MONEY FOR NOTHING

BY P. G. WODEHOUSE

GARDEN CITY, NEW YORK
DOUBLEDAY, DORAN & COMPANY, INC.
1928

COPYRIGHT, 1928,
BY P. G. WODEHOUSE
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES AT
THE COUNTRY LIFE PRESS,
GARDEN CITY, N. Y.

FIRST EDITION

CONTENTS

MONEY FOR NOTHING

CHAPTER I

I

The picturesque village of Rudge-in-the-Vale dozed in the summer sunshine. Along its narrow High Street the only signs of life visible were a cat stropping its backbone against the Jubilee Watering Trough, some flies doing deep-breathing exercises on the hot window sills, and a little group of serious thinkers who, propped up against the wall of the Carmody Arms, were waiting for that establishment to open. At no time is there ever much doing in Rudge's main thoroughfare, but the hour at which a stranger, entering it, is least likely to suffer the illusion that he has strayed into Broadway, Piccadilly, or the Rue de Rivoli is at two o'clock on a warm afternoon in July.

You will find Rudge-in-the-Vale, if you search carefully, in that pleasant section of rural England where the gray stone of Gloucestershire gives place to Worcestershire's old red brick. Quiet, in fact, almost unconscious, it nestles beside the tiny river Skirme and lets the world go by, somnolently content with its Norman church, its eleven public-houses, its Pop.—to quote the Automobile Guide—of 3,541, and its only effort in the direction of modern progress, the emporium of Chas. Bywater, Chemist.

Chas. Bywater is a live wire. He takes no afternoon siesta, but works while others sleep. Rudge as a whole is inclined after luncheon to go into the back room, put a handkerchief over its face and take things easy for a bit. But not Chas. Bywater. At the moment at which this story begins he was all bustle and activity, and had just finished selling to Colonel Meredith Wyvern a bottle of Brophy's Paramount Elixir (said to be good for gnat bites).

Having concluded his purchase, Colonel Wyvern would have preferred to leave, but Mr. Bywater was a man who liked to sweeten trade with pleasant conversation. Moreover, this was the first time the Colonel had been inside his shop since that sensational affair up at the Hall two weeks ago, and Chas. Bywater, who held the unofficial position of chief gossip monger to the village, was aching to get to the bottom of that.

With the bare outline of the story he was, of course, familiar. Rudge Hall, seat of the Carmody family for so many generations, contained in its fine old park a number of trees which had been planted somewhere about the reign of Queen Elizabeth. This meant that every now and then one of them would be found to have become a wobbly menace to the passer-by, so that experts had to be sent for to reduce it with a charge of dynamite to a harmless stump. Well, two weeks ago, it seems, they had blown up one of the Hall's Elizabethan oaks and as near as a toucher, Rudge learned, had blown up Colonel Wyvern and Mr. Carmody with it. The two friends had come walking by just as the expert set fire to the train and had had a very narrow escape.

Thus far the story was common property in the village, and had been discussed nightly in the eleven tap-rooms of its eleven public-houses. But Chas. Bywater, with his trained nose for news and that sixth sense which had so often enabled him to ferret out the story behind the story when things happen in the upper world of the nobility and gentry, could not help feeling that there was more in it than this. He decided to give his customer the opportunity of confiding in him.

"Warm day, Colonel," he observed.

"Ur," grunted Colonel Wyvern.

"Glass going up, I see."

"Ur."

"May be in for a spell of fine weather at last."

"Ur."

"Glad to see you looking so well, Colonel, after your little accident," said Chas. Bywater, coming out into the open.

It had been Colonel Wyvern's intention, for he was a man of testy habit, to enquire of Mr. Bywater why the devil he couldn't wrap a bottle of Brophy's Elixir in brown paper and put a bit of string round it without taking the whole afternoon over the task: but at these words he abandoned this project. Turning a bright mauve and allowing his luxuriant eyebrows to meet across the top of his nose, he subjected the other to a fearful glare.

"Little accident?" he said. "Little accident?"

"I was alluding——"

"Little accident!"

"I merely——"

"If by little accident," said Colonel Wyvern in a thick, throaty voice, "you mean my miraculous escape from death when that fat thug up at the Hall did his very best to murder me, I should be obliged if you would choose your expressions more carefully. Little accident! Good God!"

Few things in this world are more painful than the realization that an estrangement has occurred between two old friends who for years have jogged amiably along together through life, sharing each other's joys and sorrows and holding the same views on religion, politics, cigars, wine, and the Decadence of the Younger Generation: and Mr. Bywater's reaction, on hearing Colonel Wyvern describe Mr. Lester Carmody, of Rudge Hall, until two short weeks ago his closest crony, as a fat thug, should have been one of sober sadness. Such, however, was not the case. Rather was he filled with an unholy exultation. All along he had maintained that there was more in that Hall business than had become officially known, and he stood there with his ears flapping, waiting for details.

These followed immediately and in great profusion: and Mr. Bywater, as he drank them in, began to realize that his companion had certain solid grounds for feeling a little annoyed. For when, as Colonel Wyvern very sensibly argued, you have been a man's friend for twenty years and are walking with him in his park and hear warning shouts and look up and realize that a charge of dynamite is shortly about to go off in your immediate neighbourhood, you expect a man who is a man to be a man. You do not expect him to grab you round the waist and thrust you swiftly in between himself and the point of danger, so that, when the explosion takes place, you get the full force of it and he escapes without so much as a singed eyebrow.

"Quite," said Mr. Bywater, hitching up his ears another inch.

Colonel Wyvern continued. Whether, if in a condition to give the matter careful thought, he would have selected Chas. Bywater as a confidant, one cannot say. But he was not in such a condition. The stoppered bottle does not care whose is the hand that removes its cork—all it wants is the chance to fizz: and Colonel Wyvern resembled such a bottle. Owing to the absence from home of his daughter, Patricia, he had had no one handy to act as audience for his grievances, and for two weeks he had been suffering torments. He told Chas. Bywater all.

It was a very vivid picture that he conjured up. Mr. Bywater could see the whole thing as clearly as if he had been present in person—from the blasting gang's first horrified realization that human beings had wandered into the danger zone to the almost tenser moment when, running up to sort out the tangled heap on the ground, they had observed Colonel Wyvern rise from his seat on Mr. Carmody's face and had heard him start to tell that gentleman precisely what he thought of him. Privately, Mr. Bywater considered that Mr. Carmody had acted with extraordinary presence of mind, and had given the lie to the theory, held by certain critics, that the landed gentry of England are deficient in intelligence. But his sympathies were, of course, with the injured man. He felt that Colonel Wyvern had been hardly treated, and was quite right to be indignant about it. As to whether the other was justified in alluding to his former friend as a jelly-bellied hell-hound, that was a matter for his own conscience to decide.

"I'm suing him," concluded Colonel Wyvern, regarding an advertisement of Pringle's Pink Pills with a smouldering eye.

"Quite."

"The only thing in the world that super-fatted old Blackhander cares for is money, and I'll have his last penny out of him, if I have to take the case to the House of Lords."

"Quite," said Mr. Bywater.

"I might have been killed. It was a miracle I wasn't. Five thousand pounds is the lowest figure any conscientious jury could put the damages at. And, if there were any justice in England, they'd ship the scoundrel off to pick oakum in a prison cell."

Mr. Bywater made noncommittal noises. Both parties to this unfortunate affair were steady customers of his, and he did not wish to alienate either by taking sides. He hoped the Colonel was not going to ask him for his opinion of the rights of the case.

Colonel Wyvern did not. Having relieved himself with some six minutes of continuous speech, he seemed to have become aware that he had bestowed his confidences a little injudiciously. He coughed and changed the subject.

"Where's that stuff?" he said. "Good God! Isn't it ready yet? Why does it take you fellows three hours to tie a knot in a piece of string?"

"Quite ready, Colonel," said Chas. Bywater hastily. "Here it is. I have put a little loop for the finger, to facilitate carrying."

"Is this stuff really any good?"

"Said to be excellent, Colonel. Thank you, Colonel. Much obliged, Colonel. Good day, Colonel."

Still fermenting at the recollection of his wrongs, Colonel Wyvern strode to the door: and, pushing it open with extreme violence, left the shop.

The next moment the peace of the drowsy summer afternoon was shattered by a hideous uproar. Much of this consisted of a high, passionate barking, the remainder being contributed by the voice of a retired military man, raised in anger. Chas. Bywater blenched, and, reaching out a hand toward an upper shelf, brought down, in the order named, a bundle of lint, a bottle of arnica, and one of the half-crown (or large) size pots of Sooth-o, the recognized specific for cuts, burns, scratches, nettle stings, and dog bites. He believed in Preparedness.

II

While Colonel Wyvern had been pouring his troubles into the twitching ear of Chas. Bywater, there had entered the High Street a young man in golf clothes and Old Rugbian tie. This was John Carroll, nephew of Mr. Carmody, of the Hall. He had walked down to the village, accompanied by his dog Emily, to buy tobacco, and his objective, therefore, was the same many-sided establishment which was supplying the Colonel with Brophy's Elixir.

For do not be deceived by that "Chemist" after Mr. Bywater's name. It is mere modesty. Some whim leads this great man to describe himself as a chemist, but in reality he goes much deeper than that. Chas. is the Marshall Field of Rudge, and deals in everything, from crystal sets to mousetraps. There are several places in the village where you can get stuff they call tobacco, but it cannot be considered in the light of pipe-joy for the discriminating smoker. To obtain something that will leave a little skin on the roof of the mouth you must go to Mr. Bywater.

John came up the High Street with slow, meditative strides, a large and muscular young man whose pleasant features betrayed at the moment an inward gloom. What with being hopelessly in love and one thing and another, his soul was in rather a bruised condition these days, and he found himself deriving from the afternoon placidity of Rudge-in-the-Vale a certain balm and consolation. He had sunk into a dreamy trance when he was abruptly aroused by the horrible noise which had so shaken Chas. Bywater.

The causes which had brought about this disturbance were simple and are easily explained. It was the custom of the dog Emily, on the occasions when John brought her to Rudge to help him buy tobacco, to yield to an uncontrollable eagerness and gallop on ahead to Mr. Bywater's shop—where, with her nose wedged against the door, she would stand, sniffing emotionally, till somebody came and opened it. She had a morbid passion for cough drops, and experience had taught her that by sitting and ogling Mr. Bywater with her liquid amber eyes she could generally secure two or three. To-day, hurrying on as usual, she had just reached the door and begun to sniff when it suddenly opened and hit her sharply on the nose. And, as she shot back with a yelp of agony, out came Colonel Wyvern carrying his bottle of Brophy.

There is an etiquette in these matters on which all right-minded dogs insist. When people trod on Emily, she expected them immediately to fuss over her, and the same procedure seemed to her to be in order when they hit her on the nose with doors. Waiting expectantly, therefore, for Colonel Wyvern to do the square thing, she was stunned to find that he apparently had no intention of even apologizing. He was brushing past without a word, and all the woman in Emily rose in revolt against such boorishness.

"Just a minute!" she said dangerously. "Just one minute, if you please. Not so fast, my good man. A word with you, if I may trespass upon your valuable time."

The Colonel, chafing beneath the weight of his wrongs, perceived that they had been added to by a beast of a hairy dog that stood and yapped at him.

"Get out!" he bellowed.

Emily became hysterical.

"Indeed?" she said shrilly. "And who do you think you are, you poor clumsy Robot? You come hitting ladies on the nose as if you were the King of England, and as if that wasn't enough...."

"Go away, sir."

"Who the devil are you calling Sir?" Emily had the Twentieth Century girl's freedom of speech and breadth of vocabulary. "It's people like you that cause all this modern unrest and industrial strife. I know your sort well. Robbers and oppressors. And let me tell you another thing...."

At this point the Colonel very injudiciously aimed a kick at Emily.

It was not much of a kick, and it came nowhere near her, but it sufficed. Realizing the futility of words, Emily decided on action. And it was just as she had got a preliminary grip on the Colonel's left trouser leg that John arrived at the Front.

"Emily!!!" roared John, shocked to the core of his being.

He had excellent lungs, and he used them to the last ounce of their power. A young man who sees the father of the girl he loves being swallowed alive by a Welsh terrier does not spare his voice. The word came out of him like the note of the Last Trump, and Colonel Wyvern, leaping spasmodically, dropped his bottle of Brophy. It fell on the pavement and exploded, and Emily, who could do her bit in a rough-and-tumble but barred bombs, tucked her tail between her legs and vanished. A faint, sleepy cheering from outside the Carmody Arms announced that she had passed that home from home and was going well.

John continued to be agitated. You would not have supposed, to look at Colonel Wyvern, that he could have had an attractive daughter, but such was the case, and John's manner was as concerned and ingratiating as that of most young men in the presence of the fathers of attractive daughters.

"I'm so sorry, Colonel. I do hope you're not hurt, Colonel."

The injured man, maintaining an icy silence, raked him with an eye before which sergeant-majors had once drooped like withered roses, and walked into the shop. The anxious face of Chas. Bywater loomed up over the counter. John hovered in the background. "I want another bottle of that stuff," said the Colonel shortly.

"I'm awfully sorry," said John.

"I dropped the other outside. I was attacked by a savage dog."

"I'm frightfully sorry."

"People ought not to have these pests running loose and not under proper control."

"I'm fearfully sorry."

"A menace to the community and a nuisance to everybody," said Colonel Wyvern.

"Quite," said Mr. Bywater.

Conversation languished. Chas. Bywater, realizing that this was no moment for lingering lovingly over brown paper and toying dreamily with string, lowered the record for wrapping a bottle of Brophy's Paramount Elixir by such a margin that he set up a mark for other chemists to shoot at for all time. Colonel Wyvern snatched it and stalked out, and John, who had opened the door for him and had not been thanked, tottered back to the counter and in a low voice expressed a wish for two ounces of the Special Mixture.

"Quite," said Mr. Bywater. "In one moment, Mr. John."

With the passing of Colonel Wyvern a cloud seemed to have rolled away from the chemist's world. He was his old, charmingly chatty self again. He gave John his tobacco, and, detaining him by the simple means of not handing over his change, surrendered himself to the joys of conversation.

"The Colonel appears a little upset, sir."

"Have you got my change?" said John.

"It seems to me he hasn't been the same man since that unfortunate episode up at the Hall. Not at all the same sunny gentleman."

"Have you got my change?"

"A very unfortunate episode, that," sighed Mr. Bywater.

"My change?"

"I could see, the moment he walked in here, that he was not himself. Shaken. Something in the way he looked at one. I said to myself 'The Colonel's shaken!'"

John, who had had such recent experience of the way Colonel Wyvern looked at one, agreed. He then asked if he might have his change.

"No doubt he misses Miss Wyvern," said Chas. Bywater, ignoring the request with an indulgent smile. "When a man's had a shock like the Colonel's had—when he's shaken, if you understand what I mean—he likes to have his loved ones around him. Stands to reason," said Mr. Bywater.

John had been anxious to leave, but he was so constituted that he could not tear himself away from anyone who had touched on the subject of Patricia Wyvern. He edged a little nearer the counter.

"Well, she'll be home again soon," said Chas. Bywater. "To-morrow, I understand."

A powerful current of electricity seemed to pass itself through John's body. Pat Wyvern had been away so long that he had fallen into a sort of dull apathy in which he wondered sometimes if he would ever see her again.

"What!"

"Yes, sir. She returned from France yesterday. She had a good crossing. She is at the Lincoln Hotel, Curzon Street, London. She thinks of taking the three-o'clock train to-morrow. She is in excellent health."

It did not occur to John to question the accuracy of the other's information, nor to be surprised at its minuteness of detail. Mr. Bywater, he was aware, had a daughter in the post office.

"To-morrow!" he gasped.

"Yes, sir. To-morrow."

"Give me my change," said John.

He yearned to be off. He wanted air and space in which he could ponder over this wonderful news.

"No doubt," said Mr. Bywater, "she...."

"Give me my change," said John.

Chas. Bywater, happening to catch his eye, did so.

III

To reach Rudge Hall from the door of Chas. Bywater's shop, you go up the High Street, turn sharp to the left down River Lane, cross the stone bridge that spans the slow-flowing Skirme as it potters past on its way to join the Severn, carry on along the road till you come to the gates of Colonel Wyvern's nice little house, and then climb a stile and take to the fields. And presently you are in the park and can see through the trees the tall chimneys and red walls of the ancient home of the Carmodys.

The scene, when they are not touching off dynamite there under the noses of retired military officers, is one of quiet peace. For John it had always held a peculiar magic. In the fourteen years which had passed since the Wyverns had first come to settle in Rudge Pat had contrived, so far as he was concerned, to impress her personality ineffaceably on the landscape. Almost every inch of it was in some way associated with her. Stumps on which she had sat and swung her brown-stockinged legs; trees beneath which she had taken shelter with him from summer storms; gates on which she had climbed, fields across which she had raced, and thorny bushes into which she had urged him to penetrate in search of birds' eggs—they met his eye on every side. The very air seemed to be alive with her laughter. And not even the recollection that that laughter had generally been directed at himself was able to diminish for John the glamour of this mile of Fairyland.

Half-way across the park, Emily rejoined him with a defensive, Where-on-earth-did-you-disappear-to manner, and they moved on in company till they rounded the corner of the house and came to the stable yard. John had a couple of rooms over the stables, and thither he made his way, leaving Emily to fuss round Bolt, the chauffeur, who was washing the Dex-Mayo.

Arrived in his sitting room, he sank into a deck chair and filled his pipe with Mr. Bywater's Special Mixture. Then, putting his feet up on the table, he stared hard and earnestly at the photograph of Pat which stood on the mantelpiece.

It was a pretty face that he was looking at—one whose charm not even a fashionable modern photographer, of the type that prefers to depict his sitters in a gray fog with most of their features hidden from view, could altogether obscure. In the eyes, a little slanting, there was a Puck-like look, and the curving lips hinted demurely at amusing secrets. The nose had that appealing, yet provocative, air which slight tip-tiltedness gives. It seemed to challenge, and at the same time to withdraw.

This was the latest of the Pat photographs, and she had given it to him three months ago, just before she left to go and stay with friends at Le Touquet. And now she was coming home....

John Carroll was one of those solid persons who do not waver in their loyalties. He had always been in love with Pat, and he always would be, though he would have had to admit that she gave him very little encouragement. There had been a period when, he being fifteen and she ten, Pat had lavished on him all the worship of a small girl for a big boy who can wiggle his ears and is not afraid of cows. But since then her attitude had changed. Her manner toward him nowadays alternated between that of a nurse toward a child who is not quite right in the head and that of the owner of a clumsy but rather likable dog.

Nevertheless, he loved her. And she was coming home....

John sat up suddenly. He was a slow thinker, and only now did it occur to him just what the position of affairs would be when she did come home. With this infernal feud going on between his uncle Lester and the old Colonel she would probably look on him as in the enemy's camp and refuse to see or speak to him.

The thought chilled him to the marrow. Something, he felt, must be done, and swiftly. And, with a flash of inspiration of a kind that rarely came to him, he saw what that something was. He must go up to London this afternoon, tell her the facts, and throw himself on her clemency. If he could convince her that he was whole-heartedly pro-Colonel and regarded his uncle Lester as the logical successor to Doctor Crippen and the Brides-in-the-Bath murderer, things might straighten themselves.

Once the brain gets working, there is no knowing where it will stop. The very next instant there had come to John Carroll a thought so new and breathtaking that he uttered an audible gasp.

Why shouldn't he ask Pat to marry him?

IV

John sat tingling from head to foot. The scales seemed to have fallen from his eyes, and he saw clearly where he might quite conceivably have been making a grave blunder all these years. Deeply as he had always loved Pat, he had never—now he came to think of it—told her so. And in this sort of situation the spoken word is quite apt to make all the difference.

Perhaps that was why she laughed at him so frequently—because she was entertained by the spectacle of a man, obviously in love with her, refraining year after year from making any verbal comment on the state of his emotions.

Resolution poured over John in a strengthening flood. He looked at his watch. It was nearly three. If he got the two-seater and started at once, he could be in London by seven, in nice time to take her to dinner somewhere. He hurried down the stairs and out into the stable yard.

"Shove that car out of the way, Bolt," said John, eluding Emily, who, wet to the last hair, was endeavouring to climb up him. "I want to get the two-seater."

"Two-seater, sir?"

"Yes. I'm going to London."

"It's not there, Mr. John," said the chauffeur, with the gloomy satisfaction which he usually reserved for telling his employer that the battery had run down.

"Not there? What do you mean?"

"Mr. Hugo took it, sir, an hour ago. He told me he was going over to see Mr. Carmody at Healthward Ho. Said he had important business and knew you wouldn't object."

The stable yard reeled before John. Not for the first time in his life, he cursed his light-hearted cousin. "Knew you wouldn't object!" It was just the fat-headed sort of thing Hugo would have said.

CHAPTER II

I

There is something about those repellent words, Healthward Ho, that has a familiar ring. You feel that you have heard them before. And then you remember. They have figured in letters to the daily papers from time to time.

THE STRAIN OF MODERN LIFE

To the Editor

The Times.

Sir:

In connection with the recent correspondence in your columns on the Strain of Modern Life, I wonder if any of your readers are aware that there exists in the county of Worcestershire an establishment expressly designed to correct this strain. At Healthward Ho (formerly Graveney Court), under the auspices of the well-known American physician and physical culture expert, Doctor Alexander Twist, it is possible for those who have allowed the demands of modern life to tax their physique too greatly to recuperate in ideal surroundings and by means of early hours, wholesome exercise, and Spartan fare to build up once more their debilitated tissues.

It is the boast of Doctor Twist that he makes New Men for Old.

I am, sir,
Yrs. etc.,
Mens Sana in Corpore Sano.

DO WE EAT TOO MUCH?

To the Editor

Daily Mail.

Sir:

The correspondence in your columns on the above subject calls to mind a remark made to me not long ago by Doctor Alexander Twist, the well-known American physician and physical culture expert. "Over-eating," said Doctor Twist emphatically, "is the curse of the Age."

At Healthward Ho (formerly Graveney Court), his physical culture establishment in Worcestershire, wholesale exercise and Spartan fare are the order of the day, and Doctor Twist has, I understand, worked miracles with the most apparently hopeless cases.

It is the boast of Doctor Twist that he makes New Men for Old.

I am, sir,
Yrs. etc.,
Moderation in all Things.

SHOULD THE CHAPERONE BE RESTORED?

To the Editor

Daily Express.

Sir:

A far more crying need than that of the Chaperone in these modern days is for a Supervisor of the middle-aged man who has allowed himself to get "out of shape."

At Healthward Ho (formerly Graveney Court), in Worcestershire, where Doctor Alexander Twist, the well-known American physician and physical culture expert, ministers to such cases, wonders have been achieved by means of simple fare and mild, but regular, exercise.

It is the boast of Doctor Twist that he makes New Men for Old.

I am, sir,
Yrs. etc.
Vigilant.

These letters and many others, though bearing a pleasing variety of signatures, proceeded in fact from a single gifted pen—that of Doctor Twist himself—and among that class of the public which consistently does itself too well when the gong goes and yet is never wholly free from wistful aspirations toward a better liver they had created a scattered but quite satisfactory interest in Healthward Ho. Clients had enrolled themselves on the doctor's books, and now, on this summer afternoon, he was enabled to look down from his study window at a group of no fewer than eleven of them, skipping with skipping ropes under the eye of his able and conscientious assistant, ex-Sergeant-Major Flannery.

Sherlock Holmes—and even, on one of his bright days, Doctor Watson—could have told at a glance which of those muffled figures was Mr. Flannery. He was the only one who went in instead of out at the waist-line. All the others were well up in the class of man whom Julius Cæsar once expressed a desire to have about him. And pre-eminent among them in stoutness, dampness, and general misery was Mr. Lester Carmody, of Rudge Hall.

The fact that Mr. Carmody was by several degrees the most unhappy-looking member of this little band of martyrs was due to his distress, unlike that of his fellow-sufferers, being mental as well as physical. He was allowing his mind, for the hundredth time, to dwell on the paralyzing cost of these hygienic proceedings.

Thirty guineas a week, thought Mr. Carmody as he bounded up and down. Four pound ten a day.... Three shillings and ninepence an hour.... Three solid farthings a minute.... To meditate on these figures was like turning a sword in his heart. For Lester Carmody loved money as he loved nothing else in this world except a good dinner.

Doctor Twist turned from the window. A maid had appeared bearing a card on a salver.

"Show him in," said Doctor Twist, having examined this. And presently there entered a lissom young man in a gray flannel suit.

"Doctor Twist?"

"Yes, sir."

The newcomer seemed a little surprised. It was as if he had been expecting something rather more impressive, and was wondering why, if the proprietor of Healthward Ho had the ability which he claimed, to make New Men for Old, he had not taken the opportunity of effecting some alterations in himself. For Doctor Twist was a small man, and weedy. He had a snub nose and an expression of furtive slyness. And he wore a waxed moustache.

However, all this was not the visitor's business. If a man wishes to wax his moustache, it is a matter between himself and his God.

"My name's Carmody," he said. "Hugo Carmody."

"Yes. I got your card."

"Could I have a word with my uncle?"

"Sure, if you don't mind waiting a minute. Right now," explained Doctor Twist, with a gesture toward the window, "he's occupied."

Hugo moved to the window, looked out, and started violently.

"Great Scott!" he exclaimed.

He gaped down at the group below. Mr. Carmody and colleagues had now discarded the skipping ropes and were performing some unpleasant-looking bending and stretching exercises, holding their hands above their heads and swinging painfully from what one may loosely term their waists. It was a spectacle well calculated to astonish any nephew.

"How long has he got to go on like that?" asked Hugo, awed.

Doctor Twist looked at his watch.

"They'll be quitting soon now. Then a cold shower and rub down, and they'll be through till lunch."

"Cold shower?"

"Yes."

"You mean to say you make my uncle Lester take cold shower baths?"

"That's right."

"Good God!"

A look of respect came into Hugo's face as he gazed upon this master of men. Anybody who, in addition to making him tie himself in knots under a blazing sun, could lure Uncle Lester within ten yards of a cold shower bath was entitled to credit.

"I suppose after all this," he said, "they do themselves pretty well at lunch?"

"They have a lean mutton chop apiece, with green vegetables and dry toast."

"Is that all?"

"That's all."

"And to drink?"

"Just water."

"Followed, of course, by a spot of port?"

"No, sir."

"No port?"

"Certainly not."

"You mean—literally—no port?"

"Not a drop. If your old man had gone easier on the port, he'd not have needed to come to Healthward Ho."

"I say," said Hugo, "did you invent that name?"

"Sure. Why?"

"Oh, I don't know. I just thought I'd ask."

"Say, while I think of it," said Doctor Twist, "have you any cigarettes?"

"Oh, rather." Hugo produced a bulging case. "Turkish this side, Virginian that."

"Not for me. I was only going to say that when you meet your uncle just bear in mind he isn't allowed tobacco."

"Not allowed...? You mean to say you tie Uncle Lester into a lover's knot, shoot him under a cold shower, push a lean chop into him accompanied by water, and then don't even let the poor old devil get his lips around a single gasper?"

"That's right."

"Well, all I can say is," said Hugo, "it's no life for a refined Caucasian."

Dazed by the information he had received, he began to potter aimlessly about the room. He was not particularly fond of his uncle. Mr. Carmody Senior's practice of giving him no allowance and keeping him imprisoned all the year round at Rudge would alone have been enough to check anything in the nature of tenderness, but he did not think he deserved quite all that seemed to be coming to him at Healthward Ho.

He mused upon his uncle. A complex character. A man with Lester Carmody's loathing for expenditure ought by rights to have been a simple liver, existing off hot milk and triturated sawdust like an American millionaire. That Fate should have given him, together with his prudence in money matters, a recklessness as regarded the pleasures of the table seemed ironic.

"I see they've quit," said Doctor Twist, with a glance out of the window. "If you want to have a word with your uncle you could do it now. No bad news, I hope?"

"If there is I'm the one that's going to get it. Between you and me," said Hugo, who had no secrets from his fellow men, "I've come to try to touch him for a bit of money."

"Is that so?" said Doctor Twist, interested. Anything to do with money always interested the well-known American physician and physical culture expert.

"Yes," said Hugo. "Five hundred quid, to be exact."

He spoke a little despondently, for, having arrived at the window again, he was in a position now to take a good look at his uncle. And so forbidding had bodily toil and mental disturbance rendered the latter's expression that he found the fresh young hopes with which he had started out on this expedition rapidly ebbing away. If Mr. Carmody were to burst—and he looked as if he might do so at any moment—he, Hugo, being his nearest of kin, would inherit, but, failing that, there seemed to be no cash in sight whatever.

"Though when I say 'touch'," he went on, "I don't mean quite that. The stuff is really mine. My father left me a few thousand, you see, but most injudiciously made Uncle Lester my trustee, and I'm not allowed to get at the capital without the old blighter's consent. And now a pal of mine in London has written offering me a half share in a new night club which he's starting if I will put up five hundred pounds."

"I see."

"And what I ask myself," said Hugo, "is will Uncle Lester part? That's what I ask myself. I can't say I'm betting on it."

"From what I have seen of Mr. Carmody, I shouldn't say that parting was the thing he does best."

"He's got absolutely no gift for it whatever," said Hugo gloomily.

"Well, I wish you luck," said Doctor Twist. "But don't you try to bribe him with cigarettes."

"Do what?"

"Bribe him with cigarettes. After they have been taking the treatment for a while, most of these birds would give their soul for a coffin nail."

Hugo started. He had not thought of this; but, now that it had been called to his attention, he saw that it was most certainly an idea.

"And don't keep him standing around longer than you can help. He ought to get under that shower as soon as possible."

"I suppose I couldn't tell him that owing to my pleading and persuasion you've consented to let him off a cold shower to-day?"

"No, sir."

"It would help," urged Hugo. "It might just sway the issue, as it were."

"Sorry. He must have his shower. When a man's been exercising and has got himself into a perfect lather of sweat...."

"Keep it clean," said Hugo coldly. "There is no need to stress the physical side. Oh, very well, then, I suppose I shall have to trust to tact and charm of manner. But I wish to goodness I hadn't got to spring business matters on him on top of what seems to have been a slightly hectic morning."

He shot his cuffs, pulled down his waistcoat, and walked with a resolute step out of the room. He was about to try to get into the ribs of a man who for a lifetime had been saving up to be a miser and who, even apart from this trait in his character, held the subversive view that the less money young men had the better for them. Hugo was a gay optimist, cheerful of soul and a mighty singer in the bath tub, but he could not feel very sanguine. However, the Carmodys were a bulldog breed. He decided to have a pop at it.

II

Theoretically, no doubt, the process of exercising flaccid muscles, opening hermetically sealed pores, and stirring up a liver which had long supposed itself off the active list ought to engender in a man a jolly sprightliness. In practice, however, this is not always so. That Lester Carmody was in no radiant mood was shown at once by the expression on his face as he turned in response to Hugo's yodel from the rear. In spite of all that Healthward Ho had been doing to Mr. Carmody this last ten days, it was plain that he had not yet got that Kruschen feeling.

Nor, at the discovery that a nephew whom he had supposed to be twenty miles away was standing at his elbow, did anything in the nature of sudden joy help to fill him with sweetness and light.

"How the devil did you get here?" were his opening words of welcome. His scarlet face vanished for an instant into the folds of a large handkerchief; then reappeared, wearing a look of acute concern. "You didn't," he quavered, "come in the Dex-Mayo?"

A thought to shake the sturdiest man. It was twenty miles from Rudge Hall to Healthward Ho, and twenty miles back again from Healthward Ho to Rudge Hall. The Dex-Mayo, that voracious car, consumed a gallon of petrol for every ten miles it covered. And for a gallon of petrol they extorted from you nowadays the hideous sum of one shilling and sixpence halfpenny. Forty miles, accordingly, meant—not including oil, wear and tear of engines, and depreciation of tires—a loss to his purse of over six shillings—a heavy price to pay for the society of a nephew whom he had disliked since boyhood.

"No, no," said Hugo hastily. "I borrowed John's two-seater,"

"Oh," said Mr. Carmody, relieved.

There was a pause, employed by Mr. Carmody in puffing; by Hugo in trying to think of something to say that would be soothing, tactful, ingratiating, and calculated to bring home the bacon. He turned over in his mind one or two conversational gambits.

("Well, Uncle, you look very rosy."

Not quite right.

"I say, Uncle what ho the School-Girl Complexion?"

Absolutely no! The wrong tone altogether.

Ah! That was more like it. "Fit." Yes, that was the word.)

"You look very fit, Uncle," said Hugo.

Mr. Carmody's reply to this was to make a noise like a buffalo pulling its foot out of a swamp. It might have been intended to be genial, or it might not. Hugo could not tell. However, he was a reasonable young man, and he quite understood that it would be foolish to expect the milk of human kindness instantly to come gushing like a geyser out of a two-hundred-and-twenty-pound uncle who had just been doing bending and stretching exercises. He must be patient and suave—the Sympathetic Nephew.

"I expect it's been pretty tough going, though," he proceeded. "I mean to say, all these exercises and cold showers and lean chops and so forth. Terribly trying. Very upsetting. A great ordeal. I think it's wonderful the way you've stuck it out. Simply wonderful. It's Character that does it. That's what it is. Character. Many men would have chucked the whole thing up in the first two days."

"So would I," said Mr. Carmody, "only that damned doctor made me give him a cheque in advance for the whole course."

Hugo felt damped. He had had some good things to say about Character, and it seemed little use producing them now.

"Well, anyway, you look very fit. Very fit indeed. Frightfully fit. Remarkably fit. Extraordinarily fit." He paused. This was getting him nowhere. He decided to leap straight to the point at issue. To put his fortune to the test, to win or lose it all. "I say, Uncle Lester, what I really came about this afternoon was a matter of business."

"Indeed? I supposed you had come merely to babble. What business?"

"You know a friend of mine named Fish?"

"I do not know a friend of yours named Fish."

"Well, he's a friend of mine. His name's Fish. Ronnie Fish."

"What about him?"

"He's starting a new night club."

"I don't care," said Mr. Carmody, who did not.

"It's just off Bond Street, in the heart of London's pleasure-seeking area. He's calling it the Hot Spot."

The only comment Mr. Carmody vouchsafed on this piece of information was a noise like another buffalo. His face was beginning to lose its vermilion tinge, and it seemed possible that in a few moments he might come off the boil.

"I had a letter from him this morning. He says he will give me a half share if I put up five hundred quid."

"Then you won't get a half share," predicted Mr. Carmody.

"But I've got five hundred. I mean to say, you're holding a lot more than that in trust for me."

"Holding," said Mr. Carmody, "is the right word."

"But surely you'll let me have this quite trivial sum for a really excellent business venture that simply can't fail? Ronnie knows all about night clubs. He's practically lived in them since he came down from Cambridge."

"I shall not give you a penny. Have you no conception of the duties of a trustee? Trust money has to be invested in gilt-edged securities."

"You'll never find a gilter-edged security than a night club run by Ronnie Fish."

"If you have finished this nonsense I will go and take my shower bath."

"Well, look here, Uncle, may I invite Ronnie to Rudge, so that you can have a talk with him?"

"You may not. I have no desire to talk with him."

"You'd like Ronnie. He has an aunt in the looney-bin."

"Do you consider that a recommendation?"

"No, I just mentioned it."

"Well, I refuse to have him at Rudge."

"But listen, Uncle. The vicar will be round any day now to get me to perform at the village concert. If Ronnie were on the spot, he and I could do the Quarrel Scene from Julius Cæsar and really give the customers something for their money."

Even this added inducement did not soften Mr. Carmody.

"I will not invite your friends to Rudge."

"Right ho," said Hugo, a game loser. He was disappointed, but not surprised. All along he had felt that that Hot Spot business was merely a Utopian dream. There are some men who are temperamentally incapable of parting with five hundred pounds, and his uncle Lester was one of them. But in the matter of a smaller sum it might be that he would prove more pliable, and of this smaller sum Hugo had urgent need. "Well, then, putting that aside," he said, "there's another thing I'd like to chat about for a moment, if you don't mind."

"I do," said Mr. Carmody.

"There's a big fight on to-night at the Albert Hall. Eustace Rodd and Cyril Warburton are going twenty rounds for the welter-weight championship. Have you ever noticed," said Hugo, touching on a matter to which he had given some thought, "a rather odd thing about boxers these days? A few years ago you never heard of one that wasn't Beefy This or Porky That or Young Cat's-meat or something. But now they're all Claudes and Harolds and Cuthberts. And when you consider that the heavyweight champion of the world is actually named Eugene, it makes you think a bit. However, be that as it may, these two birds are going twenty rounds to-night, and there you are."

"What," inquired Mr. Carmody, "is all this drivel?"

He eyed his young relative balefully. In an association that had lasted many years, he had found Hugo consistently irritating to his nervous system, and he was finding him now rather more trying than usual.

"I only meant to point out that Ronnie Fish has sent me a ticket, and I thought that, if you were to spring a tenner for the necessary incidental expenses—bed, breakfast, and so on ... well, there I would be, don't you know."

"You mean you wish to go to London to see a boxing contest?"

"That's it."

"Well, you're not going. You know I have expressly forbidden you to visit London. The last time I was weak enough to allow you to go there, what happened? You spent the night in a police station."

"Yes, but that was Boat-Race Night."

"And I had to pay five pounds for your fine."

Hugo dismissed the past with a gesture.

"The whole thing," he said, "was an unfortunate misunderstanding, and, if you ask me, the verdict of posterity will be that the policeman was far more to blame than I was. They're letting a bad type of men into the force nowadays. I've noticed it on several occasions. Besides, it won't happen again."

"You are right. It will not."

"On second thoughts, then, you will spring that tenner?"

"On first, second, third, and fourth thoughts I will do nothing of the kind."

"But, Uncle, do you realize what it would mean if you did?"

"The interpretation I would put upon it is that I was suffering from senile decay."

"What it would mean is that I should feel you trusted me, Uncle Lester, that you had faith in me. There's nothing so dangerous as a want of trust. Ask anybody. It saps a young man's character."

"Let it," said Mr. Carmody callously.

"If I went to London, I could see Ronnie Fish and explain all the circumstances about my not being able to go into that Hot Spot thing with him."

"You can do that by letter."

"It's so hard to put things properly in a letter."

"Then put them improperly," said Mr. Carmody. "Once and for all, you are not going to London."

He had started to turn away as the only means possible of concluding this interview, when he stopped, spellbound. For Hugo, as was his habit when matters had become difficult and required careful thought, was pulling out of his pocket a cigarette case.

"Goosh!" said Mr. Carmody, or something that sounded like that.

He made an involuntary motion with his hand, as a starving man will make toward bread: and Hugo, with a strong rush of emotion, realized that the happy ending had been achieved and that at the eleventh hour matters could at last be put on a satisfactory business basis.

"Turkish this side, Virginian that," he said. "You can have the lot for ten quid."

"Say, I think you'd best be getting along and taking your shower, Mr. Carmody," said the voice of Doctor Twist, who had come up unobserved and was standing at his elbow.

The proprietor of Healthward Ho had a rather unpleasant voice, but never had it seemed so unpleasant to Mr. Carmody as it did at that moment. Parsimonious though he was, he would have given much for the privilege of heaving a brick at Doctor Twist. For at the very instant of this interruption he had conceived the Machiavellian idea of knocking the cigarette case out of Hugo's hand and grabbing what he could from the débris: and now this scheme must be abandoned.

With a snort which came from the very depths of an overwrought soul, Lester Carmody turned and shuffled off toward the house.

"Say, you shouldn't have done that," said Doctor Twist, waggling a reproachful head at Hugo. "No, sir, you shouldn't have done that. Not right to tantalize the poor fellow."

Hugo's mind seldom ran on parallel lines with that of his uncle, but it was animated now by the identical thought which only a short while back Mr. Carmody had so wistfully entertained. He, too, was feeling that what Doctor Twist needed was a brick thrown at him. When he was able to speak, however, he did not mention this, but kept the conversation on a pacific and businesslike note.

"I say," he said, "you couldn't lend me a tenner, could you?"

"I could not," agreed Doctor Twist.

In Hugo's mind the inscrutable problem of why an all-wise Creator should have inflicted a man like this on the world deepened.

"Well, I'll be pushing along, then," he said moodily.

"Going already?"

"Yes, I am."

"I hope," said Doctor Twist, as he escorted his young guest to his car, "you aren't sore at me for calling you down about those student's lamps. You see, maybe your uncle was hoping you would slip him one, and the disappointment will have made him kind of mad. And part of the system here is to have the patients think tranquil thoughts."

"Think what?"

"Tranquil, beautiful thoughts. You see, if your mind's all right, your body's all right. That's the way I look at it."

Hugo settled himself at the wheel.

"Let's get this clear," he said. "You expect my uncle Lester to think beautiful thoughts?"

"All the time."

"Even under a cold shower?"

"Yes, sir."

"God bless you!" said Hugo.

He stepped on the self-starter, and urged the two-seater pensively down the drive. He was glad when the shrubberies hid him from the view of Doctor Twist, for one wanted to forget a fellow like that as soon as possible. A moment later, he was still gladder: for, as he turned the first corner, there popped out suddenly from a rhododendron bush a stout man with a red and streaming face. Lester Carmody had had to hurry, and he was not used to running.

"Woof!" he ejaculated, barring the fairway.

Relief flooded over Hugo. The marts of trade had not been closed after all.

"Give me those cigarettes!" panted Mr. Carmody.

For an instant Hugo toyed with the idea of creating a rising market. But he was no profiteer. Hugo Carmody, the Square Dealer.

"Ten quid," he said, "and they're yours."

Agony twisted Mr. Carmody's glowing features.

"Five," he urged.

"Ten," said Hugo.

"Eight."

"Ten."

Mr. Carmody made the great decision.

"Very well. Give me them. Quick."

"Turkish this side, Virginian that," said Hugo.

The rhododendron bush quivered once more from the passage of a heavy body: birds in the neighbouring trees began to sing again their anthems of joy: and Hugo, in his trousers pocket two crackling five-pound notes, was bowling off along the highway.

Even Doctor Twist could have found nothing to cavil at in the beauty of the thoughts he was thinking. He carolled like a linnet in the springtime.

CHAPTER III

"Yes, sir," Hugo Carmody was assuring a listening world as he turned the two-seater in at the entrance of the stable yard of Rudge Hall some thirty minutes later, "that's my baby. No, sir, don't mean maybe. Yes, sir, that's my baby now. And, by the way, by the way...."

"Blast you!" said his cousin John, appearing from nowhere. "Get out of that car."

"Hullo, John," said Hugo. "So there you are, John. I say, John, I've just been paying a call on the head of the family over at Healthward Ho. Why they don't run excursion trains of sightseers there is more than I can understand. It's worth seeing, believe me. Large, fat men doing bending and stretching exercises. Tons of humanity leaping about with skipping ropes. Never a dull moment from start to finish, and all clean, wholesome fun, mark you, without a taint of vulgarity or suggestiveness. Pack some sandwiches and bring the kiddies. And let me tell you the best thing of all, John...."

"I can't stop to listen. You've made me late already."

"Late for what?"

"I'm going to London."

"You are?" said Hugo, with a smile at the happy coincidence. "So am I. You can give me a lift."

"I won't."

"I am certainly not going to run behind."

"You're not going to London."

"You bet I'm going to London."

"Well, go by train, then."

"And break into hard-won cash, every penny of which will be needed for the big time in the metropolis? A pretty story!"

"Well, anyway, you aren't coming with me."

"Why not?"

"I don't want you."

"John," said Hugo, "there is more in this than meets the eye. You can't deceive me. You are going to London for a purpose. What purpose?"

"If you really want to know, I'm going to see Pat."

"What on earth for? She'll be here to-morrow. I looked in at Chas. Bywater's this morning for some cigarettes—and, gosh, how lucky it was I did!—by the way, he's putting them down to you—and he told me she's arriving by the three-o'clock train."

"I know. Well, I happen to want to see her very particularly to-night."

Hugo eyed his cousin narrowly. He was marshalling the facts and drawing conclusions.

"John," he said, "this can mean but one thing. You are driving a hundred miles in a shaky car—that left front tire wants a spot of air. I should look to it before you start, if I were you—to see a girl whom you could see to-morrow in any case by the simple process of meeting the three-o'clock train. Your state of mind is such that you prefer—actually prefer—not to have my company. And, as I look at you, I note that you are blushing prettily. I see it all. You've at last decided to propose to Pat. Am I right or wrong?"

John drew a deep breath. He was not one of those men who derive pleasure from parading their inmost feelings and discussing with others the secrets of their hearts. Hugo, in a similar situation, would have advertised his love like the hero of a musical comedy; he would have made the round of his friends, confiding in them; and, when the supply of friends had given out, would have buttonholed the gardener. But John was different. To hear his aspirations put into bald words like this made him feel as if he were being divested of most of his more important garments in a crowded thoroughfare.

"Well, that settles it," said Hugo briskly. "Such being the case, of course you must take me along. I will put in a good word for you. Pave the way."

"Listen," said John, finding speech. "If you dare to come within twenty miles of us...."

"It would be wiser. You know what you're like. Heart of gold but no conversation. Try to tackle this on your own and you'll bungle it."

"You keep out of this," said John, speaking in a low, husky voice that suggested the urgent need of one of those throat lozenges purveyed by Chas. Bywater and so esteemed by the dog Emily. "You keep right out of this."

Hugo shrugged his shoulders.

"Just as you please. Hugo Carmody is the last man," he said, a little stiffly, "to thrust his assistance on those who do not require same. But a word from me would make all the difference, and you know it. Rightly or wrongly, Pat has always looked up to me, regarded me as a wise elder brother, and, putting it in a nutshell, hung upon my lips. I could start you off right. However, since you're so blasted independent, carry on, only bear this in mind—when it's all over and you are shedding scalding tears of remorse and thinking of what might have been, don't come yowling to me for sympathy, because there won't be any."

John went upstairs and packed his bag. He packed well and thoroughly. This done, he charged down the stairs, and perceived with annoyance that Hugo was still inflicting the stable yard with his beastly presence.

But Hugo was not there to make jarring conversation. He was present now, it appeared, solely in the capacity of Good Angel.

"I've fixed up that tire," said Hugo, "and filled the tank and put in a drop of oil and passed an eye over the machinery in general. She ought to run nicely now."

John melted. His mood had softened, and he was in a fitter frame of mind to remember that he had always been fond of his cousin.

"Thanks. Very good of you. Well, good-bye."

"Good-bye," said Hugo. "And heaven speed your wooing, boy."

Freed from the restrictions placed upon a light two-seater by the ruts and hillocks of country lanes, John celebrated his arrival on the broad main road that led to London by placing a large foot on the accelerator and keeping it there. He was behind time, and he intended to test a belief which he had long held, that a Widgeon Seven can, if pressed, do fifty. To the scenery, singularly beautiful in this part of England, he paid no attention. Automatically avoiding wagons by an inch and dreamily putting thoughts of the hereafter into the startled minds of dogs and chickens, he was out of Worcestershire and into Gloucestershire almost before he had really settled in his seat. It was only when the long wall that fringes Blenheim Park came into view that it was borne in upon him that he would be reaching Oxford in a few minutes and could stop for a well-earned cup of tea. He noted with satisfaction that he was nicely ahead of the clock.

He drifted past the Martyrs' Memorial, and, picking his way through the traffic, drew up at the door of the Clarendon. He alighted stiffly, and stretched himself. And as he did so, something caught his attention out of the corner of his eye. It was his cousin Hugo, climbing down from the dickey.

"A very nice run," said Hugo with satisfaction. "I should say we made pretty good time."

He radiated kindliness and satisfaction with all created things. That John was looking at him in rather a peculiar way, and apparently trying to say something, he did not seem to notice.

"A little refreshment would be delightful," he observed. "Dusty work, sitting in dickeys. By the way, I got on to Pat on the 'phone before we left, and there's no need to hurry. She's dining out and going to a theatre to-night."

"What!" cried John, in agony.

"It's all right. Don't get the wind up. She's meeting us at eleven-fifteen at the Mustard Spoon. I'll come on there from the fight and we'll have a nice home evening. I'm still a member, so I'll sign you in. And, what's more, if all goes well at the Albert Hall and Cyril Warburton is half the man I think he is and I can get some sporting stranger to bet the other way at reasonable odds, I'll pay the bill."

"You're very kind!"

"I try to be, John," said Hugo modestly. "I try to be. I don't think we ought to leave it all to the Boy Scouts."

CHAPTER IV

I

A man whose uncle jerks him away from London as if he were picking a winkle out of its shell with a pin and keeps him for months and months immured in the heart of Worcestershire must inevitably lose touch with the swiftly-changing kaleidoscope of metropolitan night-life. Nothing in a big city fluctuates more rapidly than the status of its supper-dancing clubs; and Hugo, had he still been a lad-about-town in good standing, would have been aware that recently the Mustard Spoon had gone down a good deal in the social scale. Society had migrated to other, newer institutions, leaving it to become the haunt of the lesser ornaments of the stage and the Portuguese, the Argentines and the Greeks.

To John Carroll, however, as he stood waiting in the lobby, the place seemed sufficiently gay and glittering. Nearly a year had passed since his last visit to London: and the Mustard Spoon rather impressed him. An unseen orchestra was playing with extraordinary vigour, and from time to time ornate persons of both sexes drifted past him into the brightly lighted supper room. Where an established connoisseur of night clubs would have pursed his lips and shaken his head, John was conscious only of feeling decidedly uplifted and exhilarated.

But then he was going to see Pat again, and that was enough to stimulate any man.

She arrived unexpectedly, at a moment when he had taken his eye off the door to direct it in mild astonishment at a lady in an orange dress who, doubtless with the best motives, had dyed her hair crimson and was wearing a black-rimmed monocle. So absorbed was he with this spectacle that he did not see her enter, and was only made aware of her presence when there spoke from behind him a clear little voice which, even when it was laughing at you, always seemed to have in it something of the song of larks on summer mornings and winds whispering across the fields in spring.

"Hullo, Johnnie."

The hair, scarlet though it was, lost its power to attract. The appeal of the monocle waned. John spun round.

"Pat!"

She was looking lovelier than ever. That was the thing that first presented itself to John's notice. If anybody had told him that Pat could possibly be prettier than the image of her which he had been carrying about with him all these months, he would not have believed him. But so it was. Some sort of a female with plucked eyebrows and a painted face had just come in, and she might have been put there expressly for purposes of comparison. She made Pat seem so healthy, so wholesome, such a thing of the open air and the clean sunshine, so pre-eminently fit. She looked as if she had spent her time at Le Touquet playing thirty-six holes of golf a day.

"Pat!" cried John, and something seemed to catch at his throat. There was a mist in front of his eyes. His heart was thumping madly.

She extended her hand composedly. In her this meeting after long separation had apparently stirred no depths. Her demeanour was friendly, but matter-of-fact.

"Well, Johnnie. How nice to see you again. You're looking very brown and rural. Where's Hugo?"

It takes two to hoist a conversation to an emotional peak. John choked, and became calmer.

"He'll be here soon, I expect," he said.

Pat laughed indulgently.

"Hugo'll be late for his own funeral—if he ever gets to it. He said eleven-fifteen and it's twenty-five to twelve. Have you got a table?"

"Not yet."

"Why not?"

"I'm not a member," said John, and saw in her eyes the scorn which women reserve for male friends and relations who show themselves wanting in enterprise. "You have to be a member," he said, chafing under the look.

"I don't," said Pat with decision. "If you think I'm going to wait all night for old Hugo in a small lobby with six draughts whizzing through it, correct that impression. Go and find the head waiter and get a table while I leave my cloak. Back in a minute."

John's emotions as he approached the head waiter rather resembled those with which years ago he had once walked up to a bull in a field, Pat having requested him to do so because she wanted to know if bulls in fields really are fierce or if the artists who depict them in comic papers are simply trying to be funny. He felt embarrassed and diffident. The head waiter was a large, stout, smooth-faced man who would have been better for a couple of weeks at Healthward Ho, and he gave the impression of having disliked John from the start.

John said it was a nice evening. The head waiter did not seem to believe him.

"Has—er—has Mr. Carmody booked a table?" asked John.

"No, monsieur."

"I'm meeting him here to-night."

The head waiter appeared uninterested. He began to talk to an underling in rapid French. John, feeling more than ever an intruder, took advantage of a lull in the conversation to make another attempt.

"I wonder.... Perhaps.... Can you give me a table?"

Most of the head waiter's eyes were concealed by the upper strata of his cheeks, but there was enough of them left visible to allow him to look at John as if he were something unpleasant that had come to light in a portion of salad.

"Monsieur is a member?"

"Er—no."

"If you will please wait in the lobby, thank you."

"But I was wondering...."

"If you will wait in the lobby, please," said the head waiter, and, dismissing John from the scheme of things, became gruesomely obsequious to an elderly man with diamond studs, no hair, an authoritative manner, and a lady in pink. He waddled before them into the supper room, and Pat reappeared.

"Got that table?"

"I'm afraid not. He says...."

"Oh, Johnnie, you are maddening. Why are you so helpless?"

Women are unjust in these matters. When a man comes into a night club of which he is not a member and asks for a table he feels that he is butting in, and naturally is not at his best. This is not helplessness, it is fineness of soul. But women won't see that.

"I'm awfully sorry."

The head waiter had returned, and was either doing sums or drawing caricatures on a large pad chained to a desk. He seemed so much the artist absorbed in his work that John would not have dreamed of venturing to interrupt him. Pat had no such delicacy.

"I want a table, please," said Pat.

"Madame is a member?"

"A table, please. A nice, large one. I like plenty of room. And when Mr. Carmody arrives tell him that Miss Wyvern and Mr. Carroll are inside."

"Very good, madame. Certainly, madame. This way, madame."

Just as simple as that! John, making a physically impressive but spiritually negligible tail to the procession, wondered, as he crossed the polished floor, how Pat did these things. It was not as if she were one of those massive, imperious women whom you would naturally expect to quell head waiters with a glance. She was no Cleopatra, no Catherine of Russia—just a slim, slight girl with a tip-tilted nose. And yet she had taken this formidable magnifico in her stride, kicked him lightly in the face, and passed on. He sat down, thrilled with a worshipping admiration.

Pat, as always happened after one of her little spurts of irritability, was apologetic.

"Sorry I bit your head off, Johnnie," she said. "It was a shame, after you had come all this way just to see an old friend. But it makes me so angry when you're meek and sheep-y and let people trample on you. Still I suppose it's not your fault." She smiled across at him. "You always were a slow, good-natured old thing, weren't you, like one of those big dogs that come and bump their head on your lap and snuffle. Poor old Johnnie!"

John felt depressed. The picture she had conjured up was not a flattering one; and, as for this "Poor Old Johnnie!" stuff, it struck just the note he most wanted to avoid. If one thing is certain in the relations of the sexes, it is that the Poor Old Johnnies of this world get nowhere. But before he could put any of these feelings into words Pat had changed the subject.

"Johnnie," she said, "what's all this trouble between your uncle and Father? I had a letter from Father a couple of weeks ago, and as far as I could make out Mr. Carmody seems to have been trying to murder him. What's it all about?"

Not so eloquently, nor with such a wealth of imagery as Colonel Wyvern had employed in sketching out the details of the affair of the dynamite outrage for the benefit of Chas. Bywater, Chemist, John answered the question.

"Good heavens!" said Pat.

"I—I hope...." said John.

"What do you hope?"

"Well, I—I hope it's not going to make any difference?"

"Difference? How do you mean?"

"Between us. Between you and me, Pat."

"What sort of difference?"

John had his cue.

"Pat, darling, in all these years we've known one another haven't you ever guessed that I've been falling more and more in love with you every minute? I can't remember a time when I didn't love you. I loved you as a kid in short skirts and a blue jersey. I loved you when you came back from that school of yours, looking like a princess. And I love you now more than I have ever loved you. I worship you, Pat darling. You're the whole world to me, just the one thing that matters the least little bit. And don't you try to start laughing at me again now, because I've made up my mind that, whatever else you laugh at, you've got to take me seriously. I may have been Poor Old Johnnie in the past, but the time has come when you've got to forget all that. I mean business. You're going to marry me, and the sooner you make up your mind to it, the better."

That was what John had intended to say. What he actually did say was something briefer and altogether less effective.

"Oh, I don't know," said John.

"Do you mean you're afraid I'm going to stop being friends with you just because my father and your uncle have had a quarrel?"

"Yes," said John. It was not quite all he had meant, but it gave the general idea.

"What a weird notion! After all these years? Good heavens, no. I'm much too fond of you, Johnnie."

Once more John had his cue. And this time he was determined that he would not neglect it. He stiffened his courage. He cleared his throat. He clutched the tablecloth.

"Pat...."

"Oh, there's Hugo at last," she said, looking past him. "And about time. I'm starving. Hullo! Who are the people he's got with him? Do you know them?"

John heaved a silent sigh. Yes, he could have counted on Hugo arriving at just this moment. He turned, and perceived that unnecessary young man crossing the floor. With him were a middle-aged man and a younger and extremely dashing-looking girl. They were complete strangers to John.

II

Hugo pranced buoyantly up to the table, looking like the Laughing Cavalier, clean-shaved.

He was wearing the unmistakable air of a man who has been to a welter-weight boxing contest at the Albert Hall and backed the winner.

"Hullo, Pat," he said jovially. "Hullo, John. Sorry I'm late. Mitt—if that is the word I want—my dear old friend ... I've forgotten your name," he added, turning to his companion.

"Molloy, brother. Thomas G. Molloy."

Hugo's dear old friend spoke in a deep, rich voice, well in keeping with his appearance. He was a fine, handsome, open-faced person in the early forties, with grizzled hair that swept in a wave off a massive forehead. His nationality was plainly American, and his aspect vaguely senatorial.

"Molloy," said Hugo, "Thomas G. and daughter. This is Miss Wyvern. And this is my cousin, Mr. Carroll. And now," said Hugo, relieved at having finished with the introductions, "let's try to get a bit of supper."

The service at the Mustard Spoon is not what it was; but by the simple process of clutching at the coat tails of a passing waiter and holding him till he consented to talk business Hugo contrived to get fairly rapid action. Then, after an interval of the rather difficult conversation which usually marks the first stages of this sort of party, the orchestra burst into a sudden torrent of what it evidently mistook for music and Thomas G. Molloy rose and led Miss Molloy out on to the floor. He danced a little stiffly, but he knew how to give the elbow and he appeared, as the crowd engulfed him, to be holding his own.

"Who are your friends, Hugo?" asked Pat.

"Thos. G...."

"Yes, I know. But who are they?"

"Well, there," said Hugo, "you rather have me. I sat next to Thos. at the fight, and I rather took to the fellow. He seemed to me a man full of noble qualities, including a looney idea that Eustace Rodd was some good as a boxer. He actually offered to give me three to one, and I cleaned up substantially at the end of the seventh round. After that, I naturally couldn't very well get out of giving the man supper. And as he had promised to take his daughter out to-night, I said bring her along. You don't mind?"

"Of course not. Though it would have been cosier, just we three."

"Quite true. But never forget that, if it had not been for this Thos., you would not be getting the jolly good supper which I have now ample funds to supply. You may look on Thos. as practically the Founder of the Feast." He cast a wary eye at his cousin, who was leaning back in his chair with the abstracted look of one in deep thought. "Has old John said anything to you yet?"

"John? What do you mean? What about?"

"Oh, things in general. Come and dance this. I want to have a very earnest word with you, young Pat. Big things are in the wind."

"You're very mysterious."

"Ah!" said Hugo.

Left alone at the table with nothing to entertain him but his thoughts, John came almost immediately to the conclusion that his first verdict on the Mustard Spoon had been an erroneous one. Looking at it superficially, he had mistaken it for rather an attractive place: but now, with maturer judgment, he saw it for what it was—a blot on a great city. It was places like the Mustard Spoon that made a man despair of progress. He disliked the clientèle. He disliked the head waiter. He disliked the orchestra. The clientèle was flashy and offensive and, as regarded the male element of it, far too given to the use of hair oil. The head waiter was a fat parasite who needed kicking. And, as for Ben Baermann's Collegiate Buddies, he resented the fact that they were being paid for making the sort of noises which he, when a small boy, had produced—for fun and with no thought of sordid gain—on a comb with a bit of tissue paper over it.

He was brooding on the scene in much the same spirit of captious criticism as that in which Lot had once regarded the Cities of the Plain, when the Collegiate Buddies suddenly suspended their cacophony, and he saw Pat and Hugo coming back to the table.

But the Buddies had only been crouching, the better to spring. A moment later they were at it again, and Pat, pausing, looked expectantly at Hugo.

Hugo shook his head.

"I've just seen Ronnie Fish up in the balcony," he said. "I positively must go and confer with him. I have urgent matters to discuss with the old leper. Sit down and talk to John. You've got lots to talk about. See you anon. And, if there's anything you want, order it, paying no attention whatever to the prices in the right-hand column. Thanks to Thos., I'm made of money to-night."

Hugo melted away: Pat sat down: and John, with another abrupt change of mood, decided that he had misjudged the Mustard Spoon. A very jolly little place, when you looked at it in the proper spirit. Nice people, a distinctly lovable head waiter, and as attractive a lot of musicians as he remembered ever to have seen. He turned to Pat, to seek her confirmation of these views, and, meeting her gaze, experienced a rather severe shock. Her eyes seemed to have frozen over. They were cold and hard. Taken in conjunction with the fact that her nose turned up a little at the end, they gave her face a scornful and contemptuous look.

"Hullo!" he said, alarmed. "What's the matter?"

"Nothing."

"Why are you looking like that?"

"Like what?"

"Well...."

John had little ability as a word painter. He could not on the spur of the moment give anything in the nature of detailed description of the way Pat was looking. He only knew he did not like it.

"I suppose you expected me to look at you 'with eyes overrunning with laughter'?"

"Eh?"

"'Archly the maiden smiled, and with eyes overrunning with laughter said in a tremulous voice, "Why don't you speak for yourself, John?"'"

"I don't know what you're talking about."

"Don't you know The Courtship of Miles Standish? I thought that must have been where you got the idea. I had to learn chunks of it at school, and even at that tender age I always thought Miles Standish a perfect goop. 'If the great captain of Plymouth is so very eager to wed me, Why does he not come himself and take the trouble to woo me? If I am not worth the wooing, I surely am not worth the winning.' And yards more of it. I knew it by heart once. Well, what I want to know is, do you expect my answer direct, or would you prefer that I communicated with your agent?"

"I don't understand."

"Don't you? No? Really?"

"Pat, what's the matter?"

"Oh, nothing much. When we were dancing just now, Hugo proposed to me."

A cold hand clutched at John's heart. He had not a high opinion of his cousin's fascinations, but the thought of anybody but himself proposing to Pat was a revolting one.

"Oh, did he?'

"Yes, he did. For you."

"For me? How do you mean, for me?"

"I'm telling you. He asked me to marry you. And very eloquent he was, too. All the people who heard him—and there must have been dozens who did—were much impressed."

She stopped: and, as far as such a thing is possible at the Mustard Spoon when Baermann's Collegiate Buddies are giving an encore of "My Sweetie Is A Wow," there was silence. Emotion of one sort or another had deprived Pat of words: and, as for John, he was feeling as if he could never speak again.

He had flushed a dusky red, and his collar had suddenly become so tight that he had all the sensations of a man who is being garrotted. And so powerfully had the shock of this fearful revelation affected his mind that his only coherent thought was a desire to follow Hugo up to the balcony, tear him limb from limb, and scatter the fragments onto the tables below.

Pat was the first to find speech. She spoke quickly, stormily.

"I can't understand you, Johnnie. You never used to be such a jellyfish. You did have a mind of your own once. But now ... I believe it's living at Rudge all the time that has done it. You've got lazy and flabby. It's turned you into a vegetable. You just loaf about and go on and on, year after year, having your three fat meals a day and your comfortable rooms and your hot-water bottle at night...."

"I don't!" cried John, stung by this monstrous charge from the coma which was gripping him.

"Well, bed socks, then," amended Pat. "You've just let yourself be cosseted and pampered and kept in comfort till the You that used to be there has withered away and you've gone blah. My dear, good Johnnie," said Pat vehemently, riding over his attempt at speech and glaring at him above a small, perky nose whose tip had begun to quiver even as it had always done when she lost her temper as a child. "My poor, idiotic, flabby, fat-headed Johnnie, do you seriously expect a girl to want to marry a man who hasn't the common, elementary pluck to propose to her for himself and has to get someone else to do it for him?"

"I didn't!"

"You did."

"I tell you I did not."

"You mean you never asked Hugo to sound me out?"

"Of course not. Hugo is a meddling, officious idiot, and if I'd got him here now, I'd wring his neck."

He scowled up at the balcony. Hugo, who happened to be looking down at the moment, beamed encouragingly and waved a friendly hand as if to assure his cousin that he was with him in spirit. Silence, tempered by the low wailing of the Buddy in charge of the saxophone and the unpleasant howling of his college friends, who had just begun to sing the chorus, fell once more.

"This opens up a new line of thought," said Pat at length. "Our Miss Wyvern appears to have got the wires crossed," she looked at him meditatively. "It's funny. Hugo seemed so convinced about the way you felt."

John's collar tightened up another half inch, but he managed to get his vocal chords working.

"He was quite right about the way I felt."

"You mean.... Really?"

"Yes."

"You mean you're ... fond of me?"

"Yes."

"But, Johnnie!"

"Damn it, are you blind?" cried John, savage from shame and the agony of harrowed feelings, not to mention a collar which appeared to have been made for a man half his size. "Can't you see? Don't you know I've always loved you? Yes, even when you were a kid."

"But, Johnnie, Johnnie, Johnnie!" Distress was making Pat's silver voice almost squeaky. "You can't have done. I was a horrible kid. I did nothing but bully you from morning till night."

"I liked it."

"But how can you want me to marry you? We know each other too well. I've always looked on you as a sort of brother."

There are words in the language which are like a knell. Keats considered "forlorn" one of them. John Carroll was of opinion that "brother" was a second.

"Oh, I know. I was a fool. I knew you would simply laugh at me."

Pat's eyes were misty. The tip of her nose no longer quivered, but now it was her mouth that did so. She reached out across the table and her hand rested on his for a brief instant.

"I'm not laughing at you, Johnnie, you—you chump. What would I want to laugh at you for? I'm much nearer crying. I'd do anything in the world rather than hurt you. You must know that. You're the dearest old thing that ever lived. There's no one on earth I'm fonder of." She paused. "But this ... it—it simply isn't on the board."

She was looking at him, furtively, taking advantage of the fact that his face was turned away and his eyes fixed on the broad, swallow-tailed back of Mr. Ben Baermann. It was odd, she felt, all very odd. If she had been asked to describe the sort of man whom one of these days she hoped to marry, the description, curiously enough, would not have been at all unlike dear old Johnnie. He had the right clean, fit look—she knew she could never give a thought to anything but an outdoor man—and the straightness and honesty and kindliness which she had come, after moving for some years in a world where they were rare, to look upon as the highest of masculine qualities. Nobody could have been farther than John from the little, black-moustached dancing-man type which was her particular aversion, and yet ... well, the idea of becoming his wife was just simply too absurd and that was all there was to it.

But why? What, then, was wrong with Johnnie? Simply, she felt, the fact that he was Johnnie. Marriage, as she had always envisaged it, was an adventure. Poor cosy, solid old Johnnie would have to display quite another side of himself, if such a side existed, before she could regard it as an adventure to marry him.

"That man," said John, indicating Mr. Baermann, "looks like a Jewish black beetle."

Pat was relieved. If by this remark he was indicating that he wished the recent episode to be taken as concluded, she was very willing to oblige him.

"Doesn't he?" she said. "I don't know where they can have dug him up from. The last time I was here, a year ago, they had another band, a much better one. I think this place has gone down. I don't like the look of some of these people. What do you think of Hugo's friends?"

"They seem all right." John cast a moody eye at Miss Molloy, a prismatic vision seen fitfully through the crowd. She was laughing, and showing in the process teeth of a flashing whiteness. "The girl's the prettiest girl I've seen for a long time."

Pat gave an imperceptible start. She was suddenly aware of a feeling which was remarkably like uneasiness. It lurked at the back of her consciousness like a small formless cloud.

"Oh!" she said.

Yes, the feeling was uneasiness. Any other man who at such a moment had said those words she would have suspected of a desire to pique her, to stir her interest by a rather obviously assumed admiration of another. But not John. He was much too honest. If Johnnie said a thing, he meant it.

A quick flicker of concern passed through Pat. She was always candid with herself, and she knew quite well that, though she did not want to marry him, she regarded John as essentially a piece of personal property. If he had fallen in love with her, that was, of course, a pity: but it would, she realized, be considerably more of a pity if he ever fell in love with someone else. A Johnnie gone out of her life and assimilated into that of another girl would leave a frightful gap. The Mustard Spoon was one of those stuffy, overheated places, but, as she meditated upon this possibility, Pat shivered.

"Oh!" she said.

The music stopped. The floor emptied. Mr. Molloy and his daughter returned to the table. Hugo remained up in the gallery, in earnest conversation with his old friend, Mr. Fish.

III

Ronald Overbury Fish was a pink-faced young man of small stature and extraordinary solemnity. He had been at school with Hugo and also at the university. Eton was entitled to point with pride at both of them, and only had itself to blame if it failed to do so. The same remark applies to Trinity College, Cambridge. From earliest days Hugo had always entertained for R. O. Fish an intense and lively admiration, and the thought of being compelled to let his old friend down in this matter of the Hot Spot was doing much to mar an otherwise jovial evening.

"I'm most frightfully sorry, Ronnie, old thing," he said immediately the first greetings were over. "I sounded the aged relative this afternoon about that business, and there's nothing doing."

"No hope?"

"None."

Ronnie Fish surveyed the dancers below with a grave eye. He removed the stub of his cigarette from its eleven-inch holder, and recharged that impressive instrument.

"Did you reason with the old pest?"

"You can't reason with my uncle Lester."

"I could," said Mr. Fish.

Hugo did not doubt this. Ronnie, in his opinion, was capable of any feat.

"Yes, but the only trouble is," he explained, "you would have to do it at long range. I asked if I might invite you down to Rudge and he would have none of it."

Ronnie Fish relapsed into silence. It seemed to Hugo, watching him, that that great brain was busy, but upon what train of thought he could not conjecture.

"Who are those people you're with?" he asked at length.

"The big chap with the fair hair is my cousin John. The girl in green is Pat Wyvern. She lives near us."

"And the others? Who's the stately looking bird with the brushed-back hair who has every appearance of being just about to address a gathering of constituents on some important point of policy?"

"That's a fellow named Molloy. Thos. G. I met him at the fight. He's an American."

"He looks prosperous."

"He is not so prosperous, though, as he was before the fight started. I took thirty quid off him."

"Your uncle, from what you have told me, is pretty keen on rich men, isn't he?"

"All over them."

"Then the thing's simple," said Ronnie Fish. "Invite this Mulcahy or whatever his name is to Rudge, and invite me at the same time. You'll find that in the ecstasy of getting a millionaire on the premises your uncle will forget to make a fuss about my coming. And once I am in I can talk this business over with him. I'll guarantee that if I can get an uninterrupted half hour with the old boy I can easily make him see the light."

A rush of admiration for his friend's outstanding brain held Hugo silent for a moment. The bold simplicity of the move thrilled him.

"What it amounts to," continued Ronnie Fish, "is that your uncle is endeavouring to do you out of a vast fortune. I tell you, the Hot Spot is going to be a gold mine. To all practical intents and purposes he is just as good as trying to take thousands of pounds out of your pocket. I shall point this out to him, and I shall be surprised if I can't put the thing through. When would you like me to come down?"

"Ronnie," said Hugo, "this is absolute genius." He hesitated. He had no wish to discourage his friend, but he desired to be fair and above-board. "There's just one thing. Would you have any objection to performing at the village concert?"

"I should enjoy it."

"They're sure to rope you in. I thought you and I might do the Quarrel Scene from Julius Cæsar again."

"Excellent."

"And this time," said Hugo generously, "you can be Brutus."

"No, no," said Ronnie, moved.

"Yes, yes."

"Very well. Then fix things up with this American bloke, and leave the rest to me. Shall I like your uncle?"

"No," said Hugo confidently.

"Ah well," said Mr. Fish equably, "I don't for a moment suppose he'll like me."

IV

The respite afforded to their patrons' ear drums by the sudden cessation of activity on the part of the Buddies proved of brief duration. Men like these ex-collegians, who have really got the saxophone virus into their systems, seldom have long lucid intervals between the attacks. Very soon they were at it again, and Mr. Molloy, rising, led Pat gallantly out onto the floor. His daughter, following them with a bright eye as she busied herself with a lip stick, laughed amusedly.

"She little knows!"

John, like Pat a short while before, had fallen into a train of thought. From this he now woke with a start to the realization that he was alone with this girl and presumably expected by her to make some effort at being entertaining.

"I beg your pardon?" he said.

Even had he been less preoccupied, he would have found small pleasure in this tête-à-tête. Miss Molloy—her father addressed her as Dolly—belonged to the type of girl in whose society a diffident man is seldom completely at ease. There hung about her like an aura a sort of hard glitter. Her challenging eyes were of a bright hazel—beautiful but intimidating. She looked supremely sure of herself.

"I was saying," she explained, "that your Girl Friend little knows what she has taken on, going out to step with Soapy."

"Soapy?"

It seemed to John that his companion had momentarily the appearance of being a little confused.

"My father, I mean," she said quickly. "I call him Soapy."

"Oh?" said John. He supposed the practice of calling a father by a nickname in preference to the more old-fashioned style of address was the latest fad of the Modern Girl.

"Soapy," said Miss Molloy, developing her theme, "is full of Sex Appeal, but he has two left feet." She emitted another little gurgle of laughter. "There! Would you just look at him now!"

John was sorry to appear dull, but, eyeing Mr. Molloy as requested, he could not see that he was doing anything wrong. On the contrary, for one past his first youth, the man seemed to him enviably efficient.

"I'm afraid I don't know anything about dancing," he said apologetically.

"At that, you're ahead of Soapy. He doesn't even suspect anything. Whenever I get into the ring with him and come out alive I reckon I've broke even. It isn't so much his dancing on my feet that I mind—it's the way he jumps on and off that slays me. Don't you ever hoof?"

"Oh, yes. Sometimes. A little."

"Well, come and do your stuff, then. I can't sit still while they're playing that thing."

John rose reluctantly. Their brief conversation had made it clear to him that in the matter of dancing this was a girl of high ideals, and he feared he was about to disappoint her. If she regarded with derision a quite adequate performer like Mr. Molloy, she was obviously no partner for himself. But there was no means of avoiding the ordeal. He backed her out into mid-stream, hoping for the best.

Providence was in a kindly mood. By now the floor had become so congested that skill was at a discount. Even the sallow youths with the marcelled hair and the india-rubber legs were finding little scope to do anything but shuffle. This suited John's individual style. He, too, shuffled: and, playing for safety, found that he was getting along better than he could have expected. His tension relaxed, and he became conversational.

"Do you often come to this place?" he asked, resting his partner against the slim back of one of the marcelled-hair brigade who, like himself, had been held up in the traffic block.

"I've never been here before. And it'll be a long time before I come again. A more gosh-awful aggregation of yells for help, than this gang of whippets," said Miss Molloy, surveying the company with a critical eye, "I've never seen. Look at that dame with the eyeglass."

"Rather weird," agreed John.

"A cry for succour," said Miss Molloy severely. "And why, when you can buy insecticide at any drug store, people let these boys with the shiny hair go around loose beats me."

John began to warm to this girl. At first, he had feared that he and she could have little in common. But this remark told him that on certain subjects, at any rate, they saw eye to eye. He, too, had felt an idle wonder that somebody did not do something about these youths.

The Buddies had stopped playing: and John, glowing with the strange new spirit of confidence which had come to him, clapped loudly for an encore.

But the Buddies were not responsive. Hitherto, a mere tapping of the palms had been enough to urge them to renewed epileptic spasms; but now an odd lethargy seemed to be upon them, as if they had been taking some kind of treatment for their complaint. They were sitting, instruments in hand, gazing in a spellbound manner at a square-jawed person in ill-fitting dress clothes who had appeared at the side of Mr. Baermann. And the next moment, there shattered the stillness a sudden voice that breathed Vine Street in every syllable.

"Ladies and gentlemen," boomed the voice, proceeding, as nearly as John could ascertain, from close to the main entrance, "will you kindly take your seats."

"Pinched!" breathed Miss Molloy in his ear. "Couldn't you have betted on it!"

Her diagnosis was plainly correct. In response to the request, most of those on the floor had returned to their tables, moving with the dull resignation of people to whom this sort of thing has happened before: and, enjoying now a wider range of vision, John was able to see that the room had become magically filled with replicas of the sturdy figure standing beside Mr. Baermann. They were moving about among the tables, examining with an offensive interest the bottles that stood thereon and jotting down epigrams on the subject in little notebooks. Time flies on swift wings in a haunt of pleasure like the Mustard Spoon, and it was evident that the management, having forgotten to look at its watch, had committed the amiable error of serving alcoholic refreshments after prohibited hours.

"I might have known," said Miss Molloy querulously, "that something of the sort was bound to break loose in a dump like this."

John, like all dwellers in the country as opposed to the wicked inhabitants of cities, was a law-abiding man. Left to himself, he would have followed the crowd and made for his table, there to give his name and address in the sheepish undertone customary on these occasions. But he was not left to himself. A moment later it had become plain that the dashing exterior of Miss Molloy was a true index to the soul within. She grasped his arm and pulled him commandingly.

"Snap into it!" said Miss Molloy.

The "it" into which she desired him to snap was apparently a small door that led to the club's service quarters. It was the one strategic point not yet guarded by a stocky figure with large feet and an eye like a gimlet. To it his companion went like a homing rabbit, dragging him with her. They passed through; and John, with a resourcefulness of which he was surprised to find himself capable, turned the key in the lock.

"Smooth!" said Miss Molloy approvingly. "Nice work! That'll hold them for a while."

It did. From the other side of the door there proceeded a confused shouting, and somebody twisted the handle with a good deal of petulance, but the Law had apparently forgotten to bring its axe with it to-night, and nothing further occurred. They made their way down a stuffy passage, came presently to a second door, and, passing through this, found themselves in a backyard, fragrant with the scent of old cabbage stalks and dish water.

Miss Molloy listened. John listened. They could hear nothing but a distant squealing and tooting of horns, which, though it sounded like something out of the repertoire of the Collegiate Buddies, was in reality the noise of the traffic in Regent Street.

"All quiet along the Potomac," said Miss Molloy with satisfaction. "Now," she added briskly, "if you'll just fetch one of those ash cans and put it alongside that wall and give me a leg-up and help me round that chimney and across that roof and down into the next yard and over another wall or two, I think everything will be more or less jake."

V

John sat in the lobby of the Lincoln Hotel in Curzon Street. A lifetime of activity and dizzy hustle had passed, but it had all been crammed into just under twenty minutes, and, after seeing his fair companion off in a taxicab, he had made his way to the Lincoln, to ascertain from a sleepy night porter that Miss Wyvern had not yet returned. He was now awaiting her coming.

She came some little while later, escorted by Hugo. It was a fair summer night, warm and still, but with her arrival a keen east wind seemed to pervade the lobby. Pat was looking pale and proud, and Hugo's usually effervescent demeanour had become toned down to a sort of mellow sadness. He had the appearance of a man who has recently been properly ticked off by a woman for Taking Me to Places Like That.

"Oh, hullo, John," he murmured in a low, bedside voice. He brightened a little, as a man will who, after a bad quarter of an hour with an emotional girl, sees somebody who may possibly furnish an alternative target for her wrath. "Where did you get to? Left early to avoid the rush?"

"It was this way ..." began John. But Pat had turned to the desk, and was asking the porter for her key. If a female martyr in the rougher days of the Roman Empire had had occasion to ask for a key, she would have done it in just the voice which Pat employed. It was not a loud voice, nor an angry one,—just the crushed, tortured voice of a girl who has lost her faith in the essential goodness of humanity.

"You see ..." said John.

"Are there any letters for me?" asked Pat.

"No, no letters," said the night porter; and the unhappy girl gave a little sigh, as if that was just what might be expected in a world where men who had known you all your life took you to Places which they ought to have Seen from the start were just Drinking-Hells, while other men, who also had known you all your life, and, what was more, professed to love you, skipped through doors in the company of flashy women and left you to be treated by the police as if you were a common criminal.

"What happened," said John, "was this...."

"Good night," said Pat.

She followed the porter to the lift, and Hugo, producing a handkerchief, dabbed it lightly over his forehead.

"Dirty weather, shipmate!" said Hugo. "A very deep depression off the coast of Iceland, laddie."

He placed a restraining hand on John's arm, as the latter made a movement to follow the Snow Queen.

"No good, John," he said gravely. "No good, old man, not the slightest. Don't waste your time trying to explain to-night. Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned, and not many like a girl who's just had to give her name and address in a raided night club to a plain-clothes cop who asked her to repeat it twice and then didn't seem to believe her."

"But I want to tell her why...."

"Never tell them why. It's no use. Let us talk of pleasanter things. John, I have brought off the coup of a lifetime. Not that it was my idea. It was Ronnie Fish who suggested it. There's a fellow with a brain, John. There's a lad who busts the seams of any hat that isn't a number eight."

"What are you talking about?"

"I'm talking about this amazingly intelligent idea of old Ronnie's. It's absolutely necessary that by some means Uncle Lester shall be persuaded to cough up five hundred quid of my capital to enable me to go into a venture second in solidity only to the Mint. The one person who can talk him into it is Ronnie. So Ronnie's coming to Rudge."

"Oh?" said John, uninterested.

"And to prevent Uncle Lester making a fuss about this, I've invited old man Molloy and daughter to come and visit us as well. That was Ronnie's big idea. Thos. is rolling in money, and, once Uncle Lester learns that, he won't kick about Ronnie being there. He loves having rich men around. He likes to nuzzle them."

"Do you mean," cried John, "that that girl is coming to stay at Rudge?"

He was appalled. Limpidly clear though his conscience was, he was able to see that his rather spectacular association with Miss Dolly Molloy had displeased Pat, and the last thing he wished for was to be placed in a position which was virtually tantamount to hobnobbing with the girl. If she came to stay at Rudge, Pat might think.... What might not Pat think?

He became aware that Hugo was speaking to him in a quiet, brotherly voice.

"How did all that come out, John?"

"All what?"

"About Pat. Did she tell you that I paved the way?"

"She did! And look here...."

"All right, old man," said Hugo, raising a deprecatory hand. "That's absolutely all right. I don't want any thanks. You'd have done the same for me. Well, what has happened? Everything pretty satisfactory?"

"Satisfactory!"

"Don't tell me she turned you down?"

"If you really want to know, yes, she did."

Hugo sighed.

"I feared as much. There was something about her manner when I was paving the way that I didn't quite like. Cold. Not responsive. A bit glassy-eyed. What an amazing thing it is," said Hugo, tapping a philosophical vein, "that in spite of all the ways there are of saying Yes, a girl on an occasion like this nearly always says No. An American statistician has estimated that, omitting substitutes like 'All right,' 'You bet,' 'O.K.,' and nasal expressions like 'Uh-huh,' the English language provides nearly fifty different methods of replying in the affirmative, including Yeah, Yeth, Yum, Yo, Yaw, Chess, Chass, Chuss, Yip, Yep, Yop, Yup, Yurp...."

"Stop it!" cried John forcefully.

Hugo patted him affectionately on the shoulder.

"All right, John. All right, old man. I quite understand. You're upset. A little on edge, yes? Of course you are. But listen, John, I want to talk to you very seriously for a moment, in a broad-minded spirit of cousinly good will. If I were you, laddie, I would take myself firmly in hand at this juncture. You must see for yourself by now that you're simply wasting your time fooling about after dear old Pat. A sweet girl, I grant you—one of the best: but if she won't have you she won't, and that's that. Isn't it or is it? Take my tip and wash the whole thing out and start looking round for someone else. Now, there's Miss Molloy, for instance. Pretty. Pots of money. If I were you, while she's at Rudge, I'd have a decided pop at her. You see, you're one of those fellows that Nature intended for a married man right from the start. You're a confirmed settler-down, the sort of chap that likes to roll the garden lawn and then put on his slippers and light a pipe and sit side by side with the little woman, sharing a twin set of head phones. Pull up your socks, John, and have a dash at this Molloy girl. You'd be on velvet with a rich wife."

At several points during this harangue John had endeavoured to speak, and he was just about to do so now, when there occurred that which rendered speech impossible. From immediately behind them, as they stood facing the door, a voice spoke.

"I want my bag, Hugo."

It was Pat. She was standing within a yard of them. Her face was still that of a martyr, but now she seemed to suggest by her expression a martyr whose tormentors have suddenly thought up something new.

"You've got my bag," she said.

"Oh, ah," said Hugo.

He handed over the beaded trifle, and she took it with a cold aloofness. There was a pause.

"Well, good night," said Hugo.

"Good night," said Pat.

"Good night," said John.

"Good night," said Pat.

She turned away, and the lift bore her aloft. Its machinery badly needed a drop of oil, and it emitted, as it went, a low wailing sound that seemed to John like a commentary on the whole situation.

VI

Some half a mile from Curzon Street, on the fringe of the Soho district, there stands a smaller and humbler hotel named the Belvidere. In a bedroom on the second floor of this, at about the moment when Pat and Hugo had entered the lobby of the Lincoln, Dolly Molloy sat before a mirror, cold-creaming her attractive face. She was interrupted in this task by the arrival of the senatorial Thomas G.

"Hello, sweetie-pie," said Miss Molloy. "There you are."

"Yes," replied Mr. Molloy. "Here I am."

Although his demeanour lacked the high tragedy which had made strong men quail in the presence of Pat Wyvern, this man was plainly ruffled. His fine features were overcast and his frank gray eyes looked sombre.

"Gee! If there's one thing in this world I hate," he said, "it's having to talk to policemen."

"What happened?"

"Oh, I gave my name and address. A name and address, that is to say. But I haven't got over yet the jar it gave me seeing so many cops all gathered together in a small room. And that's not all," went on Mr. Molloy, ventilating another grievance. "Why did you make me tell those folks you were my daughter?"

"Well, sweetie, it sort of cramps my style, having people know we're married."

"What do you mean, cramps your style?"

"Oh, just cramps my style."

"But, darn it," complained Mr. Molloy, going to the heart of the matter, "it makes me out so old, folks thinking I'm your father." The rather pronounced gap in years between himself and his young bride was a subject on which Soapy Molloy was always inclined to be sensitive. "I'm only forty-two."

"And you don't seem that, not till you look at you close," said Dolly with womanly tact. "The whole thing is, sweetie, being so dignified, you can call yourself anybody's father and get away with it."

Mr. Molloy, somewhat soothed, examined himself, not without approval, in the mirror.

"I do look dignified," he admitted.

"Like a professor or something."

"That isn't a bald spot coming there, is it?"

"Sure it's not. It's just the way the light falls."

Mr. Molloy resumed his examination with growing content.

"Yes," he said complacently, "that's a face which for business purposes is a face. I may not be the World's Sweetheart, but nobody can say I haven't got a map that inspires confidence. I suppose I've sold more bum oil stock to suckers with it than anyone in the profession. And that reminds me, honey, what do you think?"

"What?" asked Mrs. Molloy, removing cream with a towel.

"We're sitting in the biggest kind of luck. You know how I've been wanting all this time to get hold of a really good prospect—some guy with money to spend who might be interested in a little oil deal? Well, that Carmody fellow we met to-night has invited us to go and visit at his country home."

"You don't say!"

"I do say!"

"Well, isn't that the greatest thing. Is he rich?"

"He's got an uncle that must be, or he couldn't be living in a place like he was telling me. It's one of those stately homes of England you read about."

Mrs. Molloy mused. The soft smile on her face showed that her day dreams were pleasant ones.

"I'll have to get me some new frocks ... and hats ... and shoes ... and stockings ... and ..."

"Now, now, now!" said her husband, with that anxious alarm which husbands exhibit on these occasions. "Be yourself, baby! You aren't going to stay at Buckingham Palace."

"But a country-house party with swell people...."

"It isn't a country-house party. There's only the uncle besides those two boys we met to-night. But I'll tell you what. If I can plant a good block of those Silver River shares on the old man, you can go shopping all you want."

"Oh, Soapy! Do you think you can?"

"Do I think I can?" echoed Mr. Molloy scornfully. "I don't say I've ever sold Central Park or Brooklyn Bridge to anybody, but if I can't get rid of a parcel of home-made oil stock to a guy that lives in the country I'm losing my grip and ought to retire. Sure, I'll sell him those Silver Rivers, honey. These fellows that own these big estates in England are only glorified farmers when you come right down to it, and a farmer will buy anything you offer him, just so long as it's nicely engraved and shines when you slant the light on it."

"But, Soapy...."

"Now what?"

"I've been thinking. Listen, Soapy. A home like this one where we're going is sure to have all sorts of things in it, isn't it? Pictures, I mean, and silver and antiques and all like that. Well, why can't we, once we're in the place, get away with them and make a nice clean-up?"

Mr. Molloy, though conceding that this was the right spirit, was obliged to discourage his wife's pretty enthusiasm.

"Where could you sell that sort of stuff?"

"Anywhere, once you got it over to the other side. New York's full of rich millionaires who'll buy anything and ask no questions, just so long as it's antiques."

Mr. Molloy shook his head.

"Too dangerous, baby. If all that stuff left the house same time as we did, we'd have the bulls after us in ten minutes. Besides, it's not in my line. I've got my line, and I like to stick to it. Nobody ever got anywhere in the long run by going outside of his line."

"Maybe you're right."

"Sure I'm right. A nice conservative business, that's what I aim at."

"But suppose when we get to this joint it looks dead easy?"

"Ah! Well then, I'm not saying. All I'm against is risks. If something's handed to you on a plate, naturally no one wouldn't ever want to let it get past them."

And with this eminently sound commercial maxim Mr. Molloy reached for his pyjamas and prepared for bed. Something attempted, something done, had earned, he felt, a night's repose.

CHAPTER V

I

Some years before the date of the events narrated in this story, at the time when there was all that trouble between the aristocratic householders of Riverside Row and the humbler dwellers in Budd Street (arising, if you remember, from the practice of the latter of washing their more intimate articles of underclothing and hanging them to dry in back gardens into which their exclusive neighbours were compelled to gaze every time they looked out of windows), the vicar of the parish, the Rev. Alistair Pond-Pond, always a happy phrase-maker, wound up his address at the annual village sports of Rudge with an impressive appeal to the good feeling of those concerned.

"We must not," said the Reverend Alistair, "consider ourselves as belonging to this section of Rudge-in-the-Vale or to that section of Rudge-in-the-Vale. Let us get together. Let us recollect that we are all fellow-members of one united community. Rudge must be looked on as a whole. And what a whole it is!"

With the concluding words of this peroration Pat Wyvern, by the time she had been home a little under a week, found herself in hearty agreement. Walking with her father along High Street on the sixth morning, she had to confess herself disappointed with Rudge.

There are times in everyone's experience when Life, after running merrily for a while through pleasant places, seems suddenly to strike a dull and depressing patch of road: and this was what was happening now to Pat. The sense, which had come to her so strongly in the lobby of the Lincoln Hotel in Curzon Street, of being in a world unworthy of her—a world cold and unsympathetic and full of an inferior grade of human being, had deepened. Her home-coming, she had now definitely decided, was not a success.

Elderly men with a grievance are seldom entertaining companions for the young, and five days of the undiluted society of Colonel Wyvern had left Pat with the feeling that, much as she loved her father, she wished he would sometimes change the subject of his conversation. Had she been present in person she could not have had a fuller grasp of the facts of that dynamite outrage than she now possessed.

But this was not all. After Mr. Carmody's thug-like behaviour on that fatal day, she was given to understand, the Hall and its grounds were as much forbidden territory to her as the piazza of the townhouse of the Capulets would have been to a young Montague. And, though, being a modern girl, she did not as a rule respond with any great alacrity to parental mandates, she had her share of clan loyalty and realized that she must conform to the rules of the game.

Accordingly she had not been within half a mile of the Hall since her arrival, and, having been accustomed for fourteen years to treat the place and its grounds as her private property, found Rudge, with a deadline drawn across the boundaries of Mr. Carmody's park, a poor sort of place. Unlovable character though Mr. Carmody was in many respects, she had always been fond of him, and she missed seeing him. She also missed seeing Hugo. And, as for John, not seeing him was the heaviest blow of all.

From the days of her childhood, John had always been her stand-by. Men might come and men might go, but John went on for ever. He had never been too old, like Mr. Carmody, or too lazy, like Hugo, to give her all the time and attention she required, and she did think that, even though there was this absurd feud going on, he might have had the enterprise to make an opportunity of meeting her. As day followed day her resentment grew, until now she had reached the stage when she was telling herself that this was simply what from a knowledge of his character she might have expected. John—she had to face it—was a jellyfish. And if a man is a jellyfish, he will behave like a jellyfish, and it is at times of crisis that his jellyfishiness will be most noticeable.

It was conscience that had brought Pat to the High Street this morning. Her father had welcomed her with such a pathetic eagerness, and had been so plainly pleased to see her back that she was ashamed of herself for not feeling happier. And it was in a spirit of remorse that now, though she would have preferred to stay in the garden with a book, she had come with him to watch him buy another bottle of Brophy's Paramount Elixir from Chas. Bywater, Chemist.

Brophy, it should be mentioned, had proved a sensational success. His Elixir was making the local gnats feel perfect fools. They would bite Colonel Wyvern on the face and stand back, all ready to laugh, and he would just smear Brophy on himself and be as good as new. It was simply sickening, if you were a gnat; but fine, of course, if you were Colonel Wyvern, and that just man, always ready to give praise where praise was due, said as much to Chas. Bywater.

"That stuff," said Colonel Wyvern, "is good. I wish I'd heard of it before. Give me another bottle."

Mr. Bywater was delighted—not merely at this rush of trade, but because, good kindly soul, he enjoyed ameliorating the lot of others.

"I thought you would find it capital, Colonel. I get a great many requests for it. I sold a bottle yesterday to Mr. Carmody, senior."

Colonel Wyvern's sunniness vanished as if someone had turned it off with a tap.

"Don't talk to me about Mr. Carmody," he said gruffly.

"Quite," said Chas. Bywater.

Pat bridged a painful silence.

"Is Mr. Carmody back, then?" she asked. "I heard he was at some sort of health place."

"Healthward Ho, miss, just outside Lowick."

"He ought to be in prison," said Colonel Wyvern.

Mr. Bywater stopped himself in the nick of time from saying "Quite," which would have been a deviation from his firm policy of never taking sides between customers.

"He returned the day before yesterday, miss, and was immediately bitten on the nose by a mosquito."

"Thank God!" said Colonel Wyvern.

"But I sold him one of the three-and-sixpenny size of the Elixir," said Chas. Bywater, with quiet pride, "and a single application completely eased the pain."

Colonel Wyvern said he was sorry to hear it, and there is no doubt that conversation would once more have become difficult had there not at this moment made itself heard from the other side of the door a loud and penetrating sniff.

A fatherly smile lit up Chas. Bywater's face.

"That's Mr. John's dog," he said, reaching for the cough drops.

Pat opened the door and the statement was proved correct. With a short wooffle, partly of annoyance at having been kept waiting and partly of happy anticipation, Emily entered, and seating herself by the counter, gazed expectantly at the chemist.

"Hullo, Emily," said Pat.

Emily gave her a brief look in which there was no pleased recognition, but only the annoyance of a dog interrupted during an important conference. She then returned her gaze to Mr. Bywater.

"What do you say, doggie?" said Mr. Bywater, more paternal than ever, poising a cough drop.

"Oh, Hell! Snap into it!" replied Emily curtly, impatient at this foolery.

"Hear her speak for it?" said Mr. Bywater. "Almost human, that dog is."

Colonel Wyvern, whom he had addressed, did not seem to share his lively satisfaction. He muttered to himself. He regarded Emily sourly, and his right foot twitched a little.

"Just like a human being, isn't she, miss?" said Chas. Bywater, damped but persevering.

"Quite," said Pat absently.

Mr. Bywater, startled by this infringement of copyright, dropped the cough lozenge and Emily snapped it up.

Pat, still distraite, was watching the door. She was surprised to find that her breath was coming rather quickly and that her heart had begun to beat with more than its usual rapidity. She was amazed at herself. Just because John Carroll would shortly appear in that doorway must she stand fluttering, for all the world as though poor old Johnnie, an admitted jellyfish, were something that really mattered? It was too silly, and she tried to bully herself into composure. She failed. Her heart, she was compelled to realize, was now simply racing.

A step sounded outside, a shadow fell on the sunlit pavement, and Dolly Molloy walked into the shop.

II

It is curious, when one reflects, to think how many different impressions a single individual can make simultaneously on a number of his or her fellow-creatures. At the present moment it was almost as though four separate and distinct Dolly Molloys had entered the establishment of Chas. Bywater.

The Dolly whom Colonel Wyvern beheld was a beautiful woman with just that hint of diablerie in her bearing which makes elderly widowers feel that there is life in the old dog yet. Colonel Wyvern was no longer the dashing Hussar who in the 'nineties had made his presence felt in many a dim sitting-out place and in many a punt beneath the willows of the Thames, but there still lingered in him a trace of the old barrack-room fire. Drawing himself up, he automatically twirled his moustache. To Colonel Wyvern Dolly represented Beauty.

To Chas. Bywater, with his more practical and worldly outlook, she represented Wealth. He saw in Dolly not so much a beautiful woman as a rich-looking woman. Although Soapy had contrived, with subtle reasoning, to head her off from the extensive purchases which she had contemplated making in preparation for her visit to Rudge, Dolly undoubtedly took the eye. She was, as she would have put it herself, a snappy dresser, and in Chas. Bywater's mind she awoke roseate visions of large orders for face creams, imported scents and expensive bath salts.

Emily, it was evident, regarded Mrs. Molloy as Perfection. A dog who, as a rule, kept herself to herself and looked on the world with a cool and rather sardonic eye, she had conceived for Dolly the moment they met one of those capricious adorations which come occasionally to the most hard-boiled Welsh terriers. Hastily swallowing her cough drop, she bounded at Dolly and fawned on her.

So far, the reactions caused by the newcomer's entrance have been unmixedly favourable. It is only when we come to Pat that we find Disapproval rearing its ugly head.

"Disapproval," indeed, is a mild and inadequate word. "Loathing" would be more correct. Where Colonel Wyvern beheld beauty and Mr. Bywater opulence, Pat saw only flashiness, vulgarity, and general horribleness. Piercing with woman's intuitive eye through an outer crust which to vapid and irreflective males might possibly seem attractive, she saw Dolly as a vampire and a menace—the sort of woman who goes about the place ensnaring miserable fat-headed innocent young men who have lived all their lives in the country and so lack the experience to see through females of her type.

For beyond a question, felt Pat, this girl must have come to Rudge in brazen pursuit of poor old Johnnie. The fact that she took her walks abroad accompanied by Emily showed that she was staying at the Hall; and what reason could she have had for getting herself invited to the Hall if not that she wished to continue the acquaintance begun at the Mustard Spoon? This, then, was the explanation of John's failure to come and pass the time of day with an old friend. What she had assumed to be jellyfishiness was in reality base treachery. Like Emily, whom, slavering over Mrs. Molloy's shoes, she could gladly have kicked, he had been hypnotized by this woman's specious glamour and had forsaken old allegiances.

Pat, eyeing Dolly coldly, was filled with a sisterly desire to save John from one who could never make him happy.

Dolly was all friendliness.

"Why, hello," she said, removing a shapely foot from Emily's mouth, "I was wondering when I was going to run into you. I heard you lived in these parts."

"Yes?" said Pat frigidly.

"I'm staying at the Hall."

"Yes?"

"What a wonderful old place it is."

"Yes."

"All those pictures and tapestries and things."

"Yes."

"Is this your father?"

"Yes. This is Miss Molloy, Father. We met in London."

"Pleased to meet you," said Dolly.

"Charmed," said Colonel Wyvern.

He gave another twirl of his moustache. Chas. Bywater hovered beamingly. Emily, still ecstatic, continued to gnaw one of Dolly's shoes. The whole spectacle was so utterly revolting that Pat turned to the door.

"I'll be going along, Father," she said. "I want to buy some stamps."

"I can sell you stamps, miss," said Chas. Bywater affably.

"Thank you, I will go to the post office," said Pat. Her manner suggested that you got a superior brand of stamps there. She walked out. Rudge, as she looked upon it, seemed a more depressing place than ever. Sunshine flooded the High Street. Sunshine fell on the Carmody Arms, the Village Hall, the Plough and Chickens, the Bunch of Grapes, the Waggoner's Rest and the Jubilee Watering Trough. But there was no sunshine in the heart of Pat Wyvern.

III

And, curiously enough, at this very moment up at the Hall the same experience was happening to Mr. Lester Carmody. Staring out of his study window, he gazed upon a world bathed in a golden glow: but his heart was cold and heavy. He had just had a visit from the Rev. Alistair Pond-Pond, and the Reverend Alistair had touched him for five shillings.

Many men in Mr. Carmody's place would have considered that they had got off lightly. The vicar had come seeking subscriptions to the Church Organ Fund, the Mothers' Pleasant Sunday Evenings, the Distressed Cottagers' Aid Society, the Stipend of the Additional Curate and the Rudge Lads' Annual Summer Outing, and there had been moments of mad optimism when he had hoped for as much as a ten-pound note. The actual bag, as he totted it up while riding pensively away on his motor-bicycle, was the above-mentioned five shillings and a promise that the squire's nephew Hugo and his friend Mr. Fish should perform at the village concert next week.

And even so, Mr. Carmody was looking on him as a robber. Five shillings had gone—just like that—and every moment now he was expecting his nephew John to walk in and increase his expenditure. For just after breakfast John had asked if he could have a word with him later on in the morning, and Mr. Carmody knew what that meant.

John ran the Hall's dairy farm, and he was always coming to Mr. Carmody for money to buy exotic machinery which could not, the latter considered, be really necessary. To Mr. Carmody a dairy farm was a straight issue between man and cow. You backed the cow up against a wall, secured its milk, and there you were. John always seemed to want to make the thing so complicated and difficult, and only the fact that he also made it pay induced his uncle ever to accede to his monstrous demands.

Nor was this all that was poisoning a perfect summer day for Mr. Carmody. There was in addition the soul-searing behaviour of Doctor Alexander Twist, of Healthward Ho.

When Doctor Twist had undertaken the contract of making a new Lester Carmody out of the old Lester Carmody, he had cannily stipulated for cash down in advance—this to cover a course of three weeks. But at the end of the second week Mr. Carmody, learning from his nephew Hugo that an American millionaire was arriving at the Hall, had naturally felt compelled to forego the final stages of the treatment and return home. Equally naturally, he had invited Doctor Twist to refund one-third of the fee. This the eminent physician and physical culture expert had resolutely declined to do, and Mr. Carmody, re-reading the man's letter, thought he had never set eyes upon a baser document.

He was shuddering at the depths of depravity which it revealed, when the door opened and John came in. Mr. Carmody beheld him and shuddered. John—he could tell it by his eye—was planning another bad dent in the budget.

"Oh, Uncle Lester," said John.

"Well?" said Mr. Carmody hopelessly.

"I think we ought to have some new Alpha Separators."

"What?"

"Alpha Separators."

"Why?"

"We need them."

"Why?"

"The old ones are past their work."

"What," inquired Mr. Carmody, "is an Alpha Separator?"

John said it was an Alpha Separator.

There was a pause. John, who appeared to have something on his mind these days, stared gloomily at the carpet. Mr. Carmody shifted in his chair.

"Very well," he said.

"And new tractors," said John. "And we could do with a few harrows."

"Why do you want harrows?"

"For harrowing."

Even Mr. Carmody, anxious though he was to find flaws in the other's reasoning, could see that this might well be so. Try harrowing without harrows, and you are handicapped from the start. But why harrow at all? That was what seemed to him superfluous and wasteful. Still, he supposed it was unavoidable. After all, John had been carefully trained at an agricultural college after leaving Oxford and presumably knew.

"Very well," he said.

"All right," said John.

He went out, and Mr. Carmody experienced a little relief at the thought that he had now heard all this morning's bad news.

But dairy farmers have second thoughts. The door opened again.

"I was forgetting," said John, poking his head in.

Mr. Carmody uttered a low moan.

"We want some Thomas tap-cinders."

"Thomas what?"

"Tap-cinders."

"Thomas tap-cinders?"

"Thomas tap-cinders."

Mr. Carmody swallowed unhappily. He knew it was no use asking what these mysterious implements were, for his nephew would simply reply that they were Thomas tap-cinders or that they were something invented by a Mr. Thomas for the purpose of cinder-tapping, leaving his brain in the same addled condition in which it was at present. If John wished to tap cinders, he supposed he must humour him.

"Very well," he said dully.

He held his breath for a few moments after the door had closed once more, then, gathering at length that the assault on his purse was over, expelled it in a long sigh and gave himself up to bleak meditation.

The lot of the English landed proprietor, felt Mr. Carmody, is not what it used to be in the good old times. When the first Carmody settled in Rudge he had found little to view with alarm. He was sitting pretty, and he admitted it. Those were the days when churls were churls, and a scurvy knave was quite content to work twelve hours a day, Saturdays included, in return for a little black bread and an occasional nod of approval from his overlord. But in this Twentieth-Century England's peasantry has degenerated. They expect coddling. Their roofs leak, and you have to mend them; their walls fall down and you have to build them up; their lanes develop holes and you have to restore the surface, and all this runs into money. The way things were shaping, felt Mr. Carmody, in a few years a landlord would be expected to pay for the repairs of his tenants' wireless sets.

He wandered to the window and looked out at the sunlit garden. And as he did so there came into his range of vision the sturdy figure of his guest, Mr. Molloy, and for the first time that morning Lester Carmody seemed to hear, beating faintly in the distance, the wings of the blue bird. In a world containing anybody as rich-looking as Thomas G. Molloy there was surely still hope.

Ronald Fish's prediction that Hugo's uncle would appreciate a visit from so solid a citizen of the United States as Mr. Molloy had been fulfilled to the letter. Mr. Carmody had welcomed his guest with open arms. The more rich men he could gather about him, the better he was pleased, for he was a man of vision, and had quite a number of schemes in his mind for which he was anxious to obtain financial support.

He decided to go and have a chat with Mr. Molloy. On a morning like this, with all Nature smiling, an American millionaire might well feel just in the mood to put up a few hundred thousand dollars for something. For July had come in on golden wings, and the weather now was the kind of weather to make a poet sing, a lover love, and a Scotch business man subscribe largely to companies formed for the purpose of manufacturing diamonds out of coal tar. On such a morning, felt Mr. Carmody, anybody ought to be willing to put up any sum for anything.

IV

Nature continued to smile for about another three and a quarter minutes, and then, as far as Mr. Carmody was concerned, the sun went out. With a genial heartiness, which gashed him like a knife, the plutocratic Mr. Molloy declined to invest even a portion of his millions in a new golf course, a cinema de luxe to be established in Rudge High Street, or any of the four other schemes which his host presented to his notice.

"No, sir," said Mr. Molloy. "I'm mighty sorry I can't meet you in any way, but the fact is I'm all fixed up in Oil. Oil's my dish. I began in Oil and I'll end in Oil. I wouldn't be happy outside of Oil."

"Oh?" said Mr. Carmody, regarding this Human Sardine with as little open hostility and dislike as he could manage on the spur of the moment.

"Yes, sir," proceeded Mr. Molloy, still in lyrical vein, "I put my first thousand into Oil and I'll put my last thousand into Oil. Oil's been a good friend to me. There's money in Oil."

"There is money," urged Mr. Carmody, "in a cinema in Rudge High Street."

"Not the money there is in Oil."

"You are a stranger here," went on Mr. Carmody patiently, "so you have no doubt got a mistaken idea of the potentialities of Rudge. Rudge, you must remember, is a centre. Small though it is, never forget that it lies just off the main road in the heart of a prosperous county. Worcester is only seven miles away, Birmingham only eighteen. People would come in their motors...."

"I'm not stopping them," said Mr. Molloy generously. "All I'm saying is that my money stays in little old Oil."

"Or take Golf," said Mr. Carmody, side-stepping and attacking from another angle. "The only good golf course in Worcestershire at present is at Stourbridge. Worcestershire needs more golf courses. You know how popular Golf is nowadays."

"Not so popular as Oil. Oil," said Mr. Molloy, with the air of one making an epigram, "is Oil."

Mr. Carmody stopped himself just in time from saying what he thought of Oil. To relieve his feelings he ground his heel into the soft gravel of the path, and had but one regret, that Mr. Molloy's most sensitive toe was not under it. Half turning in the process of making this bitter gesture, he perceived that Providence, since the days of Job always curious to know just how much a good man can bear, had sent Ronald Overbury Fish to add to his troubles. Young Mr. Fish was sauntering up behind his customary eleven inches of cigarette holder, his pink face wearing that expression of good-natured superiority which, ever since their first meeting, had afflicted Mr. Carmody sorely.

From the list of Mr. Carmody's troubles, recently tabulated, Ronnie Fish was inadvertently omitted. Although to Lady Julia Fish, his mother, this young gentleman, no doubt, was all the world, Lester Carmody had found him nothing but a pain in the neck. Apart from the hideous expense of entertaining a man who took twice of nearly everything, and helped himself unblushingly to more port, he chafed beneath his guest's curiously patronizing manner. He objected to being treated as a junior—and, what was more, as a half-witted junior—by solemn young men with pink faces.

"What's the argument?" asked Ronnie Fish, anchoring self and cigarette holder at Mr. Carmody's side.

Mr. Molloy smiled genially.

"No argument, brother," he replied with that bluff heartiness which Lester Carmody had come to dislike so much. "I was merely telling our good friend and host here that the best investment under the broad blue canopy of God's sky is Oil."

"Quite right," said Ronnie Fish. "He's perfectly correct, my dear Carmody."

"Our good host was trying to interest me in golf courses."

"Don't touch 'em," said Mr. Fish.

"I won't," said Mr. Molloy. "Give me Oil. Oil's oil. First in war, first in peace, first in the hearts of its countrymen, that's what Oil is. The Universal Fuel of the Future."

"Absolutely," said Ronnie Fish. "What did Gladstone say in '88? You can fuel some of the people all the time, and you can fuel all the people some of the time, but you can't fuel all the people all of the time. He was forgetting about Oil. Probably he meant coal."

"Coal?" Mr. Molloy laughed satirically. You could see he despised the stuff. "Don't talk to me about Coal."

This was another disappointment for Mr. Carmody. Cinemas de luxe and golf courses having failed, Coal was just what he had been intending to talk about. He suspected its presence beneath the turf of the park, and would have been glad to verify his suspicions with the aid of someone else's capital.

"You listen to this bird, Carmody," said Mr. Fish, patting his host on the back. "He's talking sense. Oil's the stuff. Dig some of the savings out of the old sock, my dear Carmody, and wade in. You'll never regret it."

And, having delivered himself of this advice with a fatherly kindliness which sent his host's temperature up several degrees, Ronnie Fish strolled on.

Mr. Molloy watched him disappear with benevolent approval. He said to Mr. Carmody that that young man had his head screwed on the right way, and seemed not to notice a certain lack of responsive enthusiasm on the other's part. Ronnie Fish's head was not one of Mr. Carmody's favourite subjects at the moment.

"Yes, sir," said Mr. Molloy, resuming. "Any man that goes into Oil is going into a good thing. Oil's all right. You don't see John D. Rockefeller running round asking for hand-outs from his friends, do you? No, sir! John's got his modest little competence, same as me, and he got it, like I did, out of Oil. Say, listen, Mr. Carmody, it isn't often I give up any of my holdings, but you've been mighty nice to me, inviting me to your home and all, and I'd like to do something for you in return. What do you say to a good, solid block of Silver River stock at just the price it cost me? And let me tell you I'm offering you something that half the big men on our side would give their eye teeth for. Only a couple of days before I sailed I was in Charley Schwab's office, and he said to me, 'Tom,' said Charley, 'right up till now I've stuck to Steel and I've done well. Understand,' he said, 'I'm not knocking Steel. But Oil's the stuff, and if you want to part with any of that Silver River of yours, Tom,' he said, 'pass it across this desk and write your own ticket.' That'll show you."

There is no anguish like the anguish of the man who is trying to extract cash from a fellow human being and suddenly finds the fellow human being trying to extract it from him. Mr. Carmody laughed a bitter laugh.

"Do you imagine," he said, "that I have money to spare for speculative investments?"

"Speculative?" Mr. Molloy seemed to suspect his ears of playing tricks. "Silver River spec——?"

"By the time I've finished paying the bills for the expenses of this infernal estate I consider myself lucky if I've got a few hundred that I can call my own."

There was a pause.

"Is that so?" said Mr. Molloy in a thin voice.

Strictly speaking, it was not. Before succeeding to his present position of head of the family and squire of Rudge Hall, Lester Carmody had contrived to put away in gilt-edged securities a very nice sum indeed, the fruit of his labours in the world of business. But it was his whim to regard himself as a struggling pauper.

"But all this...." Mr. Molloy indicated with a wave of his hand the smiling gardens, the rolling park and the opulent-looking trees reflected in the waters of the moat. "Surely this means a barrel of money?"

"Everything that comes in goes out again in expenses. There's no end to my expenses. Farmers in England to-day sit up at night trying to think of new claims they can make against a landlord."

There was another pause.

"That's bad," said Mr. Molloy thoughtfully. "Yes, sir, that's bad."

His commiseration was not all for Mr. Carmody. In fact, very little of it was. Most of it was reserved for himself. It began to look, he realized, as though in coming to this stately home of England he had been simply wasting valuable time. It was not as if he enjoyed staying at country houses in a purely æsthetic spirit. On the contrary, a place like Rudge Hall afflicted his town-bred nerves. Being in it seemed to him like living in the first-act set of an old-fashioned comic opera. He always felt that at any moment a band of villagers and retainers might dance out and start a drinking chorus.

"Yes, sir," said Mr. Molloy, "that must grind you a good deal."

"What must?"

It was not Mr. Carmody who had spoken, but his guest's attractive young wife, who, having returned from the village, had come up from the direction of the rose garden. From afar she had observed her husband spreading his hands in broad, persuasive gestures, and from her knowledge of him had gathered that he had embarked on one of those high-pressure sales talks of his which did so much to keep the wolf from the door. Then she had seen a shadow fall athwart his fine face, and, scenting a hitch in the negotiations, had hurried up to lend wifely assistance.

"What must grind him?" she asked.

Mr. Molloy kept nothing from his bride.

"I was offering our host here a block of those Silver River shares...."

"Oh, you aren't going to sell Silver Rivers!" cried Mrs. Molloy in pretty concern. "Why, you've always told me they're the biggest thing you've got."

"So they are. But...."

"Oh, well," said Dolly with a charming smile, "seeing it's Mr. Carmody. I wouldn't mind Mr. Carmody having them."

"Nor would I," said Mr. Molloy sincerely. "But he can't afford to buy."

"What!"

"You tell her," said Mr. Molloy.

Mr. Carmody told her. He was never averse to speaking of the unfortunate position in which the modern owner of English land found himself.

"Well, I don't get it," said Dolly, shaking her head. "You call yourself a poor man. How can you be poor, when that gallery place you showed us round yesterday is jam full of pictures worth a fortune an inch and tapestries and all those gold coins?"

"Heirlooms."

"How's that?"

"They're heirlooms," said Mr. Carmody bitterly.

He always felt bitter when he thought of the Rudge Hall heirlooms. He looked upon them as a mean joke played on him by a gang of sardonic ancestors.

To a man, lacking both reverence for family traditions and appreciation of the beautiful in art, who comes into possession of an ancient house and its contents, there must always be something painfully ironical about heirlooms. To such a man they are simply so much potential wealth which is being allowed to lie idle, doing no good to anybody. Mr. Carmody had always had that feeling very strongly.

Unlike the majority of heirs, he had not been trained from boyhood to revere the home of his ancestors, and to look forward to its possession as a sacred trust. He had been the second son of a second son, and his chance of ever succeeding to the property was at the outset so remote that he had seldom given it a thought. He had gone into business at an early age, and when, in middle life, a series of accidents made him squire of Rudge Hall, he had brought with him to the place a practical eye and the commercial outlook. The result was that when he walked in the picture gallery and thought how much solid cash he could get for this Velasquez or that Gainsborough, if only he were given a free hand, the iron entered into Lester Carmody's soul.

"They're heirlooms," he said. "I can't sell them."

"How come? They're yours, aren't they?"

"No," said Mr. Carmody, "they belong to the estate."

On Mr. Molloy, as he listened to his host's lengthy exposition of the laws governing heirlooms, there descended a deepening cloud of gloom. You couldn't, it appeared, dispose of the darned things without the consent of trustees; while even if the trustees gave their consent they collared the money and invested it on behalf of the estate. And Mr. Molloy, though ordinarily a man of sanguine temperament, could not bring himself to believe that a hard-boiled bunch of trustees, most of them probably lawyers with tight lips and suspicious minds, would ever have the sporting spirit to take a flutter in Silver River Ordinaries.

"Hell!" said Mr. Molloy with a good deal of feeling.

Dolly linked her arm in his with a pretty gesture of affectionate solicitude.

"Poor old Pop!" she said. "He's all broken up about this."

Mr. Carmody regarded his guest sourly.

"What's he got to worry about?" he asked with a certain resentment.

"Why, Pop was sort of hoping he'd be able to buy all this stuff," said Dolly. "He was telling me only this morning that, if you felt like selling, he would write you out his cheque for whatever you wanted without thinking twice."

V

Moodily scanning his wife's face during Mr. Carmody's lecture on Heirloom Law, Mr. Molloy had observed it suddenly light up in a manner which suggested that some pleasing thought was passing through her always agile brain; but, presented now in words, this thought left him decidedly cold. He could not see any sense in it.

"For the love of Pete...!" began Mr. Molloy.

His bride had promised to love, honour, and obey him, but she had never said anything about taking any notice of him when he tried to butt in on her moments of inspiration. She ignored the interruption.

"You see," she said, "Pop collects old junk—I mean antiques and all like that. Over in America he's got a great big museum place full of stuff. He's going to present it to the nation when he hands in his dinner pail. Aren't you, Pop?"

It became apparent to Mr. Molloy that at the back of his wife's mind there floated some idea at which, handicapped by his masculine slowness of wit, he could not guess. It was plain to him, however, that she expected him to do his bit, so he did it.

"You betcher," he said.

"How much would you say all that stuff in your museum was worth, Pop?"

Mr. Molloy was still groping in outer darkness, but he persevered.

"Oo," he said, "worth? Call it a million.... Two millions.... Three, maybe."

"You see," explained Dolly, "the place is so full up, he doesn't really know what he's got. But Pierpont Morgan offered you a million for the pictures alone, didn't he?"

Now that figures had crept into the conversation, Mr. Molloy was feeling more at his ease. He liked figures.

"You're thinking of Jake Shubert, honey," he said. "It was the tapestries that Pierp. wanted. And it wasn't a million, it was seven hundred thousand. I laughed in his face. I asked him if he thought he was trying to buy cheese sandwiches at the delicatessen store or something. Pierp. was sore." Mr. Molloy shook his head regretfully, and you could see he was thinking that it was too bad that his little joke should have caused a coolness between himself and an old friend. "But, great guns!" he said, in defence of his attitude. "Seven hundred thousand! Did he think I wanted carfare?"

Mr. Carmody's always rather protuberant eyes had been bulging farther and farther out of their sockets all through this exchange of remarks, and now they reached the farthest point possible and stayed there. His breath was coming in little gasps, and his fingers twitched convulsively. He was suffering the extreme of agony.

It was all very well for a man like Mr. Molloy to speak sneeringly of $700,000. To most people—and Mr. Carmody was one of them—$700,000 is quite a nice little sum. Mr. Molloy, if he saw $700,000 lying in the gutter, might not think it worth his while to stoop and pick it up, but Mr. Carmody could not imitate that proud detachment. The thought that he had as his guest at Rudge a man who combined with a bottomless purse a taste for antiquities and that only the imbecile laws relating to heirlooms prevented them consummating a deal racked him from head to foot.

"How much would you have given Mr. Carmody for all those pictures and things he showed us yesterday?" asked Dolly, twisting the knife in the wound.

Mr. Molloy spread his hands carelessly.

"Two hundred thousand ... three ... we wouldn't have quarrelled about the price. But what's the use of talking? He can't sell 'em."

"Why can't he?"

"Well, how can he?"

"I'll tell you how. Fake a burglary."

"What!"

"Sure. Have the things stolen and slipped over to you without anybody knowing, and then you hand him your cheque for two hundred thousand or whatever it is, and you're happy and he's happy and everybody's happy. And, what's more, I guess all this stuff is insured, isn't it? Well then, Mr. Carmody can stick to the insurance money, and he's that much up besides whatever he gets from you."

There was a silence. Dolly had said her say, and Mr. Molloy felt for the moment incapable of speech. That he had not been mistaken in supposing that his wife had a scheme at the back of her head was now plain, but, as outlined, it took his breath away. Considered purely as a scheme, he had not a word to say against it. It was commercially sound and did credit to the ingenuity of one whom he had always regarded as the slickest thinker of her sex. But it was not the sort of scheme, he considered, which ought to have emanated from the presumably innocent and unspotted daughter of a substantial Oil millionaire. It was calculated, he felt, to create in their host's mind doubts and misgivings as to the sort of people he was entertaining.

He need have no such apprehension. It was not righteous disapproval that was holding Mr. Carmody dumb.

It has been laid down by an acute thinker that there is a subtle connection between felony and fat. Almost all embezzlers, for instance, says this authority, are fat men. Whether this is or is not true, the fact remains that the sensational criminality of the suggestion just made to him awoke no horror in Mr. Carmody's ample bosom. He was startled, as any man might be who had this sort of idea sprung suddenly on him in his own garden, but he was not shocked. A youth and middle age spent on the London Stock Exchange had left Lester Carmody singularly broad-minded. He had to a remarkable degree that specious charity which allows a man to look indulgently on any financial project, however fishy, provided he can see a bit in it for himself.

"It's money for nothing," urged Dolly, misinterpreting his silence. "The stuff isn't doing any good, just lying around the way it is now. And it isn't as if it didn't really belong to you. All what you were saying awhile back about the law is simply mashed potatoes. The things belong to the house, and the house belongs to you, so where's the harm in your selling them? Who's supposed to get them after you?"

Mr. Carmody withdrew his gaze from the middle distance.

"Eh? Oh. My nephew Hugo."

"Well, you aren't worrying about him?"

Mr. Carmody was not. What he was worrying about was the practicability of the thing. Could it, he was asking himself, be put safely through without the risk, so distasteful to a man of sensibility, of landing him for a lengthy term of years in a prison cell? It was on this aspect of the matter that he now touched.

"It wouldn't be safe," he said, and few men since the world began have ever spoken more wistfully. "We would be found out."

"Not a chance. Who would find out? Who's going to say anything? You're not. I'm not. Pop's not."

"You bet your life Pop's not," asserted Mr. Molloy.

Mr. Carmody gazed out over the waters of the moat. His brain, quickened by the stimulating prospect of money for nothing, detected another doubtful point.

"Who would take the things?"

"You mean get them out of the house?"

"Exactly. Somebody would have to take them. It would be necessary to create the appearance of an actual burglary."

"Well, there'll be an actual burglary."

"But whom could we trust in such a vital matter?"

"That's all right. Pop's got a friend, another millionaire like himself, who would put this thing through just for the fun of it, to oblige Pop. You could trust him."

"Who?" asked Mr. Molloy, plainly surprised that any friend of his could be trusted.

"Chimp," said Dolly briefly.

"Oh, Chimp," said Mr. Molloy, his face clearing. "Yes, Chimp would do it."

"Who," asked Mr. Carmody, "is Chimp?"

"A good friend of mine. You wouldn't know him."

Mr. Carmody scratched at the gravel with his toe, and for a long minute there was silence in the garden. Mr. Molloy looked at Mrs. Molloy. Mrs. Molloy looked at Mr. Molloy. Mr. Molloy closed his left eye for a fractional instant, and in response Mrs. Molloy permitted her right eyelid to quiver. But, perceiving that this was one of the occasions on which a strong man wishes to be left alone to commune with his soul, they forebore to break in upon his reverie with jarring speech.

"Well, I'll think it over," said Mr. Carmody.

"Atta-boy!" said Mr. Molloy.

"Sure. You take a nice walk around the block all by yourself," advised Mrs. Molloy, "and then come back and issue a bulletin."

Mr. Carmody moved away, pondering deeply, and Mr. Molloy turned to his wife.

"What made you think of Chimp?" he asked doubtfully.

"Well, he's the only guy on this side that we really know. We can't pick and choose, same as if we were in New York."

Mr. Molloy eyed the moat with a thoughtful frown.

"Well, I'll tell you, honey. I'm not so darned sure that I sort of kind of like bringing Chimp into a thing like this. You know what he is—as slippery as an eel that's been rubbed all over with axle grease. He might double-cross us."

"Not if we double-cross him first."

"But could we?"

"Sure we could. And, anyway, it's Chimp or no one. This isn't the sort of affair you can just go out into the street and pick up the first man you run into. It's a job where you've got to have somebody you've worked with before."

"All right, baby. If you say so. You always were the brains of the firm. If you think it's kayo, then it's all right by me and no more to be said. Cheese it! Here's his nibs back again."

Mr. Carmody was coming up the gravel path, his air that of a man who has made a great decision. He had evidently been following a train of thought, for he began abruptly at the point to which it had led him.

"There's only one thing," he said. "I don't like the idea of bringing in this friend of yours. He may be all right or he may not. You say you can trust him, but it seems to me the fewer people who know about this business, the better."

These were Mr. Molloy's sentiments, also. He would vastly have preferred to keep it a nice, cosy affair among the three of them. But it was no part of his policy to ignore obvious difficulties.

"I'd like that, too," he said. "I don't want to call in Chimp any more than you do. But there's this thing of getting the stuff out of the house."

"What you were saying just now," Mrs. Molloy reminded Mr. Carmody. "It's got to look like an outside job, what I mean."

"As it's called," said Mr. Molloy hastily. "She's always reading these detective stories," he explained. "That's where she picks up these expressions. Outside job, ha, ha! But she's dead right, at that. You said yourself it would be necessary to create the appearance of an actual burglary. If we don't get Chimp, who is going to take the stuff?"

"I am."

"Eh?"

"I am," repeated Mr. Carmody stoutly. "I have been thinking the whole matter out, and it will be perfectly simple. I shall get up very early to-morrow morning and enter the picture gallery through the window by means of a ladder. This will deceive the police into supposing the theft to have been the work of a professional burglar."

Mr. Molloy was regarding him with affectionate admiration.

"I never knew you were such a hot sketch!" said Mr. Molloy. "You certainly are one smooth citizen. Looks to me as if you'd done this sort of thing before."

"Wear gloves," advised Mrs. Molloy.

"What she means," said Mr. Molloy, again speaking with a certain nervous haste, "is that the first thing the bulls—as the expression is—they always call the police bulls in these detective stories—the first thing the police look for is fingerprints. The fellows in the books always wear gloves."

"A very sensible precaution," said Mr. Carmody, now thoroughly in the spirit of the thing. "I am glad you mentioned it. I shall make a point of doing so."

CHAPTER VI

I

The picture gallery of Rudge Hall, the receptacle of what Mrs. Soapy Molloy had called the antiques and all like that, was situated on the second floor of that historic edifice. To Mr. Carmody, at five-thirty on the following morning, as he propped against the broad sill of the window facing the moat a ladder, which he had discovered in one of the barns, it looked much higher. He felt, as he gazed upward, like an inexpert Jack about to mount the longest bean stalk on record.

Even as a boy, Lester Carmody had never been a great climber. While his young companions, reckless of risk to life and limb, had swarmed to the top of apple trees, Mr. Carmody had preferred to roam about on solid ground, hunting in the grass for windfalls. He had always hated heights, and this morning found him more prejudiced against them than ever. It says much for crime as a wholesome influence in a man's life that the lure of the nefarious job which he had undertaken should have induced him eventually after much hesitation to set foot on the ladder's lowest rung. Nothing but a single-minded desire to do down an innocent insurance company could have lent him the necessary courage.

Mind having triumphed over matter to this extent, Mr. Carmody found the going easier. Carefully refraining from looking down, he went doggedly upward. Only the sound of his somewhat stertorous breathing broke the hushed stillness of the summer morning. As far as the weather was concerned, it was the start of a perfect day. But Mr. Carmody paid no attention to the sunbeams creeping over the dewy grass, nor, when the quiet was broken by the first piping of birds, did he pause to listen. He had not, he considered, time for that sort of thing. He was to have ample leisure later, but of this he was not aware.

He continued to climb, using the extreme of caution—a method which, while it helped to ease his mind, necessarily rendered progress slow. Before long, he was suffering from a feeling that he had been climbing this ladder all his life. The thing seemed to have no end. He was now, he felt, at such a distance from the earth that he wondered the air was not more rarefied, and it appeared incredible to him that he should not long since have reached the window sill.

Looking up at this point, a thing he had not dared to do before, he found that steady perseverance had brought about its usual result. The sill was only a few inches above his head, and with the realization of this fact there came to him something that was almost a careless jauntiness. He quickened his pace, and treading heavily on an upper rung snapped it in two as if it had been matchwood.

When this accident occurred, he had been on a level with the sill and just about to step warily on to it. The effect of the breaking of the rung was to make him execute this movement at about fifteen times the speed which he had contemplated. There was a moment in which the whole universe seemed to dissolve, and then he was on the sill, his fingers clinging with a passionate grip to a small piece of lead piping that protruded from the wall and his legs swinging dizzily over the abyss. The ladder, urged outward by his last frenzied kick, tottered for an instant, then fell to the ground.

The events just described, though it seemed longer to the principal actor in them, had occupied perhaps six seconds. They left Mr. Carmody in a world that jumped and swam before his eyes, feeling as though somebody had extracted his heart and replaced it with some kind of lively firework. This substitute, whatever it was, appeared to be fizzing and leaping inside his chest, and its gyrations interfered with his breathing. For some minutes his only conscious thought was that he felt extremely ill. Then becoming by slow degrees more composed, he was enabled to examine the situation.

It was not a pleasant one. At first, it had been agreeable enough simply to allow his mind to dwell on the fact that he was alive and in one piece. But now, probing beneath this mere surface aspect of the matter, he perceived that, taking the most conservative estimate, he must acknowledge himself to be in a peculiarly awkward position.

The hour was about a quarter to six. He was thirty feet or so above the ground. And, though reason told him that the window sill on which he sat was thoroughly solid and quite capable of bearing a much heavier weight, he could not rid himself of the feeling that at any moment it might give way and precipitate him into the depths.

Of course, looked at in the proper spirit, his predicament had all sorts of compensations. The medical profession is agreed that there is nothing better for the health than the fresh air of the early morning: and this he was in a position to drink into his lungs in unlimited quantities. Furthermore, nobody could have been more admirably situated than he to compile notes for one of those Country Life articles which are so popular with the readers of daily papers.

"As I sit on my second-floor window sill and gaze about me," Mr. Carmody ought to have been saying to himself, "I see Dame Nature busy about her morning tasks. Everything in my peaceful garden is growing and blowing. Here I note that most gem-like of all annuals, the African nemesia with its brilliant ruby and turquoise tints; there the lovely tangle of blue, purple, and red formed by the blending shades of delphiniums, Canterbury bells, and the popular geum. Birds, too, are chanting everywhere their morning anthems. I see the Jay (Garrulus Glandarius Rufitergum), the Corvus Monedula Spermologus or Jackdaw, the Sparrow (better known, perhaps, to some of my readers as Prunella Modularis Occidentalis) and many others...."

But Mr. Carmody's reflections did not run on these lines. It was with a gloomy and hostile eye that he regarded the grass, the trees, the flowers, the birds and dew that lay like snow upon the turf: and of all these, it was possibly the birds that he disliked most. They were an appalling crowd—noisy, fussy, and bustling about with a sort of overdone heartiness that seemed to Mr. Carmody affected and offensive. They got on his nerves and stayed there: and outstanding among the rest in general lack of charm was a certain Dartford Warbler (Melizophilus Undatus Dartfordiensis) which, instead of staying in Dartford, where it belonged, had come all the way up to Worcestershire simply, it appeared, for the purpose of adding to his discomfort.

This creature, flaunting a red waistcoat which might have been all right for a frosty day in winter but on a summer morning seemed intolerably loud and struck the jarring note of a Fair Isle sweater in the Royal Enclosure at Ascot, arrived at five minutes past six and, sitting down on the edge of Mr. Carmody's window sill, looked long and earnestly at that unfortunate man with its head cocked on one side.

"This can't be real," said the Dartford Warbler in a low voice.

It then flew away and did some rough work among the insects under a bush. At six-ten it returned.

"It is real," it soliloquized. "But if real, what is it?"

Pondering this problem, it returned to its meal, and Mr. Carmody was left for some considerable time to his meditations. It may have been about twenty-five minutes to seven when a voice at his elbow aroused him once more. The Dartford Warbler was back again, its eye now a little glazed and wearing the replete look of the bird that has done itself well at the breakfast table.

"And why?" mused the Dartford Warbler, resuming at the point where he had left off.

To Mr. Carmody, conscious now of a devouring hunger, the spectacle of this bloated bird was the last straw. He struck out at it in a spasm of irritation and nearly overbalanced. The Warbler uttered a shrill exclamation of terror and disappeared, looking like an absconding bookmaker. Mr. Carmody huddled back against the window, palpitating. And more time passed.

It was at half-past seven, when he was beginning to feel that he had not tasted food since boyhood, that there sounded from somewhere below on his right a shrill whistling.

II

He looked cautiously down. It gave him acute vertigo to do so, but he braved this in his desire to see. Since his vigil began, he had heard much whistling. In addition to the Garrulus Glandarius Rufitergum and the Corvus Monedula Spermologus, he had been privileged for the last hour or so to listen to a concert featuring such artists as the Dryobates Major Anglicus, the Sturnus Vulgaris, the Emberiza Curlus, and the Muscicapa Striata, or Spotted Flycatcher: and, a moment before, he would have said that in the matter of whistling he had had all he wanted. But this latest outburst sounded human. It stirred in his bosom something approaching hope.

So Mr. Carmody, craning his neck, waited: and presently round the corner of the house, a towel about his shoulders, suggesting that he was on his way to take an early morning dip in the moat, came his nephew Hugo.

Mr. Carmody, as this chronicle has shown, had never entertained for Hugo quite that warmth of affection which one likes to see in an uncle toward his nearest of kin, but at the present moment he could not have appreciated him more if he had been a millionaire anxious to put up capital for a new golf course in the park.

"Hoy!" he cried, much as the beleaguered garrison of Lucknow must have done to the advance guard of the relieving Highlanders. "Hoy!"

Hugo stopped. He looked to his right, then to his left, then in front of him, and then, turning, behind him. It was a spectacle that chilled in an instant the new sensation of kindness which his uncle had been feeling toward him.

"Hoy!" cried Mr. Carmody. "Hugo! Confound the boy! Hugo!"

For the first time the other looked up. Perceiving Mr. Carmody in his eyrie, he stood rigid, gazing with opened mouth. He might have been posing for a statue of Young Man Startled By Snake in Path While About to Bathe.

"Great Scot!" said Hugo, looking to his uncle's prejudiced eye exactly like the Dartford Warbler. "What on earth are you doing up there?"

Mr. Carmody would have writhed in irritation, had not prudence reminded him that he was thirty feet too high in the air to do that sort of thing.

"Never mind what I'm doing up here! Help me down."

"How did you get there?"

"Never mind how I got here!"

"But what," persisted Hugo insatiably, "is the big—or general—idea?"

Withheld from the relief of writhing, Mr. Carmody gritted his teeth.

"Put that ladder up," he said in a strained voice.