Chapter 1

defence. He would have notified the police, and considered that all that remained for him personally to do was to stay in his room at night with his revolver. But boys will be boys. The only course that seemed to him in any way satisfactory in this his hour of rejuvenation was to visit the bee farm, the hotbed of crime, and keep an eye on it. He wanted to go there and prowl.

He did not anticipate any definite outcome of his visit. In his boyish, elemental way he just wanted to take a revolver and a pocketful of cartridges, and prowl.

It was a great night for prowling. A moon so little less than full that the eye could barely detect its slight tendency to become concave, shone serenely, creating a desirable combination of black shadows where the prowler might hide and great stretches of light in which the prowler might reveal his wickedness without disguise. Mr Pickering walked briskly along the road, then less briskly as he drew nearer the farm. An opportune belt of shrubs that ran from the gate adjoining the road to a point not far from the house gave him just the cover he needed. He slipped into this belt of shrubs and began to work his way through them.

Like generals, authors, artists, and others who, after planning broad effects, have to get down to the detail work, he found that this was where his troubles began. He had conceived the journey through the shrubbery in rather an airy mood. He thought he would just go through the shrubbery. He had not taken into account the branches, the thorns, the occasional unexpected holes, and he was both warm and dishevelled when he reached the end of it and found himself out in the open within a short distance of what he recognized as beehives. It was not for some time that he was able to give that selfless attention to exterior objects which is the prowler's chief asset. For quite a while the only thought of which he was conscious was that what he needed most was a cold drink and a cold bath. Then, with a return to clear-headedness, he realized that he was standing out in the open, visible from three sides to anyone who might be in the vicinity, and he withdrew into the shrubbery. He was not fond of the shrubbery, but it was a splendid place to withdraw into. It swallowed you up.

This was the last move of the first part of Mr Pickering's active campaign. He stayed where he was, in the middle of a bush, and waited for the enemy to do something. What he expected him to do he did not know. The subconscious thought that animated him was that on a night like this something was bound to happen sooner or later. Just such a thought on similarly stimulating nights had animated men of his acquaintance thirty years ago, men who were as elderly and stolid and unadventurous now as Mr Pickering had been then. He would have resented the suggestion profoundly, but the truth of the matter was that Dudley Pickering, after a late start, had begun to play Indians.

Nothing had happened for a long time--for such a long time that, in spite of the ferment within him, Mr Pickering almost began to believe that nothing would happen. The moon shone with unutterable calm. The crickets and the tree frogs performed their interminable duet, apparently unconscious that they were attacking it in different keys--a fact that, after a while, began to infuriate Mr Pickering. Mosquitoes added their reedy tenor to the concert. A twig on which he was standing snapped with a report like a pistol. The moon went on shining.

Away in the distance a dog began to howl. An automobile passed in the road. For a few moments Mr Pickering was able to occupy himself pleasantly with speculations as to its make; and then he became aware that something was walking down the back of his neck just beyond the point where his fingers could reach it. Discomfort enveloped Mr Pickering. At various times by day he had seen long-winged black creatures with slim waists and unpleasant faces. Could it be one of these? Or a caterpillar? Or--and the maddening thing was that he did not dare to slap at it, for who knew what desperate characters the sound might not attract?

Well, it wasn't stinging him; that was something.

A second howling dog joined the first one. A wave of sadness was apparently afflicting the canine population of the district to-night.

Mr Pickering's vitality began to ebb. He was ageing, and imagination slackened its grip. And then, just as he had begun to contemplate the possibility of abandoning the whole adventure and returning home, he was jerked back to boyhood again by the sound of voices.

He shrank farther back into the bushes. A man--The Man--was approaching, accompanied by his female associate. They passed so close to him that he could have stretched out a hand and touched them.

The female associate was speaking, and her first words set all Mr Pickering's suspicions dancing a dance of triumph. The girl gave herself away with her opening sentence.

'You can't think how nervous I was this afternoon,' he heard her say. She had a soft pleasant voice; but soft, pleasant voices may be the vehicles for conveying criminal thoughts. 'I thought every moment one of those newspaper men would look in here.'

Where was here? Ah, that outhouse! Mr Pickering had had his suspicions of that outhouse already. It was one of those structures that look at you furtively as if something were hiding in them.

'James! James! I thought I heard James in those bushes.'

The girl was looking straight at the spot occupied by Mr Pickering, and it had been the start caused by her first words and the resultant rustle of branches that had directed her attention to him. He froze. The danger passed. She went on speaking. Mr Pickering pondered on James. Who was James? Another of the gang, of course. How many of them were there?

'Once I thought it was all up. One of them was about a yard from the window, just going to look in.'

Mr Pickering thrilled. There was something hidden in the outhouse, then! Swag?

'Thank goodness, a bee stung him at the psychological moment, and--oh!'

She stopped, and The Man spoke:

'What's the matter?'

It interested Mr Pickering that The Man retained his English accent even when talking privately with his associates. For practice, no doubt.

'Come and get a banana,' said the girl. And they went off together in the direction of the house, leaving Mr Pickering bewildered. Why a banana? Was it a slang term of the underworld for a pistol? It must be that.

But he had no time for speculation. Now was his chance, the only chance he would ever get of looking into that outhouse and finding out its mysterious contents. He had seen the girl unlock the door. A few steps would take him there. All it needed was nerve. With a strong effort Mr Pickering succeeded in obtaining the nerve. He burst from his bush and trotted to the outhouse door, opened it, and looked in. And at that moment something touched his leg.

At the right time and in the right frame of mind man is capable of stoic endurances that excite wonder and admiration. Mr Pickering was no weakling. He had once upset his automobile in a ditch, and had waited for twenty minutes until help came to relieve a broken arm, and he had done it without a murmur. But on the present occasion there was a difference. His mind was not adjusted for the occurrence. There are times when it is unseasonable to touch a man on the leg. This was a moment when it was unseasonable in the case of Mr Pickering. He bounded silently into the air, his whole being rent asunder as by a cataclysm.

He had been holding his revolver in his hand as a protection against nameless terrors, and as he leaped he pulled the trigger. Then with the automatic instinct for self-preservation, he sprang back into the bushes, and began to push his way through them until he had reached a safe distance from the danger zone.

James, the cat, meanwhile, hurt at the manner in which his friendly move had been received, had taken refuge on the outhouse roof. He mewed complainingly, a puzzled note in his voice. Mr Pickering's behaviour had been one of those things that no fellow can understand. The whole thing seemed inexplicable to James.

18

Lord Dawlish stood in the doorway of the outhouse, holding the body of Eustace gingerly by the tail. It was a solemn moment. There was no room for doubt as to the completeness of the extinction of Lady Wetherby's pet.

Dudley Pickering's bullet had done its lethal work. Eustace's adventurous career was over. He was through.

Elizabeth's mouth was trembling, and she looked very white in the moonlight. Being naturally soft-hearted, she deplored the tragedy for its own sake; and she was also, though not lacking in courage, decidedly upset by the discovery that some person unknown had been roaming her premises with a firearm.

'Oh, Bill!' she said. Then: 'Poor little chap!' And then: 'Who could have done it?'

Lord Dawlish did not answer. His whole mind was occupied at the moment with the contemplation of the fact that she had called him Bill. Then he realized that she had spoken three times and expected a reply.

'Who could have done it?'

Bill pondered. Never a quick thinker, the question found him unprepared.

'Some fellow, I expect,' he said at last brightly. 'Got in, don't you know, and then his pistol went off by accident.'

'But what was he doing with a pistol?'

Bill looked a little puzzled at this.

'Why, he would have a pistol, wouldn't he? I thought everybody had over here.'

Except for what he had been able to observe during the brief period of his present visit, Lord Dawlish's knowledge of the United States had been derived from the American plays which he had seen in London, and in these chappies were producing revolvers all the time. He had got the impression that a revolver was as much a part of the ordinary well-dressed man's equipment in the United States as a collar.

'I think it was a burglar,' said Elizabeth. 'There have been a lot of burglaries down here this summer.'

'Would a burglar burgle the outhouse? Rummy idea, rather, what? Not much sense in it. I think it must have been a tramp. I expect tramps are always popping about and nosing into all sorts of extraordinary places, you know.'

'He must have been standing quite close to us while we were talking,' said Elizabeth, with a shiver.

Bill looked about him. Everywhere was peace. No sinister sounds competed with the croaking of the tree frogs. No alien figures infested the landscape. The only alien figure, that of Mr Pickering, was wedged into a bush, invisible to the naked eye.

'He's gone now, at any rate,' he said. 'What are we going to do?'

Elizabeth gave another shiver as she glanced hurriedly at the deceased. After life's fitful fever Eustace slept well, but he was not looking his best.

'With--it?' she said.

'I say,' advised Bill, 'I shouldn't call him "it," don't you know. It sort of rubs it in. Why not "him"? I suppose we had better bury him. Have you a spade anywhere handy?'

'There isn't a spade on the place.'

Bill looked thoughtful.

'It takes weeks to make a hole with anything else, you know,' he said. 'When I was a kid a friend of mine bet me I wouldn't dig my way through to China with a pocket knife. It was an awful frost. I tried for a couple of days, and broke the knife and didn't get anywhere near China.' He laid the remains on the grass and surveyed them meditatively. 'This is what fellows always run up against in the detective novels--What to Do With the Body. They manage the murder part of it all right, and then stub their toes on the body problem.'

'I wish you wouldn't talk as if we had done a murder.'

'I feel as if we had, don't you?'

'Exactly.'

'I read a story once where a fellow slugged somebody and melted the corpse down in a bath tub with sulphuric--'

'Stop! You're making me sick!'

'Only a suggestion, don't you know,' said Bill apologetically.

'Well, suggest something else, then.'

'How about leaving him on Lady Wetherby's doorstep? See what I mean--let them take him in with the morning milk? Or, if you would rather ring the bell and go away, and--you don't think much of it?'

'I simply haven't the nerve to do anything so risky.'

'Oh, I would do it. There would be no need for you to come.'

'I wouldn't dream of deserting you.'

'That's awfully good of you.'

'Besides, I'm not going to be left alone to-night until I can jump into my little white bed and pull the clothes over my head. I'm scared, I'm just boneless with fright. And I wouldn't go anywhere near Lady Wetherby's doorstep with it.'

'Him.'

'It's no use, I can't think of it as "him." It's no good asking me to.'

Bill frowned thoughtfully.

'I read a story once where two chappies wanted to get rid of a body. They put it inside a fellow's piano.'

'You do seem to have read the most horrible sort of books.'

'I rather like a bit of blood with my fiction,' said Bill. 'What about this piano scheme I read about?'

'People only have talking machines in these parts.'

'I read a story--'

'Let's try to forget the stories you've read. Suggest something of your own.'

'Well, could we dissect the little chap?'

'Dissect him?'

'And bury him in the cellar, you know. Fellows do it to their wives.'

Elizabeth shuddered.

'Try again,' she said.

'Well, the only other thing I can think of is to take him into the woods and leave him there. It's a pity we can't let Lady Wetherby know where he is; she seems rather keen on him. But I suppose the main point is to get rid of him.'

'I know how we can do both. That's a good idea of yours about the woods. They are part of Lady Wetherby's property. I used to wander about there in the spring when the house was empty. There's a sort of shack in the middle of them. I shouldn't think anybody ever went there--it's a deserted sort of place. We could leave him there, and then--well, we might write Lady Wetherby a letter or something. We could think out that part afterward.'

'It's the best thing we've thought of. You really want to come?'

'If you attempt to leave here without me I shall scream. Let's be starting.'

Bill picked Eustace up by his convenient tail.

'I read a story once,' he said, 'where a fellow was lugging a corpse through a wood, when suddenly--'

'Stop right there,' said Elizabeth firmly.

During the conversation just recorded Dudley Pickering had been keeping a watchful eye on Bill and Elizabeth from the interior of a bush. His was not the ideal position for espionage, for he was too far off to hear what they said, and the light was too dim to enable him to see what it was that Bill was holding. It looked to Mr Pickering like a sack or bag of some sort. As time went by he became convinced that it was a sack, limp and empty at present, but destined later to receive and bulge with what he believed was technically known as the swag. When the two objects of vigilance concluded their lengthy consultation, and moved off in the direction of Lady Wetherby's woods, any doubts he may have had as to whether they were the criminals he had suspected them of being were dispersed. The whole thing worked out logically.

The Man, having spied out the land in his two visits to Lady Wetherby's house, was now about to break in. His accomplice would stand by with the sack. With a beating heart Mr Pickering gripped his revolver and moved round in the shadow of the shrubbery till he came to the gate, when he was just in time to see the guilty couple disappear into the woods. He followed them. He was glad to get on the move again. While he had been wedged into the bush, quite a lot of the bush had been wedged into him. Something sharp had pressed against the calf of his leg, and he had been pinched in a number of tender places. And he was convinced that one more of God's unpleasant creatures had got down the back of his neck.

Dudley Pickering moved through the wood as snakily as he could. Nature had shaped him more for stability than for snakiness, but he did his best. He tingled with the excitement of the chase, and endeavoured to creep through the undergrowth like one of those intelligent Indians of whom he had read so many years before in the pages of Mr Fenimore Cooper. In those days Dudley Pickering had not thought very highly of Fenimore Cooper, holding his work deficient in serious and scientific interest; but now it seemed to him that there had been something in the man after all, and he resolved to get some of his books and go over them again. He wished he had read them more carefully at the time, for they doubtless contained much information and many hints which would have come in handy just now. He seemed, for example, to recall characters in them who had the knack of going through forests without letting a single twig crack beneath their feet. Probably the author had told how this was done. In his unenlightened state it was beyond Mr Pickering. The wood seemed carpeted with twigs. Whenever he stepped he trod on one, and whenever he trod on one it cracked beneath his feet. There were moments when he felt gloomily that he might just as well be firing a machine-gun.

Bill, meanwhile, Elizabeth following close behind him, was ploughing his way onward. From time to time he would turn to administer some encouraging remark, for it had come home to him by now that encouraging remarks were what she needed very much in the present crisis of her affairs. She was showing him a new and hitherto unsuspected side of her character. The Elizabeth whom he had known--the valiant, self-reliant Elizabeth--had gone, leaving in her stead someone softer, more appealing, more approachable. It was this that was filling him with strange emotions as he led the way to their destination.

He was becoming more and more conscious of a sense of being drawn very near to Elizabeth, of a desire to soothe, comfort, and protect her. It was as if to-night he had discovered the missing key to a puzzle or the missing element in some chemical combination. Like most big men, his mind was essentially a protective mind; weakness drew out the best that was in him. And it was only to-night that Elizabeth had given any sign of having any weakness in her composition. That clear vision which had come to him on his long walk came again now, that vivid conviction that she was the only girl in the world for him.

He was debating within himself the advisability of trying to find words to express this sentiment, when Mr Pickering, the modern Chingachgook, trod on another twig in the background and Elizabeth stopped abruptly with a little cry.

'What was that?' she demanded.

Bill had heard a noise too. It was impossible to be within a dozen yards of Mr Pickering, when on the trail, and not hear a noise. The suspicion that someone was following them did not come to him, for he was a man rather of common sense than of imagination, and common sense was asking him bluntly why the deuce anybody should want to tramp after them through a wood at that time of night. He caught the note of panic in Elizabeth's voice, and was soothing her.

'It was just a branch breaking. You hear all sorts of rum noises in a wood.'

'I believe it's the man with the pistol following us!'

'Nonsense. Why should he? Silly thing to do!' He spoke almost severely.

'Look!' cried Elizabeth.

'What?'

'I saw someone dodge behind that tree.'

'You mustn't let yourself imagine things. Buck up!'

'I can't buck up. I'm scared.'

'Which tree did you think you saw someone dodge behind?'

'That big one there.'

'Well, listen: I'll go back and--'

'If you leave me for an instant I shall die in agonies.' She gulped. 'I never knew I was such a coward before. I'm just a worm.'

'Nonsense. This sort of thing might frighten anyone. I read a story once--'

'Don't!'

Bill found that his heart had suddenly begun to beat with unaccustomed rapidity. The desire to soothe, comfort, and protect Elizabeth became the immediate ambition of his life. It was very dark where they stood. The moonlight, which fell in little patches round them, did not penetrate the thicket which they had entered. He could hardly see her. He was merely aware of her as a presence. An excellent idea occurred to him.

'Hold my hand,' he said.

It was what he would have said to a frightened child, and there was much of the frightened child about Elizabeth then. The Eustace mystery had given her a shock which subsequent events had done nothing to dispel, and she had lost that jauntiness and self-confidence which was her natural armour against the more ordinary happenings of life.

Something small and soft slid gratefully into his palm, and there was silence for a space. Bill said nothing. Elizabeth said nothing. And Mr Pickering had stopped treading on twigs. The faintest of night breezes ruffled the tree-tops above them. The moonbeams filtered through the branches. He held her hand tightly.

'Better?'

'Much.'

The breeze died away. Not a leaf stirred. The wood was very still. Somewhere on a bough a bird moved drowsily 'All right?'

'Yes.'

And then something happened--something shattering, disintegrating. It was only a pheasant, but it sounded like the end of the world. It rose at their feet with a rattle that filled the universe, and for a moment all was black confusion. And when that moment had passed it became apparent to Bill that his arm was round Elizabeth, that she was sobbing helplessly, and that he was kissing her. Somebody was talking very rapidly in a low voice.

He found that it was himself.

'Elizabeth!'

There was something wonderful about the name, a sort of music. This was odd, because the name, as a name, was far from being a favourite of his. Until that moment childish associations had prejudiced him against it. It had been inextricably involved in his mind with an atmosphere of stuffy schoolrooms and general misery, for it had been his misfortune that his budding mind was constitutionally incapable of remembering who had been Queen of England at the time of the Spanish Armada--a fact that had caused a good deal of friction with a rather sharp-tempered governess. But now it seemed the only possible name for a girl to have, the only label that could even remotely suggest those feminine charms which he found in this girl beside him. There was poetry in every syllable of it. It was like one of those deep chords which fill the hearer with vague yearnings for strange and beautiful things. He asked for nothing better than to stand here repeating it.

'Elizabeth!'

'Bill, dear!'

That sounded good too. There was music in 'Bill' when properly spoken. The reason why all the other Bills in the world had got the impression that it was a prosaic sort of name was that there was only one girl in existence capable of speaking it properly, and she was not for them.

'Bill, are you really fond of me?'

'Fond of you!'

She gave a sigh. 'You're so splendid!'

Bill was staggered. These were strange words. He had never thought much of himself. He had always looked on himself as rather a chump--well-meaning, perhaps, but an awful ass. It seemed incredible that any one--and Elizabeth of all people--could look on him as splendid.

And yet the very fact that she had said it gave it a plausible sort of sound. It shook his convictions. Splendid! Was he? By Jove, perhaps he was, what? Rum idea, but it grew on a chap. Filled with a novel feeling of exaltation, he kissed Elizabeth eleven times in rapid succession.

He felt devilish fit. He would have liked to run a mile or two and jump a few gates. He wished five or six starving beggars would come along; it would be pleasant to give the poor blighters money. It was too much to expect at that time of night, of course, but it would be rather jolly if Jess Willard would roll up and try to pick a quarrel. He would show him something. He felt grand and strong and full of beans. What a ripping thing life was when you came to think of it.

'This,' he said, 'is perfectly extraordinary!' And time stood still.

A sense of something incongruous jarred upon Bill. Something seemed to be interfering with the supreme romance of that golden moment. It baffled him at first. Then he realized that he was still holding Eustace by the tail.

Dudley Pickering had watched these proceedings--as well as the fact that it was extremely dark and that he was endeavouring to hide a portly form behind a slender bush would permit him--with a sense of bewilderment. A comic artist drawing Mr Pickering at that moment would no doubt have placed above his head one of those large marks of interrogation which lend vigour and snap to modern comic art. Certainly such a mark of interrogation would have summed up his feelings exactly. Of what was taking place he had not the remotest notion. All he knew was that for some inexplicable reason his quarry had come to a halt and seemed to have settled down for an indefinite stay. Voices came to him in an indistinguishable murmur, intensely irritating to a conscientious tracker. One of Fenimore Cooper's Indians--notably Chingachgook, if, which seemed incredible, that was really the man's name--would have crept up without a sound and heard what was being said and got in on the ground floor of whatever plot was being hatched. But experience had taught Mr Pickering that, superior as he was to Chingachgook and his friends in many ways, as a creeper he was not in their class. He weighed thirty or forty pounds more than a first-class creeper should. Besides, creeping is like golf. You can't take it up in the middle forties and expect to compete with those who have been at it from infancy.

He had resigned himself to an all-night vigil behind the bush, when to his great delight he perceived that things had begun to move again. There was a rustling of feet in the undergrowth, and he could just see two indistinct forms making their way among the bushes. He came out of his hiding place and followed stealthily, or as stealthily as the fact that he had not even taken a correspondence course in creeping allowed. And profiting by earlier mistakes, he did succeed in making far less noise than before. In place of his former somewhat elephantine method of progression he adopted a species of shuffle which had excellent results, for it enabled him to brush twigs away instead of stepping flatfootedly on them. The new method was slow, but it had no other disadvantages.

Because it was slow, Mr Pickering was obliged to follow his prey almost entirely by ear. It was easy at first, for they seemed to be hurrying on regardless of noise. Then unexpectedly the sounds of their passage ceased.

He halted. In his boyish way the first thing he thought was that it was an ambush. He had a vision of that large man suspecting his presence and lying in wait for him with a revolver. This was not a comforting thought. Of course, if a man is going to fire a revolver at you it makes little difference whether he is a giant or a pygmy, but Mr Pickering was in no frame of mind for nice reasoning. It was the thought of Bill's physique which kept him standing there irresolute.

What would Chingachgook--assuming, for purposes of argument, that any sane godfather could really have given a helpless child a name like that--have done? He would, Mr Pickering considered, after giving the matter his earnest attention, have made a _detour_ and outflanked the enemy. An excellent solution of the difficulty. Mr Pickering turned to the left and began to advance circuitously, with the result that, before he knew what he was doing, he came out into a clearing and understood the meaning of the sudden silence which had perplexed him. Footsteps made no sound on this mossy turf.

He knew where he was now; the clearing was familiar. This was where Lord Wetherby's shack-studio stood; and there it was, right in front of him, black and clear in the moonlight. And the two dark figures were going into it.

Mr Pickering retreated into the shelter of the bushes and mused upon this thing. It seemed to him that for centuries he had been doing nothing but retreat into bushes for this purpose. His perplexity had returned. He could imagine no reason why burglars should want to visit Lord Wetherby's studio. He had taken it for granted, when he had tracked them to the clearing, that they were on their way to the house, which was quite close to the shack, separated from it only by a thin belt of trees and a lawn.

They had certainly gone in. He had seen them with his own eyes--first the man, then very close behind him, apparently holding to his coat, the girl. But why?

Creep up and watch them? Would Chingachgook have taken a risk like that? Hardly, unless insured with some good company. Then what? He was still undecided when he perceived the objects of his attention emerging. He backed a little farther into the bushes.

They stood for an instant, listening apparently. The man no longer carried the sack. They exchanged a few inaudible words. Then they crossed the clearing and entered the wood a few yards to his right. He could hear the crackling of their footsteps diminishing in the direction of the road.

A devouring curiosity seized upon Mr Pickering. He wanted, more than he had wanted almost anything before in his life, to find out what the dickens they had been up to in there. He listened. The footsteps were no longer audible. He ran across the clearing and into the shack. It was then that he discovered that he had no matches.

This needless infliction, coming upon him at the crisis of an adventurous night, infuriated Mr Pickering. He swore softly. He groped round the walls for an electric-light switch, but the shack had no electric-light switch. When there was need to illuminate it an oil lamp performed the duty. This occurred to Mr Pickering after he had been round the place three times, and he ceased to grope for a switch and began to seek for a match-box. He was still seeking it when he was frozen in his tracks by the sound of footsteps, muffled but by their nearness audible, just outside the door. He pulled out his pistol, which he had replaced in his pocket, backed against the wall, and stood there prepared to sell his life dearly.

The door opened.

One reads of desperate experiences ageing people in a single night. His present predicament aged Mr Pickering in a single minute. In the brief interval of time between the opening of the door and the moment when a voice outside began to speak he became a full thirty years older. His boyish ardour slipped from him, and he was once more the Dudley Pickering whom the world knew, the staid and respectable middle-aged man of affairs, who would have given a million dollars not to have got himself mixed up in this deplorable business.

And then the voice spoke.

'I'll light the lamp,' it said; and with an overpowering feeling of relief Mr Pickering recognized it as Lord Wetherby's. A moment later the temperamental peer's dapper figure became visible in silhouette against a background of pale light.

'Ah-hum!' said Mr Pickering.

The effect on Lord Wetherby was remarkable. To hear some one clear his throat at the back of a dark room, where there should rightfully be no throat to be cleared, would cause even your man of stolid habit a passing thrill. The thing got right in among Lord Wetherby's highly sensitive ganglions like an earthquake. He uttered a strangled cry, then dashed out and slammed the door behind him.

'There's someone in there!'

Lady Wetherby's tranquil voice made itself heard.

'Nonsense; who could be in there?'

'I heard him, I tell you. He growled at me!'

It seemed to Mr Pickering that the time had come to relieve the mental distress which he was causing his host. He raised his voice.

'It's all right!' he called.

'There!' said Lord Wetherby.

'Who's that?' asked Lady Wetherby, through the door.

'It's all right. It's me--Pickering.'

The door was opened a few inches by a cautious hand.

'Is that you, Pickering?'

'Yes. It's all right.'

'Don't keep saying it's all right,' said Lord Wetherby, irritably. 'It isn't all right. What do you mean by hiding in the dark and popping out and barking at a man? You made me bite my tongue. I've never had such a shock in my life.'

Mr Pickering left his lair and came out into the open. Lord Wetherby was looking aggrieved, Lady Wetherby peacefully inquisitive. For the first time Mr Pickering discovered that Claire was present. She was standing behind Lady Wetherby with a floating white something over her head, looking very beautiful.

'For the love of Mike!' said Lady Wetherby.

Mr Pickering became aware that he was still holding the revolver.

'Oh, ah!' he said, and pocketed the weapon.

'Barking at people!' muttered Lord Wetherby in a querulous undertone.

'What on earth are you doing, Dudley?' said Claire.

There was a note in her voice which both puzzled and pained Mr Pickering, a note that seemed to suggest that she found herself in imperfect sympathy with him. Her expression deepened the suggestion. It was a cold expression, unfriendly, as if it was not so keen a pleasure to Claire to look at him as it should be for a girl to look at the man whom she is engaged to marry. He had noticed the same note in her voice and the same hostile look in her eye earlier in the evening. He had found her alone, reading a letter which, as the stamp on the envelope showed, had come from England. She had seemed so upset that he had asked her if it contained bad news, and she had replied in the negative with so much irritation that he had desisted from inquiries. But his own idea was that she had had bad news from home. Mr Pickering still clung to his early impression that her little brother Percy was consumptive, and he thought the child must have taken a turn for the worse. It was odd that she should have looked and spoken like that then, and it was odd that she should look and speak like that now. He had been vaguely disturbed then and he was vaguely disturbed now. He had the feeling that all was not well.

'Yes,' said Lady Wetherby. 'What on earth are you doing, Dudley?'

'Popping out!' grumbled Lord Wetherby.

'We came here to see Algie's picture, which has got something wrong with its eyes apparently, and we find you hiding in the dark with a gun. What's the idea?'

'It's a long story,' said Mr Pickering.

'We have the night before us,' said Lady Wetherby.

'You remember The Man--the fellow I found looking in at the window, The Man who said he knew Claire?'

'You've got that man on the brain, Dudley. What's he been doing to you now?'

'I tracked him here.'

'Tracked him? Where from?'

'From that bee-farm place where he's living. He and that girl you spoke of went into these woods. I thought they were making for the house, but they went into the shack.'

'What did they do then?' asked Lady Wetherby.

'They came out again.'

'Why?'

'That's what I was trying to find out.'

Lord Wetherby uttered an exclamation.

'By Jove!' There was apprehension in his voice, but mingled with it a certain pleased surprise. 'Perhaps they were after my picture. I'll light the lamp. Good Lord, picture thieves--Romneys--missing Gainsboroughs--' His voice trailed off as he found the lamp and lit it. Relief and disappointment were nicely blended in his next words: 'No, it's still there.'

The soft light of the lamp filled the studio.

'Well, that's a comfort,' said Lady Wetherby, sauntering in. 'We couldn't afford to lose--Oh!'

Lord Wetherby spun round as her scream burst upon his already tortured nerve centres. Lady Wetherby was kneeling on the floor. Claire hurried in.

'What is it, Polly?'

Lady Wetherby rose to her feet, and pointed. Her face had lost its look of patient amusement. It was hard and set. She eyed Mr Pickering in a menacing way.

'Look!'

Claire followed her finger.

'Good gracious! It's Eustace!'

'Shot!'

She was looking intently at Mr Pickering. 'Well, Dudley,' she said, coldly, 'what about it?'

Mr Pickering found that they were all looking at him--Lady Wetherby with glittering eyes, Claire with cool scorn, Lord Wetherby with a horror which he seemed to have achieved with something of an effort.

'Well!' said Claire.

'What about it, Dudley?' said Lady Wetherby.

'I must say, Pickering,' said Lord Wetherby, 'much as I disliked the animal, it's a bit thick!'

Mr Pickering recoiled from their accusing gaze.

'Good heavens! Do you think I did it?'

In the midst of his anguish there flashed across his mind the recollection of having seen just this sort of situation in a moving picture, and of having thought it far-fetched.

Lady Wetherby's good-tempered mouth, far from good-tempered now, curled in a devastating sneer. She was looking at him as Claire, in the old days when they had toured England together in road companies, had sometimes seen her look at recalcitrant landladies. The landladies, without exception, had wilted beneath that gaze, and Mr Pickering wilted now.

'But--but--but--' was all he could contrive to say.

'Why should we think you did it?' said Lady Wetherby, bitterly. 'You had a grudge against the poor brute for biting you. We find you hiding here with a pistol and a story about burglars which an infant couldn't swallow. I suppose you thought that, if you planted the poor creature's body here, it would be up to Algie to get rid of it, and that if he were found with it I should think that it was he who had killed the animal.'

The look of horror which Lord Wetherby had managed to assume became genuine at these words. The gratitude which he had been feeling towards Mr Pickering for having removed one of the chief trials of his existence vanished.

'Great Scot!' he cried. 'So that was the game, was it?'

Mr Pickering struggled for speech. This was a nightmare.

'But I didn't! I didn't! I didn't! I tell you I hadn't the remotest notion the creature was there.'

'Oh, come, Pickering!' said Lord Wetherby. 'Come, come, come!'

Mr Pickering found that his accusers were ebbing away. Lady Wetherby had gone. Claire had gone. Only Lord Wetherby remained, looking at him like a pained groom. He dashed from the place and followed his hostess, speaking incoherently of burglars, outhouses, and misunderstandings. He even mentioned Chingachgook. But Lady Wetherby would not listen. Nobody would listen.

He found Lord Wetherby at his side, evidently prepared to go deeper into the subject. Lord Wetherby was looking now like a groom whose favourite horse has kicked him in the stomach.

'Wouldn't have thought it of you, Pickering,' said Lord Wetherby. Mr Pickering found no words. 'Wouldn't, honestly. Low trick!'

'But I tell you--'

'Devilish low trick!' repeated Lord Wetherby, with a shake of the head. 'Laws of hospitality--eaten our bread and salt, what!--all that sort of thing--kill valuable monkey--not done, you know--low, very low!'

And he followed his wife, now in full retreat, with scorn and repulsion written in her very walk.

'Mr Pickering!'

It was Claire. She stood there, holding something towards him, something that glittered in the moonlight. Her voice was hard, and the expression on her face suggested that in her estimation he was a particularly low-grade worm, one of the submerged tenth of the worm world.

'Eh?' said Mr Pickering, dazedly.

He looked at what she had in her hand, but it conveyed nothing to his overwrought mind.

'Take it!'

'Eh?'

Claire stamped.

'Very well,' she said.

She flung something on the ground before him--a small, sparkling object. Then she swept away, his eyes following her, and was lost in the darkness of the trees. Mechanically Mr Pickering stooped to pick up what she had let fall. He recognized it now. It was her engagement ring.

19

Bill leaned his back against the gate that separated the grounds of the bee-farm from the high road and mused pleasantly. He was alone. Elizabeth was walking up the drive on her way to the house to tell the news to Nutty. James, the cat, who had come down from the roof of the outhouse, was sharpening his claws on a neighbouring tree. After the whirl of excitement that had been his portion for the past few hours, the peace of it all appealed strongly to Bill. It suited the mood of quiet happiness which was upon him.

Quietly happy, that was how he felt now that it was all over. The white heat of emotion had subsided to a gentle glow of contentment conducive to thought. He thought tenderly of Elizabeth. She had turned to wave her hand before going into the house, and he was still smiling fatuously. Wonderful girl! Lucky chap he was! Rum, the way they had come together! Talk about Fate, what?

He stooped to tickle James, who had finished stropping his claws and was now enjoying a friction massage against his leg, and began to brood on the inscrutable way of Fate.

Rum thing, Fate! Most extraordinary!

Suppose he had never gone down to Marvis Bay that time. He had wavered between half a dozen places; it was pure chance that he had chosen Marvis Bay. If he hadn't he would never have met old Nutcombe. Probably old Nutcombe had wavered between half a dozen places too. If they hadn't both happened to choose Marvis Bay they would never have met. And if they hadn't been the only visitors there they might never have got to know each other. And if old Nutcombe hadn't happened to slice his approach shots he would never have put him under an obligation. Queer old buster, old Nutcombe, leaving a fellow he hardly knew from Adam a cool million quid just because he cured him of slicing.

It was at this point in his meditations that it suddenly occurred to Bill that he had not yet given a thought to what was immeasurably the most important of any of the things that ought to be occupying his mind just now. What was he to do about this Lord Dawlish business?

Life at Brookport had so accustomed him to being plain Bill Chalmers that it had absolutely slipped his mind that he was really Lord Dawlish, the one man in the world whom Elizabeth looked on as an enemy. What on earth was he to do about that? Tell her? But if he told her, wouldn't she chuck him on the spot?

This was awful. The dreamy sense of well-being left him. He straightened himself to face this problem, ignoring the hint of James, who was weaving circles about his legs expectant of more tickling. A man cannot spend his time tickling cats when he has to concentrate on a dilemma of this kind.

Suppose he didn't tell her? How would that work out? Was a marriage legal if the cove who was being married went through it under a false name? He seemed to remember seeing a melodrama in his boyhood the plot of which turned on that very point. Yes, it began to come back to him. An unpleasant bargee with a black moustache had said, 'This woman is not your wife!' and caused the dickens of a lot of unpleasantness; but there in its usual slipshod way memory failed. Had subsequent events proved the bargee right or wrong? It was a question for a lawyer to decide. Jerry Nichols would know. Well, there was plenty of time, thank goodness, to send Jerry Nichols a cable, asking for his professional opinion, and to get the straight tip long before the wedding day arrived.

Laying this part of it aside for the moment, and assuming that the thing could be worked, what about the money? Like a chump, he had told Elizabeth on the first day of his visit that he hadn't any money except what he made out of his job as secretary of the club. He couldn't suddenly spring five million dollars on her and pretend that he had forgotten all about it till then.

Of course, he could invent an imaginary uncle or something, and massacre him during the honeymoon. Something in that. He pictured the thing in his mind. Breakfast: Elizabeth doling out the scrambled eggs. 'What's the matter, Bill? Why did you exclaim like that? Is there some bad news in the letter you are reading?'

'Oh, it's nothing--only my Uncle John's died and left me five million dollars.'

The scene worked out so well that his mind became a little above itself. It suggested developments of serpentine craftiness. Why not get Jerry Nichols to write him a letter about his Uncle John and the five millions? Jerry liked doing that sort of thing. He would do it like a shot, and chuck in a lot of legal words to make it sound right. It began to be clear to Bill that any move he took--except full confession, at which he jibbed--was going to involve Jerry Nichols as an ally; and this discovery had a soothing effect on him. It made him feel that the responsibility had been shifted. He couldn't do anything till he had consulted Jerry, so there was no use in worrying. And, being one of those rare persons who can cease worrying instantly when they have convinced themselves that it is useless, he dismissed the entire problem from his mind and returned to the more congenial occupation of thinking of Elizabeth.

It was a peculiar feature of his position that he found himself unable to think of Elizabeth without thinking of Claire. He tried to, but failed. Every virtue in Elizabeth seemed to call up the recollection of a corresponding defect in Claire. It became almost mathematical. Elizabeth was so straight on the level they called it over here. Claire was a corkscrew among women. Elizabeth was sunny and cheerful. Querulousness was Claire's besetting sin. Elizabeth was such a pal. Claire had never been that. The effect that Claire had always had on him was to deepen the conviction, which never really left him, that he was a bit of an ass. Elizabeth, on the other hand, bucked him up and made him feel as if he really amounted to something.

How different they were! Their very voices--Elizabeth had a sort of quiet, soothing, pleasant voice, the kind of voice that somehow suggested that she thought a lot of a chap without her having to say it in so many words. Whereas Claire's voice--he had noticed it right from the beginning--Claire's voice--

While he was trying to make clear to himself just what it was about Claire's voice that he had not liked he was granted the opportunity of analysing by means of direct observation its failure to meet his vocal ideals, for at this moment it spoke behind him.

'Bill!'

She was standing in the road, her head still covered with that white, filmy something which had commended itself to Mr Pickering's eyes. She was looking at him in a way that seemed somehow to strike a note of appeal. She conveyed an atmosphere of softness and repentance, a general suggestion of prodigal daughters revisiting old homesteads.

'We seem always to be meeting at gates, don't we?' she said, with a faint smile.

It was a deprecating smile, wistful.

'Bill!' she said again, and stopped. She laid her left hand lightly on the gate. Bill had a sort of impression that there was some meaning behind this action; that, if he were less of a chump than Nature had made him, he would at this point receive some sort of a revelation. But, being as Nature had made him, he did not get it.

He was one of those men to whom a girl's left hand is simply a girl's left hand, irrespective of whether it wears rings on its third finger or not.

This having become evident to Claire after a moment of silence, she withdrew her hand in rather a disappointed way and prepared to attack the situation from another angle.

'Bill, I've come to say something to you.'

Bill was looking at her curiously. He could not have believed that, even after what had happened, he could face her with such complete detachment; that she could so extraordinarily not matter. He felt no resentment toward her. It was simply that she had gone out of his life.

'Bill, I've been a fool.'

He made no reply to this for he could think of no reply that was sufficiently polite. 'Yes?' sounded as if he meant to say that that was just what he had expected. 'Really?' had a sarcastic ring. He fell back on facial expression, to imply that he was interested and that she might tell all.

Claire looked away down the road and began to speak in a low, quick voice:

'I've been a fool all along. I lost you through being a fool. When I saw you dancing with that girl in the restaurant I didn't stop to think. I was angry. I was jealous. I ought to have trusted you, but--Oh, well, I was a fool.'

'My dear girl, you had a perfect right--'

'I hadn't. I was an idiot. Bill, I've come to ask you if you can't forgive me.'

'I wish you wouldn't talk like that--there's nothing to forgive.'

The look which Claire gave him in answer to this was meek and affectionate, but inwardly she was wishing that she could bang his head against the gate. His slowness was maddening. Long before this he should have leaped into the road in order to fold her in his arms. Her voice shook with the effort she had to make to keep it from sharpness.

'I mean, is it too late? I mean, can you really forgive me? Oh, Bill'--she stopped herself by the fraction of a second from adding 'you idiot'--'can't we be the same again to each other? Can't we--pretend all this has never happened?'

Exasperating as Bill's wooden failure to play the scene in the spirit in which her imagination had conceived it was to Claire, several excuses may be offered for him: He had opened the evening with a shattering blow at his faith in woman. He had walked twenty miles at a rapid pace. He had heard shots and found a corpse, and carried the latter by the tail across country. Finally, he had had the stunning shock of discovering that Elizabeth Boyd loved him. He was not himself. He found a difficulty in concentrating. With the result that, in answer to this appeal from a beautiful girl whom he had once imagined that he loved, all he could find to say was: 'How do you mean?'

Claire, never an adept at patience, just succeeded in swallowing the remark that sprang into her mind. It was incredible to her that a man could exist who had so little intuition. She had not anticipated the necessity of being compelled to put the substance of her meaning in so many blunt words, but it seemed that only so could she make him understand.

'I mean, can't we be engaged again, Bill?'

Bill's overtaxed brain turned one convulsive hand-spring, and came to rest with a sense of having dislocated itself. This was too much. This was not right. No fellow at the end of a hard evening ought to have to grapple with this sort of thing. What on earth did she mean, springing questions like that on him? How could they be engaged? She was going to marry someone else, and so was he. Something of these thoughts he managed to put into words:

'But you're engaged to--'

'I've broken my engagement with Mr Pickering.'

'Great Scot! When?'

'To-night. I found out his true character. He is cruel and treacherous. Something happened--it may sound nothing to you, but it gave me an insight into what he really was. Polly Wetherby had a little monkey, and just because it bit Mr Pickering he shot it.'

'Pickering!'

'Yes. He wasn't the sort of man I should have expected to do a mean, cruel thing like that. It sickened me. I gave him back his ring then and there. Oh, what a relief it was! What a fool I was ever to have got engaged to such a man.'

Bill was puzzled. He was one of those simple men who take their fellows on trust, but who, if once that trust is shattered, can never recover it. Like most simple men, he was tenacious of ideas when he got them, and the belief that Claire was playing fast and loose was not lightly to be removed from his mind. He had found her out during his self-communion that night, and he could never believe her again. He had the feeling that there was something behind what she was saying. He could not put his finger on the clue, but that there was a clue he was certain.

'I only got engaged to him out of pique. I was angry with you, and--Well, that's how it happened.'

Still Bill could not believe. It was plausible. It sounded true. And yet some instinct told him that it was not true. And while he waited, perplexed, Claire made a false step.

The thing had been so close to the top of her mind ever since she had come to the knowledge of it that it had been hard for her to keep it down. Now she could keep it down no longer.

'How wonderful about old Mr Nutcombe, Bill!' she said.

A vast relief rolled over Bill. Despite his instinct, he had been wavering. But now he understood. He had found the clue.

'You got my letter, then?'

'Yes; it was forwarded on from the theatre. I got it to-night.'

Too late she realized what she had said and the construction that an intelligent man would put on it. Then she reflected that Bill was not an intelligent man. She shot a swift glance at him. To all appearances he had suspected nothing.

'It went all over the place,' she hurried on. 'The people at the Portsmouth theatre sent it to the London office, who sent it home, and mother mailed it on to me.'

'I see.'

There was a silence. Claire drew a step nearer.

'Bill!' she said softly.

Bill shut his eyes. The moment had come which he had dreaded. Not even the thought that she was crooked, that she had been playing with him, could make it any better. She was a woman and he was a man. That was all that mattered, and nothing could alter it.

'I'm sorry,' he said. 'It's impossible.'

Claire stared at him in amazement. She had not been prepared for this. He met her eyes, but every nerve in his body was protesting.

'Bill!'

'I'm sorry.

'But, Bill!'

He set his teeth. It was just as bad as he had thought it would be.

'But, Bill, I've explained. I've told you how--'

'I know.'

Claire's eyes opened wide.

'I thought you loved me.' She came closer. She pulled at his sleeve. Her voice took on a note of soft raillery. 'Don't be absurd, Bill! You mustn't behave like a sulky schoolboy. It isn't like you, this. You surely don't want me to humble myself more than I have done.' She gave a little laugh. 'Why, Bill, I'm proposing to you! I know I've treated you badly, but I've explained why. You must be just enough to see that it wasn't altogether my fault. I'm only human. And if I made a mistake I've done all I can do to undo it. I--'

'Claire, listen: I'm engaged!'

She fell back. For the first time the sense of defeat came to her. She had anticipated many things. She had looked for difficulties. But she had not expected this. A feeling of cold fury surged over her at the way fate had tricked her. She had gambled recklessly on her power of fascination, and she had lost.

Mr Pickering, at that moment brooding in solitude in the smoking-room of Lady Wetherby's house, would have been relieved could he have known how wistfully she was thinking of him.

'You're engaged?'

'Yes.'

'Well!' She forced another laugh. 'How very--rapid of you! To whom?'

'To Elizabeth Boyd.'

'I'm afraid I'm very ignorant, but who is Elizabeth Boyd? The ornate lady you were dancing with at the restaurant?'

'No!'

'Who then?'

'She is old Ira Nutcombe's niece. The money ought to have been left to her. That was why I came over to America, to see if I could do anything for her.'

'And you're going to marry her? How very romantic--and convenient! What an excellent arrangement for her. Which of you suggested it?'

Bill drew in a deep breath. All this was, he supposed, unavoidable, but it was not pleasant.

Claire suddenly abandoned her pose of cool amusement. The fire behind it blazed through.

'You fool!' she cried passionately. 'Are you blind? Can't you see that this girl is simply after your money? A child could see it.'

Bill looked at her steadily.

'You're quite wrong. She doesn't know who I am.'

'Doesn't know who you are? What do you mean? She must know by this time that her uncle left his money to you.'

'But she doesn't know that I am Lord Dawlish. I came to America under another name. She knows me as Chalmers.'

Claire was silent for a moment.

'How did you get to know her?' she asked, more quietly.

'I met her brother by chance in New York.'

'By chance!'

'Quite by chance. A man I knew in England lent me his rooms in New York. He happened to be a friend of Boyd's. Boyd came to call on him one night, and found me.'

'Odd! Had your mutual friend been away from New York long?'

'Some months.'

'And in all that time Mr Boyd had not discovered that he had left. They must have been great friends! What happened then?'

'Boyd invited me down here.'

'Down here?'

'They live in this house.'

'Is Miss Boyd the girl who keeps the bee-farm?'

'She is.'

Claire's eyes suddenly lit up. She began to speak in a louder voice:

'Bill, you're an infant, a perfect infant! Of course, she's after your money. Do you really imagine for one instant that this Elizabeth Boyd of yours and her brother don't know as well as I do that you are really Lord Dawlish? I always thought you had a trustful nature! You tell me the brother met you by chance. Chance! And invited you down here. I bet he did! He knew his business! And now you're going to marry the girl so that they will get the money after all! Splendid! Oh, Bill, you're a wonderful, wonderful creature! Your innocence is touching.'

She swung round.

'Good night,' she called over her shoulder.

He could hear her laughing as she went down the road.

20

In the smoking-room of Lady Wetherby's house, chewing the dead stump of a once imposing cigar, Dudley Pickering sat alone with his thoughts. He had been alone for half an hour now. Once Lord Wetherby had looked in, to withdraw at once coldly, with the expression of a groom who has found loathsome things in the harness-room. Roscoe Sherriff, good, easy man, who could never dislike people, no matter what they had done, had come for a while to bear him company; but Mr Pickering's society was not for the time being entertaining. He had answered with grunts the Press-agent's kindly attempts at conversation, and the latter had withdrawn to seek a more congenial audience. And now Mr Pickering was alone, talking things over with his subconscious self.

A man's subconscious self is not the ideal companion. It lurks for the greater part of his life in some dark den of its own, hidden away, and emerges only to taunt and deride and increase the misery of a miserable hour. Mr Pickering's rare interviews with his subconscious self had happened until now almost entirely in the small hours of the night, when it had popped out to remind him, as he lay sleepless, that all flesh was grass and that he was not getting any younger. To-night, such had been the shock of the evening's events, it came to him at a time which was usually his happiest--the time that lay between dinner and bed. Mr Pickering at that point of the day was generally feeling his best. But to-night was different from the other nights of his life.

One may picture Subconscious Self as a withered, cynical, malicious person standing before Mr Pickering and regarding him with an evil smile. There has been a pause, and now Subconscious Self speaks again:

'You will have to leave to-morrow. Couldn't possibly stop on after what's happened. Now you see what comes of behaving like a boy.'

Mr Pickering writhed.

'Made a pretty considerable fool of yourself, didn't you, with your revolvers and your hidings and your trailings? Too old for that sort of thing, you know. You're getting on. Probably have a touch of lumbago to-morrow. You must remember you aren't a youngster. Got to take care of yourself. Next time you feel an impulse to hide in shrubberies and take moonlight walks through damp woods, perhaps you will listen to me.'

Mr Pickering relit the stump of his cigar defiantly and smoked in long gulps for a while. He was trying to persuade himself that all this was untrue, but it was not easy. The cigar became uncomfortably hot, and he threw it away. He fumbled in his waistcoat pocket and produced a diamond ring, at which he looked pensively.

'A pretty thing, is it not?' said Subconscious Self.

Mr Pickering sighed. That moment when Claire had thrown the ring at his feet and swept out of his life like an offended queen had been the culminating blow of a night of blows, the knock-out following on a series of minor punches. Subconscious Self seized the opportunity to become offensive again.

'You've lost her, all through your own silly fault,' it said. 'How on earth you can have been such a perfect fool beats me. Running round with a gun like a boy of fourteen! Well, it's done now and it can't be mended. Countermand the order for cake, send a wire putting off the wedding, dismiss the bridesmaids, tell the organist he can stop practising "The Voice that Breathed O'er Eden"--no wedding-bells for you! For Dudley Damfool Pickering, Esquire, the lonely hearth for evermore! Little feet pattering about the house? Not on your life! Childish voices sticking up the old man for half a dollar to buy candy? No, sir! Not for D. Bonehead Pickering, the amateur trailing arbutus!'

Subconscious Self may have had an undesirable way of expressing itself, but there was no denying the truth of what it said. Its words carried conviction. Mr Pickering replaced the ring in his pocket, and, burying his head in his hands, groaned in bitterness of spirit.

He had lost her. He must face the fact. She had thrown him over. Never now would she sit at his table, the brightest jewel of Detroit's glittering social life. She would have made a stir in Detroit. Now that city would never know her. Not that he was worrying much about Detroit. He was worrying about himself. How could he ever live without her?

This mood of black depression endured for a while, and then Mr Pickering suddenly became aware that Subconscious Self was sneering at him. 'You're a wonder!' said Subconscious Self.

'What do you mean?'

'Why, trying to make yourself think that at the bottom of your heart you aren't tickled to death that this has happened. You know perfectly well that you're tremendously relieved that you haven't got to marry the girl after all. You can fool everybody else, but you can't fool me. You're delighted, man, delighted!' The mere suggestion revolted Mr Pickering. He was on the point of indignant denial, when quite abruptly there came home to him the suspicion that the statement was not so preposterous after all. It seemed incredible and indecent that such a thing should be, but he could not deny, now that it was put to him point-blank in this way, that a certain sense of relief was beginning to mingle itself with his gloom. It was shocking to realize, but--yes, he actually was feeling as if he had escaped from something which he had dreaded. Half an hour ago there had been no suspicion of such an emotion among the many which had occupied his attention, but now he perceived it clearly. Half an hour ago he had felt like Lucifer hurled from heaven. Now, though how that train of thought had started he could not have said, he was distinctly conscious of the silver lining. Subconscious Self began to drive the thing home.

'Be honest with yourself,' it said. 'You aren't often. No man is. Look at the matter absolutely fairly. You know perfectly well that the mere idea of marriage has always scared you. You hate making yourself conspicuous in public. Think what it would be like, standing up there in front of all the world and getting married. And then--afterwards! Why on earth do you think that you would have been happy with this girl? What do you know about her except that she is a beauty? I grant you she's that, but are you aware of the infinitesimal part looks play in married life? My dear chap, better is it for a man that he marry a sympathetic gargoyle than a Venus with a streak of hardness in her. You know--and you would admit it if you were honest with yourself--that this girl is hard. She's got a chilled-steel soul.

'If you wanted to marry some one--and there's no earthly reason why you should, for your life's perfectly full and happy with your work--this is the last girl you ought to marry. You're a middle-aged man. You're set. You like life to jog along at a peaceful walk. This girl wants it to be a fox-trot. You've got habits which you have had for a dozen years. I ask you, is she the sort of girl to be content to be a stepmother to a middle-aged man's habits? Of course, if you were really in love with her, if she were your mate, and all that sort of thing, you would take a pleasure in making yourself over to suit her requirements. But you aren't in love with her. You are simply caught by her looks. I tell you, you ought to look on that moment when she gave you back your ring as the luckiest moment of your life. You ought to make a sort of anniversary of it. You ought to endow a hospital or something out of pure gratitude. I don't know how long you're going to live--if you act like a grown-up man instead of a boy and keep out of woods and shrubberies at night you may live for ever--but you will never have a greater bit of luck than the one that happened to you to-night.'

Mr Pickering was convinced. His spirits soared. Marriage! What was marriage? Slavery, not to be endured by your man of spirit. Look at all the unhappy marriages you saw everywhere. Besides, you had only to recall some of the novels and plays of recent years to get the right angle on marriage. According to the novelists and playwrights, shrewd fellows who knew what was what, if you talked to your wife about your business she said you had no soul; if you didn't, she said you didn't think enough of her to let her share your life. If you gave her expensive presents and an unlimited credit account, she complained that you looked on her as a mere doll; and if you didn't, she called you a screw. That was marriage. If it didn't get you with the left jab, it landed on you with the right upper-cut. None of that sort of thing for Dudley Pickering.

'You're absolutely right,' he said, enthusiastically. 'Funny I never looked at it that way before.'

Somebody was turning the door-handle. He hoped it was Roscoe Sherriff. He had been rather dull the last time Sherriff had looked in. He would be quite different now. He would be gay and sparkling. He remembered two good stories he would like to tell Sherriff.

The door opened and Claire came in. There was a silence. She stood looking at him in a way that puzzled Mr Pickering. If it had not been for her attitude at their last meeting and the manner in which she had broken that last meeting up, he would have said that her look seemed somehow to strike a note of appeal. There was something soft and repentant about her. She suggested, it seemed to Mr Pickering, the prodigal daughter revisiting the old homestead.

'Dudley!'

She smiled a faint smile, a wistful, deprecating smile. She was looking lovelier than ever. Her face glowed with a wonderful colour and her eyes were very bright. Mr Pickering met her gaze, and strange things began to happen to his mind, that mind which a moment before had thought so clearly and established so definite a point of view.

What a gelatine-backboned thing is man, who prides himself on his clear reason and becomes as wet blotting-paper at one glance from bright eyes! A moment before Mr Pickering had thought out the whole subject of woman and marriage in a few bold flashes of his capable brain, and thanked Providence that he was not as those men who take unto themselves wives to their undoing. Now in an instant he had lost that iron outlook. Reason was temporarily out of business. He was slipping.

'Dudley!'

For a space Subconscious Self thrust itself forward.

'Look out! Be careful!' it warned.

Mr Pickering ignored it. He was watching, fascinated, the glow on Claire's face, her shining eyes.

'Dudley, I want to speak to you.'

'Tell her you can only be seen by appointment! Escape! Bolt!'

Mr Pickering did not bolt. Claire came towards him, still smiling that pathetic smile. A thrill permeated Mr Pickering's entire one hundred and ninety-seven pounds, trickling down his spine like hot water and coming out at the soles of his feet. He had forgotten now that he had ever sneered at marriage. It seemed to him now that there was nothing in life to be compared with that beatific state, and that bachelors were mere wild asses of the desert.

Claire came and sat down on the arm of his chair. He moved convulsively, but he stayed where he was.

'Fool!' said Subconscious Self.

Claire took hold of his hand and patted it. He quivered, but remained.

'Ass!' hissed Subconscious Self.

Claire stopped patting his hand and began to stroke it. Mr Pickering breathed heavily.

'Dudley, dear,' said Claire, softly, 'I've been an awful fool, and I'm dreadful, dreadful sorry, and you're going to be the nicest, kindest, sweetest man on earth and tell me you've forgiven me. Aren't you?'

Mr Pickering's lips moved silently. Claire kissed the thinning summit of his head. There was a pause.

'Where is it?' she asked.

Mr Pickering started.

'Eh?'

'Where is it? Where did you put it? The ring, silly!'

Mr Pickering became aware that Subconscious Self was addressing him. The occasion was tense, and Subconscious Self did not mince its words.

'You poor, maudlin, sentimental, doddering chunk of imbecility,' it said; 'are there no limits to your insanity? After all I said to you just now, are you deliberately going to start the old idiocy all over again?'

'She's so beautiful!' pleaded Mr Pickering. 'Look at her eyes!'

'Ass! Don't you remember what I said about beauty?'

'Yes, I know, but--'

'She's as hard as nails.'

'I'm sure you're wrong.'

'I'm not wrong.'

'But she loves me.'

'Forget it!'

Claire jogged his shoulders.

'Dudley, dear, what are you sitting there dreaming for? Where did you put the ring?'

Mr Pickering fumbled for it, located it, produced it. Claire examined it fondly.

'Did she throw it at him and nearly break his heart!' she said.

'Bolt!' urged Subconscious Self. 'Fly! Go to Japan!'

Mr Pickering did not go to Japan. He was staring worshippingly at Claire. With rapturous gaze he noted the grey glory of her eyes, the delicate curve of her cheek, the grace of her neck. He had no time to listen to pessimistic warnings from any Gloomy Gus of a Subconscious Self. He was ashamed that he had ever even for a moment allowed himself to be persuaded that Claire was not all that was perfect. No more doubts and hesitations for Dudley Pickering. He was under the influence.

'There!' said Claire, and slipped the ring on her finger.

She kissed the top of his head once more.

'So there we are!' she said.

'There we are!' gurgled the infatuated Dudley.

'Happy now?'

'Ur-r!'

'Then kiss me.'

Mr Pickering kissed her.

'Dudley, darling,' said Claire, 'we're going to be awfully, awfully happy, aren't we?'

'You bet we are!' said Mr Pickering.

Subconscious Self said nothing, being beyond speech.

21

For some minutes after Claire had left him Bill remained where he was, motionless. He felt physically incapable of moving. All the strength that was in him he was using to throw off the insidious poison of her parting speech, and it became plainer to him with each succeeding moment that he would have need of strength.

It is part of the general irony of things that in life's crises a man's good qualities are often the ones that help him least, if indeed they do not actually turn treacherously and fight against him. It was so with Bill. Modesty, if one may trust to the verdict of the mass of mankind, is a good quality. It sweetens the soul and makes for a kindly understanding of one's fellows. But arrogance would have served Bill better now. It was his fatal habit of self-depreciation that was making Claire's words so specious as he stood there trying to cast them from his mind. Who was he, after all, that he should imagine that he had won on his personal merits a girl like Elizabeth Boyd?

He had the not very common type of mind that perceives the merit in others more readily than their faults, and in himself the faults more readily than the merit. Time and the society of a great number of men of different ranks and natures had rid him of the outer symbol of this type of mind, which is shyness, but it had left him still unconvinced that he amounted to anything very much as an individual.

This was the thought that met him every time he tried to persuade himself that what Claire had said was ridiculous, the mere parting shaft of an angry woman. With this thought as an ally her words took on a plausibility hard to withstand. Plausible! That was the devil of it. By no effort could he blind himself to the fact that they were that. In the light of Claire's insinuations what had seemed coincidences took on a more sinister character. It had seemed to him an odd and lucky chance that Nutty Boyd should have come to the rooms which he was occupying that night, seeking a companion. Had it been chance? Even at the time he had thought it strange that, on the strength of a single evening spent together, Nutty should have invited a total stranger to make an indefinite visit to his home. Had there been design behind the invitation?

Bill began to walk slowly to the house. He felt tired and unhappy. He meant to go to bed and try to sleep away these wretched doubts and questionings. Daylight would bring relief.

As he reached the open front door he caught the sound of voices, and paused for an instant, almost unconsciously, to place them. They came from one of the rooms upstairs. It was Nutty speaking now, and it was impossible for Bill not to hear what he said, for Nutty had abandoned his customary drawl in favour of a high, excited tone.

'Of course, you hate him and all that,' said Nutty; 'but after all you will be getting five million dollars that ought to have come to--'

That was all that Bill heard, for he had stumbled across the hall and was in his room, sitting on the bed and staring into the darkness with burning eyes. The door banged behind him.

So it was true!

There came a knock at the door. It was repeated. The handle turned.

'Is that you, Bill?'

It was Elizabeth's voice. He could just see her, framed in the doorway.

'Bill!'

His throat was dry. He swallowed, and found that he could speak.

'Yes?'

'Did you just come in?'

'Yes.'

'Then--you heard?'

'Yes.'

There was a long silence. Then the door closed gently and he heard her go upstairs.

22

When Bill woke next morning it was ten o'clock; and his first emotion, on a day that was to be crowded with emotions of various kinds, was one of shame. The desire to do the fitting thing is innate in man, and it struck Bill, as he hurried through his toilet, that he must be a shallow, coarse-fibred sort of person, lacking in the finer feelings, not to have passed a sleepless night. There was something revolting in the thought that, in circumstances which would have made sleep an impossibility for most men, he had slept like a log. He did not do himself the justice to recollect that he had had a singularly strenuous day, and that it is Nature's business, which she performs quietly and unromantically, to send sleep to tired men regardless of their private feelings; and it was in a mood of dissatisfaction with the quality of his soul that he left his room.

He had a general feeling that he was not much of a chap and that when he died--which he trusted would be shortly--the world would be well rid of him. He felt humble and depressed and hopeless.

Elizabeth met him in the passage. At the age of eleven or thereabouts women acquire a poise and an ability to handle difficult situations which a man, if he is lucky, manages to achieve somewhere in the later seventies. Except for a pallor strange to her face and a drawn look about her eyes, there was nothing to show that all was not for the best with Elizabeth in a best of all possible worlds. If she did not look jaunty, she at least looked composed. She greeted Bill with a smile.

'I didn't wake you. I thought I would let you sleep on.'

The words had the effect of lending an additional clarity and firmness of outline to the picture of himself which Bill had already drawn in his mind--of a soulless creature sunk in hoggish slumber.

'We've had breakfast. Nutty has gone for a walk. Isn't he wonderful nowadays? I've kept your breakfast warm for you.'

Bill protested. He might be capable of sleep, but he was not going to sink to food.

'Not for me, thanks,' he said, hollowly.

'Come along.'

'Honestly--'

'Come along.'

He followed her meekly. How grimly practical women were! They let nothing interfere with the essentials of life. It seemed all wrong. Nevertheless, he breakfasted well and gratefully, Elizabeth watching him in silence across the table.

'Finished?'

'Yes, thanks.'

She hesitated for a moment.

'Well, Bill, I've slept on it. Things are in rather a muddle, aren't they? I think I had better begin by explaining what led up to those words you heard Nutty say last night. Won't you smoke?'

'No, thanks.'

'You'll feel better if you do.'

'I couldn't.'

A bee had flown in through the open window. She followed it with her eye as it blundered about the room. It flew out again into the sunshine. She turned to Bill again.

'They were supposed to be words of consolation,' she said.

Bill said nothing.

'Nutty, you see, has his own peculiar way of looking at things, and it didn't occur to him that I might have promised to marry you because I loved you. He took it for granted that I had done it to save the Boyd home. He has been very anxious from the first that I should marry you. I think that that must have been why he asked you down here. He found out in New York, you know, who you were. Someone you met at supper recognized you, and told Nutty. So, as far as that is concerned, the girl you were speaking to at the gate last night was right.'

He started. 'You heard her?'

'I couldn't help it. She meant me to hear. She was raising her voice quite unnecessarily if she did not mean to include me in the conversation. I had gone in to find Nutty, and he was out, and I was coming back to you. That's how I was there. You didn't see me because your back was turned. She saw me.'

Bill met her eyes. 'You don't ask who she was?'

'It doesn't matter who she was. It's what she said that matters. She said that we knew you were Lord Dawlish.'

'Did you know?'

'Nutty told me two or three days ago.' Her voice shook and a flush came into her face. 'You probably won't believe it, but the news made absolutely no difference to me one way or the other. I had always imagined Lord Dawlish as a treacherous, adventurer sort of man, because I couldn't see how a man who was not like that could have persuaded Uncle Ira to leave him his money. But after knowing you even for this short time, I knew you were quite the opposite of that, and I remembered that the first thing you had done on coming into the money had been to offer me half, so the information that you were the Lord Dawlish whom I had been hating did not affect me. And the fact that you were rich and I was poor did not affect me either. I loved you, and that was all I cared about. If all this had not happened everything would have been all right. But, you see, nine-tenths of what that girl said to you was so perfectly true that it is humanly impossible for you not to believe the other tenth, which wasn't. And then, to clinch it, you hear Nutty consoling me. That brings me back to Nutty.'

'I--'

'Let me tell you about Nutty first. I said that he had always been anxious that I should marry you. Something happened last night to increase his anxiety. I have often wondered how he managed to get enough money to enable him to spend three days in New York, and last night he told me. He came in just after I had got back to the house after leaving you and that girl, and he was very scared. It seems that when the letter from the London lawyer came telling him that he had been left a hundred dollars, he got the idea of raising money on the strength of it. You know Nutty by this time, so you won't be surprised at the way he went about it. He borrowed a hundred dollars from the man at the chemist's on the security of that letter, and then--I suppose it seemed so easy that it struck him as a pity to let the opportunity slip--he did the same thing with four other tradesmen. Nutty's so odd that I don't know even now whether it ever occurred to him that he was obtaining money under false pretences; but the poor tradesmen hadn't any doubt about it at all. They compared notes and found what had happened, and last night, while we were in the woods, one of them came here and called Nutty a good many names and threatened him with imprisonment.

'You can imagine how delighted Nutty was when I came in and told him that I was engaged to you. In his curious way, he took it for granted that I had heard about his financial operations, and was doing it entirely for his sake, to get him out of his fix. And while I was trying to put him right on that point he began to console me. You see, Nutty looks on you as the enemy of the family, and it didn't strike him that it was possible that I didn't look on you in that light too. So, after being delighted for a while, he very sweetly thought that he ought to cheer me up and point out some of the compensations of marriage with you. And--Well, that was what you heard. There you have the full explanation. You can't possibly believe it.'

She broke off and began to drum her fingers on the table. And as she did so there came to Bill a sudden relief from all the doubts and black thoughts that had tortured him. Elizabeth was straight. Whatever appearances might seem to suggest, nothing could convince him that she was playing an underhand game. It was as if something evil had gone out of him. He felt lighter, cleaner. He could breathe.

'I do believe it,' he said. 'I believe every word you say.'

She shook her head.

'You can't in the face of the evidence.'

'I believe it.'

'No. You may persuade yourself for the moment that you do, but after a while you will have to go by the evidence. You won't be able to help yourself. You haven't realized what a crushing thing evidence is. You have to go by it against your will. You see, evidence is the only guide. You don't know that I am speaking the truth; you just feel it. You're trusting your heart and not your head. The head must win in the end. You might go on believing for a time, but sooner or later you would be bound to begin to doubt and worry and torment yourself. You couldn't fight against the evidence, when once your instinct--or whatever it is that tells you that I am speaking the truth--had begun to weaken. And it would weaken. Think what it would have to be fighting all the time. Think of the case your intelligence would be making out, day after day, till it crushed you. It's impossible that you could keep yourself from docketing the evidence and arranging it and absorbing it. Think! Consider what you know are actual facts! Nutty invites you down here, knowing that you are Lord Dawlish. All you know about my attitude towards Lord Dawlish is what I told you on the first morning of your visit. I told you I hated him. Yet, knowing you are Lord Dawlish, I become engaged to you. Directly afterwards you hear Nutty consoling me as if I were marrying you against my will. Isn't that an absolutely fair statement of what has happened? How could you go on believing me with all that against you?'

'I know you're straight. You couldn't do anything crooked.'

'The evidence proves that I did.'

'I don't care.'

'Not now.'

'Never.'

She shook her head.

'It's dear of you, Bill, but you're promising an impossibility. And just because it's impossible, and because I love you too much to face what would be bound to happen, I'm going to send you away.'

'Send me away!'

'Yes. It's going to hurt. You don't know how it's going to hurt, Bill; but it's the only thing to do. I love you too much to live with you for the rest of my life wondering all the time whether you still believed or whether the weight of the evidence had crushed out that tiny little spark of intuition which is all that makes you believe me now. You could never know the truth for certain, you see--that's the horror of it; and sometimes you would be able to make yourself believe, but more often, in spite of all you could do, you would doubt. It would poison both our lives. Little things would happen, insignificant in themselves, which would become tremendously important just because they added a little bit more to the doubt which you would never be able to get rid of.

'When we had quarrels--which we should, as we are both human--they wouldn't be over and done with in an hour. They would stick in your mind and rankle, because, you see, they might be proofs that I didn't really love you. And then when I seemed happy with you, you would wonder if I was acting. I know all this sounds morbid and exaggerated, but it isn't. What have you got to go on, as regards me? What do you really know of me? If something like this had happened after we had been married half a dozen years and really knew each other, we could laugh at it. But we are strangers. We came together and loved each other because there was something in each of us which attracted the other. We took that little something as a foundation and built on it. But what has happened has knocked away our poor little foundation. That's all. We don't really know anything at all about each other for certain. It's just guesswork.'

She broke off and looked at the clock.

'I had better be packing if you're to catch the train.'

He gave a rueful laugh.

'You're throwing me out!'

'Yes, I am. I want you to go while I am strong enough to let you go.'

'If you really feel like that, why send me away?'

'How do you know I really feel like that? How do you know that I am not pretending to feel like that as part of a carefully-prepared plan?'

He made an impatient gesture.

'Yes, I know,' she said. 'You think I am going out of my way to manufacture unnecessary complications. I'm not; I'm simply looking ahead. If I were trying to trap you for the sake of your money, could I play a stronger card than by seeming anxious to give you up? If I were to give in now, sooner or later that suspicion would come to you. You would drive it away. You might drive it away a hundred times. But you couldn't kill it. In the end it would beat you.'

He shrugged his shoulders helplessly.

'I can't argue.'

'Nor can I. I can only put very badly things which I know are true. Come and pack.'

'I'll do it. Don't you bother.'

'Nonsense! No man knows how to pack properly.'

He followed her to his room, pulled out his suitcase, the symbol of the end of all things, watched her as she flitted about, the sun shining on her hair as she passed and repassed the window. She was picking things up, folding them, packing them. Bill looked on with an aching sense of desolation. It was all so friendly, so intimate, so exactly as it would have been if she were his wife. It seemed to him needlessly cruel that she should be playing on this note of domesticity at the moment when she was barring for ever the door between him and happiness. He rebelled helplessly against the attitude she had taken. He had not thought it all out, as she had done. It was folly, insanity, ruining their two lives like this for a scruple.

Once again he was to encounter that practical strain in the feminine mind which jars upon a man in trouble. She was holding something in her hand and looking at it with concern.

'Why didn't you tell me?' she said. 'Your socks are in an awful state, poor boy!'

He had the feeling of having been hit by something. A man has not a woman's gift of being able to transfer his mind at will from sorrow to socks.

'Like sieves!' She sighed. A troubled frown wrinkled her forehead. 'Men are so helpless! Oh, dear, I'm sure you don't pay any attention to anything important. I don't believe you ever bother your head about keeping warm in winter and not getting your feet wet. And now I shan't be able to look after you!'

Bill's voice broke. He felt himself trembling.

'Elizabeth!'

She was kneeling on the floor, her head bent over the suitcase. She looked up and met his eyes.

'It's no use, Bill, dear. I must. It's the only way.'

The sense of the nearness of the end broke down the numbness which held him.

'Elizabeth! It's so utterly absurd. It's just--chucking everything away!'

She was silent for a moment.

'Bill, dear, I haven't said anything about it before but don't you see that there's my side to be considered too? I only showed you that you could never possibly know that I loved you. How am I to know that you really love me?'

He had moved a step towards her. He drew back, chilled.

'I can't do more than tell you,' he said.

'You can't. And there you have put in two words just what I've been trying to make clear all the time. Don't you see that that's the terrible thing about life, that nobody can do more than tell anybody anything? Life's nothing but words, words, words; and how are we to know when words are true? How am I to know that you didn't ask me to marry you out of sheer pity and an exaggerated sense of justice?'

He stared at her.

'That,' he said, 'is absolutely ridiculous!'

'Why? Look at it as I should look at it later on, when whatever it is inside me that tell me it's ridiculous now had died. Just at this moment, while we're talking here, there's something stronger than reason which tells me you really do love me. But can't you understand that that won't last? It's like a candle burning on a rock with the tide coming up all round it. It's burning brightly enough now, and we can see the truth by the light of it. But the tide will put it out, and then we shall have nothing left to see by. There's a great black sea of suspicion and doubt creeping up to swamp the little spark of intuition inside us.

'I will tell you what would happen to me if I didn't send you away. Remember I heard what that girl was saying last night. Remember that you hated the thought of depriving me of Uncle Ira's money so much that your first act was to try to get me to accept half of it. The quixotic thing is the first that it occurs to you to do, because you're like that, because you're the straightest, whitest man I've ever known or shall know. Could anything be more likely, looking at it as I should later on, than that you should have hit on the idea of marrying me as the only way of undoing the wrong you thought you had done me? I've been foolish about obligations all my life. I've a sort of morbid pride that hates the thought of owing anything to anybody, of getting anything that I have not earned. By and by, if I were to marry you, a little rotten speck of doubt would begin to eat its way farther and farther into me. It would be the same with you. We should react on each other. We should be watching each other, testing each other, trying each other out all the time. It would be horrible, horrible!'

He started to speak; then, borne down by the hopelessness of it, stopped. Elizabeth stood up. They did not look at each other. He strapped the suitcase and picked it up. The end of all things was at hand.

'Better to end it all cleanly, Bill,' she said, in a low voice. 'It will hurt less.'

He did not speak.

'I'll come down to the gate with you.'

They walked in silence down the drive. The air was heavy with the torpor of late summer. The sun beat down on them, turning her hair to burnished gold. They reached the gate.

'Good-bye, Bill, dear.'

He took her hand dully.

'Good-bye,' he said.

Elizabeth stood at the gate, watching. He swung down the road with long strides. At the bend he turned and for a moment stood there, as if waiting for her to make some sign. Then he fell into his stride again and was gone. Elizabeth leaned on the gate. Her face was twisted, and she clutched the warm wood as if it gave her strength.

The grounds were very empty. The spirit of loneliness brooded on them. Elizabeth walked slowly back to the house. Nutty was coming towards her from the orchard.

'Halloa!' said Nutty.

He was cheerful and debonair. His little eyes were alight with contentment. He hummed a tune.

'Where's Dawlish?' he said.

'He has gone.'

Nutty's tune failed in the middle of a bar. Something in his sister's voice startled him. The glow of contentment gave way to a look of alarm.

'Gone? How do you mean--gone? You don't mean--gone?'

'Yes.'

'Gone away?'

'Gone away.'

They had reached the house before he spoke again.

'You don't mean--gone away?'

'Yes.'

'Do you mean--gone away?'

'Yes.'

'You aren't going to marry him?'

'No.'

The world stood still. The noise of the crickets and all the little sounds of summer smote on Nutty's ear in one discordant shriek.

'Oh, gosh!' he exclaimed, faintly, and collapsed on the front steps like a jelly-fish.

23

The spectacle of Nutty in his anguish did not touch Elizabeth. Normally a kind-hearted girl, she was not in the least sorry for him. She had even taken a bitter pleasure and found a momentary relief in loosing the thunderbolt which had smitten him down. Even if it has to manufacture it, misery loves company. She watched Nutty with a cold and uninterested eye as he opened his mouth feebly, shut it again and reopened it; and then when it became apparent that these manoeuvres were about to result in speech, she left him and walked quickly down the drive again. She had the feeling that if Nutty were to begin to ask her questions--and he had the aspect of one who is about to ask a thousand--she would break down. She wanted solitude and movement, so she left Nutty sitting and started for the gate. Presently she would go and do things among the beehives; and after that, if that brought no solace, she would go in and turn the house upside down and get dusty and tired. Anything to occupy herself.

Reaction had set in. She had known it would come, and had made ready to fight against it, but she had underestimated the strength of the enemy. It seemed to her, in those first minutes, that she had done a mad thing; that all those arguments which she had used were far-fetched and ridiculous. It was useless to tell herself that she had thought the whole thing out clearly and had taken the only course that could have been taken. With Bill's departure the power to face the situation steadily had left her. All she could think of was that she loved him and that she had sent him away.

Why had he listened to her? Why hadn't he taken her in his arms and told her not to be a little fool? Why did men ever listen to women? If he had really loved her, would he have gone away? She tormented herself with this last question for a while. She was still tormenting herself with it when a melancholy voice broke in on her meditations.

'I can't believe it,' said the voice. She turned, to perceive Nutty drooping beside her. 'I simply can't believe it!'

Elizabeth clenched her teeth. She was not in the mood for Nutty.

'It will gradually sink in,' she said, unsympathetically.

'Did you really send him away?'

'I did.'

'But what on earth for?'

'Because it was the only thing to do.'

A light shone on Nutty's darkness.

'Oh, I say, did he hear what I said last night?'

'He did hear what you said last night.'

Nutty's mouth opened slowly.

'Oh!'

Elizabeth said nothing.

'But you could have explained that.'

'How?'

'Oh, I don't know--somehow or other.' He appeared to think. 'But you said it was you who sent him away.'

'I did.'

'Well, this beats me!'

Elizabeth's strained patience reached the limit.

'Nutty, please!' she said. 'Don't let's talk about it. It's all over now.'

'Yes, but--'

'Nutty, don't! I can't stand it. I'm raw all over. I'm hating myself. Please don't make it worse.'

Nutty looked at her face, and decided not to make it worse. But his anguish demanded some outlet. He found it in soliloquy.

'Just like this for the rest of our lives!' he murmured, taking in the farm-grounds and all that in them stood with one glassy stare of misery. 'Nothing but ghastly bees and sweeping floors and fetching water till we die of old age! That is, if those blighters don't put me in jail for getting that money out of them. How was I to know that it was obtaining money under false pretences? It simply seemed to me a darned good way of collecting a few dollars. I don't see how I'm ever going to pay them back, so I suppose it's prison for me all right.'

Elizabeth had been trying not to listen to him, but without success.

'I'll look after that, Nutty. I have a little money saved up, enough to pay off what you owe. I was saving it for something else, but never mind.'

'Awfully good of you,' said Nutty, but his voice sounded almost disappointed. He was in the frame of mind which resents alleviation of its gloom. He would have preferred at that moment to be allowed to round off the picture of the future which he was constructing in his mind with a reel or two showing himself brooding in a cell. After all, what difference did it make to a man of spacious tastes whether he languished for the rest of his life in a jail or on a farm in the country? Jail, indeed, was almost preferable. You knew where you were when you were in prison. They didn't spring things on you. Whereas life on a farm was nothing but one long succession of things sprung on you. Now that Lord Dawlish had gone, he supposed that Elizabeth would make him help her with the bees again. At this thought he groaned aloud. When he contemplated a lifetime at Flack's, a lifetime of bee-dodging and carpet-beating and water-lugging, and reflected that, but for a few innocent words--words spoken, mark you, in a pure spirit of kindliness and brotherly love with the object of putting a bit of optimistic pep into sister!--he might have been in a position to touch a millionaire brother-in-law for the needful whenever he felt disposed, the iron entered into Nutty's soul. A rotten, rotten world!

Nutty had the sort of mind that moves in circles. After contemplating for a time the rottenness of the world, he came back to the point from which he had started.

'I can't understand it,' he said. 'I can't believe it.'

He kicked a small pebble that lay convenient to his foot.

'You say you sent him away. If he had legged it on his own account, because of what he heard me say, I could understand that. But why should you--'

It became evident to Elizabeth that, until some explanation of this point was offered to him, Nutty would drift about in her vicinity, moaning and shuffling his feet indefinitely.

'I sent him away because I loved him,' she said, 'and because, after what had happened, he could never be certain that I loved him. Can you understand that?'

'No,' said Nutty, frankly, 'I'm darned if I can! It sounds loony to me.'

'You can't see that it wouldn't have been fair to him to marry him?'

'No.'

The doubts which she was trying to crush increased the violence of their attack. It was not that she respected Nutty's judgement in itself. It was that his view of what she had done chimed in so neatly with her own. She longed for someone to tell her that she had done right: someone who would bring back that feeling of certainty which she had had during her talk with Bill. And in these circumstances Nutty's attitude had more weight than on its merits it deserved. She wished she could cry. She had a feeling that if she once did that the right outlook would come back to her.

Nutty, meanwhile, had found another pebble and was kicking it sombrely. He was beginning to perceive something of the intricate and unfathomable workings of the feminine mind. He had always looked on Elizabeth as an ordinary good fellow, a girl whose mind worked in a more or less understandable way. She was not one of those hysterical women you read about in the works of the novelists; she was just a regular girl. And yet now, at the one moment of her life when everything depended on her acting sensibly, she had behaved in a way that made his head swim when he thought of it. What it amounted to was that you simply couldn't understand women.

Into this tangle of silent sorrow came a hooting automobile. It drew up at the gate and a man jumped out.

24

The man who had alighted from the automobile was young and cheerful. He wore a flannel suit of a gay blue and a straw hat with a coloured ribbon, and he looked upon a world which, his manner seemed to indicate, had been constructed according to his own specifications through a single eyeglass. When he spoke it became plain that his nationality was English.

Nutty regarded his beaming countenance with a lowering hostility. The indecency of anyone being cheerful at such a time struck him forcibly. He would have liked mankind to have preserved till further notice a hushed gloom. He glared at the young man.

Elizabeth, such was her absorption in her thoughts, was not even aware of his presence till he spoke to her.

'I beg your pardon, is this Flack's?'

She looked up and met that sunny eyeglass.

'This is Flack's,' she said.

'Thank you,' said the young man.

The automobile, a stout, silent man at the helm, throbbed in the nervous way automobiles have when standing still, suggesting somehow that it were best to talk quick, as they can give you only a few minutes before dashing on to keep some other appointment. Either this or a natural volatility lent a breezy rapidity to the visitor's speech. He looked at Elizabeth across the gate, which it had not occurred to her to open, as if she were just what he had expected her to be and a delight to his eyes, and burst into speech.

'My name's Nichols--J. Nichols. I expect you remember getting a letter from me a week or two ago?'

The name struck Elizabeth as familiar. But he had gone on to identify himself before she could place it in her mind.

'Lawyer, don't you know. Wrote you a letter telling you that your Uncle Ira Nutcombe had left all his money to Lord Dawlish.'

'Oh, yes,' said Elizabeth, and was about to invite him to pass the barrier, when he began to speak again.

'You know, I want to explain that letter. Wrote it on a sudden impulse, don't you know. The more I have to do with the law, the more it seems to hit me that a lawyer oughtn't to act on impulse. At the moment, you see, it seemed to me the decent thing to do--put you out of your misery, and so forth--stop your entertaining hopes never to be realized, what? and all that sort of thing. You see, it was like this: Bill--I mean Lord Dawlish--is a great pal of mine, a dear old chap. You ought to know him. Well, being in the know, you understand, through your uncle having deposited the will with us, I gave Bill the tip directly I heard of Mr Nutcombe's death. I sent him a telephone message to come to the office, and I said: "Bill, old man, this old buster"--I beg your pardon, this old gentleman--"has left you all his money." Quite informal, don't you know, and at the same time, in the same informal spirit, I wrote you the letter.' He dammed the torrent for a moment. 'By the way, of course you are Miss Elizabeth Boyd, what?'

'Yes.'

The young man seemed relieved.

'I'm glad of that,' he said. 'Funny if you hadn't been. You'd have wondered what on earth I was talking about.'

In spite of her identity, this was precisely what Elizabeth was doing. Her mind, still under a cloud, had been unable to understand one word of Mr Nichols's discourse. Judging from his appearance, which was that of a bewildered hosepipe or a snake whose brain is being momentarily overtaxed, Nutty was in the same difficulty. He had joined the group at the gate, abandoning the pebble which he had been kicking in the background, and was now leaning on the top bar, a picture of silent perplexity.

'You see, the trouble is,' resumed the young man, 'my governor, who's the head of the firm, is all for doing things according to precedent. He loves red tape--wears it wrapped round him in winter instead of flannel. He's all for doing things in the proper legal way, which, as I dare say you know, takes months. And, meanwhile, everybody's wondering what's happening and who has got the money, and so on and so forth. I thought I would skip all that and let you know right away exactly where you stood, so I wrote you that letter. I don't think my temperament's quite suited to the law, don't you know, and if he ever hears that I wrote you that letter I have a notion that the governor will think so too. So I came over here to ask you, if you don't mind, not to mention it when you get in touch with the governor. I frankly admit that that letter, written with the best intentions, was a bloomer.'

With which manly admission the young man paused, and allowed the rays of his eyeglass to play upon Elizabeth in silence. Elizabeth tried to piece together what little she understood of his monologue.

'You mean that you want me not to tell your father that I got a letter from you?'

'Exactly that. And thanks very much for not saying "without prejudice," or anything of that kind. The governor would have.'

'But I don't understand. Why should you think that I should ever mention anything to your father?'

'Might slip out, you know, without your meaning it.'

'But when? I shall never meet your father.'

'You might quite easily. He might want to see you about the money.'

'The money?'

The eyebrow above the eyeglass rose, surprised.

'Haven't you had a letter from the governor?'

'No.'

The young man made a despairing gesture.

'I took it for granted that it had come on the same boat that I