had found on the top of the altar. The lower part of the ashes and the top of the altar were still quite warm from the fire. I carried the case up to my car, sweating with the effort and my hurry. I put the case in the tonneau and covered it with a rug, and then, with the dog by my side, I went home as fast as I could drive.

My partner had returned from his round and joined me in my examination of what was in the case. Incineration had been imperfect and we had no doubt whatever. I could state confidently that on an altar in an orchard at Felonsdene the body of a young child had been burned, within thirty-six hours of the time of my discovery, which was precisely twenty minutes past twelve on the morning of 29th March. I returned at once to my car and drove to the police-station, where I gave my information.

The number and the appearance of Tarn's car were well known. A white man travelling with a negress cannot go anywhere in England without being noticed. He and the woman had been in Paris before, and the man had admitted to Perrot, under circumstances which might have overcome his usual reticence, that he was going to France. The inspector who saw me felt sure that Tarn would be found, and the whole mystery cleared up, in a very short time.

Tarn and Mala were never found. They had been seen in the car in the very early morning of the 28th. The car itself was found at Melcombe Cliffs, an unimportant place on the coast about five miles from Helmstone. Inquiries at ports gave negative results; no negress accompanied by a white man had gone by any of the boats; the only negress who had gone abroad bore no resemblance to Mala and was satisfactorily accounted for.

The coroner was extremely polite to me at the inquest on the remains of the child. He said that I had given my evidence in a most clear and open manner. I had mentioned circumstances which I thought to be suspicious, and of course it was my duty to mention them. But still I had admitted fully—and he thought it a most important point—that both Tarn and his wife were devoted to the child. It made any theory that they had been guilty of the horrible crime of murdering the child seem very improbable. Tarn had married a negress and was very sensitive on the point; he lived alone; he hated any publicity. It seemed to him more likely that the child died suddenly, perhaps as the result of an accident, when Tarn and his wife were on the point of departure; and that sooner than face the publicity and inquiry, they had taken this quite illegal way of disposing of the body. Tarn was an educated man and he would know that what he had done was illegal. He would be anxious to avoid detection, and would probably change his plans in consequence. He was also a wealthy man; the abandonment of the motor-car would not mean very much to him. Inquiries had been made on the supposition that Tarn and his wife had gone to France; but they might have gone elsewhere. They might have shipped from Liverpool. A negress with the help of a thick motor-veil, a wig, and grease-paints might easily conceal her race for a little while. The absence of any evidence from people at Melcombe Cliffs and the neighbourhood seemed rather to point to this. Tarn was a gloomy man of rather morbid and religious temperament. He had certainly said some extraordinary things, but the bark of a man of that type was generally worse than his bite. The cremation of the child's body was wrong and illegal, but the jury had nothing to do with that. There was really no evidence pointing to murder; on the contrary, they had heard that both parents were devoted to their child. An inconclusive verdict was given.

It was on 27th March that the child was born; a year later precisely its body was burned. It may have been a coincidence; it may not. I, at any rate, have never been able to accept the coroner's comforting theory. I remember that negress too well, and the power that she and her horrible faith had over her husband. They loved their child, I believe. But in the propitiation of the Power of evil, the dearer the victim the more potent will be the sacrifice. They must have been insane in the end. And possibly the sea at Melcombe Cliffs still holds the secret of what became of them.

THE FEAST AND THE RECKONING

Mr Duncan Garth stood at his windows in park Lane and looked out. He was a man of forty-five, unusually tall and broad, with a strong, clean-shaven face.

"I should rather like," he said, "to buy Hyde Park."

His secretary, seated at a table behind him, chuckled.

"You are quite right, Ferguson," said Garth. "I can't buy Hyde Park or the National Gallery. But I presume I've got the money value of both. Wouldn't you say so, Ferguson?"

Ferguson was a slender young man. He looked far too young for the important post of secretary to Mr Garth, and much younger than he really was. His scrupulous care as to his personal appearance rather amused Garth, who was careless in such matters almost to the point of untidiness.

Ferguson lit a cigarette and reflected. "I should say not," he said. "Hyde Park alone, of course, you could buy, if it were for sale. I don't know what the National Gallery would figure out at, but silly people give absurd sums for paint and canvas nowadays, and there's any amount of it there. You might be able to do them both, but I should doubt it."

"Well, I'm going to give a luncheon-party, anyhow."

"Yes," said Ferguson, drily, "you can afford to do that. Whom am I to ask?"

Garth consulted some memoranda on the back of an envelope. "I'm going to mix 'em up a bit," he said. "You remember that girl in the post-office yesterday?"

"The one who asked if you'd got any eyes in your head?"

"Yes. One should not, of course, hand in telegrams to the money-order department. There was something in the bitter fury of the woman that interested me. Naturally, I don't know her name and address, but I suppose you can get that."

"Of course," said Ferguson, making a shorthand note.

"Then I must have old Lady Longshore. I should like an actor-manager, too. Could you suggest?"

"Want him for his egotism?"

"Quite so," said Mr Garth. "Of course."

"Then you can't do better than Eustace Richards. A fluent talker. But you've met him."

"So I have," said Garth, "now I come to think of it. He will do admirably. Then I should like Archdeacon Pringle and his wife, and that chap I went to about my throat."

"Let me see," said Ferguson—"that was Sir Edwin Goodchild, wasn't it? A good sort—I know him well. Any more?"

"Yes. Lots more. I want that man who sweeps the crossing just outside the club. He always seemed to me to be full of character. His name is Timbs, and I don't know his address. But in this case perhaps you'd better not write. See him personally. Could you get me a nice Suffragette?"

"Certainly," said Ferguson. "Any particular one?"

"No. Just an ordinary, plain Suffragette. Also the editor of Happy Homes. Likewise the Unconquerable Belgian. I don't know at which of the halls he's wrestling now, but you can find out."

"Suppose his trainer won't let him come?"

"My dear Ferguson, you know very well how to deal with a case like that. There are solid inducements that influence opinion."

"True. Would you like the girl who does my nails?"

"Your manicurist? Yes, that's an excellent idea. We shall also need a Cabinet Minister, a nice specimen of a modern gilded youth, and somebody prominent in the Salvation Army."

The list was finally made out. Ferguson looked at it reflectively. "I suppose you wouldn't ask me too," he said. "I wish to goodness you would!"

"You can come if you've got any decent clothes," said Garth, sardonically. "Behave yourself decently, mind. Don't giggle."

"Right," said Ferguson. "This will be the day of my life. You know all your servants will give notice, of course. But that doesn't matter, you can get others."

"It might simplify things," said Mr Garth, "if I took some rooms at the Ritz and gave the luncheon there. Arrange that for me, will you?"

"Certainly. And the date?"

"You'll want a little time to get the gang together. Say four weeks from to-day."

Mr Ferguson needed all his tact to get them together. Lady Longshore, it is true, expressed herself as willing to meet anybody except her own relations. But Eustace Richards, on being told of the idea of the party, said quite frankly that he preferred to mix with his equals. "The devil of it is to find 'em," said Ferguson. Richards, still frank, admitted that in the present state of dramatic art there might be something in that. He decided to attend. A Suffragette was caught by the bait of the Cabinet Minister, who subsequently refused on hearing of the Suffragette. Sir Edwin Goodchild, the editor of Happy Homes, the manicure lady, and Colonel Harriet Stokes, of the Salvation Army, accepted at once. Mr Timbs, who swept the crossing outside the club, was suspicious and took longer to decide. "Look 'ere, Mr Ferguson," he said, "is it strite? You aren't gettin' anythin' up for me, eh? I've got a good suit o' clothes, so far as that goes; one I've kept for funerals, so far. But I don't want to put that on for nothing. Barrin' sells, now, is it strite?" With renewed assurances Ferguson secured him. The lady of the post-office began with a direct refusal, which started in the third person and trailed off into the first. It said that she had not the honour of Mr Garth's acquaintance, and that she was at a loss to understand, and so on. Ferguson returned to the attack, and, metaphorically, dangled the Dowager Countess of Longshore before her. This failing, he changed his fly, and caught her with the Archdeacon. The Archdeacon had known her father, and seemed to Miss Bostock to guarantee everything. It was not absolutely fair, as the Archdeacon had a professional engagement in the North on that day, and had been compelled to refuse. Mrs Pringle, however, would be present, and, as Ferguson said in self-justification, Mrs Pringle was more archidiaconal than any archdeacon living. The Unconquerable Belgian accepted in a letter written by Mr Savage, his trainer. Mr Savage expressed a hope that the Unconquerable would not be pressed to drink, and that he would be able to get away for a professional engagement at four o'clock.

On the day appointed, Lady Longshore was the first guest to be announced.

"Came early on purpose," she said. "This is to be a freak lunch, so Fergy says, and I want to get the hang of it."

"It's simplicity itself," said Garth. "You are going to meet people whom you have never met before. Conventions that would interfere with this are abandoned. You will not, for instance, sit next to me."

"Nor to me," added Mr Ferguson. "But bear up."

"Don't be a fool, Fergy, and tell me all about it."

Ferguson glanced at a plan of the table. "On your right hand, Lady Longshore, you will have Mr Timbs, who sweeps one of the principal crossings in St James's Street, on your left will be Mr Pudbrook, who edits that serviceable kitchen weekly, Happy Homes. But the table is oval, and we hope that the conversation will be general."

"Well, it's not half a bad idea. Let me look at the rest of 'em." She snatched the plan from the secretary's hand. "Thank Heaven, I haven't got Eustace Richards—these mummers make me angry. Here, who's this?"

Monsieur Renard had just been announced.

"That," said Ferguson, in a low voice, "is Monsieur Renard, better known as the Unconquerable Belgian. You may have seen him on the stage."

"Quite a good deal of him—même trop," said the Countess.

In the meantime the Belgian extended a hand like a twenty-pound York ham. He was an enormous athlete, whose sweet temper had not yet been injured by his prolonged war with fat. He was of great simplicity, and his forehead ran back at a gentle slope from his eyebrows to the back of his head. Intelligent? Mais que voulez-vous que je vous dise? Can one have everything? His clothes were of the best quality and of the latest fashion. Let us be content.

Duncan Garth grasped some of the extended hand. "This is most kind of you, Monsieur Renard. We have all admired your prowess, and are delighted to have the chance to know you a little better."

The Belgian was slow and self-possessed. "Thank—you," he said.

"We shall have to behave ourselves," laughed Garth, "or you'll be throwing all of us out of the window."

"But no," said the Unconquerable, seriously. "That will not be so. My manager does not permit me to do anything of that kind, unless arranged with him."

"It would be an excellent advertisement," said Garth. "Just you think it over." He turned to some new arrivals.

At this moment Ferguson laid a manicured hand on the Belgian's almighty arm. "Pardon me, Monsieur Renard, but the Countess of Longshore is most anxious that you should be presented to her."

"That is all right. I kom," said the placid wrestler.

The new arrivals were Miss Bostock of the post-office, Sir Edwin Goodchild of Harley Street, and Mr Pudbrook of Happy Homes. Miss Bostock was tailor-made, smooth-haired, rather hygienic about the boots, and wore pince-nez. She looked as if she would have been handsomer if she had been happier. Her voice shook a little as she responded to Mr Garth's most respectful salutation, but her nervousness was not too apparent.

"Is—is the Archdeacon here, Mr Garth?" she inquired. "He used to know my father slightly."

"The Archdeacon regrets—a conference at York. But that is Mrs Pringle just coming in. Let me take you up to her."

Sir Edwin Goodchild took Mr Garth's secretary aside. "I say, Fergy," he said, "what the deuce is all this?"

"This?" said Ferguson, innocently. "This is a private reception-room at the Ritz. Style, Louis Quinze or thereabouts. Through those folding doors, when at the appointed time they are opened, we enter the luncheon-room. There we eat huitres Lucullus, consommé norvégienne, filets—"

"Now, don't talk nonsense."

"Nonsense, man? Considering I constructed the menu myself, I—"

"Yes, but the people. Look at that lot just come in."

"My poor lost sheep, I'll tell you just two things. Firstly, we are eccentric millionaires. Secondly, you will be seated at lunch between Colonel Harriet Stokes, of the Salvation Army, and Miss Paul, a manicure lady."

"Let me out. This is a nightmare."

"No, it's a fact, and I'll prove it to you by introducing to your kind attention Mr Pudbrook, the editor of Happy Homes. He somewhat interferes with your profession by giving remedies for black-heads and indigestion in his paper on alternate weeks. But don't let that prejudice you against him."

Certainly, the "lot" to which Sir Edwin referred looked strange enough in their present entourage. Mr Timbs wore a complete suit of black broadcloth, alleviated by new brown shoes, white socks, and a very large crimson silk handkerchief. His expression combined curiously the confident and the furtive. Those in his immediate neighbourhood were conscious of a blended fragrance of benzine and yellow soap. A white-faced woman with big eyes, severely uniformed, was in conversation with him, and Mr Timbs was choosing his language with unusual care. Miss Edith Stunt, the Suffragette, had faced meetings in Trafalgar Square, and had nothing more to fear. Her fanatical eyes looked round eagerly for an opportunity to say a good word. At present Duncan Garth was talking to Mrs Gust, a nicely-dressed lady, slightly mad. The death of her husband under treatment had not shaken her faith in Christian Science, any more than his life had shaken her belief in matrimony. Garth himself had discovered her, and had directed that she should be of the party.

Miss Vera Paul, the manicurist, was talking to Ferguson. She was a remarkably pretty girl, but there were many others who wished to speak to Ferguson. He handed her over to Mrs Pringle, and promised her that she should be next to him at luncheon. The Unconquerable Belgian bore down on Ferguson, carrying in his hand a copy of the menu, with which Ferguson had thoughtfully provided him. He tapped it with a heavy finger and said plaintively: "You excuse me. I cannot eat moch this food." Ferguson's suggestion of a porter-house steak was accepted. At the same moment Timbs approached him with care, as of one who stalked big game.

"You'll keep your eye on me, sir," said Timbs. "You told me it was strite, and it's to you I looks. I don't want to do anything I didn't ought."

"My dear chap," said Ferguson, with candour, "we want you to do the things you didn't ought."

Timbs would have pursued the conversation, but he was put aside by Miss Edith Stunt, who wished to know if she would have an opportunity to say a few words to the company. And she was put aside by Harriet Stokes, who wished to know if she could send round a collecting-card. And Harriet Stokes was obliterated by Mr Pudbrook, who wished to know if he could get a few words on private business with Mr Garth.

Then came the arrival of the last guest. Mr Eustace Richards made a splendid entrance; he was a quarter of an hour late and gracefully apologetic. "An unexpected rehearsal, my dear fellow," he said to Garth in a clearly-articulated whisper that carried to every part of the room, "Royal command for next Friday. Quite unexpected. Gratifying, eh?"

The big folding-doors opened. Ferguson flew around with his plan of the table, showing people where they were to sit. So far Mr Eustace Richards had hardly glanced at the company. He did not look much at the audience when he was acting, and he was almost always acting. But now he murmured to Garth: "My dear fellow, you warned me—but what have you done?"

"Don't quite know yet," said Garth, drily.

Mr Ferguson had his own little suite of rooms at the house in Park Lane. He dined at his club that night, and was back again by nine o'clock to check once more some figures of considerable importance. The work only took him a few minutes, and he was just finishing it when Duncan Garth entered, wearing the dinner-jacket and black tie of the domestic life.

"Hallo!" said Ferguson. "Thought you were dining at the Silchesters'."

"So I was," said Garth, dejectedly, "but I didn't." He selected a cigar from his secretary's cabinet.

"Cheaper for you, anyhow," said Ferguson. "His Grace meant to borrow money to-night."

"I'm not a fool," said Garth, wearily, "and I'm not lending money to the Duke of Silchester. How did you think it went this afternoon?"

"What? The lunch? Of course it was very, very funny."

"Or slightly tragic," said Garth, as he took an easy-chair. "Put people into new circumstances and you can always judge them. I've got a low opinion of the human race to-night, Fergy."

"But there were nice points," said Ferguson. "I like the self-centred, complete indifference of our friend Renard. He's a headless Hercules. I mean, his head is the only thing against him. It's a loss, too, that is easily excused. You saw how Lady Longshore, and Mrs Pringle, and Colonel Harriet Stokes of the Salvation Army were anxious to please that lump of beef."

"Of course I saw it. That's one of the reasons why I call the thing a tragedy. By the way, you can go over our list and draw a line through the Archdeacon and his wife."

"Certainly," said Ferguson. "Might one ask why?"

"Because I hate the type," said Garth. "Miss Bostock's father was a curate, had been at college with the Archdeacon, and knew him fairly well. Mrs Pringle snubbed Miss Bostock. She was afraid she could not remember all the curates that her husband might have happened to meet. She also snubbed Pudbrook. When she saw the nature of the party she would have left but for Lady Longshore, who, to do her credit, does not care one curse about anybody on this earth or elsewhere. She was almost affectionate to Timbs when Lady Longshore repeated his stories. She was quite nice to your manicurist girl. She recognised the charm of the Unconquerable Belgian. But she snubbed Miss Bostock and she snubbed Pudbrook. She admits the hopeless and snubs the hopeful. She is a mixture of the coward and the bully. I don't like it, and I've no more to do with it. Strike them off, Fergy. I shall feel happier when it's done."

Ferguson took down an alphabetical list, turned up the letter "P," and put a black ink cross where it was required. "I wonder what this has cost you," he said cheerfully.

"You paid the bill. Nothing, anyhow."

"The Salvationist got a subscription, and so did Mrs Gust. The Suffragette also hit you. I think you have promised to be manicured. Mr Pudbrook owns half his paper, and the printer owns the other half. They are not doing too well, and they are thinking of a limited company. You know best how far you have come into it. Eustace Richards, in spite of his jabber, has done no good with his last two things. He stayed with you for some time. If he was not suggesting that you should release him from the people who are financing him at present, then, of course, it's my mistake."

"You're a clear-sighted chap," said Garth, "and you've mentioned nothing which is very far out. There are even some things which you might have mentioned and have omitted. They don't really matter. I've done what was wanted. I've even shown Lady Longshore how to make the money she wants. But that's not what's worrying me."

"Give it a name," said Ferguson.

The door opened. "A young person of the name of Bostock wishes to see you, sir," said the butler. "I have told her that you are not in the habit of seeing people at this time of the evening, but she seemed rather pressing."

"In here, please," said Garth.

"Let's see," said Ferguson, "Miss Bostock left before the show was over."

"She did," said Garth; "and I want to know why."

In the meantime the butler had returned to Miss Bostock with a totally different manner. So far as the rules went, he had made no mistake, but there were exceptions, of course. On sight, Miss Bostock was a young person. On further investigation she was a young lady whom Mr Duncan Garth wished to see, and that made a difference.

She entered the room with perfect composure, wearing the same clothes that she had worn at the luncheon-party.

"Perhaps I shouldn't have come," she said, "but there are things I want to say. I want to know why you did that."

"You'll sit down, won't you?" said Garth. "What is it precisely we are talking about?"

"Why did you give that luncheon? Why did you make me come to it? I refused at first, you know. Then Mr Ferguson came to see me and persuaded me. He told me the Archdeacon was coming, and that seemed like a mutual acquaintance. I think if he had been there he wouldn't have been as rude to me as his wife was. I dare say, if I had told her I was a general servant, she would have been as sweet to me as she was to that half-drunken crossing-sweeper, or that Belgian brute, or some of the other people whom you ought not to have asked me to meet."

"Yes," said Mr Ferguson, cheerfully. "Lady Longshore also is very unconventional, isn't she?"

"I'm not speaking about that," said Miss Bostock, doggedly. "The rudeness of that lady to me is a small personal matter easily forgotten. It's the ghastly humiliation of the whole thing that makes me sick and savage."

There was a moment's silence. "Ferguson," said Garth, "there was that letter."

"Yes," said Ferguson, "I'll see to it," and passed out of the room.

"Now, then," said Garth. "What's the trouble, Miss Bostock?"

"The trouble is that the whole of us were merely a show got up for your amusement. You gave us a lunch that we might make fools of ourselves. Fish out of water are very absurd, aren't they? But it's cruel to take them out of water and to watch them dying, all the same. That luncheon-party was the most brutal thing done in London to-day, and you were the brute who did it. What harm was I doing? Why did you drag me into it?"

"Five or six weeks ago," said Garth, "I met you for the first time. It was in the post-office. You asked me if I'd got any eyes in my head."

"I remember now," said Miss Bostock. "I ought not to have said it. I think the tick of the telegraph gets on my nerves. You were not the first, too, and the notices were up clear enough. Still, why couldn't you have reported me? That would have been the right way to punish me."

"No," said Garth, "I did not want to punish you. I distinctly liked the spirit and the temper with which you spoke to me. You will understand, perhaps, that I get rather too much of the other kind of thing. I had no wish whatever to humiliate you. I did wish to amuse myself. You may be glad to hear that I have not done it. Is there anything I can do?"

"Nothing now," said the girl, contemptuously.

"I think there is," said Garth, and rang the bell. He sent the servant to fetch Mr Ferguson.

"I say, Ferguson," said Garth, "can you tell me what the price of that luncheon was?"

"Eight shillings a head, exclusive of the wine, of course."

"Let me see, Miss Bostock," said Garth, "I think you drank water."

"Yes, yes, I see it now," said Miss Bostock, eagerly. She fumbled clumsily at her pocket, and produced an emaciated purse. She took out half a sovereign. "There is your money. Can you give me change?"

Garth did not carry money. Ferguson handed Garth a florin, and Garth gravely handed it to Miss Bostock.

"Now I can breathe again," she said. "I am going now. Good-night."

Garth followed her out, along the corridor and into the hall. Servants were waiting at the door. A sign from Garth dismissed them. As he held the door open for her, she turned to him, hesitated, and then spoke.

"I thought at lunch to-day that the doctor was the only gentleman there. I—I am not so sure about it."

"If I were ten years younger," said Garth, "I think I should ask you to marry me. Good-night."

He stood watching her as she passed down the steps into Park Lane.

POST-MORTEM

I

After dining for the last time at his club, Evan Hurst returned at once to his flat in Jermyn Street. The greater part of his arrangements had already been made, and most of his things packed; but there were still a few details to settle, and he was to leave for the north early on the following morning.

Yet when he entered his room he did not proceed at once to letter-writing or to business of any kind. He flung himself down in an easy-chair. He felt unaccountably tired. All day he had had business to attend to, necessary no doubt for the carrying out of his somewhat wild and romantic scheme, none the less wearisome to a man of poetical temperament and of poor physique. He was a man of slight build, with fair and rather fluffy hair, a pretty, thin-lipped mouth, and plaintive blue eyes. To the world in general his lot would have seemed a fairly easy one. He had sufficient means of his own; and no one in any way depended upon him. His volume of poems, Under the Sea, published a year or two before, had excited a great deal of public attention and some controversy; what had seemed genius to one critic had seemed insanity to another. He was not unpopular at his club although he was thought to be slightly ridiculous. It was not supposed that he had any trouble of any kind. Women, of whom in his poems he wrote with such knowledge and such fervency, had never really come much into his life.

As he lay there and smoked endless cigarettes, he admitted the truth to himself. It was vanity that was at the root of it. He had seen the talented and remarkable Evan Hurst dwindling down into nobody again. Once it was supposed that Evan Hurst was dead, dead by his own act, and leaving such strange communications behind him, interest would revive. People would speak again of Under the Sea, his unpublished poems would be produced, and there would be obituary notices. There would be, for a while at least, breathless interest in the poet and the suicide, and he, alive and not dead, under another name and acting another part, would read and enjoy it all. To carry out his scheme meant many sacrifices, but the fascination of it was too strong for him, and the success of it seemed to be certain.

His sensations were really very much those of a man who actually knows that he is about to die. He had withdrawn a large balance from his bank and transferred it to another bank in the name which he now intended to take, but it was essential if Evan Hurst were to die that he should leave money behind him. That money he willingly sacrificed. It was enough if he retained for his new incarnation sufficient for a reasonable livelihood. It annoyed him far more to think that he must leave also his books, the collections, the furniture and the treasures of his Jermyn Street flat. They had all come together slowly, and all represented in a way his individuality. The scattering of them by public auction would be like the disintegration of death. He could imagine already the notice in the catalogue of a second-hand bookseller offering that exquisitely-bound set of Huysman's works, "containing the book-plate of the late Evan Hurst." There were prints and engravings that from long affection and study had given him almost a feeling as if he had had a part in their creation. The Durer, a splendid impression, would fetch fifty pounds at least. Men at the club would remember this evening. They would recall that Evan Hurst was there only a few days before his death, and that even then they had remarked how gloomy and silent he seemed to be.

He laughed bitterly and aloud, flung down his cigarette and passed into his bedroom. There for a while he packed energetically, but soon he had to stop for a feeling of intense and almost painful weariness came over him again. After all there would be time to finish the packing in the morning. He decided to go to bed.

On the following afternoon he left King's Cross for Salsay on the Yorkshire coast.

II

Salsay is a small fishing village that has not yet suffered from the curse of popularity. Evan Hurst put up at the one hotel in the place and constituted its one permanent visitor. Occasionally a commercial traveller would arrive one day and leave on the next, and would talk as much as possible to Evan Hurst. Evan Hurst, in return, would talk as little as possible, consistent with bare politeness, to the commercial traveller. Every morning he bathed from the shore before breakfast at a point at some considerable distance from the village. Here there was a small cave in the cliffs, a useful shelter if rain came on, and useful to Evan Hurst for other purposes; for it was here that gradually, bit by bit, he collected the slender outfit with which he was to begin the world in his new character on the day that Evan Hurst was supposed to commit suicide. His plan was simplicity itself. He would go out to bathe as usual, and he would not return. His clothes would be found on the shore, and in the pocket of his coat there would be a letter to the landlord of the hotel leaving no doubt whatever as to his intentions. In the meantime, in a little cave, he would have altered his appearance, put on different clothes, and from there struck out for the nearest railway station. In the evening he would be in Dover, and next day in Paris, without one tie left between what he had once been and what he was now going to be.

He looked forward to the change with pleasurable excitement. It was something more than vanity after all. As Evan Hurst he had begun in a rôle which he was not competent to sustain; to have continued in it would have been to disappoint the public opinion of him. In a new part he could write as he liked; act as he liked; talk as he liked. There would be no preconceived opinion of him in the world; it would be all for him to make with the benefit of his experience of his past blunders.

He took immense care with the composition of that brief letter to the landlord. It ran as follows:—

"Dear Sir,—It would be impossible to explain to you the reasons why I intend this morning to take my life, but undoubtedly some apology is due to you for any inconvenience which my death may cause you. I leave behind me at the hotel a quantity of money which will be more than sufficient to discharge my obligations to you. Nor have I any explanation to offer to the coroner and the British jury. These good people will return their usual verdict. Not to be interested in so extremely uninteresting a thing as my life has become, would be a clear proof to them of insanity. I shall swim out so long as my strength lasts, and the end will come under the sea.—Faithfully yours,

"Evan Hurst."

He did not quite like it now that he had finished it. The way in which he had introduced the title of his book seemed to him to be a little on the cheap side, but at any rate it was a letter which would call for a good deal of comment. He promised himself much amusing and interesting reading when the English papers reached Paris a few days later.

The morning came at last; grey, overcast, and misty, and more likely to turn to great heat than to rain. Evan Hurst looked at himself in the glass and laughed. He had spent some hours in his room the night before dyeing his fluffy hair. Unquestionably it was an improvement to his appearance. There was no danger that it would be observed on his leaving the hotel; for he wore his towels slung round his neck, and a broad-brimmed straw hat. As he walked towards the cave he now felt an unaccountable nervousness. True, but few people went that way, and even if they entered the cave his store of clothes was so carefully hidden that it was unlikely that anybody would find them. Still, there was just a chance, and it would be maddening if just at the last some trifle occurred to balk his scheme. He breathed a sigh of relief when he found everything just as he had left it. In less than half an hour the change was complete; the clothes of that fluffy poet, Evan Hurst, were disposed with a careful carelessness on the rocks above high-water mark, with the letter to the landlord in the pocket of the coat, and Evan Hurst, in his new incarnation, strode away in a blue serge suit, black felt hat, and black boots, carrying a small bag, which contained a change of linen and the articles of his toilet. The rest of his luggage was to be purchased in London.

For the first mile or so his way lay along the beach, and he was careful to walk on the sand, where, in half an hour, the sea would obliterate his footprints. His feelings were at first those of amusement. In every little detail of his clothes he was so different from what he had ever been before. He speculated whether he would not perforce become quite a different kind of man under the clothes' influence. Already he felt himself a stouter person, readier to tackle the world and deal with it properly. His satisfaction was intense. He was still meditating on the subject when he reached the path up the cliffs; a perfectly easy and safe path with a few low rocks between him and it. As he clambered over the rocks, inconvenienced by the bag that he was carrying, he slipped and fell, and lay quite still.

The hours passed, and now the sun blazed. The waves had already touched one of the black boots. They crept up to the head and came back with a pinky stain. At last, when the figure was fully covered, it gave a sudden and ungainly movement, and for a little while floated with arms and legs shot out queerly like the limbs of a starfish. The black felt hat had drifted far away, and tossed about on the waves with absurdity. Then, slowly, the figure disappeared from sight.

THE GIRL WITH THE BEAUTIFUL HAIR

[By my own unaided intelligence I chose the exactly right spot at the farther end of the orchard, and with my own hand I slung the hammock. Now that the day is hot and luncheon is over, I take my book and go thither to reap the fruits of my labour. And, behold, the hammock is already occupied with four large cushions and one small girl—a solemn and inscrutable girl who hears to the end a complaint of the cruelty and injustice of her trespass, and then says kindly that I may sit on the grass.

"Thank you. I am glad you do not want all the grass as well."

I do the best that I can with the grass, and open my book, and the voice from the hammock bids me to tell a story.

"What, with no better audience than that?"

It appears that this is the charm. She has never had a story all to herself before.]

There once was a girl who had very long and very beautiful hair.

(As long as yours? Much longer and much more beautiful. And if you interrupt me again, I will stop this story, empty you out of the hammock, tie you to a tree, and teach you as much as I can remember of the French gender rules. Very well, then.)

As I was saying—there once was a girl who had very long and very beautiful hair, and she knew it. Her sisters, who were as plain-spoken as sisters generally are, were in the habit of saying that she was a perfect peacock. Her hair was very much the colour of a chestnut, and she took the greatest possible care of it. It was a rule of life with her, when she had nothing else to do, to brush her hair. Frequently also she brushed it when she had other things to do. She never would have it cut. She even refused a lock of it to her own mother. When she went out for walks with her sisters she listened attentively as people passed her, because sometimes they said things about her hair which she liked very much. Then she would try not to look pleased, and when a girl who is really pleased tries to look as if she did not care, she looks perfectly horrid. Her sisters remarked upon it.

Her father, who was a good and wise man, explained to her how wicked vanity was, especially vanity about one's hair. He showed her that personal attractions, especially if connected in any way with the hair, were worthless as compared with the intellectual and moral attributes. On the other hand, her mother took her to a photographer's and had her taken in fourteen different positions, and they all made such beautiful pictures that the photographer nearly committed suicide because he was not allowed to exhibit them in his shop window.

She reached the age at which every good Christian girl wishes to have long dresses and do her hair up into a lump, but this girl (whose name was Elsa, of course) would not have her hair done up, and stamped with her foot and was rude to the governess. In the end, of course, Elsa had to submit, for it is very wicked for girls of a certain age to wear their hair down. But she became extremely ingenious. She had ways of doing that hair so that it would not stop up, but tumbled down unexpectedly and caused great admiration. She would then pretend to be confused and embarrassed. Now, when a girl who is not in the least confused and embarrassed tries to look so, she looks simply silly. Her sisters told her so. Every single girl friend she had, and many who were only acquaintances, had seen that hair in its native glory. Some of these raved about it to Elsa's sisters, and were surprised that the sisters did not share their enthusiasm.

"She has such a lot of it," the friends would say.

"She thinks such a lot of it," the sisters would answer.

Now, Elsa and her sisters were not the only girls in the world, and they did not know all the rest; consequently a girl called Kate came to them as something of a novelty. As she was called Kate, she was, of course, quite good. Katherine may be proud, and Kitty may be frivolous, but Kate is solid. If you ask me if Kate is clever, I reply that she is a good housekeeper. If you ask me if she is pretty, I change the subject rapidly. There was nothing dazzling about this Kate. She was just Kate.

It is a sad truth that it is the people who are naturally the nicest to look at who take the greatest trouble to look nice. The woman who, so far as her face is concerned, makes the best of a bad job, is very rare. Kate was not a beauty, but she was sensible and resigned. She dressed herself very quickly in things that wore well. It was her boast that she could do her hair without a looking-glass, and everybody who saw her hair believed it. But as it happened, when Kate met Elsa, a change came over her.

"Your hair is perfectly divine," she said to Elsa.

Elsa tried to be politely bored.

"So kind of you to say so," she said. "I get frightfully sick of my old wig myself. It's an endless bother."

"And you do it so beautifully," said Kate. "I do wish you'd give me some idea for my hair, so that it wouldn't look awful."

"It isn't awful at all," said Elsa, politely. "I don't think I should change the way of doing it if I were you."

Then she went into elaborate technical details and showed Kate that the thing was bad and that improvement was impossible. Of course, she did not use these words, and was sweetly delicate about it.

Now, that night, as Elsa was having her own hair brushed, a horrible suspicion came over her. She put it aside as a thing perfectly absurd. It might have been a trick of the looking-glass. It might have been her own imagination. It did not keep her awake for a moment. But next morning one of her sisters came into her room, looked at her, and said: "What an idiot you were to have your hair cut!"

"I have not had it cut," said Elsa, furiously. "It's the same as it always was."

"Rubbish," said the sister. "It's three inches shorter at least."

"It's not," said Elsa; "and I wish you'd go away. I can't get on properly while you're hanging about talking."

The sister went away, and Elsa flew to the looking-glass. The cold morning light confirmed her suspicions of the night before. Her sister was perfectly right. Elsa's hair was undoubtedly three inches shorter.

That afternoon Elsa secretly and surreptitiously went to a great hair specialist. She had seen his advertisement, and she felt that here she might at any rate know the worst. He looked at her hair and said that it had become shorter from a shrinkage in the cells, owing to undue epithelial activity of the cranium. It was as well that she came to him when she did. As it was, if she would rub in a little of his relaxative she would have nothing to fear. He then sold her a fourpenny pot of pomatum for three guineas, washed his hands, and went home to tea.

But the pomatum was quite ineffectual. Every day her hair seemed to be a little shorter and a little thinner. This was particularly the case when she had been behaving like a peacock or like a spiteful cat. It reached a point when all her friends who met her exclaimed: "Why, Elsa, what on earth have you done with your hair?"

Then she would smile sweetly and say: "Brushed it. What did you think?" But inwardly she was a mad woman.

About this time she saw the advertisement of the Indian hair doctor, and she thought she could but try. I do not think the man was really Indian, I know he was not really a doctor, and I fancy he did not know much about hair. But he said that Elsa's case was extremely grave, and that in another week she would have been entirely bald. She must take a course of scalp friction; twelve applications for three guineas the application. She took them; and at the end of the course her hair was nearly all gone, her temper was quite gone, her money was almost gone, and she did not want to see anybody or to do anything except die.

And then unwittingly she did what was best for herself. To escape the sweet sympathy of her friends and relations she went away all by herself to live in a little cottage in a forest. It is good for a girl who has been seeing too many people to live all by herself for a while. It is good for a girl who has been long in a crowded town to go away into the forest solitude. Your soul must go to the cleaner, just like your gloves.

Now that there was no one to sympathise with her loss, and no one to attract by her beautiful hair even if she had still had it, she could begin to think of other things. And she thought about squirrels, and nuts, and blackberries, and sunsets, and streams that made silvery lines down the green hillsides. And every morning she went all by herself to a cottage two miles off and fetched milk for herself.

The old woman who kept the cows at this cottage was tall and old and always polite, but also she was always very sad. She had the face of one who never ceased to suffer. After Elsa had been two months in her cottage she suddenly saw that this woman had always looked really sad. The sadness of other people had never mattered to her in the least before; but now one day she asked the old woman why this was, and if there were anything that she might do for her.

Then the old woman said: "I have a daughter and she was very beautiful. None that saw her ever forgot how beautiful she was. And she fell ill of a strange disease so that her whole face became loathesome. No one but I can bear to look on her, lest their dreams should be haunted for ever."

"And she lives here, this poor daughter of yours?" asked Elsa.

"Yes; she lies in the room upstairs. They tell me that she will now soon be dead."

"I will come up and talk to her," said Elsa, "and help to nurse her, for you must often be away on your farm."

"No," said the old woman, "that is too much for you to do. I tell you that no one but myself can bear it. You must not see her."

"Look," said Elsa. And then she took off the big kerchief that she always wore over her head. "I had pretty hair once," she said, "and I have lost it all. I can bear anything, and I want to help you."

Then Elsa went upstairs into a room which was darkened, and even in that dim light she could see that this old woman's daughter, who was once very beautiful, had now become painful to behold. Elsa was frightened, but tried not to show it, and a girl who is frightened and tries not to show it, very frequently does not look nearly such a fool as she thinks. She remained there a long time, and when she came out her face was quite white, and she wanted to go back to her cottage and cry.

But every day after that until the end came she went to see the sick girl who loved and adored her. And the end came one afternoon quite quietly. And the old woman did not weep at that time, but she blessed Elsa and went out, for the cows were waiting to be milked, and that must not be left.

Next morning when Elsa awoke it was very late, and the sun was streaming into her room. For a while she lay with her eyes closed, thinking over all that had happened. Each visit to the sick girl had been a separate terror to her, but now she grieved that the girl was dead, and wondered in her mind if there were none other for whom she might find something to do.

At last, since it was a shame to lie so late, she got up, and, behold, masses of beautiful chestnut-coloured hair fell far down over her white shoulders! She rubbed her eyes and said that she must be dreaming. But no, it had really happened. Her mirror echoed the truth. The glory of her pretty head had come back to it as strangely as it had gone. So that afternoon she mused what she would do as, sitting in the garden of her cottage, she made a wreath of white lilies.

And the next day she left her cottage in the wood and went back to her own home; and her sisters were all delighted to see her, and praised her beautiful hair, and were glad that it had grown again so quickly. Yet one of them said secretly to another: "Now she will be as vain and horrible as ever."

But, as it happened, she was not vain and horrible; she was really quite nice, so that the prince who married her loved her as much for the sweetness of her heart as for her angel's face and her beautiful long hair.

THE WIDOWER

The decision of Edward Morris to marry again was one of the few practical things of his record. He had married first at the age of eighteen without the knowledge of his parents. His wife died two years later. He had no children by her. At her death he was desolate.

He was as desolate, that is, as one can be at twenty. He was free from the annoying minor-poet habit of advertising his afflictions, but it was quite clear to himself that there was nothing more left. Yet it is idle for a man to say he will stop when Nature, his proprietor, says that he will go on. There is no comedy at ninety, and there is no tragedy at twenty. After he had deposited the remains of his wife in Brompton cemetery—she had a strong aversion to cremation and inwardly believed that it destroyed the immortal soul—he went off into the country, selecting a village where he knew nobody. Here he learned by heart considerable portions of the poems of Heine, neglected to return the call of the rector, and bored himself profusely. It must not be understood that he resented the boredom. That was what life was to be in future, a continuous dreariness. After a brief stay in the village he went off to Paris to study art. At the time when he thought of giving himself to music all noticed his ability in painting. When he took to art they remembered that he had musical talent. A year later, when he returned to England to live the life of a hermit, to teach in song what he had learned in sorrow, some said that he was a lost artist, and some that he was a lost musician, and others that he was a well-defined case of dilettantism. It is, however, difficult to be a hermit in London. London has many tentacles; it puts them out and draws you into the liveliest part of itself. A claim of relationship, an old friendship, a piece of medical advice, a chance meeting—anything may become a tentacle. Almost before he knows it the misanthropical hermit is dragged from his shell and is writing that he has much pleasure in accepting her very kind invitation for the thirteenth, and wonders if that man in Sackville Street will be able to make him some evening clothes in time, his others being not so much clothes as a relic of those pre-hermit days when his wife, his only love, still lived and took him out to dinners, and would have the glass down in the hansoms. The thought that he resented this last action at the time saddens him, but the acceptance is posted. He is drawn into the vortex.

Once in, Edward Morris had to explain to himself how he got there. Nobody else wanted any explanation. Nobody else knew that the first time he took his hostess in to dinner he looked down the long table towards his host's right hand and remembered. His explanation to himself was that he did it to avoid comment. One could not wear one's heart on one's coat sleeve. One must go somewhere and must do something. One must unfortunately live, even when the savour of life has gone. So he lived, and in living the savour of life came back again.

It was on a muggy December evening that he accompanied Lady Marchsea and her eminent husband to a first-night performance. When the eminent man was grumbling at the draught, and Lady Marchsea was, with justification, admiring herself, her dress, and everything that was hers, Edward Morris looked up. Out of the gloom of the box above him a brown-faced girl with dark eyes, her chin leaning on her white gloves, bent forward and looked down.

Yet it was not till the end of the first act that he asked who she was and was told that she was nobody, but was apparently with the Martins, who were very, very dear friends, and would Mr Morris take her round? That was the beginning of it, and the end of it was his engagement to Adela Constantia Graham, who was nobody. Everybody who knew Adela Constantia knew that it was an excellent thing for her—a much wealthier man than she had any reason to expect. Everyone who knew Edward Morris knew that it was the best thing for him. "Ballast," said Lady Marchsea, emphatically, "that is what marriage means to a man like Edward Morris. He needs ballast; something to make him concentrate himself and trust himself; something to encourage him and urge him on."

Her notions of the general uses of ballast were vague, but her conviction was sincere that Edward Morris, happily re-married, would achieve something in one, or possibly in all, of the arts. Her eminent husband said: "Nice sort of man, but no good really." But still he paid for the dinner-service with the sanctifying mark on the bottom of all the plates, which they forwarded to Edward Morris a short time before the wedding—the wedding which never took place.

About a week before the date fixed for that wedding it occurred to Edward Morris in a moment of leisure—he was naturally very busy at the time—that his first wife had been a jealous woman, and he wondered what she would have thought and said if she had been alive. He could laugh at the illogicality. If she had been alive there would have been nothing to think or to say. The haunting face with the chin pressed on the white gloves against the darkness at the back of the box would have been merely a face and nothing more, and would not have haunted. He collected his old love-letters and burned them. Other little relics of his first wife he gathered together, had them placed in a box and deposited at his bankers. The old life was done; the new life was beginning. Yet one night as he stood in a darkened room with Adela Constantia in his arms the door opened with a little quick click some few inches. She stepped back from him, thinking it was a servant, and he turned white, thinking, in a moment of madness, that it was someone else; then he went to the door and opened it wider. No one was there.

The position of the widower who marries again is irritating to him if he be, as Edward Morris was, a man of nice feeling. He has to say, and to believe, that he loves as he never loved in his life before. Scraps of used romance must be whipped up out of his respectable past to set against the virginal fervour of the young woman who has just begun to love him. Yet he feels that all this is an insult to the dead—to the woman who loved him before. A man of the world has a happy habit of forgetting and of ignoring. He may marry for the second or third time quite easily. He takes nothing too seriously. He may order a new overcoat, but he does not feel that the coat will be worthless unless he swears and tries to believe that he never wore a coat like that before. Morris, however, was a sentimentalist, and so he became irritated with himself. The next step inevitably followed. He became irritated with his dead wife. She had got her cold arms round his neck and was dragging him down and holding him back from the joyful development of his life.

When in London it was his custom to visit her grave in Brompton cemetery at regular intervals, once every month. During his engagement to Adela Constantia he made up his mind that this regular visit must be dropped. Some arrangement could be made to have the grave kept in decent order, but he could not go near it again. He remembered having been told a story of a widower who married again and went hand-in-hand with his second wife to stand by the grave of the first. It had been told him as something pathetic. He had never been able to see in it anything but a subject for a humorous paper; Guy de Maupassant would have done wonders with it. He settled the day when the last visit should be made. He selected an appropriate wreath, in which everlastings and dead leaves were symbolically interwoven. But that afternoon more than ever before his hatred to his dead wife grew within him. He recollected her strange belief with regard to cremation. Fire destroyed everything, even the immortal soul, and it seemed as if fire destroyed love too. He remembered that he had burnt her letters. As he drove down Regent Street an old friend, a man whom he had not seen for some time, recognised him. He stopped the cab and his friend came up.

"Why do I never see you now?" said the friend. "But of course I know. Very much engaged aren't you? (That's not bad for an impromptu, by the way.) I suppose you are going there now?"

"No," said Morris, "as a matter of fact I am not."

"Well, you are evidently going somewhere, and you carry a big box with you with a florist's label on it, so all I can say is that if you are not going there you ought to be."

Edward Morris laughed, and to laugh was the last touch of horror.

"Well," the friend said, "if you are really not going to see Miss Graham I have no scruples in annexing you. Come round to the club for a game of billiards."

"Thanks," said Morris, "I am afraid I am very busy this afternoon."

However, he let himself be persuaded. The box containing the wreath was left in the charge of the hall-porter at the club. On the following day Morris despatched the wreath to Brompton cemetery by a messenger-boy, where the symbolical offering was deposited on the grave of Charles Ernest Jessop, who died at the age of two and a half, and of whose death or previous existence Morris was unaware. Messenger-boys are so careless. Morris never even attempted to visit the cemetery again. It was not only anger, it was not only hatred; it was also fear that kept him away. He was assured in his own mind that the dead woman was awake again and was watching him jealously.

The moment when he had just awoken from sleep was always a horrible one for him. The fear of the dead woman was in his mind then and nothing else was very clear. He left the electric light on all night and, as a rule, slept fairly well and without any haunting or painful dreams. But the moment of waking was always a trial. He kept on expecting to see something that he never did see. He would not have wondered if, as he awoke, someone had touched his hand, or the electric light had been suddenly switched off.

Of course everybody noticed that he looked wretchedly ill. Adela Constantia was in despair about his health. There were things about him which were very queer; that he did not like dark rooms. That when he was talking to her he would suddenly look over his shoulder—at nothing. The comforting doctor told her that Morris has been very busy indeed with the preparation for his married life and, the doctor added, a lot of worry upsets the nerves. This is quite true.

On his wedding morning he certainly looked much fitter to be buried than to be married. His best man gave him champagne and told him to hold his head up more. The bride made an adorable and pathetic figure; a beautiful young girl is always a pathetic figure on her wedding-morning. Her sisters fluttered around her, ready to cry at the right moments. Her father looked a little nervous and elated. He had had quite a long talk with Lady Marchsea, whose husband was kept away by the toothache. The ceremony went with its customary brilliance until that point when the bridegroom was required to say: "I, Edward, take thee, Adela Constantia." He said this in a loud voice, but he did not say "Adela Constantia"; he gave another name. There was a moment's pause, and while everybody was looking at everybody he fainted and fell.

At the inquest it was found that the blow on the head from the sharp edge of the stone step satisfactorily accounted for the death. All the evening papers had readable paragraphs headed "Tragic End to a Fashionable Wedding Ceremony."

And Adela Constantia married somebody else.

And the dead woman went to sleep again.

THE UNFINISHED GAME

At Tanslowe, which is on the Thames, I found just the place that I wanted. I had been born in the hotel business, brought up in it, and made my living at it for thirty years. For the last twenty I had been both proprietor and manager, and had worked uncommonly hard, for it is personal attention and plenty of it which makes a hotel pay. I might have retired altogether, for I was a bachelor with no claims on me and had made more money than enough; but that was not what I wanted. I wanted a nice, old-fashioned house, not too big, in a nice place with a longish slack season. I cared very little whether I made it pay or not. The Regency Hotel at Tanslowe was just the thing for me. It would give me a little to do and not too much. Tanslowe was a village, and though there were two or three public-houses, there was no other hotel in the place, nor was any competition likely to come along. I was particular about that, because my nature is such that competition always sets me fighting, and I cannot rest until the other shop goes down. I had reached a time of life when I did want to rest and did not want any more fighting. It was a free house, and I have always had a partiality for being my own master. It had just the class of trade that I liked—principally gentlefolk taking their pleasure in a holiday on the river. It was very cheap, and I like value for money. The house was comfortable, and had a beautiful garden sloping down to the river. I meant to put in some time in that garden—I have a taste that way.

The place was so cheap that I had my doubts. I wondered if it was flooded when the river rose, if it was dropping to pieces with dry-rot, if the drainage had been condemned, if they were going to start a lunatic asylum next door, or what it was. I went into all these points and a hundred more. I found one or two trifling drawbacks, and one expects them in any house, however good—especially when it is an old place like the Regency. I found nothing whatever to stop me from taking the place.

I bought the whole thing, furniture and all, lock, stock and barrel, and moved in. I brought with me my own head-waiter and my man-cook, Englishmen both of them. I knew they would set the thing in the right key. The head-waiter, Silas Goodheart, was just over sixty, with grey hair and a wrinkled face. He was worth more to me than two younger men would have been. He was very precise and rather slow in his movements. He liked bright silver, clean table-linen, and polished glass. Artificial flowers in the vases on his tables would have given him a fit. He handled a decanter of old port as if he loved it—which, as a matter of fact, he did. His manner to visitors was a perfect mixture of dignity, respect and friendliness. If a man did not quite know what he wanted for dinner, Silas had sympathetic and very useful suggestions. He took, I am sure, a real pleasure in seeing people enjoy their luncheon or dinner. Americans loved him, and tipped him out of all proportion. I let him have his own way, even when he gave the thing away.

"Is the coffee all right here?" a customer asked after a good dinner.

"I cannot recommend it," said Silas. "If I might suggest, sir, we have the Chartreuse of the old French shipping."

I overheard that, but I said nothing. The coffee was extract, for there was more work than profit in making it good. As it was, that customer went away pleased, and came back again and again, and brought his friends too. Silas was really the only permanent waiter. When we were busy I got one or two foreigners from London temporarily. Silas soon educated them. My cook, Timbs, was an honest chap, and understood English fare. He seemed hardly ever to eat, and never sat down to a meal; he lived principally on beer, drank enough of it to frighten you, and was apparently never the worse for it. And a butcher who tried to send him second-quality meat was certain of finding out his mistake.

The only other man I brought with me was young Harry Bryden. He always called me uncle, but as a matter of fact he was no relation of mine. He was the son of an old friend. His parents died when he was seven years old and left him to me. It was about all they had to leave. At this time he was twenty-two, and was making himself useful. There was nothing which he was not willing to do, and he could do most things. He would mark at billiards, and played a good game himself. He had run the kitchen when the cook was away on his holiday. He had driven the station-omnibus when the driver was drunk one night. He understood book-keeping, and when I got a clerk who was a wrong 'un, he was on to him at once and saved me money. It was my intention to make him take his proper place more when I got to the Regency; for he was to succeed me when I died. He was clever, and not bad-looking in a gipsy-faced kind of way. Nobody is perfect, and Harry was a cigarette-maniac. He began when he was a boy, and I didn't spare the stick when I caught him at it. But nothing I could say or do made any difference; at twenty-two he was old enough and big enough to have his own way, and his way was to smoke cigarettes eternally. He was a bundle of nerves, and got so jumpy sometimes that some people thought he drank, though he had never in his life tasted liquor. He inherited his nerves from his mother, but I daresay the cigarettes made them worse.

I took Harry down with me when I first thought of taking the place. He went over it with me and made a lot of useful suggestions. The old proprietor had died eighteen months before, and the widow had tried to run it for herself and made a mess of it. She had just sense enough to clear out before things got any worse. She was very anxious to go, and I thought that might have been the reason why the price was so low.

The billiard-room was an annexe to the house, with no rooms over it. We were told that it wasn't used once in a twelvemonth, but we took a look at it—we took a look at everything. The room had got a very neglected look about it. I sat down on the platform—tired with so much walking and standing—and Harry whipped the cover off the table. "This was the one they had in the Ark," he said.

There was not a straight cue in the rack, the balls were worn and untrue, the jigger was broken. Harry pointed to the board. "Look at that, uncle," he said. "Noah had made forty-eight; Ham was doing nicely at sixty-six; and then the Flood came and they never finished." From neatness and force of habit he moved over and turned the score back. "You'll have to spend some money here. My word, if they put the whole lot in at a florin we're swindled." As we came out Harry gave a shiver. "I wouldn't spend a night in there," he said, "not for a five-pound note."

His nerves always made me angry. "That's a very silly thing to say," I told him. "Who's going to ask you to sleep in a billiard-room?"

Then he got a bit more practical, and began to calculate how much I should have to spend to make a bright, up-to-date billiard-room of it. But I was still angry.

"You needn't waste your time on that," I said, "because the place will stop as it is. You heard what Mrs Parker said—that it wasn't used once in a twelvemonth. I don't want to attract all the loafers in Tanslowe into my house. Their custom's worth nothing, and I'd sooner be without it. Time enough to put that room right if I find my staying visitors want it, and people who've been on the river all day are mostly too tired for a game after dinner."

Harry pointed out that it sometimes rained, and there was the winter to think about. He had always got plenty to say, and what he said now had sense in it. But I never go chopping and changing about, and I had made my mind up. So I told him he had got to learn how to manage the house, and not to waste half his time over the billiard-table. I had a good deal done to the rest of the house in the way of redecorating and improvements, but I never touched the annexe.

The next time I saw the room was the day after we moved in. I was alone, and I thought it certainly did look a dingy hole as compared with the rest of the house. Then my eye happened to fall on the board, and it still showed sixty-six—forty-eight, as it had done when I entered the room with Harry three months before. I altered the board myself this time. To me it was only a funny coincidence; another game had been played there and had stopped exactly at the same point. But I was glad Harry was not with me, for it was the kind of thing that would have made him jumpier than ever.

It was the summer time and we soon had something to do. I had been told that motor-cars had cut into the river trade a good deal; so I laid myself out for the motorist. Tanslowe was just a nice distance for a run from town before lunch. It was all in the old-fashioned style, but there was plenty of choice and the stuff was good; and my wine-list was worth consideration. Prices were high, but people will pay when they are pleased with the way they are treated. Motorists who had been once came again and sent their friends. Saturday to Monday we had as much as ever we could do, and more than I had ever meant to do. But I am built like that—once I am in a shop I have got to run it for all it's worth.

I had been there about a month, and it was about the height of our season, when one night, for no reason that I could make out, I couldn't get to sleep. I had turned in, tired enough, at half-past ten, leaving Harry to shut up and see the lights out, and at a quarter past twelve I was still awake. I thought to myself that a pint of stout and a biscuit might be the cure for that. So I lit my candle and went down to the bar. The gas was out on the staircase and in the passages, and all was quiet. The door into the bar was locked, but I had thought to bring my pass-key with me. I had just drawn my tankard of stout when I heard a sound that made me put the tankard down and listen again.

The billiard-room door was just outside in the passage, and there could not be the least doubt that a game was going on. I could hear the click-click of the balls as plainly as possible. It surprised me a little, but it did not startle me. We had several staying in the house, and I supposed two of them had fancied a game. All the time that I was drinking the stout and munching my biscuit the game went on—click, click-click, click. Everybody has heard the sound hundreds of times standing outside the glass-pannelled door of a billiard-room and waiting for the stroke before entering. No other sound is quite like it.

Suddenly the sound ceased. The game was over. I had nothing on but my pyjamas and a pair of slippers, and I thought I would get upstairs again before the players came out. I did not want to stand there shivering and listening to complaints about the table. I locked the bar, and took a glance at the billiard-room door as I was about to pass it. What I saw made me stop short. The glass panels of the door were as black as my Sunday hat, except where they reflected the light of my candle. The room, then, was not lit up, and people do not play billiards in the dark. After a second or two I tried the handle. The door was locked. It was the only door to the room.

I said to myself: "I'll go on back to bed. It must have been my fancy, and there was nobody playing billiards at all." I moved a step away, and then I said to myself again: "I know perfectly well that a game was being played. I'm only making excuses because I'm in a funk."

That settled it. Having driven myself to it, I moved pretty quickly. I shoved in my pass-key, opened the door, and said "Anybody there?" in a moderately loud voice that sounded somehow like another man's. I am very much afraid that I should have jumped if there had come any answer to my challenge, but all was silent. I took a look round. The cover was on the table. An old screen was leaning against it; it had been put there to be out of the way. As I moved my candle the shadows of things slithered across the floor and crept up the walls. I noticed that the windows were properly fastened, and then, as I held my candle high, the marking-board seemed to jump out of the darkness. The score recorded was sixty-six—forty-eight.

I shut the door, locked it again, and went up to my room. I did these things slowly and deliberately, but I was frightened and I was puzzled. One is not at one's best in the small hours.

The next morning I tackled Silas.

"Silas," I said, "what do you do when gentlemen ask for the billiard-room?"

"Well, sir," said Silas, "I put them off if I can. Mr Harry directed me to, the place being so much out of order."

"Quite so," I said. "And when you can't put them off?"

"Then they just try it, sir, and the table puts them off. It's very bad. There's been no game played there since we came."

"Curious," I said. "I thought I heard a game going on last night."

"I've heard it myself, sir, several times. There being no light in the room, I've put it down to a loose ventilator. The wind moves it and it clicks."

"That'll be it," I said. Five minutes later I had made sure that there was no loose ventilator in the billiard-room. Besides, the sound of one ball striking another is not quite like any other sound. I also went up to the board and turned the score back, which I had omitted to do the night before. Just then Harry passed the door on his way from the bar, with a cigarette in his mouth as usual. I called him in.

"Harry," I said, "give me thirty, and I'll play you a hundred up for a sovereign. You can tell one of the girls to fetch our cues from upstairs."

Harry took his cigarette out of his mouth and whistled. "What, uncle!" he said. "Well, you're going it, I don't think. What would you have said to me if I'd asked you for a game at ten in the morning?"

"Ah!" I said, "but this is all in the way of business. I can't see much wrong with the table, and if I can play on it, then other people may. There's a chance to make a sovereign for you anyhow. You've given me forty-five and a beating before now."

"No, uncle," he said, "I wouldn't give you thirty. I wouldn't give you one. The table's not playable. Luck would win against Roberts on it."

He showed me the faults of the thing and said he was busy. So I told him if he liked to lose the chance of making a sovereign he could.

"I hate that room," he said, as we came out. "It's not too clean, and it smells like a vault."

"It smells a lot better than your cigarettes," I said.

For the next six weeks we were all busy, and I gave little thought to the billiard-room. Once or twice I heard old Silas telling a customer that he could not recommend the table, and that the whole room was to be redecorated and refitted as soon as we got the estimates. "You see, sir, we've only been here a little while, and there hasn't been time to get everything as we should like it quite yet."

One day Mrs Parker, the woman who had the Regency before me, came down from town to see how we were getting on. I showed the old lady round, pointed out my improvements, and gave her a bit of lunch in my office.

"Well, now," I said, as she sipped her glass of port afterwards, "I'm not complaining of my bargain, but isn't the billiard-room a bit queer?"

"It surprises me," she said, "that you've left it as it is. Especially with everything else going ahead, and the yard half full of motors. I should have taken it all down myself if I'd stopped. That iron roof's nothing but an eyesore, and you might have a couple of beds of geraniums there and improve the look of your front."

"Let's see," I said. "What was the story about that billiard-room?"

"What story do you mean?" she said, looking at me suspiciously.

"The same one you're thinking of," I said.

"About that man, Josiah Ham?"

"That's it."

"Well, I shouldn't worry about that if I were you. That was all thirty years ago, and I doubt if there's a soul in Tanslowe knows it now. Best forgotten, I say. Talk of that kind doesn't do a hotel any good. Why, how did you come to hear of it?"

"That's just it," I said. "The man who told me was none too clear. He gave me a hint of it. He was an old commercial passing through, and had known the place in the old days. Let's hear your story and see if it agrees with his."

But I had told my fibs to no purpose. The old lady seemed a bit flustered. "If you don't mind, Mr Sanderson, I'd rather not speak of it."

I thought I knew what was troubling her. I filled her glass and my own. "Look here," I said. "When you sold the place to me it was a fair deal. You weren't called upon to go thirty years back, and no reasonable man would expect it. I'm satisfied. Here I am, and here I mean to stop, and twenty billiard-rooms wouldn't drive me away. I'm not complaining. But, just as a matter of curiosity, I'd like to hear your story."

"What's your trouble with the room?"

"Nothing to signify. But there's a game played there and marked there—and I can't find the players, and it's never finished. It stops always at sixty-six—forty-eight."

She gave a glance over her shoulder. "Pull the place down," she said. "You can afford to do it, and I couldn't." She finished her port. "I must be going, Mr Sanderson. There's rain coming on, and I don't want to sit in the train in my wet things. I thought I would just run down to see how you were getting on, and I'm sure I'm glad to see the old place looking up again."

I tried again to get the story out of her, but she ran away from it. She had not got the time, and it was better not to speak of such things. I did not worry her about it much, as she seemed upset over it.

I saw her across to the station, and just got back in time. The rain came down in torrents. I stood there and watched it, and thought it would do my garden a bit of good. I heard a step behind me and looked round. A fat chap with a surly face stood there, as if he had just come out of the coffee-room. He was the sort that might be a gentleman and might not.

"Afternoon, sir," I said. "Nasty weather for motoring."

"It is," he said. "Not that I came in a motor. You the proprietor, Mr Sanderson?"

"I am," I said. "Came here recently."

"I wonder if there's any chance of a game of billiards."

"I'm afraid not," I said. "Table's shocking. I'm having it all done up afresh, and then—"

"What's it matter?" said he. "I don't care. It's something to do, and one can't go out."

"Well," I said, "if that's the case, I'll give you a game, sir. But I'm no flyer at it at the best of times, and I'm all out of practice now."

"I'm no good myself. No good at all. And I'd be glad of the game."

At the billiard-room door I told him I'd fetch a couple of decent cues. He nodded and went in.

When I came back with my cue and Harry's, I found the gas lit and the blinds drawn, and he was already knocking the balls about.

"You've been quick, sir," I said, and offered him Harry's cue. But he refused and said he would keep the one he had taken from the rack. Harry would have sworn if he had found that I had lent his cue to a stranger, so I thought that was just as well. Still, it seemed to me that a man who took a twisted cue by preference was not likely to be an expert.

The table was bad, but not so bad as Harry had made out. The luck was all my side. I was fairly ashamed of the flukes I made, one after the other. He said nothing, but gave a short, loud laugh once or twice—it was a nasty-sounding laugh. I was at thirty-seven when he was nine, and I put on eleven more at my next visit and thought I had left him nothing.

Then the fat man woke up. He got out of his first difficulty, and after that the balls ran right for him. He was a player, too, with plenty of variety and resource, and I could see that I was going to take a licking. When he had reached fifty-one, an unlucky kiss left him an impossible position. But I miscued, and he got going again. He played very, very carefully now, taking a lot more time for consideration than he had done in his previous break. He seemed to have got excited over it, and breathed hard, as fat men do when they are worked up. He had kept his coat on, and his face shone with perspiration.

At sixty-six he was in trouble again; he walked round to see the exact position, and chalked his cue. I watched him rather eagerly, for I did not like the score. I hoped he would go on. His cue slid back to strike, and then dropped with a clatter from his hand. The fat man was gone—gone, as I looked at him, like a flame blown out, vanished into nothing.

I staggered away from the table. I began to back slowly towards the door, meaning to make a bolt for it. There was a click from the scoring-board, and I saw the thing marked up. And then—I am thankful to say—the billiard-room door opened, and I saw Harry standing there. He was very white and shaky. Somehow, the fact that he was frightened helped to steady me.

"Good heavens, uncle!" he gasped, "I've been standing outside. What's the matter? What's happened?"

"Nothing's the matter," I said sharply. "What are you shivering about?" I swished back the curtain, and sent up the blind with a snap. The rain was over now, and the sun shone in through the wet glass—I was glad of it.

"I thought I heard voices—laughing—somebody called the score."

I turned out the gas. "Well," I said, "this table's enough to make any man laugh, when it don't make him swear. I've been trying your game of one hand against another, and I daresay I called the score out loud. It's no catch—not even for a wet afternoon. I'm not both-handed, like the apes and Harry Bryden."

Harry is as good with the left hand as the right, and a bit proud of it. I slid my own cue back into its case. Then, whistling a bit of a tune, I picked up the stranger's cue, which I did not like to touch. I nearly dropped it again when I saw the initials "J.H." on the butt. "Been trying the cues," I said, as I put it in the rack. He looked at me as if he were going to ask more questions. So I put him on to something else. "We've not got enough cover for those motor-cars," I said. "Lucky we hadn't got many here in this rain. There's plenty of room for another shed, and it needn't cost much. Go and see what you can make of it. I'll come out directly, but I've got to talk to that girl in the bar first."

He went off, looking rather ashamed of his tremors.

I had not really very much to say to Miss Hesketh in the bar. I put three fingers of whisky in a glass and told her to put a dash of soda on the top of it. That was all. It was a full-sized drink and did me good.

Then I found Harry in the yard. He was figuring with pencil on the back of an envelope. He was always pretty smart where there was anything practical to deal with. He had spotted where the shed was to go, and he was finding what it would cost at a rough estimate.

"Well," I said, "if I went on with that idea of mine about the flower-beds it needn't cost much beyond the labour."

"What idea?"

"You've got a head like a sieve. Why, carrying on the flower-beds round the front where the billiard-room now stands. If we pulled that down it would give us all the materials we want for the new motor-shed. The roofing's sound enough, for I was up yesterday looking into it."

"Well, I don't think you mentioned it to me, but it's a rare good idea."

"I'll think about it," I said.

That evening my cook, Timbs, told me he'd be sorry to leave me, but he was afraid he'd find the place too slow for him—not enough doing. Then old Silas informed me that he hadn't meant to retire so early, but he wasn't sure—the place was livelier than he had expected, and there would be more work than he could get through. I asked no questions. I knew the billiard-room was somehow or other at the bottom of it, and so it turned out. In three days' time the workmen were in the house and bricking up the billiard-room door; and after that Timbs and old Silas found the Regency suited them very well after all. And it was not just to oblige Harry, or Timbs, or Silas that I had the alteration made. That unfinished game was in my mind; I had played it, and wanted never to play it again. It was of no use for me to tell myself that it had all been a delusion, for I knew better. My health was good, and I had no delusions. I had played it with Josiah Ham—with the lost soul of Josiah Ham—and that thought filled me not with fear, but with a feeling of sickness and disgust.

It was two years later that I heard the story of Josiah Ham, and it was not from old Mrs Parker. An old tramp came into the saloon bar begging, and Miss Hesketh was giving him the rough side of her tongue.

"Nice treatment!" said the old chap. "Thirty years ago I worked here, and made good money, and was respected, and now it's insults."

And then I struck in. "What did you do here?" I asked.

"Waited at table and marked at billiards."

"Till you took to drink?" I said.

"Till I resigned from a strange circumstance."

I sent him out of the bar, and took him down the garden, saying I'd find him an hour or two's work. "Now, then," I said, as soon as I had got him alone, "what made you leave?"

He looked at me curiously. "I expect you know, sir," he said. "Sixty-six. Unfinished."

And then he told me of a game played in that old billiard-room on a wet summer afternoon thirty years before. He, the marker, was one of the players. The other man was a commercial traveller, who used the house pretty regularly. "A fat man, ugly-looking, with a nasty laugh. Josiah Ham his name was. He was at sixty-six when he got himself into a tight place. He moved his ball—did it when he thought I wasn't looking. But I saw it in the glass, and I told him of it. He got very angry. He said he wished he might be struck dead if he ever touched the ball."

The old tramp stopped. "I see," I said.

"They said it was apoplexy. It's known to be dangerous for fat men to get very angry. But I'd had enough of it before long. I cleared out, and so did the rest of the servants."

"Well," I said, "we're not so superstitious nowadays. And what brought you down in the world?"

"It would have driven any man to it," he said. "And once the habit is formed—well, it's there."

"If you keep off it I can give you a job weeding for three days."

He did not want the work. He wanted a shilling, and he got it; and I saw to it that he did not spend it in my house.

We have got a very nice billiard-room upstairs now. Two new tables and everything ship-shape. You may find Harry there most evenings. It is all right. But I have never taken to billiards again myself.

And where the old billiard-room was there are flower-beds. The pansies that grow there have got funny markings—like figures.

SPARKLING BURGUNDY

In London a day in mid-August drew to its close. The air was motionless, the pavements were hot. Weary children came home with the perambulator from the sand-pit of Regent's Park or the playground of Kensington Gardens. Young men from the city wore straw hats and thronged the outside of motor-omnibuses. Oxford Street, that singularly striving street, was still striving, still exhibiting some of its numerous activities. Starting from a humble and Holborn origin, it lives to touch the lips of Park Lane, but it goes to Bayswater when it dies. It was still protesting that it was not tired and still crowded with traffic. Irregular masses of buildings and heavy dusty trees stood out darkly against a sky of fainting lettuce colour. Young Mrs Bablove noticed them as she came out of the Tube station, drawing her cloak round her unwonted evening-dress. "Yes," said her husband, as she called his attention to the effect. "Striking." It was scarcely a minute's walk from the station to the Restaurant Merveilleux, where they were to be the guests of Mr Albert Carver.

The Restaurant Merveilleux does its best. It has an arc-lamp and a medium-sized commissionaire. It bears its name proudly in gilt letters a foot and a half high. In the entrance are bay trees in green tubs and a framed bill of our celebrated diner du jour at half-a-crown. Within are little tables brightly appointed and many electric lights. A mahogany screen is carved with challenging pine-apples and grapes, and against it is a table for six. Mr Carver had reserved this table. Yet somehow one gets the correct impression that this is a small eating-house under Italian proprietorship.

The occasion of the little dinner given by this bachelor and viveur was the engagement of Ada Bunting to Harold Simcox. Albert Carver had received much hospitality from Miss Bunting's parents. He had as nearly as possible got engaged to Miss Bunting himself, and now knew what the condemned man feels like who is unexpectedly reprieved. Miss Bunting and Mr Simcox were the guests of importance. She was lymphatic and pale-haired; her future husband was smaller and a shade shorter than she. He concentrated on politeness, and made anyone to whom he spoke feel like a possible customer. As for Mr and Mrs Bablove, Mr Albert Carver had always intended to ask them, if he ever asked anybody. He frankly admired young Mrs Bablove, and said so, and was slightly pleased when this created surprise and it was suggested that she was hardly his type. It seemed to imply that Mr Carver was a problem, and this was subtly flattering to Mr Carver—who, if a problem, was singularly soluble. It is true none the less that the women whom Albert Carver admired were mostly fleshy and exuberant. Mrs Bablove looked like an angel who had gone into domestic service—a soul in servitude. She had to make a just-sufficient income suffice, and as she was devoted to her husband and her two little boys she did a good deal of work herself. She had a sweet and rather childish nature, was not without some true æsthetic perception, and under less stringent limitations might have developed further. Mr Bablove, a very quiet and prosaic man, who wore spectacles only when he was reading, made about the same income as Mr Carver. They both held responsible positions in the same firm. They both lived in the same street in the Shepherd's Bush neighbourhood. But Mr Bablove's income had to provide for a household, and Mr Albert Carver's income was all ear-marked for Mr Albert Carver. There was less splendour in Mr Bablove's house than in Mr Carver's wicked flat with the hookah (from the cut-price tobacconist) standing on the low inlaid table and the French photogravure of a bathing subject over the mantelpiece.

The remaining guest was Miss Adela Holmes. She was beautiful and looked Oriental. Her movements (after office-hours) were slow and very graceful. Her voice was soft and languorous; her eyes also spoke. During the day she was the third quickest typist in London, and ran her own office strictly on business lines. Mr Carver in his light way would sometimes call her "Nirvana"; he was convinced that this was an Eastern term of endearment, and, though an allusion to her appearance, permissible in a platonic friend who had known her for years.

Mr Carver surveyed his little party with pleasure. It was not the celebrated half-crown dinner that was being served for this Lucullus; it was the rich man's alternative—the diner de luxe at four-and-six. Mr Carver always said that if he did a thing at all he liked to do it well. He was a man of middle stature and middle age. His hair was very black and intensely smooth. His face suggested a commercial Napoleon. He was dressed with some elaboration; pink coral buttons constrained his white waistcoat over a slight protuberance. Other diners at other tables were not so dressed—not dressed for the evening at all. One blackguard had entered in a suit of flannels and a straw hat. But other tables had not the profusion of smilax and carnations which graced the table reserved for Mr Carver's party. A paper simulation of chrysanthemums was good enough for the half-crowners. How could they expect the eager attendance given to Mr Carver's party? The frock-coated proprietor hovered near the mahogany screen. The head-waiter, at a side-table, took the neck of a bottle of sparkling burgundy between his dusky hands and caused it to rotate vigorously in the ice-pail. This does not really make that curious wine any the worse. Another waiter handed up for Mr Carver's approval the chef's attempt to make a lobster look like a sunset on the Matterhorn.

"Looks almost too good to eat," said Adela Holmes, drowsily.

Mr Carver laughed joyously. "Think so, Nirvana? Well, we'll try it."

The wonder had not yet quite gone out of the soft brown eyes of Dora Bablove. This was luxury indeed. It was a new way of living that she had never known; in the course of her married life she had dined out very rarely, and never after this manner. Somehow she felt as if she was not Dora Bablove at all.

The proprietor made a suggestion to Mr Carver. "Good idea, signor," said Mr Carver. "You'd like an electric fan, Mrs Bablove, wouldn't you?"

It was done in a moment. An electric lamp was taken out, and something plugged in its place. A gentle whirr, with a hint of an aeroplane in it. A cool breeze that fluttered the pendent smilax.

"I think you're being very well looked after," said Mrs Bablove, timidly.

"You've got it," said Mr Carver, with conviction. "That's just the advantage of a little place like this. I'm here pretty often, and the signor knows me; and—oh, well, I daresay he thinks it worth his while to keep my custom. I assure you I get an amount of personal attention here that I never get at the Ritz." As Mr Carver had never been to the Ritz this is credible.

"I like being looked after," said Mrs Bablove. "I like to think that so many people are taking so much trouble to please me."

"I should think—er—that that must always happen," said the polite Mr Simcox on her other side.

"Not a bit," laughed Dora. "As a rule, I take all the trouble. Ask Teddy if I don't."

But nobody asked Teddy. Mr Bablove was discussing palmistry with Miss Bunting, who thought there might be something in it, and with Miss Holmes, who was quite expert and offered to read his hand.

Mr Carver said, in his whimsical way, that he thought Mrs Bablove should drink and forget it. He watched her as she touched with her full lips the magenta foam in her glass. He had never seen Mrs Bablove in a low dress before; certainly she had a charm. The conversation grew animated. The question of London in August was settled. London empty? Not a bit of it. That was the old idea. Why, this year, with the House sitting, half the best people were still in London. You could walk through Mayfair and see for yourself.

Mrs Bablove was not deeply interested in the question. She knew that Teddy and Mr Carter would take their holidays just when the firm decided. She was more interested in the people in the room. The blackguard in the flannel suit had finished his lager and had attempted to light a pipe; it had been politely explained to him that pipes were not permissible. At a little table in the corner were a man with a saturnine face and a very young girl in red. They drank champagne, talked low and confidentially, and paid no attention to anybody. Dora Bablove had strayed into a world previously unexplored by her.

More and more the conviction came on her that the Dora who was unwrapping the vine-leaf from the fat quail on her plate was not the Dora who had been married six years, who looked after her two little boys so well, who mended, and cleaned, and did rather clever things with the rest of the cold mutton. She was for the moment a woman untrammelled by circumstances. She delighted in it, enjoyed it desperately, and was half afraid of it. Had this Dora quite the same ideas about—well, about what was right?

The girl in red had lit a cigarette now, and she was getting rather angry with the man who was with her. Dora thought he was making her angry on purpose. She wondered why. She asked Mr Carver.

Mr Carver shook his head. A mistake to make the ladies angry—that was what he always thought. But some of them had tempers. Now—well, he mustn't say that.

"Oh, go on, you must," said Dora.

"Well, I was only going to say that appearances are deceptive. You look at first sight as if you had the most placid nature in the world. But I think you could get angry, Mrs Bablove—very angry."

"Oh, no. Quite wrong. Whatever makes you think that?"

"There's a look in the eyes sometimes. Oh, I assure you it makes me very careful," laughed Mr Carver. "Frightens me. Now, really, Mrs Bablove, you must have a little yellow Chartreuse with your coffee."

But Mrs Bablove was resolute in her refusal. She did not care in the least about such things. She had drunk one glass of the sparkling burgundy, not to be out of the picture, and after that had sipped iced water. At the other end of the table "Nirvana" was saying that she didn't see why she shouldn't—two other women in the room had set the example. And with that she accepted a cigarette from Mr Bablove's silver case. The smoke wandered gently through the smilax plantation, and left hurriedly when it met the electric fan.

And now Mr Simcox had to take Miss Bunting home, for Miss Bunting lived in remote Wimbledon and in an early household, and the privilege of the latch-key was not accorded to her. Mr Simcox, who had not refused the yellow Chartreuse or anything else, was slightly flushed and more polite than ever. He assured his host that it had been the pleasantest evening of his life and he should never forget it. Even the lymphatic Miss Bunting had become quite animated. At the beginning of the dinner they had maintained towards one another a pre-concerted air of dignified reserve, but that was now quite broken down.

Mr Carver rose to see them to their cab. "And if anybody else tries to go," he said to the rest of his guests, "I shall lose my temper."

"Might have got a box at one of the halls if I'd thought about it," said Mr Carver on his return. It was a well-meant effort of the imagination. He might, but it would have been unlike him.

"Much pleasanter where we are," said Miss Holmes, languorously. "Performances always bore me."

"Ah, well, Nirvana," said Mr Carver, "so long as you're pleased—"

Miss Holmes turned again to Mr Bablove. His wife hoped that Teddy was not being too prosaic. From a word or two she caught she knew he was talking politics. But Miss Holmes did not look bored. Perhaps she was interested in politics too.

"Why do you call her Nirvana?" Mrs Bablove asked, dropping her voice a little. But the couple at the further end of the table were absorbed in their talk now and taking no notice of what the others were saying.

"Why do I call her Nirvana? Because she looks like a gipsy. She does, doesn't she?"

Mr Carver's fruity voice had also become discreet.

"I don't know. I think she looks charming."

"Do you?" said Mr Carver. "I'd like to talk to you about that. Not now—presently." He knew the value of a slight hint of mystery. "Have a cigarette now, Mrs Bablove?"

"Thanks. I think I will."

"Why wouldn't you smoke before?" he asked as he lit the cigarette for her.

"Too many people. The room's nearly empty now. I'm not so brave as—Nirvana."

"I don't think you quite know what you are. You're full of possibilities."

"I like these cigarettes," said Dora. "Teddy gives me one sometimes, though I don't often smoke, but his are not quite so nice as these."

Mr Carver became informative on the subject of Turkish tobacco, but with the information he wove much which was personal. It appeared that it was Mr Carver's ambition to leave business and London and to spend the rest of his life in Japan.

"I thought you were devoted to London," said Mrs Bablove. "What you say rather surprises me."

"I surprise myself sometimes," said Mr Carver, darkly.

A little later all rose to go.

A hansom was waiting just outside, and Mr Carver began to organise briskly.

"Will you take Miss Holmes in that cab, Teddy? It's scarcely two minutes out of your way. I'll bring Mrs Bablove in the next cab."

Mr Carver took it all for granted, and it was done as he suggested. The next cab was a taxi.

"We shall be home before them," laughed Dora as she got into the cab. "By the way, Mr Carver, what were you going to tell me about Nirvana?"

And presently Mr Carver was saying why Miss Holmes could not seem charming when Dora Bablove was present. He compared them in some detail. "I don't think you know enough about yourself," he said. "That delicious mouth of yours!"

When they reached Mrs Bablove's house Dora did not ask Mr Carver to come in. She thanked him and said good-night rather briefly. She switched on the light in the hall, ran upstairs to see that her two little boys were safely asleep, and came down to the dining-room to wait for her husband.

She poured out a glass of water and drank it. Then she sat quite still in the easy-chair with her head in her hands. What was she to do? What on earth was she to do? A man had kissed her on the lips—a man who was not her husband. She had let him do it. She thought—she hardly knew—that her lips had answered to his. Such a thing had never happened to her before. She was wide awake now. But surely in the cab she must have been half asleep.

She had leaned back with her eyes half-closed, suffused with a pleasant warmth and tiredness, and had heard his caressing voice praising her as she had never before been praised. She had not guessed that he thought so much of her—that he admired her so much. Then as he spoke of the beauty of her hands, he took one of her hands in his. She knew what would come, and was without any power to prevent it. She had seen his face come near to her own and—no, she would tell the truth to herself. For a moment she had gone mad and let herself go completely. She had wanted to be kissed, and as she felt his lips upon her own her kiss had met his.

True, the next moment she had recovered herself; she chatted gaily, was merely amused when Mr Carver would have been sentimental, and would not let him get near her. Her one reference to what had happened was as the cab neared her own door. She said, "You know what you did when I had fallen asleep. Never try to do it again. And never speak of it to me. I couldn't forgive it twice, you know. To-night I've—I made some allowance for—well, here we are. I must get out."

She was not troubled about Mr Carver. She had told him that she was asleep, and had implied that he was under the influence of wine. She felt that she could always manage Mr Carver.

But what about Teddy? He must never, never know. It was one little slip, one moment of madness, and it would never happen again. It would be wicked to let Teddy know and to make him wretched.

On the other hand, if she did not tell him, how was she to quiet the voice of conscience? What became of their mutual confidence? She felt that she could never be happy again until she had told all and been forgiven.

She took the thing tragically. She saw the whole of her own happiness and Teddy's happiness ruined by that one moment of madness and the future of the little boys seriously imperilled. She was just wondering who, in the event of a separation, would have the custody of the children, when she heard the sound of Teddy's hansom as it stopped at the door.

What on earth was she to do? She could never face him. She would just burst into tears and tell him everything.

But she found herself quite unable to carry out this decision. Teddy looked so cheerful. He talked more than usual. How had she liked it? A rare good dinner, it seemed to him. And she had been by far the prettiest woman there. He had felt proud of her.

She smiled sadly, and said that he was prejudiced. "And how did you get on with Miss Holmes?"

"Oh, all right. The trouble with her is that she's rather affected, and affectation is just one of those things that I can't stand."

If only for one moment he would take his eyes off her. She felt distraught. She hardly knew what she was saying. She observed that sparkling Burgundy seemed rather a heady wine. He hastened to agree with her.

"I didn't take much of it. To tell the truth, it's not a wine I ever met before, and the taste seemed to me rather funny. I'd sooner have a whisky-and-soda any day."

"Have one now. Do. Why not? I'll run up to bed because I'm so tired. I daresay I shall be asleep by the time you come."

"Oh, I shan't be long," said Teddy, and Dora managed to get out of the room without being kissed.

The moment she had gone Teddy's cheerfulness vanished. He mixed himself a very stiff whisky-and-soda, and sipped gloomily, staring at the dead cigarette between his fingers.

Dora panted as she undressed. Tragedy seemed to be choking her. She hurried into bed. When Teddy came up she pretended to be asleep, but she got little sleep that night.

Two days had passed and Dora had not spoken. There were dark lines under her eyes, and she seldom smiled. Teddy, always kind, had been kinder to her than ever. He said complimentary things to her. Every evening he brought her fruit from the city, because she liked fruit; it was expensive fruit too. And every kind word or act seemed to cut her heart like a knife. She felt so unworthy of devotion. The position was unendurable, and on the third morning as they rose from breakfast she suddenly determined to end it there and then—to tell him everything and throw herself on his mercy.

"I want to speak to you for a minute before you go to the city," she said. "Will you come into the drawing-room?"

"Very well," said Teddy.

In the drawing-room she found that she was shaking all over and had to sit down. She was thinking how she would begin, when she heard a hollow voice say, "Wait. You need say nothing." It was Teddy's voice.

"What do you mean?" she asked in a choked whisper.

"Do you think I haven't seen?" said Teddy, almost fiercely. "You guessed it somehow when I came into the house that night. I suppose a bad conscience gives itself away. I thought you knew when you asked me how I got on with Miss Holmes. These last two days you've been upset. You've not been yourself. And that of course made me certain you knew. Only let me tell you how I came to do it."

"Yes," said Dora, with great self-possession, "tell me that."

"Well, she was talking about the loneliness of her life. It was as much pity as anything. And the cab was going down a dark street at the time. Mind, I only kissed her once. And the moment I did it I—I was ashamed of myself. You don't know what I've been through."

Dora thought she did, but she said nothing.

"I swear that I care for no woman in the world but you, Dora. I'm awfully sorry I've hurt you like this. Can you ever forgive me?"

Dora rose, and placed both hands on his shoulders. "Could you have forgiven me," she said, "if I had let a man kiss me?"

He paused a moment. "Yes, Dora," he said, "I think so."

Her face was like the face of an angel. "Then, Teddy dear, I forgive you absolutely. We will never speak of this again. And it will never happen again, will it?"

"Never," said the repentant sinner, and kissed her.

Mrs Bablove sang happily as she helped to make the beds that morning.

And they never did speak of it again. Once, two years later—this was after poor Aunt Mary had been called to her rest and the Babloves had become prosperous in consequence—Teddy gave it as his opinion that there was only one sparkling wine worth consideration and that wine was champagne. Dora cordially agreed with him, but changed the subject rapidly.

THE ACT OF HEROISM

I

Do not go outside your part, for whatever part in life you may be cast. If you are Nature's low comedian, do not usurp the business of the hero. Hear the plain story of Alfred Smithers, who stood five foot eight, had sandy hair and an apologetic eye, earned four pounds a week by book-keeping, and was a good husband until by the merest chance he was led into the paths of heroism.

Chance plays the devil at times. Emily Trimmins, housemaid by profession and hysterical by nature, found that the postman was walking out with another lady. Consulting her recollection of penny romances she saw that suicide was clearly indicated. The relics of sense which distinguish hysteria from madness made her choose the manner of her suicide. She went up on to the Heath one afternoon and flung herself into a pond, in the presence of several philosophical male loafers, one emotional nursemaid, and two fat-headed children. Her last thought as she entered the water was which of the male loafers would pull her out again.

The first loafer said that was as silly an act as ever he saw, and he should be moving home. The second loafer observed that something ought to be done at once. The third called for help. The fourth said the police were never there when they were wanted.

The emotional nursemaid sat down at once on the grass, removed her hat, unhooked her dress at the neck, fanned herself with a handkerchief, and said, "Oh! that has give me a turn!"

The two fat-headed children cried, "Ain't that funny? Nurse, make her come out and do it again. Nurse, ain't that funny? Nurse, make her come out and do it again." Da capo.

And at this moment chance—playing the devil as aforesaid—brought upon the scene Alfred Smithers, who had fished the pond and believed the depth nowhere exceeded three feet, who saw a policeman with a coil of rope under his arm rapidly approaching, who observed that he had an audience and was accordingly inspirited.

"Go in from where you are!" shouted the second loafer. "Don't waste time thinking abart it." Smithers removed his silk hat and frock-coat.

"That's couridge! That's a man!" screamed the emotional nursemaid.

That settled it. With a stentorian cry of "Stand back, there!" to the two fat-headed children—a cry which was not needed, but inserted by way of trimming—Smithers jumped feet foremost. There was a mighty splash. When it subsided, Smithers was observed standing in the pond, the water reaching up to the terminals of his string-mended braces.

The two children rolled over and over on the grass in fits of inextinguishable laughter. It was a good afternoon; they had had nothing quite so good since the pantomime.

"Don't wait for her to come up," roared the second loafer. "Dive. That's what you've got to do."

"I know what to do all right," replied Smithers, who, as a matter of fact, didn't. He took one step forward, and incontinently vanished down a fifteen-foot hole, of the existence of which, though he had fished that pond, he had previously been unaware.

As he was going down the hole he met Emily Trimmins coming up. She paused and soldered herself firmly on to as much of Smithers as she could reach. He trod water very fast and very furiously, like a child stamping its feet on the nursery floor because it mayn't begin tea cake first. He lashed out hard and indiscriminately with both hands, and might have succeeded in scraping off most of the half-drowned lady, but that he found in his struggles they had both become entangled and tied together by a rope. He could remember no prayer but the grace after meat, which he repeated to himself fervently. Then he gave up. His breath exploded into the green jelly. He gave one more kick, and lost his interest in things.

In the meantime the policeman, assisted by the loafers, was pulling hard at the other end of the rope, and brought to bank a job lot of mixed scarecrows. Those being sorted out on the grass proved to be one moiety Smithers and one moiety Trimmins. The treatment of the apparently drowned was then proceeded with energetically, to the great satisfaction of a considerable number of spectators. They had gathered in a moment.

Smithers came to himself, feeling ill but magnificent, and assured the policeman that he was all right. He was not much to look at at the moment, yet everywhere he felt the admiring gaze upon him. "Bravo!" exclaimed an old gentleman. A very chorus of bravos followed, in which the policeman and the doctor, who was busy with Emily Trimmins, joined enthusiastically. Oh, it was good. It was very joyous.

"You done splendid, sir," said the policeman; "the way you just managed to grab the end of the rope as you went down the hole to fetch her up was very smart. You must be pretty quick and neat with your hands, and pretty cool and collected too, for I daresay she give a lot of trouble when you got 'er."

"Well, you see," said Smithers, indulgently, "she'd quite lost her head."

"And yet you managed to get the rope under her armpits, tied a good knot, and wound the slack twice round yourself! And it couldn't have been done quicker if you had been on dry land, instead of under water and 'ampered by the woman."

Emily Trimmins was by this time so far recovered as to be ripe for removal in a four-wheeler, with a policeman on the box. She did not look pretty. Her hair had come down, and something had happened to her nose. It was suggested that she had struck it in entering the water. Alfred Smithers remembered at an early stage of the struggle he had kicked something; it was not worth mentioning. He took, under advice, another drop of the brandy, and was driven home. The crowd cheered.

Mrs Smithers was a woman of some energy. Smithers was wrapped in hot blankets and tucked away in bed in no time. He had a hot-water bottle at his feet, and steaming rum-and-water at his head. Mrs Smithers sent a polite note to Messrs Garson & Begg to say why her husband would be unable to be at work as usual on the following day. She threw the story over the right-hand wall of the back-yard to Mrs Warboys, and over the left-hand wall to the widow of the late Charles Push. In twenty minutes the story was all over the terrace and had not shrunk. There was great excitement, and three separate houses hoped that Mrs Smithers would look in for a cup of tea, and would be glad if they could do anything to help. She accepted two of the invitations, and would visit the third house on the morrow, and would be obliged by the loan of a nutmeg, it being necessary to keep up an internal glow after prolonged struggle in cold water—the dare-devil had dived six times before he found the woman—and the patient otherwise being likely to take a chill in the vitals and die hurriedly. Then she decided to have the newspaper cuttings framed. The medal would go on the mantelpiece, under glass.

Smithers lay upstairs, with the feeling that his head was a large lump of dough traversed by a steam-propelled roller, but satisfied that heroism and hot rum were both excellent. He was soon asleep.

Glory reached its flood on the following day. An offering was brought from the mother of Emily Trimmins—a box encrusted without with small shells and two pieces of looking-glass and lined with pink satin within. The slip of paper which accompanied it was inscribed—"A mother's tribute to her daughter's presserver" (sic). The newspapers on the whole did well, though the Times was quite outclassed in the race for news, having but two lines to the half column of the local organ. The magistrate cautioned Miss Trimmins with some severity, and handed her over to the care of her mother. He said that the loafers were not men. He referred to the intrepid courage, cool head, strength wedded with skill, of Alfred Smithers—one of the men of whom England had good cause to be proud.

In the course of a week the postman had explained away the other lady and was au mieux with Emily Trimmins, who, so far as this story is concerned, may now take a seat at the back.

A considerable number of Smithers' friends were waiting, when the magistrate had finished, to have the pleasure of shaking hands with Smithers, and congratulating him, and so on.

And that night one of the men of whom England had good cause to be proud went home most painfully and uncompromisingly drunk.

II

Alfred Smithers, as he made his modest breakfast of a cup of tea and two liver pills next morning, explained to his wife that it had not been the drink so much as the reaction.

She said that he needn't have taken the reaction. She should overlook it this time and say no more, knowing what he was when not misled. But no amount of ironing would make that hat look anything again. He went to work feeling that the glory had been turned a little lower.

There were more newspaper cuttings, and later there was something on vellum. Smithers said rather bitterly that the Society seemed to do things on the cheap. A medal came at last, presented by the vicar on behalf of a few friends and local inhabitants. It was of silver and very large. It was kept on the mantelpiece and shown to everybody who would look at it.

But the excitement was dying down. Glory was on the ebb. Mrs Smithers would sometimes allow two days to pass without alluding to the act of heroism. Smithers watched the ebbing of the tide with inward rage and with many vain efforts to stay it. The neighbourhood sickened slowly of conversations on the different ways of rescuing the drowning—conversations initiated by Smithers in order to lead to the case of the poor girl, Emily Trimmins. But he had eaten praise-poison, and no other diet was rich enough for him now. The neighbourhood wearying of him and hinting as much, he would slip the medal into his pocket on Saturday afternoons, get on his bicycle, and seek fresh fields. A little group and a bar-parlour sufficed. Whatever the group was discussing when Smithers first leaned his bicycle against the horse-trough outside, five minutes later they were listening while Smithers got in with "I remember once being on the Heath when some fool of a girl jumped into twenty feet of water. What did I do? Watched for the bubbles coming up and then dived. The devil of it was that there was a strong cross-current and—" etc. Later, the medal would be produced. Poor Alfred Smithers! Nature's low comedian, and yet smitten with a raging madness for the strut, the soliloquy, the limelight, the sympathetic music, the roar of applause!

In his new part of hero he invented business that was not good. He began to be, as he phrased it, "master in his own house." He interfered in matters which were the special province of Mrs Smithers. He gave detailed instructions in domestic subjects of which he was completely ignorant, and brought upon himself ridicule. He was rude to Mrs Smithers, and said that she needed to be driven with a firm hand. He told the eight-pound general that his word was law, and she forthwith gave notice on the ground that she could put up with anything except haughtiness.

Mrs Smithers told him with some frankness that she was glad to see his back when he went to business of a morning, for he was more nuisance in a house than a cartload of monkeys.

At business he had got, as a rule, just enough sense not to try any heroism. He was a good book-keeper and he had got a good place and he knew it. One day, however, as his mind strayed for a moment to high things, he made a small blunder affecting a large sum, and the sum got on to the wrong side of the book and caused trouble. In due course Mr Peter Begg said, "Send me Smithers." The clerk who took the message said to Smithers, "You're going to get beans." And at this all the heroism in Smithers arose and boiled over, and he spluttered out that he thought it would be rather the other way.

"Look here," said Mr Begg, "how do you come to make such an infernal fool of yourself as this, Smithers?" Smithers was now well alight.

"Kindly understand once for all that there are some expressions I don't permit to be used to me by any man."

Mr Begg gazed at Smithers pensively through his eye-glass and sighed. "Get out," he said, "I'll finish with you to-morrow morning. You may be sober by then. Get out, go on!"

Smithers got out, and a slight chill fell on him. Possibly he had gone too far. He was unusually civil to his wife at supper that night, and appeared somewhat preoccupied. After supper he asked his wife what she thought of Klondike.

"I wouldn't care to have much to do with it. Why?"

"Well, I had a few words with Begg to-day—Peter Begg, the old one. I was in the right, as it happened, but something I said seemed to sting him rather. I can't say how it will end. I've as good as promised to see him again to-morrow morning, but he may not meet my views. And you know how it is when either the senior partner's got to go or the book-keeper."

"You apologise and ask to be took on again," said Mrs Smithers, going right through the elegancies of her husband's version and getting straight down to the bedrock facts. "That's what you'll do if you're not silly. You don't want to lose a good place."

"I don't know," said Smithers, with an air of melancholy, "same old drudgery day after day, and what's it all to come to? Nothing. I might strike it if we went to Klondike."

"You aren't going to no Klondike," said Mrs Smithers.

"I'm not sure it wouldn't be the right life for me. I'm naturally a man of action. I do the book-keeping well enough, but adventures and emergencies are more my line. You remember what the magistrate said when—"

"I remember how drunk you were that night."

"Little you know!" said Smithers, though conscious that the retort was somewhat vague. After some meditation he managed to supplement it as follows: "And little you care either—top button's been off my wescut for the last four days."

"You've got a tongue in your head to ask with, haven't you? Give it here and don't grumble."

And a little later Alfred Smithers, with a distinct chill on the heroism, went up to bed.

The chill was even more distinct when in the small hours of the morning Mrs Smithers shook him by the shoulder, awoke him, told him that there was a burglar in the kitchen, and asked him to go down.

In the small hours of the morning one's vitality is low.

III

They had been unable to get any satisfactory sleep after the disturbance, and they breakfasted early. Mrs Smithers looked amused; Alfred Smithers looked conciliatory.

"I want you to understand how it was," he said pleadingly.

"I understand it all right. And how my poor sides do ache with laughing. 'Lock our door as quietly as you can,' you says, 'and don't make a sound,' you says, 'for,' you says, 'if he knows we've discovered him he'll have the lives of both of us.' Sounds funnier still when it's said over again by daylight. Oh, my poor sides!"

And even then Alfred Smithers did not become rebellious; on the contrary, in a mirthless and subservient way he smiled.

"I'm quite willing to own I blundered in what seems now rather a funny way. But it wasn't in the way you think, my dear. My dear Agnes, it really wasn't."

"Tell your own story," said Mrs Smithers, with a victor's easiness.

"I was awoke sudden," said Smithers. "I don't suppose I was more than half awake, which accounts for the error of judgment. I'm a man, and not a machine. We all blunder at times. I own I made a mistake, and I can afford to laugh at it." He managed to jerk up another semblance of a smile. "At first I said that what you'd heard was a rat, and what you'd seen was a shadow. Then when you made me look through the corner of the blind, and I saw the end of the man's leg drawn inwardly through the downstairs window, I, being half asleep, supposed that it was a regular professional burglar. And if it had been that, my advice would have been correct. Professional burglars carry revolvers in their 'ip-pockets, and they'll shoot anybody—policeman or any man—to destroy evidence against them. Very well. What good was I unarmed against an armed burglar? Foolhardiness isn't courage. If you knew life as I know it you'd realise that. You didn't agree with my ideas, and, as I was half asleep, I own you were right; you said—"

Mrs Smithers took up the story triumphantly.

"I said it was stuff and nonsense, and so it was. Burglars don't come to a penny-farthing place like this; and if they did, they wouldn't wake up the house opening a window. Two drops of ile, a shove with the knife, and a wad o' paper to deaden the sound of the spring when it comes back."

Smithers recovered himself sufficiently to ask how they put in the two drops of oil and the wad of paper.

"How should I know, not being a burglar myself? Anyhow, I was right. I said it was just some tramp new to the business, and hungry for a supper, and that he'd bolt as soon as he heard anybody moving. And didn't he?"

"Yes," said Smithers, "he did. I was just thinking of getting out of bed and following you down the stairs. But he bolted as soon as he heard our door open, and was out of the house before you were half-way down. That's my point. It was an error of judgment on my part, not a want of courage. It's a mercy he'd no time to take much."

"Well, 'e'd got the cold beef out, and precious little he'd have left of it. The bottle of beer he knocked over and broke in his hurry. The only thing he actually got away with was that—er—that medal."

At this point Mrs Smithers' face became dark and inscrutable.

"That's a sad pity," she added; "we shall miss it too, with that inscription, 'For Gallantry and Courage; Presented by a Few Admirers of Alfred Smithers.' But you'll inquire of the police, of course, and as likely as not you'll get it back. I believe I was right in saying you ought to have gone to the police there and then."

"I believe you were," said Alfred, with alacrity. "It's no good going now, for the medal's certain to be in the melting-pot. Besides, I've no fancy for having the police in, interfering with my private business. And I think it would be just as well if we neither of us said a word about it."

"Oh, I must tell Mrs Warboys," said Mrs Smithers. "I wouldn't miss seeing her laugh over that story were it ever so. As for pore Mrs Push, when I come to the part when I put your boots on my feet because yours squeaked louder, and you'd got your head under the bed-clothes, and I said—"

"Oh, look here," said Alfred, desperately, "I do wish you wouldn't. I'd really much rather not. It isn't often I ask for anything particular, but if that story's told it's almost certain to be taken up in the wrong way as far as it concerns me. I've made a blunder and I've lost my medal. Ain't that enough for you?"

"Then you've given up that Klondike idea," observed Mrs Smithers, with more consecutiveness than was immediately apparent.

"Certainly; oh, certainly! It was just a wandering notion that wouldn't stand thinking over. And I shall smooth old Peter Begg down all right. There will be a little give-and-take compromise on both sides. It only wants tactful handling. Garson & Begg have been very good friends to me, and I'm not going to throw them over. I couldn't do it, even if you asked it."

"I don't ask it," said Mrs Smithers, drily. "Get that fixed right by to-night and I won't say nothing."

On his way to the City he reflected that it would indeed require tact. However, he entered Mr Begg's room and did his best.

"I've come," he said, "to apologise, sir, very humbly for the way I spoke yesterday. As you saw, I wasn't myself, sir."

"Then you were drunk?" said Mr Begg with mild interest.

"Oh, no, sir. At least it was more drugged. I'd suffered torments all day with toothache, and took a little laudanum for it, and that made me come over all anyhow. If I'd been myself I'd sooner have cut off my right hand—"

"That'll do," said Mr Begg. "No more need be said about it in that case. But when you are troubled with toothache again I should advise you either to take a little less laudanum or to take a good deal more. Now get on with your work."

Thus tact triumphed.

Mrs Smithers kept her word, and Mrs Warboys and the relict of the late Charles Push have missed a story which would undoubtedly have amused them. Smithers has returned to his natural rôle. The newspaper cuttings have been replaced by a chromo which happened to fit the frame exactly, and the happiness is general.

SOME NOTES ON CYRUS VERD

The name of Cyrus Verd, once so frequently seen in the newspapers and heard in conversation, has now for many years past been rarely mentioned. The absolute retirement of the latter part of his life helped the public—always ready to forget—to forget him. A few weeks ago at the club I happened to say something or other about him, and a man who, as a rule, knows his world turned to me and asked who Cyrus Verd was. The obituary notice of him in the Times the other day may possibly have revived interest in what was really rather an extraordinary personality. But the notice was brief, and beyond names and dates said little more than that he was "an eccentric millionaire, who, at the age of forty-five, chose to surrender almost the whole of his wealth and live a life of comparative poverty. It is said that this step was the result of some curious religious convictions, but Cyrus Verd himself never in his lifetime offered any explanation of it."

The few notes which I propose to add, including as they do a personal reminiscence of the man, may possibly be of interest. A writer of fiction constantly arranges his problem to suit his solution of it; it is perhaps beneficial, though somewhat humiliating, that he should occasionally turn his attention to the problems that real life sets him, and see how much more difficult it is to find the solution then.

Cyrus Verd came to England in his thirty-fourth year, an age at which many men are only at the commencement of their career. He had already made his fortune. I cannot say exactly how rich he was. Many newspaper paragraphs at the time gave estimates of his annual income—all different. I should say that the only man who really knew was Cyrus Verd himself. He owned steamships, railways, factories, mines, and enough land for a small nation. On his arrival in London many stories were told of his extravagance and eccentricity.

He was debating where he should reside, and a friend suggested that he should take or build a house in Park Lane.

"Where is Park Lane?" asked Cyrus Verd. He had been only two days in London.

"Runs along the east side of Hyde Park, in the most fashionable quarter. Your coachman would know it."

Verd went to look at it, and returned.

"Yes," he said, "it would be a fair site for a house—one house. But there seems to be some brick tenements there of some sort or other already. I suppose I could get those cleared away?"

He made the attempt, and was very angry at first when he found that he could not "get those cleared away." But he soon grew more philosophical.

"Your people," he observed, "cling to their little homes, I guess."

He was always much disappointed at first if he found there was anything which he could not buy. He went over the National Gallery alone one morning; he was a judge of pictures, and occasionally he put a pencil cross on his catalogue. When he got downstairs again he said to the man who handed him his umbrella:

"My name's Cyrus Verd, and I'm at the Métropole. Write that down. Send me round the things I've marked on my list and my secretary will hand you the cheque."

This story was much exaggerated in the newspapers; it was said that he had offered to buy the entire National Gallery, building and all, as it stood. I cannot say whether or not there was any truth in the report which appeared about the same time, to the effect that he had endeavoured to buy the Crown jewels; but, as far as I can judge his character, it does not seem impossible.

At the same time it would be rash to attempt to judge his character only from such reports as these. The secretary of a well-known charitable institution made that mistake. He wrote to ask for a donation to the institution, and guaranteed that it should be acknowledged by public advertisement in four of the leading dailies. Cyrus Verd wrote back that he had much pleasure in accepting the offer, and enclosed fourpence in stamps. The acknowledgment appeared as promised, and once more made Cyrus Verd a common topic of conversation.

But one of the strangest things that he did never got into the newspapers at all. He left, intentionally, ten pounds in gold on the seat of a railway carriage. On the following day he inquired at the Lost Property Office if the money had been brought back. He was told, with a smile, that it had not been brought back, and that there was no earthly probability that it ever would be. He repeated the experiment, and again failed to recover the money. He repeated it twenty times on different lines, and at last a carriage-cleaner found the money and brought it back. Cyrus Verd took the name and address of that carriage-cleaner, made inquiries about him and then sent for him.

"I don't see why I should reward you at all. It's the company's business. You're their servant, and such actions as yours increase the feelings of security and confidence in their passengers. Are you suited to a better position than you've got?"

"Yes, I am," said the man, "I'm a steady man, and I've a talent for figures. I'm known for it among my mates."

"Call on the chairman of directors—here is his private address—give him my card, explain the circumstances, and tell him from me that he is to put you in a position of trust, with at least three times your present wages."

The man came back to say that the chairman had laughed at him—had said that he was not the man to whom the application should have been made, and that there was no chance of its being entertained in any case.

"I must go and see him myself then," said Cyrus Verd.

The chairman was not in a very good temper.

"Really, Mr Verd, you'll be asking me to carry your luggage next. It's no part of my duties as chairman of the directors to undertake business of this kind. What that man ought to have done—"

"He did what I told him. You can get this put through if you like. Will you?"

"Frankly, I won't. It creates a precedent. It—"

"One moment, sir. If you'll have a copy of Bradshaw brought in here I'll show you something."

Now, the chairman knew that Cyrus Verd was eccentric, and so he was not surprised. He did not respect eccentricity. But he respected capital; and he knew that Cyrus Verd had already—thanks to his capital—had some little games with railway companies. So he rang the bell, and a Bradshaw was brought.

When the servant had gone Verd drew a penny blue chalk-pencil from his pocket. He opened the Bradshaw, unfolded the map, and, without saying a word, made certain marks upon it.

The chairman watched him closely, and his face changed. "Who's going to do it?" he gasped. Then he repented, as a man does repent when he has given himself away. "Parliament?" he said.

"That's all right," remarked Cyrus Verd, replacing his blue pencil. "I've asked. They daren't block it."

"It wouldn't pay," the chairman said, with an effort at the careless smile.

"That matters only to the man who runs it. Either way it would wreck your line—and you. As my time here is short, don't pretend that it wouldn't, because, of course, I know that you know that it would."

"Am I to understand," said the chairman, angrily, "that you come here to threaten me with this new line?"

"Well, I was talking about a carriage-cleaner. I want him rewarded. I want it done right away. When I want anything done I don't tell myself that I won't spend more than a couple of millions on getting it done."

"Men like you ought not to be allowed to live. I tell you that plainly, Mr Verd."

"There are no men like me. Good-afternoon, then."

"Oh, wait, wait! The man deserves to be rewarded, only these things must be done in the regular way. If he will write to—"

"I'm going to no underlings," said Cyrus Verd, "and I'm in a hurry. Next time I mark that map, those marks will stop there!"

The chairman seemed suddenly to recollect something. "What was this about a carriage-cleaner? Oh, yes, it's irregular; but naturally you wouldn't understand. I'll see about it myself."

"When?"

"Within six weeks."

"Days?"

"Weeks."

"Then it shan't be days. It shall be within six hours—a position of trust and three times his present wages within six hours. The way you talk makes me tired. If you know enough to come in when it rains, I guess you'll drop this argument."

The chairman did drop it, and that same night the carriage-cleaner received the official intimation of his promotion.

Cyrus Verd was young, fabulously wealthy, and unmarried. He was a tall, broad-shouldered man. He was not exactly handsome, but he had that look of power which, in the eyes of women, does just as well. When he first came over he was the hope of many noble matrons with unmarried daughters. He afterwards became their despair; and this was in consequence of his marriage with Anna Fokes—a woman who had neither wealth nor high position—she had been a governess. She was remarkably beautiful, but her beauty was somewhat discounted by the fact that she had—or was said to have—a trace of negro blood in her veins. When this marriage was announced, a certain noble matron said a cruel thing to Cyrus Verd. She congratulated him sardonically on having no racial prejudices.

"I shall remember your kind words, countess," he said pleasantly.

Within a year the countess was a ruined woman. Evidence came to her husband's knowledge which led him to divorce her. This terrible fall was closely followed by the loss of a part of her private income. She was left without a friend in the world and with much reduced means—a disgraced woman. There were some who said that Cyrus Verd had "remembered those kind words"; but if he was responsible for her exposure and ruin he was careful not to let any evidence of his actions appear.

It was seven years after his marriage that, as the Times obituary states, he gave up almost the whole of his property. He prepared a long list of relations and friends of himself and of his wife, and of certain charitable and religious institutions in which they were interested. He reserved for himself an annual income of five hundred pounds only, which to a man who had lived as a millionaire for years would be abject poverty. The remainder was divided among these relations, friends and institutions, and made over to them by deed of gift. Of course, many people said that he was mad. If he was, his wife was mad also, for the step that he took was planned by him with her, and she fully agreed to it.

Personally, I do not think he was mad. I had expected him to take that step, and I think I could produce evidence that in a private letter I actually foretold it. For it happened by chance that I came upon him when he was in the enjoyment of what he called his annual holiday, and it was significant.

It was in an out-of-the-way Welsh village, one year before his marriage. I was stopping there because it was out of the way chiefly—I had some work to do. Cyrus Verd was there in a caravan, and he was masquerading. He was "H. Jackson, photographer," a travelling photographer in a very small way of business, with show-cases of fly-blown photographs of posed rustics affixed to the outside of his caravan. He wore a shabby serge suit, much stained with chemicals, and a soft felt hat. He had not attempted to disguise his face; he had never allowed any portrait of himself to appear in any illustrated paper, shop window, or public gallery, and probably considered himself safe from recognition. But I had once been in the same drawing-room with Cyrus Verd, and he had been pointed out to me. He was not a man who could easily be forgotten. I never had the least doubt that the shabby man who stood touting for custom outside that caravan was Cyrus Verd.

I allowed him to photograph me. I remember that the price was seven shillings and sixpence for a dozen, and that he bothered me to take two dozen for fourteen shillings.

"No thanks, Mr Verd," I said.

He seemed to reflect for a moment, and then he asked me how I knew. I told him where I met him.

"It's my only enjoyment," he said. "You won't spoil it—everybody thinks I'm yachting."

"I won't spoil it," I said. "You might enjoy it always if you cared so much about it."

"No, I couldn't. Thank you. I am obliged to you."

"All right," I said. "Good-morning," and I moved off. He called me back again.

"You'll excuse me," he said, "but you've not paid for those photographs."

"You haven't printed them yet."

"My rule is that payment must be made at the time of sitting."

"Well, I won't pay for a thing until I get it."

We squabbled about it, and finally came to a compromise. Then rather abruptly he asked me to come to supper with him that night.

"And I warn you," he said, "that I live solely on what I make by this photographic business."

Of course I went. We had supper in the caravan. It consisted of chops and potatoes, which Cyrus Verd cooked. He cooked better than he photographed. We drank beer, which Verd had fetched from the public-house in a jug. He had no servant with him, and did everything for himself. I jeered at him gently all through supper.

"It's very pretty," I said, "but it is play-acting. It's not genuine."

"It is absolutely genuine. I tell you that I love simplicity. Had I my choice, I would always go on like this, and I like the work too. In this little village I've already picked up enough orders to keep me busy for a week. Every year I have a month of this, and I look forward to it as I look forward to nothing else."

"What?" I said. "Do you think that this sort of thing proves that you love simplicity? It proves the absolute contrary—that you love variety. No one is compelled to live the life of a rich man against his will. If you live that life for eleven months in the year, and the life of a poor man for one month, you like to be rich eleven times as much as you like to be poor."

"What you say," he said, "sounds plausible. But you don't know the circumstances. I am sorry I cannot offer you a cigar. 'H. Jackson, photographer,' cannot afford to smoke cigars."

"I have my own case here," I said.

I selected a cigar, lit it, put the case back in my pocket, and watched Cyrus Verd. The fragrance reached him. He grew uneasy. He rose, and began to put the supper things away in silence.

"Shall I help you?" I asked.

"No!" he said snappishly. He held out for about five minutes, and then said, "Give me one of those cigars."

He opened the case with trembling hands, and took no notice of my amusement at first. When his cigar was lit, and the first sigh of satisfaction was over, he appeared aggrieved, and asked me what I was laughing at.

"Go back and be a millionaire," I said. "You dress this part well, and"—glancing round the caravan—"it's very correctly staged; but you make the feeblest H. Jackson, peripatetic photographer, that ever disgraced the British drama."

"Listen," he said eagerly. "H. Jackson is a poor man. As a rule he smokes cheap shag in a clay. A gentleman comes along and offers him a cigar. H. Jackson jumps at the treat, of course. Where's the inconsistency?"

"I didn't offer you a cigar. You asked for it. Cyrus Verd could do that, but H. Jackson could not."

"I've half a mind to pitch your beastly cigar out of the window!"

But he did not. He smoked that, and others, and talked delightfully. He had a fine sense of humour, and was willing enough to laugh at himself as a millionaire; but in the character of H. Jackson he had an ardent belief in himself and a strong desire to be taken seriously.

After that, for a week, we always spent the evenings together. Gradually I guessed at the "circumstances" to which he had alluded. Near to the village was the country seat of a baronet, and Anna Fokes was governess to his children, and Cyrus Verd was in love with Anna Fokes. He had met her in the same place a year before. She and I knew who he really was; but no one else in the village did. Her method of procedure was simple. On the arrival of H. Jackson she took the baronet's children to be photographed; afterwards she called every day to see if the photographs were finished. He was, in fact, engaged to her before the night on which I first had supper with him.

A week after my return to town I got a note from Cyrus Verd, asking me to dine with him and "assist at the funeral of H. Jackson." I accepted. We were alone, and the dinner was ridiculously magnificent. I congratulated him on his engagement, which that morning had been made public. He seemed in the best of spirits. After dinner he said:

"I am going to explain the death of H. Jackson. Money has power, and the novelty of possession is attractive. But any other kind of power is better worth while, and the novelty ceases."

"Also," I observed, "time flies, and one must not judge by appearances."

"Yes, I quite understand what you would imply. I am talking platitudes. I guess, if the platitude happens to be the truth that doesn't matter. The actual enjoyment to be obtained from money must soon go, and can only be renewed in the enjoyment of another. I marry a poor woman who has worked in a subservient position; in her enjoyment I shall enjoy again. Wealth, and the power it gives, will be so new and attractive to her that I may safely calculate on a fair period of very decent second-hand enjoyment; consequently, H. Jackson may die."

"Wait," I said, "your wife's enjoyment will cease in the end, and yours with it. What then?"

"Some women have a special gift for enjoying wealth for ever," he said meditatively. "But you are right; Miss Fokes has not that gift. Then—then—there will be a revival of H. Jackson, or something very like it, perhaps in a less crude form."

This practically ended my acquaintance with Cyrus Verd. At first I still saw him occasionally, but I could not afford to know millionaires, and told him so. Afterwards, at the time when he renounced his wealth, I was away from England.

I can see, of course, that a practised author might make something of a character—a consistent whole—out of Cyrus Verd. I only give notes of what came to my knowledge, and confess that I have not the imagination requisite to connect them, supplement them, and give them that air of probability which is always found in the best fiction, and so seldom in real life.

THE FOUR-FINGERED HAND

Charles Yarrow held fours, but as he had come up against Brackley's straight flush they only did him harm, leading him to remark—by no means for the first time—that it did not matter what cards one held, but only when one held them. "I get out here," he remarked, with resignation. No one else seemed to care for further play. The two other men left at once, and shortly afterwards Yarrow and Brackley sauntered out of the club together.

"The night's young," said Brackley; "if you're doing nothing you may as well come round to me."

"Thanks, I will. I'll talk, or smoke, or go so far as to drink; but I don't play poker. It's not my night."

"I didn't know," said Brackley, "that you had any superstitions."

"Haven't. I've only noticed that, as a rule, my luck goes in runs, and that a good run or a bad run usually lasts the length of a night's play. There is probably some simple reason for it, if I were enough of a mathematician to worry it out. In luck as distinct from arithmetic I have no belief at all."

"I wish you could bring me to that happy condition. The hard-headed man of the world, without a superstition or a belief of any kind, has the best time of it."

They reached Brackley's chambers, lit pipes, and mixed drinks. Yarrow stretched himself in a lounge chair, and took up the subject again, speaking lazily and meditatively. He was a man of thirty-eight, with a clean-shaven face; he looked, as indeed he was, travelled and experienced.

"I don't read any books," he remarked, "but I've been twice round the world, and am just about to leave England again. I've been alive for thirty-eight years, and during most of them I have been living. Consequently, I've formed opinions, and one of my opinions is that it is better to dispense with superfluous luggage. Prejudices, superstitions, beliefs of any kind that are not capable of easy and immediate proof are superfluous luggage; one goes more easily without them. You implied just now that you had a certain amount of this superfluous luggage, Brackley. What form does it take? Do you turn your chair?—are you afraid of thirteen at dinner?"

"No, nothing of that sort. I'll tell you about it. You've heard of my grandfather—who made the money?"

"Heard of him? Had him rubbed into me in my childhood. He's in Smiles or one of those books, isn't he? Started life as a navvy, educated himself, invented things, made a fortune, gave vast sums in charity."

"That is the man. Well, he lived to be a fair age, but he was dead before I was born. What I know of him I know from my father, and some of it is not included in those improving books for the young. For instance, there is no mention in the printed biography of his curious belief in the four-fingered hand. His belief was that from time to time he saw a phantom hand. Sometimes it appeared to him in the daytime, and sometimes at night. It was a right hand with the second finger missing. He always regarded the appearance of the hand as a warning. It meant, he supposed, that he was to stop anything on which he was engaged; if he was about to let a house, buy a horse, go a journey, or whatever it was, he stopped if he saw the four-fingered hand."

"Now, look here," said Yarrow, "we'll examine this thing rationally. Can you quote one special instance in which your grandfather saw this maimed hand, broke off a particular project, and found himself benefited?"

"No. In telling my father about it he spoke quite generally."

"Oh, yes," said Yarrow, drily. "The people who see these things do speak quite generally as a rule."

"But wait a moment. This vision of the four-fingered hand appears to have been hereditary. My father also saw it from time to time. And here I can give you the special instances. Do you remember the Crewe disaster some years ago? Well, my father had intended to travel by the train that was wrecked. Just as he was getting into the carriage he saw the four-fingered hand. He at once got out and postponed his journey until later in the day. Another occasion was two months before the failure of Varings'. My father banked there. As a rule he kept a comparatively small balance at the bank, but on this occasion he had just realised an investment, and was about to place the result—six thousand pounds—in the bank, pending re-investment. He was on the point of sending off his confidential clerk with the money, when once more he saw the four-fingered hand. Now at that time Varings' was considered to be as safe as a church. Possibly a few people with special means of information may have had some slight suspicion at the time, but my father certainly had none. He had always banked with Varings, as his father had done before him. However, his faith in the warning hand was so great that instead of paying in the six thousand he withdrew his balance that day. Is that good enough for you?"

"Not entirely. Mind, I don't dispute your facts, but I doubt if it requires the supernatural to explain them. You say that the vision appears to be hereditary. Does that mean that you yourself have ever seen it?"

"I have seen it once."

"When?"

"I saw it to-night." Brackley spoke like a man suppressing some strong excitement. "It was just as you got up from the card-table after losing on your fours. I was on the point of urging you and the other two men to go on playing. I saw the hand distinctly. It seemed to be floating in the air about a couple of yards away from me. It was a small white hand, like a lady's hand, cut short off at the wrist. For a second it moved slowly towards me, and then vanished. Nothing would have induced me to go on playing poker to-night."

"You are—excuse me for mentioning it—not in the least degree under the influence of drink. Further, you are by habit an almost absurdly temperate man. I mention these things because they have to be taken into consideration. They show that you were not at any rate the victim of a common and disreputable form of illusion. But what service has the hand done you? We play a regular point at the club. We are not the excited gamblers of fiction. We don't increase the points, and we never play after one in the morning. At the moment when the hand appeared to you, how much had you won?"

"Twenty-five pounds—an exceptionally large amount."

"Very well. You're a careful player. You play best when your luck's worst. We stopped play at half-past eleven. If we had gone on playing till one, and your luck had been of the worst possible description all the time, we will say that you might have lost that twenty-five and twenty-five more. To me it is inconceivable, but with the worst luck and the worst play it is perhaps possible. Now then, do you mean to tell me that the loss of twenty-five pounds is a matter of such importance to a man with your income as to require a supernatural intervention to prevent you from losing it?"

"Of course it isn't."

"Well, then, the four-fingered hand has not accomplished its mission. It has not saved you from anything. It might even have been inconvenient. If you had been playing with strangers and winning, and they had wished to go on playing, you could hardly have refused. Of course, it did not matter with us—we play with you constantly, and can have our revenge at any time. The four-fingered hand is proved in this instance to have been useless and inept. Therefore, I am inclined to believe that the appearances when it really did some good were coincidences. Doubtless your grandfather and father and yourself have seen the hand, but surely that may be due to some slight hereditary defect in the seeing apparatus, which, under certain conditions, say, of the light and of your own health creates the illusion. The four-fingered hand is natural and not supernatural, subjective and not objective."

"It sounds plausible," remarked Brackley. He got up, crossed the room, and began to open the card-table. "Practical tests are always the most satisfactory, and we can soon have a practical test." As he put the candles on the table he started a little and nearly dropped one of them. He laughed drily. "I saw the four-fingered hand again just then," he said. "But no matter—come—let us play."

"Oh, the two game isn't funny enough."

"Then I'll fetch up Blake from downstairs; you know him. He never goes to bed, and he plays the game."

Blake, who was a youngish man, had chambers downstairs. Brackley easily persuaded him to join the party. It was decided that they should play for exactly an hour. It was a poor game; the cards ran low, and there was very little betting. At the end of the hour Brackley had lost a sovereign, and Yarrow had lost five pounds.

"I don't like to get up a winner, like this," said Blake. "Let's go on."

But Yarrow was not to be persuaded. He said that he was going off to bed. No allusion to the four-fingered hand was made in speaking in the presence of Blake, but Yarrow's smile of conscious superiority had its meaning for Brackley. It meant that Yarrow had overthrown a superstition, and was consequently pleased with himself. After a few minutes' chat Yarrow and Blake said good-night to Brackley, and went downstairs together.

Just as they reached the ground-floor they heard, from far up the staircase, a short cry, followed a moment afterwards by the sound of a heavy fall.

"What's that?" Blake exclaimed.

"I'm just going to see," said Yarrow, quietly. "It seemed to me to come from Brackley's rooms. Let's go up again."

They hurried up the staircase and knocked at Brackley's door. There was no answer. The whole place was absolutely silent. The door was ajar; Yarrow pushed it open, and the two men went in.

The candles on the card-table were still burning. At some distance from them, in a dark corner of the room, lay Brackley, face downwards, with one arm folded under him and the other stretched wide.

Blake stood in the doorway. Yarrow went quickly over to Brackley, and turned the body partially over.

"What is it?" asked Blake, excitedly. "Is the man ill? Has he fainted?"

"Run downstairs," said Yarrow, curtly. "Rouse the porter and get a doctor at once."

The moment Blake had gone, Yarrow took a candle from the card-table, and by the light of it examined once more the body of the dead man. On the throat there was the imprint of a hand—a right hand with the second finger missing. The marks, which were crimson at first, grew gradually fainter.

Some years afterwards, in Yarrow's presence, a man happened to tell some story of a warning apparition that he himself had investigated.

"And do you believe that?" Yarrow asked.

"The evidence that the apparition was seen—and seen by more than one person—seems to me fairly conclusive in this case."

"That is all very well. I will grant you the apparition if you like. But why speak of it as a warning? If such appearances take place, it still seems to me absurd and disproportionate to suppose that they do so in order to warn us, or help us, or hinder us, or anything of the kind. They appear for their own unfathomable reasons only. If they seem to forbid one thing or command another, that also is for their own purpose. I have an experience of my own which would tend to show that."

THE TOWER

In the billiard-room of the Cabinet Club, shortly after midnight, two men had just finished a game. A third had been watching it from the lounge at the end of the room. The winner put up his cue, slipped on his coat, and with a brief "Good-night" passed out of the room. He was tall, dark, clean-shaven and foreign in appearance. It would not have been easy to guess his nationality, but he did not look English.

The loser, a fair-haired boy of twenty-five, came over to the lounge and dropped down by the side of the elderly man who had been watching the billiards.

"Silly game, ain't it, doctor?" he said cheerfully. The doctor smiled.

"Yes," he said, "Vyse is a bit too hot for you, Bill."

"A bit too hot for anything," said the boy. "He never takes any trouble; he never hesitates; he never thinks; he never takes an easy shot when there's a brilliant one to be pulled off. It's almost uncanny."

"Ah," said the doctor, reflectively, "it's a queer thing. You're the third man whom I have heard say that about Vyse within the last week."

"I believe he's quite all right—good sort of chap, you know. He's frightfully clever too—speaks a lot of beastly difficult Oriental languages—does well at any game he takes up."

"Yes," said the doctor, "he is clever; and he is also a fool."

"What do you mean? He's eccentric, of course. Fancy his buying that rotten tower—a sweet place to spend Christmas in all alone, I don't think."

"Why does he say he's going there?"

"Says he hates the conventional Christmas, and wants to be out of it; says also that he wants to shoot duck."

"That won't do," said the doctor. "He may hate the conventional Christmas. He may, and he probably will, shoot duck. But that's not his reason for going there."

"Then what is it?" asked the boy.

"Nothing that would interest you much, Bill. Vyse is one of the chaps that want to know too much. He's playing about in a way that every medical man knows to be a rotten, dangerous way. Mind, he may get at something; if the stories are true he has already got at a good deal. I believe it is possible for a man to develop in himself certain powers at a certain price."

"What's the price?"

"Insanity, as often as not. Here, let's talk about something pleasanter. Where are you yourself going this Christmas, by the way?"

"My sister has taken compassion upon this lone bachelor. And you?"

"I shall be out of England," said the doctor. "Cairo, probably."

The two men passed out into the hall of the club.

"Has Mr Vyse gone yet?" the boy asked the porter.

"Not yet, Sir William. Mr Vyse is changing in one of the dressing-rooms. His car is outside."

The two men passed the car in the street, and noticed the luggage in the tonneau. The driver, in his long leather coat, stood motionless beside it, waiting for his master. The powerful headlight raked the dusk of the street; you could see the paint on a tired woman's cheek as she passed through it on her way home at last.

"See his game?" said Bill.

"Of course," said the doctor. "He's off to the marshes and that blessed tower of his to-night."

"Well, I don't envy him—holy sort of amusement it must be driving all that way on a cold night like this. I wonder if the beggar ever goes to sleep at all?"

They had reached Bill's chambers in Jermyn Street.

"You must come in and have a drink," said Bill.

"Don't think so, thanks," said the doctor; "it's late, you know."

"You'd better," said Bill, and the doctor followed him in.

A letter and a telegram were lying on the table in the diminutive hall. The letter had been sent by messenger, and was addressed to Sir William Orlsey, Bart., in a remarkably small hand-writing. Bill picked it up, and thrust it into his pocket at once, unopened. He took the telegram with him into the room where the drinks had been put out, and opened it as he sipped his whisky-and-soda.

"Great Scot!" he exclaimed.

"Nothing serious, I hope," said the doctor.

"I hope not. I suppose all children have got to have the measles some time or another; but it's a bit unlucky that my sister's three should all go down with it just now. That does for her house-party at Christmas, of course."

A few minutes later, when the doctor had gone, Bill took the letter from his pocket and tore it open. A cheque fell from the envelope and fluttered to the ground. The letter ran as follows:

"Dear Bill,—I could not talk to you to-night, as the doctor, who happens to disapprove of me, was in the billiard-room. Of course, I can let you have the hundred you want, and enclose it herewith with the utmost pleasure. The time you mention for repayment would suit me all right, and so would any other time. Suit your own convenience entirely.

"I have a favour to ask of you. I know you are intending to go down to the Leylands' for Christmas. I think you will be prevented from doing so. If that is the case, and you have no better engagement, would you hold yourself at my disposal for a week? It is just possible that I may want a man like you pretty badly. There ought to be plenty of duck this weather, but I don't know that I can offer any other attraction.—Very sincerely yours,

"Edward Vyse."

Bill picked up the cheque, and thrust it into the drawer with a feeling of relief. It was a queer invitation, he thought—funnily worded, with the usual intimations of time and place missing. He switched off the electric lights and went into his bedroom. As he was undressing a thought struck him suddenly.

"How the deuce," he said aloud, "did he know that I should be prevented from going to Polly's place?" Then he looked round quickly. He thought that he had heard a faint laugh just behind him. No one was there, and Bill's nerves were good enough. In twenty minutes he was fast asleep.

The cottage, built of grey stone, stood some thirty yards back from the road, from which it was screened by a shrubbery. It was an ordinary eight-roomed cottage, and it did well enough for Vyse and his servants and one guest—if Vyse happened to want a guest. There was a pleasant little walled garden of a couple of acres behind the cottage. Through a doorway in the further wall one passed into a stunted and dismal plantation, and in the middle of this rose the tower, far higher than any of the trees that surrounded it.

Sir William Orlsey had arrived just in time to change before dinner. Talk at dinner had been of indifferent subjects—the queer characters of the village and the chances of sport on the morrow. Bill had mentioned the tower, and his host had hastened to talk of other things. But now that dinner was over, and the man who had waited on them had left the room, Vyse of his own accord returned to the subject.

"Danvers is a superstitious ass," he observed, "and he's in quite enough of a funk about that tower as it is; that's why I wouldn't give you the story of it while he was in the room. According to the village tradition, a witch was burned on the site where the tower now stands, and she declared that where she burned the devil should have his house. The lord of the manor at that time, hearing what the old lady had said, and wishing to discourage house-building on that particular site, had it covered with a plantation, and made it a condition of his will that this plantation should be kept up."

Bill lit a large cigar. "Looks like checkmate," he said. "However, seeing that the tower is actually there—"

"Quite so. This man's son came no end of a cropper, and the property changed hands several times. It was divided and sub-divided. I, for instance, only own about twenty acres of it. Presently there came along a scientific old gentleman and bought the piece that I now have. Whether he knew of the story, or whether he didn't, I cannot say, but he set to work to build the tower that is now standing in the middle of the plantation. He may have intended it as an observatory. He got the stone for it on the spot from his own quarry, but he had to import his labour, as the people in these parts didn't think the work healthy. Then one fine morning before the tower was finished they found the old gentleman at the bottom of his quarry with his neck broken."

"So," said Bill, "they say of course that the tower is haunted. What is it that they think they see?"

"Nothing. You can't see it. But there are people who think they have touched it and have heard it."

"Rot, ain't it?"

"I don't know exactly. You see, I happen to be one of those people."

"Then, if you think so, there's something in it. This is interesting. I say, can't we go across there now?"

"Certainly, if you like. Sure you won't have any more wine? Come along, then."

The two men slipped on their coats and caps. Vyse carried a lighted stable-lantern. It was a frosty moonlit night, and the path was crisp and hard beneath their feet. As Vyse slid back the bolts of the gate in the garden wall, Bill said suddenly, "By the way, Vyse, how did you know that I shouldn't be at the Leylands' this Christmas? I told you I was going there."

"I don't know. I had a feeling that you were going to be with me. It might have been wrong. Anyhow, I'm very glad you're here. You are just exactly the man I want. We've only a few steps to go now. This path is ours. That cart-track leads away to the quarry where the scientific gentleman took the short cut to further knowledge. And here is the door of the tower."

They walked round the tower before entering. The night was so still that, unconsciously, they spoke in lowered voices and trod as softly as possible. The lock of the heavy door groaned and screeched as the key turned. The light of the lantern fell now on the white sand of the floor and on a broken spiral staircase on the further side. Far up above one saw a tangle of beams and the stars beyond them. Bill heard Vyse saying that it was left like that after the death in the quarry.

"It's a good solid bit of masonry," said Bill, "but it ain't a cheerful spot exactly. And, by Jove! it smells like a menagerie."

"It does," said Vyse, who was examining the sand on the floor.

Bill also looked down at the prints in the sand. "Some dog's been in here."

"No," said Vyse, thoughtfully. "Dogs won't come in here, and you can't make them. Also, there were no marks on the sand when I left the place and locked the door this afternoon. Queer, isn't it?"

"But the thing's a blank impossibility. Unless, of course, we are to suppose that—"

He did not finish his sentence, and, if he had finished it, it would not have been audible. A chorus of grunting, growling and squealing broke out almost from under his feet, and he sprang backwards. It lasted for a few seconds, and then died slowly away.

"Did you hear that?" Vyse asked quietly.

"I should rather think so."

"Good; then it was not subjective. What was it?"

"Only one kind of beast makes that row. Pigs, of course—a whole drove of them. It sounded as if they were in here, close to us. But as they obviously are not, they must be outside."

"But they are not outside," said Vyse. "Come and see."

They hunted the plantation through and through with no result, and then locked the tower door and went back to the cottage. Bill said very little. He was not capable of much self-analysis, but he was conscious of a sudden dislike of Vyse. He was angry that he had ever put himself under an obligation to this man. He had wanted the money for a gambling debt, and he had already repaid it. Now he saw Vyse in the light of a man with whom one should have no dealings, and the last man from whom one should accept a kindness. The strange experience that he had just been through filled him with loathing far more than with fear or wonder. There was something unclean and diabolical about the whole thing that made a decent man reluctant to question or to investigate. The filthy smell of the brutes seemed still to linger in his nostrils. He was determined that on no account would he enter the tower again, and that as soon as he could find a decent excuse he would leave the place altogether.

A little later, as he sat before the log fire and filled his pipe, he turned to his host with a sudden question: "I say, Vyse, why did you want me to come down here? What's the meaning of it all?"

"My dear fellow," said Vyse, "I wanted you for the pleasure of your society. Now, don't get impatient. I also wanted you because you are the most normal man I know. Your confirmation of my experiences in the tower is most valuable to me. Also, you have good nerves, and, if you will forgive me for saying so, no imagination. I may want help that only a man with good nerves would be able to give."

"Why don't you leave the thing alone? It's too beastly."

Vyse laughed. "I'm afraid my hobby bores you. We won't talk about it. After all, there's no reason why you should help me?"

"Tell me just what it is that you wanted."

"I wanted you if you heard this whistle"—he took an ordinary police-whistle down from the mantelpiece—"any time to-night or to-morrow night, to come over to the tower at once and bring a revolver with you. The whistle would be a sign that I was in a tight place—that my life, in fact, was in danger. You see, we are dealing here with something preternatural, but it is also something material; in addition to other risks, one risks ordinary physical destruction. However, I could see that you were repelled by the sight and the sound of these beasts, whatever they may be; and I can tell you from my own experience that the touch of them is even worse. There is no reason why you should bother yourself any further about the thing."

"You can take the whistle with you," said Bill. "If I hear it I will come."

"Thanks," said Vyse, and immediately changed the subject. He did not say why he was spending the night in the tower, or what it was he proposed to do there.

It was three in the morning when Bill was suddenly startled out of his sleep. He heard the whistle being blown repeatedly. He hurried on some clothes and dashed down into the hall, where his lantern and revolver lay all ready for him. He ran along the garden path and through the door in the wall until he got to the tower. The sound of the whistle had ceased now, and everything was horribly still. The door of the tower stood wide open, and without hesitation Bill entered, holding his lantern high.

The tower was absolutely empty. Not a sound was to be heard. Bill called Vyse by name twice loudly, and then again the awful silence spread over the place.

Then, as if guided by some unseen hand, he took the track that led to the quarry, well knowing what he would find at the bottom of it.

The jury assigned the death of Vyse to an accident, and said that the quarry should be fenced in. They had no explanation to offer of the mutilation of the face, as if by the teeth of some savage beast.

THE FUTILITY OF WILLIAM PENARDEN

"Let the great book of the world be your principal study."

Chesterfield.

General Penarden, C.B., married late in life, and had one son, who was intended by General Penarden to follow his father's profession, to be V.C., and D.S.O., and to be a bright and shining light. As the intentions of destiny did not precisely agree with the intentions of General Penarden, it is, perhaps, just as well that the old man died when William, his son, was a boy of six. He was thus saved some disappointment.

But even in those brief years he was not saved all disappointment. He made, grimly, a list of the different things of which the child was frightened, and it was a very long list. Many, of course, were things of which any child is frightened; many others came into a doubtful category; the fear would have been excusable, perhaps, in a girl. There was left a residue which was all wrong and quite inexplicable. The General, though disappointed, did not despair. He quoted instances of brave men who had had a timid childhood. His optimistic programme was that his son should have it all knocked out of him by the paternal hand, by the severe discipline of a public school, and by experience of dangers. Familiarity of them would breed contempt, and all would yet be well. On the day before his death from apoplexy he imagined to himself despatches in which his son's name figured brilliantly.

The General had married a woman much younger than himself. She was beautiful and she was bored. She came of a decaying race. The brilliant vices and wild extravagances of her eighteenth-century forefathers had ended with the usual and prosaic sequel of tainted blood and fallen fortunes. Possibly there were few things that bored this tired London woman more than her son William. She remembered to talk about him a little to her friends; she had the best possible care taken of him by the best possible servants; she gave him expensive presents on the days appointed. But she did not want to be with him very much. When she was with him she either spoiled him or bullied him, and more often she bullied him. At the age of twelve, William, at a preparatory school which he hated, was bidden to write an essay on the subject of war. He wrote childishly, and with many faults of punctuation and spelling, to the effect that war was the wickedest thing in the world, and that a soldier's profession was the most inhuman and abominable. By chance the essay came into his mother's way, and she laughed till she cried over it. He was not a pretty boy, and he could never be admirable, but there seemed to be some chance that he might, at least, be quaint. At the age of fourteen he made to his mother a profound observation, to wit, that though for many long years past he himself had been getting older and older, she had never changed one little bit. For this she kissed him; he might have found her in a mood when she would have struck him for it.

It was quite clear by this time that he was not to be a soldier. The weakness of his physique supported the firmness of his wishes in this respect. He could have never passed the doctor. At his public school, which he hated even more than the preparatory school, medical certificates freed him to some extent from compulsory games. He was a muff at all games, and he was no great scholar; yet he was less unpopular at school than might have been expected. He had no pretensions whatever, and he was very obliging. He would do anything for anybody. He had the fatal gift of imagination, and a few eccentricities that amused other boys. Boys treat with good humour that with which they are amused. There was, for instance, a certain short cut, a footpath across some fields, in common use by the boys, which William Penarden resolutely refused to take. He gave no reasons, but he said that he could not take that path. So he went all the way round, and was frequently late, and from that came trouble. But he remained obstinate. It was one of the things that pleased the other boys. "Mad as a hatter," they would say, and quote his dislike of the field-path in proof.

It was during his first term at Cambridge that he heard from his mother that she intended to marry again. She had not aged at all, except to the most careful observer and to her own maid, and even her own maid did not know everything. It was, perhaps, rather remarkable that she had not re-married before, but she had always preferred the admiration of the many to the devotion of one, and, by the terms of the late General's will, her re-marriage made her son much richer and herself much poorer. It may have occurred to her that this prolonged struggle with age could not be carried on indefinitely. As for the money, she was marrying a wealthy baronet, and knew how to take care of herself. It was true that he was a sportsman who hated London, and that she would have to live for the most part in the country. But the things which are supposed to amuse had bored her so long that she had begun to wonder if she could not be amused by the things that are supposed to bore. Then there was always the resource of foreign travel. She knew a doctor who could generally be counted upon to order her to the place to which she wished to go.

William was not much surprised by the news, and he wrote the kindest of letters to his mother. He was really an extremely kind young man. He had already met many characters of doubtful probity. None of them had ever asked him to lend money; he had always anticipated them by the offer of a loan. On the occasions when his mother got to hear of this she had been unfailingly very, very mad with him. At present, William was quite ready to accept the situation, but the situation was not quite ready to accept William. He was not much of a sportsman, and his new father said candidly that he could see nothing in the boy. Lady Quyne, formerly Mrs Penarden, became suddenly serious and flagrantly moral on the subject of William's career. She spelt career with a capital letter in her letters to him; she pronounced it in italics in her talk. It was true that it was not necessary for him to make an income, but no good ever came of idleness. She had, by the way, made an exhaustive trial of it herself for the last twenty years, and was, therefore, in a position to speak. She suggested politics and the Diplomatic Service; he had no taste for either. Above all, she emphasised the bad effect which a prolonged homelife had upon a young man. Before he took his degree—it was a pass degree—he had learned to interpret this correctly, and spent very little of his vacations at home. He had made friends who found him amiable and liked him to visit them occasionally. Sometimes he travelled. When he was at home he did not see very much of his mother. There were always other visitors staying in the house. Sir Charles Quyne was pessimistic on the subject of William. "He can play the piano a bit," he said, "and he can drive the car. And there is not one other solitary damned thing that he can do. I wish to goodness he would get married."

William did not get married, but he kept out of the way, which, after all, was almost as good. Further, to please his mother, he said that he proposed ultimately to become a candidate for Parliament. In the meantime, he would like to devote two or three years to serious preparation. Lady Quyne observed that he could cram up all that a Member needed to know in two or three weeks, but did not remonstrate further. William took a riverside cottage and a small flat in London. He went from one to the other as the mood took him, and as a rule made the journey on his motor-car. He liked driving the car, but it was rather a fearful pleasure. He was, perhaps, the most cautious driver extant, and the secret amusement of his hireling chauffeur. When William went from his cottage to his flat in town, he made the chauffeur take the wheel when they approached London. William did not like driving through thick traffic at any time, and did not like driving by night at all.

One Saturday night in June, Dolling, the chauffeur, received an unexpected visit from a long-absent brother. The visitor arrived just at the moment when he and his master were about to start for London in the car. Timidity and amiability struggled in the breast of William Penarden, and amiability won.

"I shan't want you, Dolling," he said, "I can manage it all right by myself."

Mr Dolling was sure that it was very kind of him. It was a bright moonlight night, with deep, bothering shadows.

William started slowly. He already felt nervous. How would it be if he gave up the London idea altogether? He could telegraph in the morning to the friend whom he was to have met. He turned off from the London road, where a circuit of two or three miles would bring him back to his cottage again. There was a dark stretch of road here, trees on either side almost meeting overhead. Beyond, the road lay white and open. William went into his third speed as he emerged from the darkness. At that moment a black figure shot out from the hedge into the road right across the way of the car. In a moment or two William had jammed on the brakes, and the car stood still, with the engines racing. Had he touched the man or not? It seemed to him to be a long while before he could force himself to look round and see. When he did so, he saw the black figure lying motionless on the road in the bright moonlight.

"Are you hurt?" William called hoarsely. All was silent. With great care William turned his car round in the road and crawled up alongside. He could see now that it was the figure of a man, raggedly dressed, absolutely motionless. The hat had fallen off, and the moonlight made the thick, white hair brilliant.

"Are you hurt?" William asked again. He stared hard to see if he could detect the slightest movement. There was none. He listened intently, stopping his engines. The whole night seemed to him full of the silence of the dead.

He knew perfectly well what he ought to do, but sheer panic had hold of him. He touched the switch and his engines started again. For once in his life he drove recklessly, and he drove to London. There would be ample evidence that he had been intending to go to London when he started, and there would be no reason why he should ever have taken his car on the road where the dead body would be found. No one had seen him; no suspicion could attach to him.

Long before he reached London, the drunken tramp, whom William supposed that he had killed, sat up. The car had never touched him. He had fallen in the road and had been slightly stunned. He rubbed his aged and disreputable head and grumbled to himself that this was what came of those sanguinary motors. Then he walked home, kicked his wife, and slept the sleep of the just.

The price that William Penarden was to pay for his cowardice was heavy enough. He was never to know that he had not even touched the man. Coincidence was already busy to convince him that he had killed that man, and to keep the terror of it fresh in his mind for the remaining two years of his life.

He came back from London by train on Sunday afternoon. He told Dolling that he was ill, and that he did not feel up to driving the car. Dolling could fetch it back from the garage on Monday. Dolling looked remarkably serious. He did not know if his master had heard of it, but a terrible thing had happened not three miles away from them. A man had been found dead in the road on Saturday night, and it was supposed that he had been knocked down by a motor-car. It was not the London road; it was just where—

William Penarden stopped him abruptly and savagely. It was all true, then, and not the dream that he had hoped to find it.

Yes, it was true enough, but it was another man and another car. The hoary reprobate who had been dazzled by the head-lights of Penarden's car, and had stunned himself in his fall, was now no worse than he usually was after his usual Saturday night.

For many weeks Penarden carefully avoided the newspapers. He was afraid of what he would find there. After that came a feeling of security, but never a moment's peace. That brilliant white hair in the moonlight wove itself into the fabric of his dreams. That black figure lurched ever before his car, till Penarden had a nervous breakdown and gave up motoring. When he got a little better, the chief question in his mind was how long he could stand it, how long it would be before his mind gave way and in his ravings he let loose his secret. Morose, nervous, ill, he saw no one. For a long time he travelled. Change of scene was an opiate. It put the day of madness a little further off.

The poor man did his best. The political career was now definitely given up. Lady Quyne spoke with a sigh to the more intimate part of her circle of her son's incurable idleness. On his return to England he had yielded to archæology; it was a subject which had always interested him, and he looked to it now to take his mind off. He journeyed from one cathedral city to another, asking erudite questions, making rubbings of brasses, and always haunted.

In the course of his wanderings in quest of the quaint he stopped at a provincial town, the normal serenity of which was in a state of temporary interruption owing to some reliability trials of motors being held in its neighbourhood. Penarden drove to the hotel which the railway porter impressed upon him was the only one likely to have accommodation for such as himself, and asked for a room. The clerk announced mournfully that "only No. 54 was unoccupied, and—well—before offering it to the gentleman he had better see the manager."

That official saw the class of man he was dealing with, and regretted deeply that he had no other room. But the reliability trials were on, and his resources were strained to the uttermost. It was all that he had to offer, and it was on the top floor of an annexe, the decoration of which was not yet completed. The painters' step-ladders and planks still lingered in the corridor. The view from the window was obstructed by a mean building scarcely eight feet away. True, the mean building had been condemned and was to come down; and the decorations would be finished and the workmen would be out in a fortnight; but in the meantime—

Well, in the meantime, William Penarden did not care much in what room he failed to get to sleep, and he accepted the bedroom that was offered. He even managed to sleep in it, until in the early hours he was aroused by the waiter (in dress trousers and the jacket of his pyjamas), who told him that the building opposite was well alight, and that they hoped that the annexe would not catch, the wind being favourable to them, but that Mr Penarden had better get down at once and bring his travelling bag with him.

"Right," said Penarden, and sent the waiter to wake up the others. Then he dressed quickly, and looked out of his window down to the alley beneath. The fire brigade had not yet arrived. Two policemen were doing their best to keep the narrow alley clear. An ugly old woman, in violent hysterics, was screaming, "They're up there!" and a man was trying to quiet her. Then Penarden gave a great sigh of relief, for here was the chance of expiation. He took the longest of the planks that the painters had left and ran it through his own window so that it dropped on a window-ledge of the burning house opposite. As a rule, he had no head at all for heights, but now he felt perfectly unperturbed. He did not attempt to walk along the plank, for he was not giving a circus exhibition, but he began to work himself along it slowly in a sitting position, taking great care not to jolt the end of it off the window-ledge opposite. An authoritative voice below shouted to him to go back. He went on. He reached the window opposite and flung it open. A volley of black and stifling smoke poured forth and he nearly fell. Then he climbed into the room, and the last that was seen of him was that he stood at the window, taking off his coat to put it over his head before he could go further. He was not seen again alive.

And, as his mother, Lady Quyne, observed, it was all so absolutely futile. The people in the house had already got out, and he had let himself be guided by the hysterical raving of some chance woman in the crowd. So he annoyed her almost as much in death as he had done in life. But it is possible that his death, horrible though it was, was for him of an extreme happiness.

THE PATHOS OF THE COMMONPLACE

He was a middle-aged man when he first came to the town. He had taken an appointment as clerk to a firm of solicitors, and he was happy in that appointment, regarding it as a step upwards. He was small in stature and wild in manner. His eyes had a hesitating look in them, and he pressed his thin lips tightly together, as though to counterbalance his look of hesitation and make himself appear rather firm. He found himself furnished apartments in a house that was one of a row on the very outskirts of the great town. They were two rooms at the top of the house, small and shabbily furnished, looking out on a piece of waste land at the back. On this piece of waste land there was one large tree growing. At the time when he first took the rooms he was talkative and told the landlady all about himself.

"My name is Peters. You see, I've just got a step upwards rather, by being appointed clerk to Grantham & Flynders. Formerly, I used to keep the books for Flynders's cousin, who's a grocer in a small way at Melstowe—oh, quite a comparatively small way."

"Really now," said Mrs Marks, a good woman, but not always logical; "and then for this Flynders to give himself those airs—and his cousin no more than that! Ah! I've many a time said that half the world doesn't know who the other half's relations are!"

"So it is!" replied Peters. "I may say—I think I may say—that I've done a good deal for Flynders's cousin. He's taken my advice more than once, notably in an extension of the counter-trade in effervescents during the hot weather, and he's found it pay him. Well, he knew that I could do a good deal better than I was doing. I'd taught myself things, you see. There was shorthand now. At Melstowe my shorthand was, if it's not to use too strong a term, going to rot, simply going to rot—in a grocery and general, there's no use for it. I pointed that all out to Flynders's cousin, and he—being good-natured and seeing what I was—got me this berth with this Flynders himself. So I left Melstowe, and I left Flynders's cousin—left him, thanks to me, doing to my certain knowledge some gross more in the lemonade than he had ever done in the past." Peters paused, and looked proud of himself. "Mind," he went on, rather weakly, "I'm telling you all this not from any—any desire to tell anyone anything, but because I may be giving up these rooms in two or three years, or even less. You see, I've taken one of those steps upwards that may lead to anything. In a post like mine you just work yourself up and work yourself up. Starting with what I may call family influence, and having rather a strong natural turn, I may be made managing clerk in no time; then, perhaps, Flynders dies, and I'm took in. 'Grantham & Peters' wouldn't sound bad. Only then, of course, I shouldn't keep these rooms—I should be taking a house of my own."

Mrs Marks considered this, not unjustly, to be a little wild. But it was cheaper always to humour a lodger; and she mostly chose the cheapest. "Then you'd be getting married," she said.

"Under the circumstances I should ask Flynders's cousin's second daughter to—to—"

"To consider it," suggested the landlady.

"To re-consider it," said Peters, sadly and correctively. He had a nervous anxiety to get away from the subject. He glanced out of the window. "I call that a pleasant lookout," he said. "Being high up, and that sycamore touching the window nearly, it ain't unlike Zaccheus."

"That's no sycamore, Mr Peters. It's a plane."

"I don't know about such things. I ain't a talker as a rule. It may be that I'm a bit excited at entering on a new sp'ere, a sp'ere from which much may be hoped. Not for worlds would I have 'em know in the office that I've got ambitions—oh, no!"

The landlady moved to the door. "Will there be anything else now?"

"A little tea, if it's not too much trouble," said Peters. "I have a partiality for tea."

"You shall have it," said Mrs Marks. She did a good deal with the manner and the tone of the voice. Peters vaguely understood that all this was exceptional, and must not occur again; he must not make a practice of taking up Mrs Marks's precious time by sheer garrulousness; and he must not get into the habit of ordering tea or anything else that he wanted—he must wait until it was brought to him spontaneously. He began to unpack his few belongings and put them away neatly. He had a picture—an engraving that he had purchased, ready framed, in Melstowe. It represented David playing before Saul. He hung it over the mantelpiece. Beneath stood a partly-decayed model of a Swiss mountain and châlet, protected by a glass case.

When everything was tidy Peters sat down and drank his tea, and thought about his ambitions.