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Simon the Jester

Chapter IX

We sprang apart, for all the world like a guilty pair surprised. Luckily the room was in its normal dim state of illumination, so that to one suddenly entering, the expression on our faces was not clearly visible; on the other hand, the subdued light gave a romantic setting to the abominable situation.

Lola saved it, however. She rushed to Dale.

"Do you know what Mr. de Gex was just telling me? His illness -- it is worse than any one thought. It's incurable. He can't live long; he must die soon. It's dreadful -- dreadful! Did you know it?"

Dale looked from her to me, and after a slight pause, came forward.

"Is this true, Simon?"

A plague on the woman for catching me in the trap! Before Dale came in I was on the point of putting an airy construction on my indiscreet speech. I had no desire to discuss my longevity with any one. I want to keep my miserable secret to myself. It was exasperating to have to entrust it even to Dale. And yet, if I repudiated her implied explanation of our apparent embrace it would have put her hopelessly in the wrong. I had to support her.

"It's what the doctors say," I replied, "but whether it's true or not is another matter."

Again he looked queerly from me to Lola and from Lola back to me. His first impression of our attitude had been a shock from which he found it difficult to recover. I smiled, and, although perfectly innocent, felt a villain.

"Madame Brandt is good enough to be soft-hearted and to take a tragic view of a most commonplace contingency."

"But it isn't commonplace. By God, it's horrible!" cried the boy, the arrested love for me suddenly gushing into his heart. "I had no idea of it. In Heaven's name, Simon, why didn't you tell me? My dear old Simon."

Tears rushed into his eyes and he gripped my hand until I winced. I put my other hand on his shoulder and laughed with a contorted visage.

"My good Dale, the moribund are fragile."

"Oh, Lord, man, how can you make a jest of it?"

"Would you have me drive about in a hearse, instead of a cab, by way of preparation?"

"But what have the doctors told you?" asked Lola.

"My two dear people!" I cried, "for goodness' sake don't fall over me in this way. I'm not going to die to-morrow unless my cook poisons me or I'm struck by lightning. I'm going to live for a deuce of a time yet. A couple of weeks at least. And you'll very much oblige me by not whispering a word abroad about what you've heard this afternoon. It would cause me infinite annoyance. And meanwhile I suggest to you, Dale, as the lawyers say, that you have been impolite enough not to say how-do-you-do to your hostess."

He turned to her rather sheepishly, and apologised. My news had bowled him over, he declared. He shook hands with her, laughed and walked Adolphus about on his hind legs.

"But where have you dropped from?" she asked.

"Berlin. I came straight through. Didn't you get my wire?"

"No."

"I sent one."

"I never got it."

He swung his arms about in a fine rage.

"If ever I get hold of that son of Satan I'll murder him. He was covered up to his beastly eyebrows in silver lace and swords and whistles and medals and things. He walked up and down the railway station as if he owned the German navy and ran trains as a genteel hobby. I gave him ten marks to send the telegram. The miserable beast has sneaked the lot. I'll get at the railway company through the Embassy and have the brute sacked and put in prison. Did you ever hear of such a skunk?"

"He must have thought you a very simple and charming young Englishman," said I.

"You've done the same thing yourself!" he retorted indignantly.

"Pardon me," said I. "If I do send a telegram in that loose way, I choose a humble and honest-looking porter and give him the exact fee for the telegram and a winning smile."

"Rot!" said Dale, and turning to Lola -- "He has demoralised the whole railway system of Europe with his tips. I've seen him give a franc to the black greasy devil that bangs at the carriage wheels with a bit of iron. He would give anybody anything."

He had recovered his boyish pride in my ridiculous idiosyncracies, and was in process of illustrating again to Lola what a "splendid chap" I was. Poor lad! If he only knew what a treacherous, traitorous, Machiavelli of a hero he had got. For the moment I suffered from a nasty crick in the conscience.

"Wouldn't he, Adolphus, you celestial old blackguard?" he laughed. Then suddenly: "My hat! You two are fond of darkness! It gives me the creeps. Do you mind, Lola, if I turn on the light?"

He marched in his young way across to the switches and set the room in the blaze he loved. My crick of the conscience was followed by an impulse of resentment. He took it for granted that his will was law in the house. He swaggered around the room with a proprietary air. He threw in the casual "Lola" as if he owned her. Dale is the most delightful specimen of the modern youth of my acquaintance. But even Dale, with all his frank charm of manner, has the modern youth's offhand way with women. I often wonder how women abide it. But they do, more shame to them, and suffer more than they realise by their indulgence. When next I meet Maisie Ellerton I will read her a wholesome lecture, for her soul's good, on the proper treatment a self-respecting female should apply to the modern young man.

Dale filled the room with his clear young laugh, and turned on every light in the place. Lola and I exchanged glances -- she had adopted her usual lazy pantherine attitude in the armchair -- and her glance was not that of a happy woman to whom a longed-for lover had unexpectedly come. Its real significance I could not divine, but it was more wistful than merely that of a fellow-conspirator.

"By George!" cried Dale, pulling up a chair by Lola's side, and stretching out his long, well-trousered legs in front of the fire. "It's good to come back to civilisation and a Christian language and a fireside -- and other things," he added, squeezing Lola's hand. "If only it had not been for this horrible news about you, dear old man -- -- "

"Oh, do forget it and give me a little peace!" I cried. "Why have you come back all of a sudden?"

"The Wymington people wired for me. It seems the committee are divided between me and Sir Gerald Macnaughton."

"He has strong claims," said I. "He has been Mayor of the place and got knighted by mistake. He also gives large dinners and wears a beautiful diamond pin."

"I believe he goes to bed in it. Oh, he's an awful ass! It was he who said at a public function 'The Mayor of Wymington must be like Caesar's wife -- all things to all men!' Oh, he's a colossal ass! And his conceit! My word!"

"You needn't expatiate on it," said I. "I who speak have suffered much at the hands of Sir Gerald Macnaughton."

"If he did get into Parliament he'd expect an armchair to be put for him next to the Speaker. Really, Lola, you never saw such a chap. If there was any one else up against me I wouldn't mind. Anyway, I'm running down to Wymington to-morrow to interview the committee. And if they choose me, then it'll be a case of 'Lord don't help me and don't help the b'ar, and you'll see the derndest best b'ar fight that ever was.' I'll make things hum in Wymington!"

He went on eagerly to explain how he would make things hum. For the moment he had forgotten his enchantress who, understanding nothing of platforms and planks and electioneering machinery, smiled with pensive politeness at the fire. Here was the Dale that I knew and loved, boyish, impetuous, slangy, enthusiastic. His dark eyes flashed, and he threw back his head and laughed, as he enunciated his brilliant ideas for capturing the constituency.

"When I was working for you, I made love to half the women in the place. You never knew that, you dear old stick. Now I'm going in on my own account I'll make love to the whole crowd. You won't mind, Lola, will you? There's safety in numbers. And when I have made love to them one by one I'll get 'em all together and make love to the conglomerate mass! And then I'll rake up all the prettiest women in London and get 'em down there to humbug the men -- "

"Lady Kynnersley will doubtless be there," said I; "and I don't quite see her -- "

He broke in with a laugh: "Oh! the mater! I'll fix up her job all right. She'll just love it, won't she? And then I know a lot of silly asses with motor-cars who'll come down. They can't talk for cob-nuts, and think the Local Option has something to do with vivisection, and have a vague idea that champagne will be cheaper if we get Tariff Reform -- but they'll make a devil of a noise at meetings and tote people round the country in their cars holding banners with 'Vote for Kynnersley' on them. That's a sound idea, isn't it?"

I gravely commended the statesmanlike sagacity of his plan of campaign, and promised to write as soon as I got home to one or two members of the committee whom I suspected of pro-Macnaughton leanings.

"I do hope they'll adopt you!" I cried fervently.

"So do I," murmured Lola in her low notes.

"If they don't," said Dale, "I'll ask Raggles to give me an unpaid billet somewhere. But," he added, with a sigh, "that will be an awful rotten game in comparison."

"I'm afraid you won't make Raggles hum," said I.

He laughed, rose and straddled across the hearthrug, his back to the fire.

"He'd throw me out if I tried, wouldn't he? But if they do adopt me -- I swear I'll make you proud of me, Simon. I'll stick my soul into it. It's the least I can do in this horrid cuckoo sort of proceeding, and I feel I shall be fighting for you as well as for myself. My dear old chap, you know what I mean, don't you?"

I knew, and was touched. I wished him God-speed with all my heart. He was a clean, honest, generous gentleman, and I admired, loved and respected him as he stood there full of his youth and hope. I suddenly felt quite old and withered at the root of my being, like some decrepit king who hands his crown to the young prince. I rose to take my leave (for what advantage was there in staying?) and felt that I was abandoning to Dale other things beside my crown.

Lola's strong, boneless hand closed round mine in a more enveloping grip than ever. She looked at me appealingly.

"Shall I see you again before you go?"

"Before you go?" cried Dale. "Where are you off to?"

"Somewhere south, out of the fogs."

"When?"

"At once," said I.

He turned to our hostess. "We can't let him go like that. I wonder if you could fix up a little dinner here, Lola, for the three of us. It would be ripping, so cosy, you know."

He glowed with the preposterous inspiration. Lola began politely:

"Of course, if Mr. de Gex -- -- "

"It would be delightful," said I, "but I'm starting at once -- to-morrow or the day after. We will have the dinner when I come back and you are a full-blown Member of Parliament."

I made my escape and fled to my own cheerful library. It is oak- panelled and furnished with old oak, and the mezzo-tints on the walls are mellow. Of the latter, I have a good collection, among them a Prince Rupert of which I am proud. I threw myself, a tired man, into an armchair by the fire, and rang the bell for a brandy and soda. Oh, the comfort of the rooms, the comfort of Rogers, the comfort of the familiar backs of the books in the shelves! I felt loth to leave it all and go vagabonding about the cold world on my lunatic adventure. For the first time in my life I cursed Marcus Aurelius. I shook my fist at him as he stood on the shelf within easy reach of my hand. It was he who had put into my head this confounded notion of achieving eumoiriety. Am I dealing to myself, I asked, a happy lot and portion? Certainly not, I replied, and when Rogers brought me my brandy and soda I drank it off desperately. After that I grew better, and drew up a merry little Commination Service.

A plague on the little pain inside.

A plague on Lady Kynnersley for weeping me into my rash undertaking.

A plague on Professor Anastasius Papadopoulos for aiding and abetting Lady Kynnersley.

A plague on Captain Vauvenarde for running away from his wife; for giving up the army; for not letting me know whether he is alive or dead; for being, I'll warrant him, in the most uncomfortable and ungetatable spot on the globe.

A plague on Dale for becoming infatuated with Lola Brandt. A plague on him for beguiling me to her acquaintance; for bursting into the room at that unfortunate moment; for his generous, unsuspecting love for me; for his youth and hope and charm; for asking me to dine with Lola and himself in ripping cosiness.

A plague on myself -- just to show that I am broad-minded.

And lastly, a plague, a special plague, a veritable murrain on Lola Brandt for complicating the splendid singleness of my purpose. I don't know what to think of myself. I have become a common conundrum -- which provides the lowest form of intellectual amusement. It is all her fault.

Listen. I set out to free a young man of brilliant promise, at his mother's earnest entreaty, from an entanglement with an impossible lady, and to bring him to the feet of the most charming girl in the world who is dying of love for him. Could intentions be simpler or more honourable or more praiseworthy?

I find myself, after two or three weeks, the lady's warm personal friend, to a certain extent her champion bound by a quixotic oath to restore her husband to her arms, and regarding my poor Dale with a feeling which is neither more nor less than green-eyed jealousy. I am praying heaven to grant his adoption by the Wymington committee, not because it will be the first step of the ladder of his career, but because the work and excitement of a Parliamentary election will prohibit overmuch lounging in my chair in Lola Brandt's drawing- room.

Is there any drug I wonder which can restore a eumoirous tone to the system?

Of course, Dale came round to my chambers in the evening and talked about Lola and himself and me until I sent him home to bed. He kept on repeating at intervals that I was glorious. I grew tired at last of the eulogy, and, adopting his vernacular, declared that I should be jolly glad to get out of this rubbishy world. He protested. There was never such a world. It was gorgeous. What was wrong with it, anyway? As I could not show him the Commination Service, I picked imaginary flaws in the universe. I complained of its amateurishness of design. But Dale, who loves fact, was not drawn into a theological disputation.

"Do you know, I had a deuce of a shock when I came into Lola's this afternoon?" he cried irrelevantly, with a loud laugh. "I thought -- it was a damnable and idiotic thing to come into my head -- but I couldn't help thinking you had cut me out! I wanted to tell you. You must forgive me for being such an ass. And I want to thank you for being so good to her while I was away. She has been telling me. You like her, don't you? I knew you would. No one can help it. Besides being other things, she's is such a good sort, isn't she?"

I admitted her many excellencies, while he walked about the room.

"By Jove!" he cried, coming to a halt. "I've got a grand idea. My little plan has succeeded so well with you that I've a good mind to try it on my mother."

"What on earth do you mean?" I asked.

"Why shouldn't I take the bull by the horns and bring my mother and Lola together?"

I gasped. "My dear boy," said I. "Do you want to kill me outright? I can't stand such shocks to the imagination."

"But it would be grand!" he exclaimed, delighted. "Why shouldn't mother take a fancy to Lola? You can imagine her roping her in for the committee!"

I refused to imagine it for one instant, and I had the greatest difficulty in the world to persuade him to renounce his maniacal project. I am going to permit no further complications.

I have been busy for the past day or two setting my house in order. I start to-morrow for Paris. All my little affairs are comfortably settled, and I can set out on my little trip to Avernus via Paris and the habitat of Captain Vauvenarde with a quiet conscience. I have allayed the anxiety of my sisters, whispered mysterious encouragement to Maisie Ellerton, held out hopes of her son's emancipation to Lady Kynnersley, played fairy godmother to various poor and deserving persons, and brought myself into an enviable condition of glowing philanthropy.

To my great relief the Wymington committee have adopted Dale as their candidate at the by-election. He can scarcely contain himself for joy. He is like a child who has been told that he shall be taken to the seaside. I believe he lies awake all night thinking how he will make things hum.

The other side have chosen Wilberforce, who unsuccessfully contested the Ferney division of Wiltshire at the last general election. He is old and ugly. Dale is young and beautiful. I think Dale will get in.

I have said good-bye to Lola. The astonishing woman burst into tears and kissed my hands and said something about my being the arbiter of her destiny -- a Gallic phrase which she must have picked up from Captain Vauvenarde. Then she buried her face in the bristling neck of Adolphus, the Chow dog, and declared him to be her last remaining consolation. Even Anastasius Papadopoulos had ceased to visit her. I uttered words of comfort.

"I have left you Dale at any rate."

She smiled enigmatically through her tears.

"I'm not ungrateful. I don't despise the crumbs."

Which remark, now that I come to think of it, was not flattering to my young friend.

But what is the use of thinking of it? My fire is burning low. It is time I ended this portion of my "Rule and Example of Eumoiriety," which, I fear, has not followed the philosophic line I originally intended.

The die is cast. My things are packed. Rogers, who likes his British beef and comforts, is resigned to the prospect of Continental travel, and has gone to bed hours ago. There is no more soda water in the siphon. I must go to bed.

Paris to-morrow.

Chapter X

"Ay!" says Touchstone; "now am I in Arden; the more fool I; when I was at home I was in a better place."

Now am I in Algiers; the more fool I; et cetera, et cetera.

It is true that from my bedroom window in the Albany I cannot see the moon silvering the Mediterranean, or hear the soft swish of pepper- trees; it is true that oranges and eucalyptus do not flourish in the Albany Court-yard as they do in this hotel garden at Mustapha Superieur; it is true that the blue African sky and sunshine are more agreeable than Piccadilly fogs; but, after all, his own kennel is best for a dying dog, and his own familiar surroundings best for his declining hours. Again, Touchstone had not the faintest idea what he was going to do in the Forest of Arden, and I was equally ignorant of what would befall when I landed at Algiers. He was bound on a fool adventure, and so was I. He preferred the easy way of home, and so do I. I have always loved Touchstone, but I have never thoroughly understood him till now.

It rained persistently in Paris. It rained as I drove from the Gare du Nord to my hotel. It rained all night. It rained all the day I spent there and it rained as I drove from my hotel to the Gare de Lyon. A cheery newspaper informed me that there were torrential rains at Marseilles. I mentioned this to Rogers, who tried to console me by reminding me that we were only staying at Marseilles for a few hours.

"That has nothing to do with it," said I. "At Marseilles I always eat bouillabaisse on the quay. Fancy eating bouillabaisse in the pouring rain!"

As usual, Rogers could not execute the imaginative exercise I prescribed; so he strapped my hold-all with an extra jerk.

Now, when homespun London is wet and muddy, no one minds very much. But when silken Paris lies bedraggled with rain and mud, she is the forlornest thing under the sky. She is a hollow-eyed pale city, the rouge is washed from her cheeks, her hair hangs dank and dishevelled, in her aspect is desolation, and moaning is in her voice. I have a Sultanesque feeling with regard to Paris. So long as she is amusing and gay I love her. I adore her mirth, her chatter, her charming ways. But when she has the toothache and snivels, she bores me to death. I lose all interest in her. I want to clap my hands for my slaves, in order to bid them bring me in something less dismal in the way of fair cities.

I drove to the Rue Saint-Dominique and handed in my card and letter of introduction at the Ministere de la Guerre. I was received by the official in charge of the Bureau des Renseignements with bland politeness tempered with suspicion that I might be taking a mental photograph of the office furniture in order to betray its secret to a foreign government. After many comings and goings of orderlies and underlings, he told me very little in complicated and reluctant language. Captain Vauvenarde had resigned his commission in the Chasseurs d'Afrique two years ago. At the present moment the Bureau had no information to give as to his domicile.

"Have you no suggestion, Monsieur, to offer?" I asked, "whereby I may obtain this essential information concerning Captain Vauvenarde?"

"His old comrades in the regiment might know, Monsieur."

"And the regiment?"

He opened the Annuaire Officiel de l'Armee Francaise, just as I might have done myself, and said:

"There are six regiments. One is at Blidah, another at Tlemcen, another at Constantine, another at Tunis, another at Algiers, and another at Mascara."

"To which regiment, then, did Captain Vauvenarde belong?" I inquired.

He referred to one of the dossiers that the orderlies had brought him.

"The 3rd, Monsieur."

"I should get information, then, from Tlemcen?"

"Evidently, Monsieur."

I thanked him and withdrew, to his obvious relief. Seekers after knowledge are unpopular even in organisations so far removed from the Circumlocution Office as the French Ministere de la Guerre. However, he had put me on the trail of my man.

During my homeward drive through the rain I reflected. I might, of course, write to the Lieutenant-Colonel of the 3rd Regiment at Tlemcen, and wait for his reply. But even if he answered by return of post, I should have to remain in Paris for nearly a week.

"That," said I, wiping from my face half a teacupful of liquid mud which had squirted in through the cab window -- "that I'll never do. I'll proceed at once to Algiers. If I can get no news of him there, I'll go to Tlemcen myself. In all probability I shall learn that he is residing here in Paris, a stone's throw from the Madeleine."

So I started for Algiers. The next morning, before the sailing of the Marechal Bugeaud, one of the quaint churns styled a steamship by the vanity of the French Company which undertakes to convey respectable folk across the Mediterranean, I ate my bouillabaisse below an awning on the sunny quay at Marseilles. The torrential rains had ceased. I advised Rogers to take equivalent sustenance, as no lunch is provided on day of sailing by the Compagnie Generale Transatlantique. I caught sight of him in a dark corner of the restaurant -- he is too British to eat in the open air on the terrace, or perhaps too modest to have his meal in my presence -- struggling grimly with a beefsteak, and, as he is a teetotaller, with an unimaginable, horrific liquid which he poured out from a vessel vaguely resembling a teapot.

My meal over, and having nearly an hour to spare, I paid my bill, rose and turned the corner of the quay into the Cannebiere, thinking to have my coffee at one of the cafes in that thoroughfare of which the natives say that, if Paris had a Cannebiere, it would be a little Marseilles. I suppose for the Marseillais there is a magic in the sonorous name; for, after all, it is but a commonplace street of shops running from the quays into the heart of the town. It is also deformed by tramcars. I strolled leisurely up, thinking of the many swans that were geese, and Paradises that were building-plots, and heroes that were dummies, and solidities that were shadows, in short, enjoying a gentle post-prandial mood, when my eyes suddenly fell on a scene which brought me down from such realities to the realm of the fantastic. There, a few yards in front of me, at the outer edge of the terrace of a cafe, clad in his eternal silk hat, frock coat, and yellow gloves, sat Professor Anastasius Papadopoulos in earnest conversation with a seedy stranger of repellent mien. The latter was clean-shaven and had a broken nose, and wore a little round, soft felt hat. The dwarf was facing me. As he caught sight of me a smile of welcome overspread his Napoleonic features. He rose, awaited my approach, and, bareheaded, made his usual sweeping bow, which he concluded by resting his silk hat on the pit of his stomach. I lifted my hat politely and would have passed on, but he stood in my path. I extended my hand. He took it after the manner of a provincial mayor receiving royalty.

"Couvrez-vous, Monsieur, je vous en prie," said I.

He covered his head. "Monsieur," said he, "I beseech you to be seated, and do me the honour of joining me in the coffee and excellent cognac of this establishment."

"Willingly," said I, mindful of Lola's tale of the long knife which he carried concealed about his person.

"Permit me to present my friend Monsieur Achille Saupiquet -- Monsieur de Gex, a great English statesman and a friend of that gnadigsten Engel, Madame Lola Brandt."

Monsieur Saupiquet and I saluted each other formally. I took a seat. Professor Anastasius Papadopoulos moved a bundle of papers tied up with pink ribbon from in front of me, and ordered coffee and cognac.

"Monsieur Saupiquet also knows Madame Brandt," he explained.

"Bien sur," said Monsieur Saupiquet. "She owes me fifteen sous."

Papadopoulos turned on his sharply. "Will you be silent!"

The other grumbled beneath his breath.

"I hope Madame is well," said Papadopoulos.

I said that she appeared so, when last I had the pleasure of seeing her. The dwarf turned to his friend.

"Monsieur has also done my cats the honour of attending a rehearsal. He has seen Hephaestus, and his tears have dropped in sympathy over the irreparable loss of my beautiful Santa Bianca."

"I hope the talented survivors," said I, "are enjoying their usual health."

"My daily bulletin from my pupil and assistant, Quast, contains excellent reports. Prosit, Signore."

It was only when I found myself at the table with the dwarf and his broken-nosed friend that I collected my wits sufficiently to realise the probable reason of his presence in Marseilles. The grotesque little creature had actually kept his ridiculous word. He, too, had come south in search of the lost Captain Vauvenarde. We were companions in the Fool Adventure. There was something mediaeval in the combination; something legendary. Put back the clock a few centuries and there we were, the Knight and the Dwarf, riding together on our quest, while the Lady for whose sake we were making idiots of ourselves was twiddling her fair thumbs in her tower far beyond the seas.

Professor Anastasius Papadopoulos broke upon this pleasing fancy by remarking again that Monsieur Saupiquet was a friend of Madame Brandt.

"He was with her at the time of her great bereavement."

"Bereavement?" I asked forgetfully.

"Her horse Sultan."

He whispered the words with solemn reverence. I must confess to being tired of the horse Sultan and disinclined to treat his loss seriously.

"Monsieur Saupiquet," said I, "doubtless offered her every consolation."

"He used to travel with her and look after Sultan's well-being. He was her -- -- "

"Her Master of the Horse," I suggested.

"Precisely. You have the power of using the right word, Monsieur de Gex. It is a great gift. My good friend Saupiquet is attached to a circus at present stationed in Toulon. He came over, at my request, to see me -- on affairs of the deepest importance" -- he waved the bundle of papers -- "the very deepest importance. Nicht wahr, Saupiquet?"

"Bien sur," murmured Saupiquet, who evidently did not count loquacity among his vices.

I wondered whether these important affairs concerned the whereabouts of Captain Vauvenarde; but the dwarf's air of mystery forbade my asking for his confidence. Besides, what should a groom in a circus know of retired Captains of Chasseurs? I said:

"You're a very busy man, Monsieur le Professeur."

He tapped his domelike forehead. "I am never idle. I carry on here gigantic combinations. I should have been a lawyer. I can spread nets that no one sees, and then -- pst! I draw the rope and the victim is in the toils of Anastasius Papadopoulos. Hast du nicht das bemerkt , Saupiquet?"

"Bien sur," said Saupiquet again. He seemed perfectly conversant with the dwarf's polyglot jargon.

"To the temperament of the artist," continued the modest Papadopoulos, "I join the intellect of the man of affairs and the heart of a young poet. I am always young; yet as you see me here I am thirty-seven years of age."

He jumped from his chair and struck an attitude of the Apollo Belvedere.

"I should never have thought that you were of the same age as a bettered person like myself," said I.

"The secret of youth," he rejoined, sitting down again, "is enthusiasm, the worship of a woman, and intimate association with cats."

Monsieur Saupiquet received this proposition without a gleam of interest manifesting itself in his dull blue eyes. His broken nose gave his face a singularly unintelligent expression. He poured out another glass of cognac from the graduated carafe in front of him and sipped it slowly. Then he gazed at me dully, almost for the first time, and said:

"Madame Brandt owes me fifteen sous."

"And I say that she doesn't!" cried the dwarf fiercely. "I send for him to discuss matters of the deepest gravity, and he comes talking about his fifteen sous. I can't get anything out of him, but his fifteen sous. And the carissima signora doesn't owe it to him. She can't owe it to him. Voyons, Saupiquet, if you don't renounce your miserable pretensions you will drive me mad, you will make me burst into tears, you will make me throw you out into the street, and hold you down until you are run over by a tramcar. You will -- you will" -- he shook his fist passionately as he sought for a climactic menace -- "you will make me spit in your eye."

He dashed his fist down on the marble table so that the glasses jingled. Saupiquet finished his cognac undisturbed.

"I say that Madame Brandt owes me fifteen sous, and until that is paid, I do no business."

The little man grew white with exasperation, and his upper lip lifted like an angry cat's, showing his teeth. I shrank from meeting Saupiquet's eye. Hurriedly, I drew a providential handful of coppers from my pocket.

"Stop, Herr Professor," said I, eager to prevent the shedding of tears, blood, or saliva, "I have just remembered. Madame did mention to me an unaquitted debt in the South, and begged me to settle it for her. I am delighted to have the opportunity. Will you permit me to act as Madam's banker?"

The dwarf at once grew suave and courteous.

"The word of carissima signora is the word of God," said he.

I solemnly counted out the fifteen halfpence on the table and pushed them over to Saupiquet, who swept them up and put them in his pocket.

"Now we can talk," said he.

"Make him give you a receipt!" cried Papadopoulos excitedly. "I know him! He is capable of any treachery where money is concerned. He is capable of re-demanding the sum from Madame Brandt. He is an ingrate. And she, Monsieur le Membre du Parlement Anglais, has overwhelmed him with benefits. Do you know what she did? She gave him the carcass of her beloved Sultan to dispose of. And he sold it, Monsieur, and he got drunk on the money."

The mingled emotions of sorrow at the demise of Sultan, the royal generosity of Madame Brandt, and the turpitude of his friend Saupiquet, brought tears to the little man's eyes. Monsieur Saupiquet shrugged his shoulders unconcernedly.

"A poor man has to get drunk when he can. It is only the rich who can get drunk when they like."

I looked at my watch and rose in a hurry.

"I'm afraid I must take an unceremonious leave of you, Monsieur le Professeur."

"You must wait for the receipt," cried the dwarf.

"Will you do me the honour of holding it for me until we meet again? Hi!" The interpellation was addressed to a cabman a few yards away. "Your conversation has made me neglect the flight of time. I shall only just catch my boat."

"Your boat?"

"I am going to Algiers."

"Where will you be staying, Monsieur? I ask in no spirit of vulgar curiosity."

I raised a protesting hand, and with a smile named my hotel.

"I arrived here from Algiers yesterday afternoon," he said, "and I proceed there again to-morrow."

"I regret," said I, "that you are not coming to-day, so that I could have the pleasure of your company on the voyage."

My polite formula seemed to delight Professor Anastasius Papadopoulos enormously. He made a series of the most complicated bows, to the joy of the waiters and the passers-by. I shook hands with him and with the stolid Monsieur Saupiquet, and waving my hat more like an excited Montenegrin than the most respectable of British valetudinarians, I drove off to the Quai de la Joliette, where I found an anxious but dogged Rogers, in the midst of a vociferating crowd, literally holding the bridge that gave access to the Marechal Bugeaud.

"Thank Heaven, you've come, sir! You almost missed it. I couldn't have held out another minute."

I, too, was thankful. If I had missed the boat I should have had to wait till the next day and crossed in the embarrassing and unrestful company of Professor Anastasius Papadopoulos. It is not that I dislike the little man, or have the Briton's nervous shrinking from being seen in eccentric society; but I wish to eliminate mediaevalism as far as possible from my quest. In conjunction with this crazy-headed little trainer of cats it would become too preposterous even for my light sardonic humour. I resolved to dismiss him from my mind altogether.

Yet, in spite of my determination, and in spite of one of Monsieur Lenotre's fascinating monographs on the French Revolution, on which I had counted to beguile the tedium of the journey, I could not get Anastasius Papadopoulos out of my head. He stayed with me the whole of a storm-tossed night, and all the next morning. He has haunted my brain ever since. I see him tossing his arms about in fury, while the broken-nosed Saupiquet makes his monotonous claim for the payment of sevenpence halfpenny; I hear him speak in broken whispers of the disastrous quadruped on whose skin and hoofs Saupiquet got drunk. I see him strutting about and boasting of his intellect. I see him taking leave of Lola Brandt, and trotting magnificently out of the room bent on finding Captain Vauvenarde. He haunts my slumbers. I hope to goodness he will not take to haunting this delectable hotel.

I wonder, after all, whether there is any method in his madness -- for mad he is, as mad as can be. Why does he come backwards and forwards between Algiers and Marseilles? What has Saupiquet to do with his quest? What revelation was he about to make on the payment of his fifteen sous? It is all so grotesque, so out of relation with ordinary life. I feel inclined to go up to the retired Colonels and elderly maiden ladies, who seem to form the majority of my fellow-guests, and pinch them and ask them whether they are real, or, like Papadopoulos and Saupiquet, the gentler creatures of a nightmare.

Well, I have written to the Lieutenant-Colonel of the 3rd Regiment of Chasseurs at Tlemcen, which is away down by the Morocco frontier. I have also written to Lola Brandt. I seem to miss her as much as any of the friends I have left behind me in England. I cannot help the absurd fancy that her rich vitality helps me along. I have not been feeling quite so robust as I did when I saw her daily. And twinges are coming more frequently. I don't think that rolling about in the Mediterranean on board the Marechal Bugeaud is good for little pains inside.

Simon the Jester

Chapter VII

The murder is out. A paragraph has appeared in the newspapers to the effect that the marriage arranged between Mr. Simon de Gex and Miss Eleanor Faversham will not take place. It has also become common knowledge that I am resigning my seat in Parliament on account of ill- health. That is the reason rightly assigned by my acquaintances for the rupture of my engagement. I am being rapidly killed by the doleful kindness of my friends. They are so dismally sympathetic. Everywhere I go there are long faces and solemn hand-shakes. In order to cheer myself I gave a little dinner-party at the club, and the function might have been a depressed wake with my corpse in a coffin on the table. My sisters, dear, kind souls, follow me with anxious eyes as if I were one of their children sickening for chicken-pox. They upbraid me for leaving them in ignorance, and in hushed voices inquire as to my symptoms. They both came this morning to the Albany to see what they could do for me. I don't see what they can do, save help Rogers put studs in my shirts. They expressed such affectionate concern that at last I cried out:

"My dear girls, if you don't smile, I'll sit upon the hearthrug and howl like a dog."

Then they exchanged glances and broke into hectic gaiety, dear things, under the impression that they were brightening me up. I am being deluged with letters. I had no idea I was such a popular person. They come from high placed and lowly, from constituents whom my base and servile flattery have turned into friends, from Members of Parliament, from warm-hearted dowagers and from little girls who have inveigled me out to lunch for the purpose of confiding to me their love affairs. I could set up as a general practitioner of medicine on the advice that is given me. I am recommended cod-liver oil, lung tonic, electric massage, abdominal belts, warm water, mud baths, Sandow's treatment, and every patent medicament save rat poison. I am urged to go to health resorts ranging geographically from the top of the Jungfrau to Central Africa. All kinds of worthy persons have offered to nurse me. Old General Wynans writes me a four-page letter to assure me that I have only to go to his friend Dr. Eustace Adams, of Wimpole Street, to be cured like a shot. I happen to know that Eustace Adams is an eminent gynecologist.

And the worst of it all is that these effusions written in the milk of human kindness have to be answered. Dale is not here. I have to sit down at my desk and toil like a galley slave. I am being worn to a shadow.

Lola Brandt, too, has heard the news, Dale in Berlin, and the London newspapers being her informants. Tears stood in her eyes when I called to learn her decision. Why had I not told her I was so ill? Why had I let her worry me with her silly troubles? Why had I not consulted her friend, Sir Joshua Oldfield? She filled up my chair with cushions (which, like most men, I find stuffy and comfortless), and if I had given her the slightest encouragement, would have stuck my feet in hot mustard and water. Why had I come out on such a dreadful day? It was indeed a detestable day of raw fog. She pulled the curtains close, and, insisting upon my remaining among my cushions, piled the grate with coal half-way up the chimney. Would I like some eucalyptus?

"My dear Madame Brandt," I cried, "my bronchial tubes and lungs are as strong as a hippopotamus's."

I wish every one would not conclude that I was going off in a rapid decline.

Lola Brandt prowled about me in a wistful, mothering way, showing me a fresh side of her nature. She is as domesticated as Penelope.

"You're fond of cooking, aren't you?" I asked suddenly.

She laughed. "I adore it. How do you know?"

"I guessed," said I.

"I'm what the French call a vraie bourgeoise."

"I'm glad to hear it," said I.

"Are you? I thought your class hated the bourgeoisie."

"The bourgeoisie," I said, "is the nation's granary of the virtues. But for God's sake, don't tell any one that I said so!"

"Why?" she asked.

"If it found its way into print it would ruin my reputation for epigram."

She drew a step or two towards me in her slow rhythmic way, and smiled.

"When you say or do a beautiful thing you always try to bite off its tail."

Then she turned and drew some needlework -- plain sewing I believe they call it -- from beneath the Union Jack cushion and sat down.

"I'll make a confession," she said. "Until now I've stuffed away my work when I heard you coming. I didn't think it genteel. What do you think?"

I scanned the shapeless mass of linen or tulle or whatever it was on her lap.

"I don't know whether it's genteel," I remarked, "but at present it looks like nothing on God's earth."

My masculine ignorance of such mysteries made her laugh. She is readily moved to mild mirth, which makes her an easy companion. Besides, little jokes are made to be laughed at, and I like women who laugh at them. There was a brief silence. I smoked and made Adolphus stand up on his hind legs and balance sugar on his nose. His mistress sewed. Presently she said, without looking up from her work:

"I've made up my mind."

I rose from my cushioned seat, into which Adolphus, evidently thinking me a fool, immediately snuggled himself, and I stood facing her with my back to the fire.

"Well?" said I.

"I am ready to go back to my husband, if he can be found, and, of course, if he will have me."

I commended her for a brave women. She smiled rather sadly and shook her head.

"Those are two gigantic 'ifs.'"

"Giants before now have been slain by the valiant," I replied.

"How is Captain Vauvenarde to be found?"

"An officer in the French Army is not like a lost sparrow in London. His whereabouts could be obtained from the French War Office. What is his regiment?"

"The Chasseurs d'Afrique. Yes," she added thoughtfully. "I see, it isn't difficult to trace him. I make one condition, however. You can't refuse me."

"What is that?"

"Until things are fixed up everything must go on just as at present between Dale and me. He is not to be told anything. If nothing comes of it then I'll have him all to myself. I won't give him up and be left alone. As long as I care for him, I swear to God, I won't!" she said, in her low, rich voice -- and I saw by her face that she was a woman of her word. "Besides, he would come raving and imploring -- and I'm not quite a woman of stone. It isn't all jam to go back to my husband. Goodness knows why I am thinking of it. It's for your sake. Do you know that?"

I did not. I was puzzled. Why in the world should Lola Brandt, whom I have only met three or four times, revolutionise the whole of her life for my sake?

"I should have thought it was for Dale's," said I.

"I suppose you would, being a man," she replied.

I retorted, with a smile: "Woman is the eternal conundrum to which the wise man always leaves her herself to supply the answer. Doubtless one of these days you'll do it. Meanwhile, I'll wait in patience."

She gave me one of her sidelong, flashing glances and sewed with more vigour than appeared necessary. I admired the beautiful curves of her neck and shoulders as she bent over her work. She seemed too strong to wield such an insignificant weapon as a needle.

"That's neither here nor there," she said in reference to my last remark. "I say, I don't look forward to going back to my husband -- though why I should say 'going back' I don't know, as he left me -- not I him. Anyhow, I'm ready to do it. If it can be managed, I'll cut myself adrift suddenly from Dale. It will be more merciful to him. A man can bear a sudden blow better than lingering pain. If it can't be managed, well, Dale will know nothing at all about it, and both he and I will be saved a mortal deal of worry and unhappiness."

"Suppose" said I, "it can't be managed? Do you propose to keep Dale ignorant of the danger he is running in keeping up a liaison with a married woman living apart from her husband?"

She reflected. "If my husband says he'll see me damned first before he'll come back to me, then I'll tell Dale everything, and you can say what you like to him. He'll be able to judge for himself; but in the meanwhile you'll let me have what happiness I can."

I accepted the compromise, and, dispossessing Adolphus, sat down again. I certainly had made progress. Feeling in a benevolent mood, I set forth the advantages she would reap by assuming her legal status; how at last she would shake the dust of Bohemia from off her feet, and instead of standing at the threshold like a disconsolate Peri, she would enter as a right the Paradise of Philistia which she craved; how her life would be one continual tea-party, and how, as her husband had doubtless by this time obtained his promotion, she would be authorised to adopt high and mighty airs in her relations with the wives of all the captains and lieutenants in the regiment. She sighed and wondered whether she would like it, after all.

"Here in England I can say 'damn' as often as I choose. I don't say it very often, but sometimes I feel I must say it or explode."

"There are its equivalents in French," I suggested.

She laughed outright. "Fancy my coming out with a sacre nom de Dieu in a French drawing-room!"

"Fancy you shouting 'damn' in an English one."

"That's true," she said. "I suppose drawing-rooms are the same all the world over. I do try to talk like a lady -- at least, what I imagine they talk like, for I've never met one."

"You see one every time you look in the glass," said I.

Her olive face flushed. "You mustn't say such things to me if you don't mean them. I like to think all you say to me is true."

"Why in the world," I cried, "should you not be a lady? You have the instincts of one. How many of my fair friends in Mayfair and Belgravia would have made their drawing-rooms unspeakable just for the sake of not hurting the feelings of Anastasius Papadopoulos?"

She put aside her work and, leaning over the arm of the chair, her chin in her hands, looked at me gratefully.

"I'm so glad you've said that. Dale can't understand it. He wants me to clear the trash away."

"Dale," said I, "is young and impetuous. I am a battered old philosopher with one foot in the grave."

Quick moisture gathered in her eyes. "You hurt me," she said. "You'll soon get well and strong again. You must!"

"Ce que femme veut, Dieu le veut," I laughed.

"Eh bien, je le veux," she said with an odd expression in her eyes which burned golden. They fascinated me, held mine. For some seconds neither of us moved. Just consider the picture. There among the cushions of her chair she sprawled beneath the light of a shaded lamp on the further side, and in front of the leaping flames, a great, powerful, sinuous creature of sweeping curves, clad in a clinging brown dress, her head crowned with superb bronze hair, two warm arms bare to the elbow, at which the sleeve ended in coffee-coloured lace falling over the side of the chair, and her leopard eyes fixed on me. About her still hung the echo of her last words spoken in deep tones whose register belongs less to human habitations than to the jungle. And from her emanated like a captivating odour -- but it was not an odour -- a strange magnetic influence.

I have done my best to write her down in my mind a commonplace, vulgar, good-natured mountebank. But I can do so no longer.

There is something deep down in the soul of Lola Brandt which sets her apart from the kindly race of womankind; whether it is the devil or a touch of pre-Adamite splendour or an ancestral catamount, I make no attempt to determine. At any rate, she is too grand a creature to fritter her life away on a statistic-hunting and pheasant-shooting young Briton like Dale Kynnersley. He would never begin to understand her. I will save her from Dale for her own sake.

All this, ladies and gentlemen, because her eyes fascinated me, and caused me to hold my breath, and made my heart beat.

And will Captain Vauvenarde understand her? Of course he won't. But then he is her husband, and husbands are notoriously and cum privilegio dunder-headed. I make no pretensions to understand her, but as I am neither her lover nor her husband it does not matter. She says nothing diabolical or eerie or fantastic or feline or pre-Adamite or uncanny or spiritual; and yet she is, in a queer, indescribable way, all these things.

"Je le veux," she said, and we drank in each other's souls, or gaped at each other like a pair of idiots just as you please. I had a horrible, yet pleasurable consciousness that she had gripped hold of my nerves of volition. She was willing me to live. I was a puppet in her hands like the wild tom-cat. At that moment I declare I could have purred and rubbed my head against her knee. I would have done anything she bade me. If she had sent me to fetch the Cham of Tartary's cap or a hair of the Prester John's beard, I would have telephoned forthwith to Rogers to pack a suit-case and book a seat in the Orient express.

What would have happened next Heaven alone knows -- for we could not have gone on gazing at each other until I backed myself out at the door by way of leave-taking -- had not Anticlimax arrived in the person of Mr. Anastasius Papadopoulos in his eternal frock-coat. But his gloves were black.

As usual he fell on his knees and kissed his lady's hand. Then he rose and greeted me with solemn affability.

"C'est un privilege de rencontrer den gnadigsten Herrn," said he.

Confining myself to one language, I responded by informing him that it was an honour always to meet so renowned a professor, and inquired politely after the health of Hephaestus.

"Ah, Signore!" he cried. "Do not ask me. It is a tragedy from which I shall never recover."

He sat down on a footstool by the side of Madame Brandt and burst into tears, which coursed down his cheeks and moustache and hung like drops of dew from the point of his imperial.

"Is he dead?" asked Madame.

"I wish he were! No. It is only the iron self-restraint that I possess which prevented me from slaying him on the spot. But poor Santa Bianca! My gentle and accomplished Angora. He has killed her. I can scarcely raise my head through grief."

Lola put her great arm round the little man's neck and patted him like a child, while he sobbed as if his heart would break.

When he recovered he gave us the details of the tragic end of Santa Bianca, and wound up by calling down the most ingeniously complicated and passionate curses on the head of the murderer. Lola Brandt strove to pacify him.

"We all have our sorrows, Anastasius. Did I not lose my beautiful horse Sultan?"

The professor sprang to his full height of four feet and dashed away his tears with a noble gesture of his black-gloved hand.

Base slave that he was to think of his own petty bereavement in the face of her eternal affliction. He turned to me and bade me mark her serene nobility. It was a model and an example for him to follow. He, too, would be brave and present a smiling face to evil fortune.

"Behold! I smile, carissima!" he cried dramatically.

We beheld -- and saw his features (smudged with tearstains and the dye from the black gloves which he obviously wore out of respect for the deceased Santa Bianca) contorted into a grimace of hideous imbecility.

"Monsieur," said he, assuming his natural expression which was one of pensive melancholy, "let us change the conversation. You are a great statesman. Will you kindly let me know your opinion on the foreign policy of Germany?"

Whereupon he sat down again upon his stool and regarded me with earnest attention.

"Germany," said I, with the solemnity of a Sir Oracle in the smoking- room of one of the political clubs, "has dreams of an empire beyond her frontiers, and with a view to converting the dream into a reality, is turning out battleships nineteen to the dozen."

The Professor nodded his head sagaciously, and looked up at Lola.

"Very profound," said he, "very profound. I shall remember it. I am a Greek, Monsieur, and the Greeks, as you know, are a nation of diplomatists."

"Ever since the days of Xenophon," said I.

"You're both too clever for me," exclaimed our hostess. "Where did you get your knowledge from, Anastasius?"

The Professor, flattered, passed his hand over his bulgy forehead.

"I was a great student in my youth," said he. "Once I could tell you all the kings of Rome and the date of the battle of Actium. But pressure of weightier concerns has driven my erudition from me. Pardon me. I have not yet asked after your health. You are looking sad and troubled. What is the matter?"

He sat bolt upright, fingering his imperial and regarding her with the keen solicitude of a family physician. To my amazement, Lola Brandt told him quite simply:

"I am thinking of living with my husband again."

"Has the traitor been annoying you?" he asked with a touch of fierceness.

"Oh, no! It's my own idea. I'm tired of living alone. I don't even know where he is."

"Do you want to know where he is?"

"How can I communicate with him unless I do?"

Anastasius Papadopoulos rose, struck an attitude, and thumped his breast.

"I will seek him for you at the ends of the earth, and will bring him to prostrate himself at your feet."

"That's very kind of you, Anastasius," said Lola gently; "but what will become of your cats?"

The dwarf raised his hand impressively.

"The Almighty will have them in His keeping. I have also my pupil and assistant, Quast."

Lola smiled indulgently from her cushions, showing her curious even teeth.

"You mustn't do anything so mad, Anastasius, I forbid you."

"Madame," said he in a most stately manner, "when I devote myself, it is to the death. I have the honour to salute you!" -- he bowed over her hand and kissed it. "Monsieur." He bowed to me with the profundity of a hidalgo, and trotted magnificently out of the room.

It was all so sudden that it took my breath away.

"Well I'm -- -- " I didn't know what I was, so I stopped. Lola Brandt broke into low laughter at my astonishment.

"That's Anastasius's way," she explained.

"But the little man surely isn't going to leave his cats and start on a wild-goose chase over Europe to find your husband?"

"He thinks he is, but I shan't let him."

"I hope you won't," said I. "And will you tell me why you made so hot- headed a person your confidant?"

I confess that I was wrathful. Here had I been using the wiles of a Balkan chancery to bring the lady to my way of thinking, and here was she, to my face, making a joke of it with this caricature of a Paladin.

"My dearest friend," she replied earnestly, "don't be angry with me. I've given the poor little man something to think of besides the death of his cat. It will do him good. And why shouldn't I tell him? He's a dear old friend, and in his way was so good to me when I was unhappy. He knows all about my married life. You may think he's half-witted; but he isn't. In ordinary business dealings he's as shrewd as they make 'em. The manager who beats Anastasius over a contract is yet to be born."

By some extraordinary process of the contortionist's art, she curled herself out of her chair on to the hearthrug and knelt before me, her hands clasped on my knee.

"You're not angry with me, are you?" she asked in her rich contralto.

I took both her hands, rose, and assisted her to rise. I was not going to be mesmerised again.

"Of course not," I laughed. Indeed my wrath had fallen from me.

Her bosom heaved with a sigh. "I'm so glad," she said. Her breath fanned my cheek. It was aromatic, intoxicating. Her lips are ripe and full.

"You had better find your husband as soon as possible," said I.

"Do you think so?" she asked.

"Yes, I do. And it strikes me I had better go and find him myself."

She started. "You?"

"Yes," I said. "The Chasseurs d'Afrique are probably in Africa, and the doctors have ordered me to winter in a hot climate, and I shall go on writing a million letters a day if I stay here, which will kill me off in no time with brain fag and writer's cramp. Your husband will be what the newspapers call an objective. Good-bye!" said I, "I'll bring him to you dead or alive."

And without knowing it at the time, I made an exit as magnificent as that of Professor Anastasius Papadopoulos.

Chapter VIII

I do not know whether I ought to laugh or rail. Judged by the ordinary canons that regulate the respectable life to which I have been accustomed, I am little short of a lunatic. The question is: Does the recognition of lunacy in oneself tend to amusement or anger? I compromise with myself. I am angry at having been forced on an insane adventure, but the prospect of its absurdity gives me a considerable pleasure.

Let me set it down once and for all. I resent Lola Brandt's existence. When I am out of her company I can contemplate her calmly from my vantage of social and intellectual superiority. I can pooh-pooh her fascinations. I can crack jokes on her shortcomings. I can see perfectly well that I am Simon de Gex, M.P. (I have not yet been appointed to the stewardship of the Chiltern Hundreds), of Eton and Trinity College, Cambridge, a barrister of the Inner Temple (though a brief would cause me as much dismay as a command to conduct the orchestra at Covent Garden), formerly of the Foreign Office, a man of the world, a diner-out, a hardened jester at feminine wiles, a cynical student of philosophy, a man of birth, and, I believe, breeding with a cultivated taste in wine and food and furniture, one also who, but for a little pain inside, would soon become a Member of His Majesty's Government, and eventually drop the "Esquire" at the end of his name and stick "The Right Honourable" in front of it -- in fact, a most superior, wise and important person; and I can also see perfectly well that Lola Brandt is an uneducated, lowly bred, vagabond female, with a taste, as I have remarked before, for wild beasts and tea-parties, with whom I have as much in common as I have with the feathered lady on a coster's donkey-cart or the Fat Woman at the Fair. I can see all this perfectly well in the calm seclusion of my library. But when I am in her presence my superiority, like Bob Acres's valour, oozes out through my finger-tips; I become a besotted idiot; the sense and the sight and the sound of her overpower me; I proclaim her rich and remarkable personality; and I bask in her lazy smiles like any silly undergraduate whose knowledge of women has hitherto been limited to his sisters and the common little girl at the tobacconist's.

I say I resent it. I resent the low notes in her voice. I resent the cajolery of the supple twists of her body. I resent her putting her hands on my shoulders, and, as the twopenny-halfpenny poets say, fanning my cheek with her breath. If it had not been for that I should never have promised to go in search of her impossible husband. At any rate, it is easy to discover his whereabouts. A French bookseller has telegraphed to Paris for the Annuaire Officiel de l'Armee Francaise , the French Army List. It locates every officer in the French army, and as the Chasseurs d'Afrique generally chase in Africa, it will tell me the station in Algeria or Tunisia which Captain Vauvenarde adorns. I can go straight to him as Madame Brandt's plenipotentiary, and if the unreasonable and fire-eating warrior does not run me through the body for impertinence before he has time to appreciate the delicacy of my mission, I may be able to convince him that a well-to-do wife is worth the respectable consideration of a hard-up captain of Chasseurs. I say I may be able to convince him; but I shrink from the impudence of the encounter. I am to accost a total stranger in a foreign army and tell him to return to his wife. This is the pretty little mission I have undertaken. It sounded glorious and eumoirous and quixotic and deucedly funny, during the noble moment of inspiration, when Lola's golden eyes were upon me; but now -- well, I shall have to persuade myself that it is funny, if I am to carry it out. It is very much like wagering that one will tweak by the nose the first gentleman in gaiters and shovel-hat one meets in Piccadilly. This by some is considered the quintessence of comedy. I foresee a revision of my sense of humour.

This afternoon I met Lady Kynnersley again -- at the Ellertons'. I was talking to Maisie, who has grown no happier, when I saw her sailing across to me with questions hoisted in her eyes. Being particularly desirous not to report progress periodically to Lady Kynnersley, I made a desperate move. I went forward and greeted her.

"Lady Kynnersley," said I, "somebody was telling me that you are in urgent need of funds for something. With my usual wooden-headedness I have forgotten what it is -- but I know it is a deserving organisation."

The philanthropist, as I hoped, ousted the mother. She exclaimed at once:

"It must have been the Cabmen and Omnibus Drivers' Rheumatic Hospital."

"That was it!" said I, hearing of the institution for the first time.

"They are martyrs to rheumatic gout, and of course have no means of obtaining proper treatment; so we have secured a site at Harrogate and are building a comfortable place, half hospital, half hotel, where they can be put up for a shilling a day and have all the benefits of the waters just as if they were staying at the Hotel Majestic. Do you want to become a subscriber?"

"I am eager to," said I.

"Then come over here and I'll tell you all about it."

I sat with her in a corner of the room and listened to her fairy-tale. She wrung my heart to such a pitch of sympathy that I rose and grasped her by the hand.

"It is indeed a noble project," I cried. "I love the London cabby as my brother, and I'll post you a cheque for a thousand pounds this evening. Good-bye!"

I left her in a state of joyous stupefaction and made my escape. If it had not fallen in with my general scheme of good works I should regard it as an expensive method of avoiding unpleasant questions.

Another philanthropist, by the way, of quite a different type from Lady Kynnersley, who has lately benefited by my eleemosynary mania is Rex Campion. I have known him since our University days and have maintained a sincere though desultory friendship with him ever since. He is also a friend of Eleanor Faversham, whom he now and then inveigles into weird doings in the impossible slums of South Lambeth. He has tried on many occasions to lure me into his web, but hitherto I have resisted. Being the possessor of a large fortune, he has been able to gratify a devouring passion for philanthropy, and has squandered most of his money on an institution -- a kind of club, school, labour-bureau, dispensary, soup-kitchen, all rolled into one -- in Lambeth; and there he lives himself, perfectly happy among a hungry, grubby, scarecrow, tatterdemalion crowd. At a loss for a defining name, he has called it "Barbara's Building," after his mother. His conception of the cosmos is that sun, moon and stars revolve round Barbara's Building. How he learned that I was, so to speak, standing at street corners and flinging money into the laps of the poor and needy, I know not. But he came to see me a day or two ago, full of Barbara's Building, and departed in high feather with a cheque for a thousand pounds in his pocket.

I may remark here on the peculiar difficulty there is in playing Monte Cristo with anything like picturesque grace. Any dull dog that owns a pen and a banking-account can write out cheques for charitable institutions. But to accomplish anything personal, imaginative, adventurous, anything with a touch of distinction, is a less easy matter. You wake up in the morning with the altruistic yearnings of a St. Francois de Sales, and yet somehow you go to bed in the evening with the craving unsatisfied. You have really had so few opportunities; and when an occasion does arise it is hedged around with such difficulties as to baffle all but the most persistent. Have you ever tried to give a beggar a five-pound note? I did this morning.

She was a miserable, shivering, starving woman of fifty selling matches in Sackville Street. She held out a shrivelled hand to me, and eyes that once had been beautiful pleaded hungrily for alms.

"Here," said I to myself, "is an opportunity of bringing unimagined gladness for a month or two into this forlorn creature's life."

I pressed a five-pound note into her hand and passed on. She ran after me, terror on her face.

"I daren't take it, sir; they would say I had stolen it, and I should be locked up. No one would believe a gentleman had given it to me."

She trembled, overwhelmed by the colossal fortune that might, and yet might not, be hers. I sympathised, but not having the change in gold, I could do no more than listen to an incoherent tale of misery, which did not aid the solution of the problem. It was manifestly impossible to take back the note; and yet if she retained it she would be subjected to scandalous indignities. What was to be done? I turned my eyes towards Piccadilly and beheld a policeman. A page wearing the name of a milliner's shop on his cap whisked past me. I stopped him and slipped a shilling into his hand.

"Will you ask that policeman to come to me?"

The boy tore down the street and told the policeman and followed him up to me, eager for amusement.

"What has the woman been doing, sir?" asked the policeman.

"Nothing," said I. "I have given her a five-pound note."

"What for, sir?" he asked.

"To further my pursuit of the eumoirous," said I, whereat he gaped stolidly; "but, be that as it may, I have given it her as a free gift, and she is afraid to present it anywhere lest she should be charged with theft. Will you kindly accompany her to a shop, where she can change it, and vouch for her honesty?"

The policeman, who seemed to form the lowest opinion of my intellect, said he didn't know a shop on his beat where they could change it. The boy whistled. The woman held the box of matches in one hand, and in the other the note, fluttering in the breeze. Idlers paused and looked on. The policeman grew authoritative and bade them pass along. They crowded all the more. My position was becoming embarrassing. At last the boy, remembering the badge of honour on his cap, undertook to change the note at the hatter's at the corner of the street. So, having given the note to the boy and bidden the policeman follow him to see fair play, and encouraged the woman to follow the policeman, I resumed my walk down Sackville Street.

But what a pother about a simple act of charity! In order to repeat it habitually I shall have to rely on the fortuitous attendance of a boy and a policeman, or have a policeman and a boy permanently attached to my person, which would be as agreeable as the continuous escort of a jackdaw and a yak.

Poor Latimer is having a dreadful time. Apparently my ten thousand pounds have vanished like a snowflake on the river of liabilities. How he is to repay me he does not know. He wishes he had not yielded to temptation and had allowed himself to be honestly hammered. Then he could have taken his family to sing in the streets with a quiet conscience.

"My dear fellow," said I through the telephone this morning. "What are ten thousand pounds to me?"

I heard him gasp at the other end.

"But you're not a millionaire!"

"I am!" I cried triumphantly. And now I come to think of it, I spoke truly. If a man reckons his capital as half a year's income, doubles it, and works out the capital that such a yearly income represents, he is the possessor of a mint of money.

"I am," I cried; "and I'll tell you what I'll do. I'll settle five thousand on Lucy and the children, so that they needn't accompany you in your singing excursions. I shouldn't like them to catch cold, poor dears, and ruin their voices."

In tones more than telephonically agonised he bade me not make a jest of his misery. I nearly threw the receiver at the blockhead.

"I'm not jesting," I bawled; "I'm deadly serious. I knew Lucy before you did, and I kissed her and she kissed me years before she knew of your high existence; and if she had been a sensible woman she would have married me instead of you -- what? The first time you've heard of it? Of course it is -- and be decently thankful that you hear it now."

It is pleasant sometimes to tell the husbands of girls you have loved exactly what you think of them; and I had loved Lucy Latimer. She came, an English rose, to console me for the loss of my French fleur- de-lis, Clothilde. Or was it the other way about? One does get so mixed in these things. At any rate, she did not marry me, her first love, but jilted me most abominably for Latimer. So I shall heap five thousand pounds on her head.

I have been unfortunate in my love affairs. I wonder why? Which reminds me that I made the identical remark to Lucy Latimer a month or two ago. (She is a plump, kind, motherly, unromantic little person now.) She had the audacity to reply that I had never had any.

"You, Lucy Crooks, dare say such a thing!" I exclaimed indignantly.

She smiled. "Are there many more qualified than I to give the opinion?"

I remember that I rose and looked her sternly in the face.

"Lucy Crooks or Lucy Latimer," said I, "you are nothing more or less than a common hussy."

Whereupon she laughed as if I had paid her a high compliment.

I maintain that I have been unfortunate in my love affairs. First, there was an angel-faced widow, a contemporary of my mother's, whom I wooed in Greek verses -- and let me tell the young lover that it is much easier to write your own doggerel and convert it into Greek than to put "To Althea" into decent Anacreontics. I also took her to the Eton and Harrow match, and talked to her of women's hats and the things she loved, and neglected the cricket. But she would have none of me. In the flood tide of my passion she married a scorbutic archdeacon of the name of Jugg. Then there was a lady whose name for the life of me I can't remember. It was something ending in "-ine." We quarrelled because we held divergent views on Mr. Wilson Barrett. Then there was Clothilde, whose tragical story I have already unfolded; Lucy Crooks, who threw me over for this dear, amiable, wooden-headed stockjobbing Latimer; X, Y and Z -- but here, let me remark, I was the hunted -- mammas spread nets for me which by the grace of heaven and the ungraciousness of the damsels I escaped; and, lastly, my incomparable Eleanor Faversham. Now, I thought, am I safe in harbour? If ever a match could have been labelled "Pure heaven-made goods, warranted not to shrink" -- that was one. But for this rupture there is an all-accounting reason. For the others there was none. I vow I went on falling in love until I grew absolutely sick and tired of the condition. You see, the vocabulary of the pastime is so confoundedly limited. One has to say to B what one has said to A; to C exactly what one has said to A and B; and when it comes to repeating to F the formularies one has uttered to A, B, C, D and E one grows almost hysterical with the boredom of it. That was the delightful charm of Eleanor Faversham; she demanded no formularies or re-enactment of raptures.

The Annuaire Officiel de l'Armee Francaise has arrived. It is a volume of nearly eighteen hundred pages, and being uncut both at top and bottom and at the side it is peculiarly serviceable as a work of reference. I attacked it bravely, however, hacking my way into it, paperknife in hand. But to my dismay, the more I hacked the less could I find of Captain Vauvenarde. I sought him in the Alphabetical Repertory of Colonial Troops, in the list of officers hors cadre , in the lists of seniority, in the list of his regiment, wherever he was likely or unlikely to be. There is no person in the French army by the name of Vauvenarde.

I went straight to Lola Brandt with the hideous volume and the unwelcome news. Together we searched the pages.

"He must be here," she said, with feminine disregard of fact.

"Are you quite certain you have got the name right?" I asked.

"Why, it is my own name!"

"So it is," said I; "I was forgetting. But how do you know he was in the army at all?"

He might have been an adventurer, a Captain of Kopenick of the day, who had poured a gallant but mendacious tale into her ears.

"I hardly ever saw him out of uniform. He was quartered at Marseilles on special duty. I knew some of his brother officers."

"Then," said I, "there are only two alternatives. Either he has left the army or he is -- -- "

"Dead?" she whispered.

"Let us hope," said I, "that he has left the army."

"You must find out, Mr. de Gex," she said in a low voice. "I took it for granted that my husband was alive. It's horrible to think that he may be dead. It alters everything, somehow. Until I know, I shall be in a state of awful suspense. You'll make inquiries at once, won't you?"

"Did you love your husband, Madame Brandt?" I asked.

She looked at the fire for some time without replying. She stood with one foot on the fender.

"I thought I did when I married him," she said at last. "I thought I did when he left me."

"And now?"

She turned her golden eyes full on me. It is a disconcerting trick of hers at any time, because her eyes are at once wistful and compelling; but on this occasion it was startling. They held mine for some seconds, and I caught in them a glimpse of the hieroglyphic of the woman's soul. Then she turned her head slowly and looked again into the fire.

"Now?" she echoed. "Many things have happened between then and now. If he is alive and I go to him, I'll try to think again that I love him. It will be the only way. It will save me from playing hell with my life."

"I am glad you see your relations to Dale in that light," said I.

"I wasn't thinking of Dale," she said calmly.

"Of what, then, if I may ask without impertinence?"

She broke into a laugh which ended in a sigh, and then swung her splendid frame away from the fireplace and walked backwards and forwards, her figure swaying and her arms flung about in unrestrained gestures.

"You are quite right," she said, with an odd note of hardness in her voice. "You're quite right in what you said the other day -- that it was high time I went back to my husband. I pray God he is not dead. I have a feeling that he isn't. He can't be. I count on you to find him and ask him to meet me. It would be better than writing. I don't know what to say when I have a pen in my hand. You must find him and speak to him and send me a wire and I'll come straight away to any part of the earth. Or would you like me to come with you and help you find him? But no; that's idiotic. Forget that I have said it. I'm a fool. But he must be found. He must, he must!"

She paused in her swinging about the room for which I was sorry, as her panther-in-a-cage movements were exceedingly beautiful, and she gazed at me with a tragic air, wringing her hands. I was puzzled to find an adequate reason for this sudden emotional outburst. Hitherto she had accepted the prospect of a resumption of married life with a fatalistic calm. Now when the man is either dead or has vanished into space, she pins all her hopes of happiness on finding him. And why had her salvation from destruction nothing to do with Dale? There is obviously another range of emotions at work beneath it all; but what their nature is baffles me. Although I contemplate with equanimity my little corner in the Garden of Prosperpine, and with indifference this common lodging-house of earth, and although I view mundane affairs with the same fine, calm, philosophic, satirical eye as if I were already a disembodied spirit, yet I do not like to be baffled. It makes me angry. But during this interview with Lola Brandt I had not time to be angry. I am angry now. In fact I am in a condition bordering on that of a mad dog. If Rogers came and disturbed me now, as I am writing, I would bite him. But I will set calmly down the story of this appalling afternoon.

Lola stood before me wringing her hands.

"What are you going to do?"

"I can get an introduction to the Chef de bureau of the information department of the Ministere de la Guerre in Paris," I replied after a moment's reflection. "He will be able to tell me whether Captain Vauvenarde is alive or dead."

"He is alive. He must be."

"Very well. But I doubt whether Captain Vauvenarde keeps the office informed of his movements."

"But you'll go in search of him, won't you?"

"The earth is rather a large place," I objected. "He may be in Dieppe, or he may be on top of Mount Popocatapetl."

"I'm sure you'll find him," she said encouragingly.

"You'll own," said I, "that there's something humourous in the idea of my wandering all over the surface of the planet in search of a lost captain of Chasseurs. It is true that we might employ a private detective."

"Yes!" she cried eagerly. "Why not? Then you could stay here -- and I could go on seeing you till the news came. Let us do that."

The swiftness of her change of mood surprised me.

"What is the particular object of your going on seeing me?" I asked, with a smile.

She turned away and shrugged her shoulders and took up her pensive attitude by the fire.

"I have no other friend," she said.

"There's Dale."

"He's not the same."

"There's Sir Joshua Oldfield."

She shrugged her shoulders.

I lit a cigarette and sat down. There was a long silence. In some unaccountable way she had me under her spell again. I felt a perfectly insane dismay at the prospect of ending this queer intimacy, and I viewed her intrigue with Dale with profound distaste. Lola had become a habit. The chair I was sitting in was my chair. Adolphus was my dog. I hated the idea of Dale making him stand up and do sentry with the fire shovel, while Lola sprawled gracefully on the hearthrug. On the other hand the thought of remaining in London and sharing with my young friend the privilege of her society was intolerable.

I smoked, and, watching her bosom rise and fall as she leaned forward with one arm on the mantelpiece, argued it out with myself, and came to the paradoxical conclusion that I could pack her off without a pang to Kamtchatka and the embraces of her unknown husband, but could not hand her over to Dale without feelings of the deepest repugnance. A pretty position to find myself in. I threw away my cigarette impatiently.

Presently she said, not stirring from her pose:

"I shall miss you terribly if you go. A man like you doesn't come into the life of a common woman like me without" -- she hesitated for a word -- "without making some impression. I can't bear to lose you."

"I shall be very sorry to give up our pleasant comradeship," said I, "but even if I stay and send the private inquiry agent instead of going myself, I shan't be able to go on seeing you in this way."

"Why not?"

"It would be scarcely dignified."

"On account of Dale?"

"Precisely."

There was another pause, during which I lit another cigarette. When I looked up I saw great tears rolling down her cheeks. A weeping woman always makes me nervous. You never know what she is going to do next. Safety lies in checking the tears -- in administering a tonic. Still, her wish to retain me was very touching. I rose and stood before her by the mantelpiece.

"You can't have your pudding and eat it too," said I.

"What do you mean?"

"You can't have Captain Vauvenarde for your husband, Dale for your cavaliere servente, and myself for your guide, philosopher and friend all at the same time."

"Which would you advise me to give up?"

"That's obvious. Give up Dale."

She uttered a sound midway between a sob and a laugh, and said, as it seemed, ironically:

"Would you take his place?"

Somewhat ironically, too, I replied, "A crock, my dear lady, with one foot in the grave has no business to put the other into the Pays du Tendre."

But all the same I had an absurd desire to take her at her word, not for the sake of constituting myself her amant en titre, but so as to dispossess the poor boy who was clamouring wildly for her among his mother's snuffy colleagues in Berlin.

"That's another reason why I shrink from your going in search of my husband," she said, dabbing her eyes. "Your ill-health."

"I shall have to go abroad out of this dreadful climate in any case. Doctor's orders. And I might just as well travel about with an object in view as idle in Monte Carlo or Egypt."

"But you might die!" she cried; and her tone touched my heart.

"I've got to," I said, as gently as I could; and the moment the words passed my lips I regretted them.

She turned a terrified look on me and seized me by the arms.

"Is it as bad as that? Why haven't you told me?"

I lifted my arms to her shoulders and shook my head and smiled into her eyes. They seemed true, honest eyes, with a world of pain behind them. If I had not regarded myself as the gentleman in the Greek Tragedy walking straight to my certain doom, and therefore holding myself aloof from such vain things, I should have yielded to the temptation and kissed her there and then. And then goodness knows what would have happened.

As it was it was bad enough. For, as we stood holding on to each other's shoulders in a ridiculous and compromising attitude, the door opened and Dale Kynnersley burst, unannounced, into the room. He paused on the threshold and gaped at us, open-mouthed.

Simon the Jester

Chapter V

I wish I had not called on Lola Brandt. She disturbs me to the point of nightmare. In a fit of dream paralysis last night I fancied myself stalked by a panther, which in the act of springing turned into Lola Brandt. What she would have done I know not, for I awoke; but I have a haunting sensation that she was about to devour me. Now, a woman who would devour a sleeping Member of Parliament is not a fit consort for a youth about to enter on a political career.

The woman worries me. I find myself speculating on her character while I ought to be minding my affairs; and this I do on her own account, without any reference to my undertaking to rescue Dale from her clutches. Her obvious attributes are lazy good nature and swift intuition, which are as contrary as her tastes in tobacco and tea; but beyond the obvious lurks a mysterious animal power which repels and attracts. Were not her expressions rather melancholy than sensuous, rather benevolent than cruel, one might take her as a model for Queen Berenice or the estimable lady monarchs who yielded themselves adorably to a gentleman's kisses in the evening and saw to it that his head was nicely chopped off in the morning. I can quite understand Dale's infatuation. She may be as worthless as you please, but she is by no means the vulgar syren I was led to expect. I wish she were. My task would be easier. Why hasn't he fallen in love with one of the chorus whom his congeners take out to supper? He is an aggravating fellow.

I have declined to discuss her merits or demerits with him. I could scarcely do that with dignity, said I; a remark which seemed to impress him with a sense of my honesty. I asked what were his intentions regarding her. I discovered that they were still indefinite. In his exalted moments he talked of marriage.

"But what has become of her husband?" I inquired, drawing a bow at a venture.

"I suppose he's dead," said Dale.

"But suppose he isn't?"

He informed me in his young magnificence that Lola and himself would be above foolish moral conventions.

"Indeed?" said I.

"Don't pretend to be a Puritan," said he.

"I don't pretend to like the idea, anyhow," I remarked.

He shrugged his shoulders. It was not the time for a lecture on morality.

"How do you know that the lady returns your passion?" I asked, watching him narrowly.

He grew red. "Is that a fair question?"

"Yes," said I. "You invited me to call on her and judge the affair for myself. I'm doing it. How far have things gone up to now?"

He flashed round on me. Did I mean to insinuate that there was anything wrong? There wasn't. How could I dream of such a thing? He was vastly indignant.

"Well, my dear boy," said I, "you've just this minute been scoffing at foolish moral conventions. If you want to know my opinion," I continued, after a pause, "it is this -- she doesn't care a scrap for you."

Of course I was talking nonsense.

I did not condescend to argue. Neither did I dwell upon the fact that her affection had not reached the point of informing him whether she had a husband, and if so, whether he was alive or dead. This gives me an idea. Suppose I can prove to him beyond a shadow of doubt that the lady, although flattered by the devotion of a handsome young fellow of birth and breeding, does not, as I remarked, care a scrap for him. Suppose I exhibit her to him in the arms, figuratively speaking, of her husband (providing one is lurking in some back-alley of the world), Mr. Anastasius Papadopoulos, a curate, or a champion wrestler. He would do desperate things for a month or two; but then he would wake up sane one fine morning and seek out Maisie Ellerton in a salutary state of penitence. I wish I knew a curate who combined a passion for bears and a yearning for ladylike tea-parties. I would take him forthwith to Cadogan Gardens. Lola Brandt and himself would have tastes in common and would fall in love with each other on the spot.

Of course there is the other time-honoured plan which I have not yet tried -- to arm myself with diplomacy, call on Madame Brandt, and, working on her feelings, persuade her in the name of the boy's mother and sweetheart to make a noble sacrifice in the good, old-fashioned way. But this seems such an unhumourous proceeding. If I am to achieve eumoiriety I may as well do it with some distinction.

"Who doth Time gallop withal?" asks Orlando.

"With a thief to the gallows," says Rosalind. It is true. The days have an uncanny way of racing by. I see my little allotted span of life shrinking visibly, like the peau de chagrin. I must bestir myself, or my last day will come before I have accomplished anything.

When I jotted down the above not very original memorandum I had passed a perfectly uneumoirous week among my friends and social acquaintances. I had stood godfather to my sister Agatha's fifth child, taking upon myself obligations which I shall never be able to perform; I had dined amusingly at my sister Jane's; I had shot pheasants at Farfax Glenn's place in Hampshire; and I had paid a long- promised charming country-house visit to old Lady Blackadder.

When I came back to town, however, I consulted my calendar with some anxiety, and set out to clear my path.

I have now practically withdrawn from political life. Letters have passed; complimentary and sympathetic gentlemen have interviewed me and tried to weaken my decision. The great Raggles has even called, and dangled the seals of office before my eyes. I said they were very pretty. He thought he had tempted me.

"Hang on as long as you can, for the sake of the Party."

I spoke playfully of the Party (a man in my position, with one eye on Time and the other on Eternity, develops an acute sense of values) and Raggles held up horrified hands. To Raggles the Party is the Alpha and Omega of things human and divine. It is the guiding principle of the Cosmos. I could have spoken disrespectfully of the British Empire, of which he has a confused notion; I could have dismissed the Trinity, on which his ideas are vaguer, with an airy jest; in the expression of my views concerning the Creator, whom he believes to be under the Party's protection, I could have out-Pained Tom Paine, out-Taxiled Leo Taxil, and he would not have winced. But to blaspheme against the Party was the sin for which there was no redemption.

"I always thought you a serious politician!" he gasped.

"Good God!" I cried. "In my public utterances have I been as dull as that? Ill-health or no, it is time for me to quit the stage."

He laughed politely, because he conjectured I was speaking humourously -- he is astute in some things -- and begged me to explain.

I replied that I did not regard mustard poultices as panaceas, the vox populi as the Vox Dei, or the policy of the other side as the machinations of the Devil; that politics was all a game of guess-work and muddle and compromise at the best; that, at the worst, as during a General Election, it was as ignoble a pastime as the wit of man had devised. To take it seriously would be the course of a fanatic, a man devoid of the sense of proportion. Were such a man, I asked, fitted to govern the country?

He did not stop to argue, but went away leaving me the conviction that he thanked his stars on the Government's providential escape from so maniacal a minister. I hope I did not treat him with any discourtesy; but, oh! it was good to speak the truth after all the dismal lies I have been forced to tell at the bidding of Raggle's Party. Now that I am no longer bound by the rules of the game, it is good to feel a free, honest man.

Never again shall I stretch forth my arms and thunder invectives against well-meaning people with whom in my heart I secretly sympathise. Never again shall I plead passionately for principles which a horrible instinct tells me are fundamentally futile. Never again shall I attempt to make mountains out of mole-hills or bricks without straw or sunbeams out of cucumbers.

I shall conduct no more inquiries into pauper lunacy, thank Heaven! And as for the public engagements which Dale Kynnersley made for me during my Thebaid existence on Murglebed-on-Sea, the deuce can take them all -- I am free.

I only await the stewardship of the Chiltern Hundreds, for which quaint post under the Crown I applied, to cease to be a Member of Parliament. And yet, in spite of all my fine and superior talk, I am glad I am giving up in the recess. I should not like to be out of my seat were the House in session.

I should hate to think of all the fascinating excitement over nothing going on in the lobbies without me, while I am still hale and hearty. When Parliament meets in February I shall either be comfortably dead or so uncomfortably alive that I shall not care.

Ce que c'est que de nous! I wonder how far Simon de Gex and I are deceiving each other?

There is no deception about my old friend Latimer, who called on me a day or two ago. He is on the Stock Exchange, and, muddle-headed creature that he is, has been "bearing" the wrong things. They have gone up sky-high. Settling-day is drawing near, and how to pay for the shares he is bound to deliver he has not the faintest notion.

He stamped up and down the room, called down curses on the prying fools who came across the unexpected streak of copper in the failing mine, drew heart-rending pictures of his wife and family singing hymns in the street, and asked me for a drink of prussic acid. I rang the bell and ordered Rogers to give him a brandy and soda.

"Now," said I, "talk sense. How much can you raise?"

He went into figures and showed me that, although he stretched his credit to the utmost, there were still ten thousand pounds to be provided.

"It's utter smash and ruin," he groaned. "And all my accursed folly. I thought I was going to make a fortune. But I'm done for now." Latimer is usually a pink, prosperous-looking man. Now he was white and flabby, a piteous spectacle. "You are executor under my will," he continued. "Heaven knows I've nothing to leave. But you'll see things straight for me, if anything happens? You will look after Lucy and the kids, won't you?"

I was on the point of undertaking to do so, in the event of the continuance of his craving for prussic acid, when I reflected upon my own approaching bow and farewell to the world where Lucy and the kids would still be wandering. I am always being brought up against this final fireproof curtain. Suddenly a thought came which caused me to exult exceedingly.

"Ten thousand pounds, my dear Latimer," said I, "would save you from being hammered on the Stock Exchange and from seeking a suicide's grave. It would also enable you to maintain Lucy and the kids in your luxurious house at Hampstead, and to take them as usual to Dieppe next summer. Am I not right?"

He begged me not to make a jest of his miseries. It was like asking a starving beggar whether a dinner at the Carlton wouldn't set him up again.

"Would ten thousand set you up?" I persisted.

"Yes. But I might as well try to raise ten million."

"Not so," I cried, slapping him on the shoulder. "I myself will lend you the money."

He leaped to his feet and stared at me wildly in the face. He could not have been more electrified if he had seen me suddenly adorned with wings and shining raiment. I experienced a thrill of eumoiriety more exquisite than I had dreamed of imagining.

"You?"

"Why not?"

"You don't understand. I can give you no security whatsoever."

"I don't want security and I don't want interest," I exclaimed, feeling more magnanimous than I had a right to be, seeing that the interest would be of no use to me on the other side of the Styx. "Pay me back when and how you like. Come round with me to my bankers and I'll settle the matter at once."

He put out his hands; I thought he was about to fall at my feet; he laughed in a silly way and, groping after brandy and soda, poured half the contents of the brandy decanter on to the tray. I took him in a cab, a stupefied man, to the bank, and when he left me at the door with my draft in his pocket, there were tears in his eyes. He wrung my hand and murmured something incoherent about Lucy.

"For Heaven's sake, don't tell her anything about it," I entreated. "I love Lucy dearly, as you know; but I don't want to have her weeping on my door-mat."

I walked back to my rooms with a springing step. So happy was I that I should have liked to dance down Piccadilly. If the Faculty had not made their pronouncement, I could have no more turned poor Latimer's earth from hell to heaven than I could have changed St. Paul's Cathedral into a bumblebee. The mere possibility of lending him the money would not have occurred to me.

A man of modest fortune does not go about playing Monte Cristo. He gives away a few guineas in charity; but he keeps the bulk of his fortune to himself. The death sentence, I vow, has compensations. It enables a man to play Monte Cristo or any other avatar of Providence with impunity, and to-day I have discovered it to be the most fascinating game in the world.

When Latimer recovers his equilibrium and regards the transaction in the dry light of reason, he will diagnose a sure symptom of megalomania, and will pity me in his heart for a poor devil.

I have seen Eleanor Faversham, and she has released me from my engagement with such grace, dignity, and sweet womanliness that I wonder how I could have railed at her thousand virtues.

"It's honourable of you to give me this opportunity of breaking it off, Simon," she said, "but I care enough for you to be willing to take my chance of illness."

"You do care for me?" I asked.

She raised astonished eyes. "If I didn't, do you suppose I should have engaged myself to you? If I married you I should swear to cherish you in sickness and in health. Why won't you let me?"

I was in a difficulty. To say that I was in ill-health and about to resign my seat in Parliament and a slave to doctor's orders was one thing; it was another to tell her brutally that I had received my death warrant. She would have taken it much more to heart than I do.

The announcement would have been a shock. It would have kept the poor girl awake of nights. She would have been for ever seeing the hand of Death at my throat. Every time we met she would have noted on my face, in my gait, infallible signs of my approaching end. I had not the right to inflict such intolerable pain on one so near and dear to me.

Besides, I am vain enough to want to walk forth somewhat gallantly into eternity; and while I yet live I particularly desire that folks should not regard me as half-dead. I defy you to treat a man who is only going to live twenty weeks in the same pleasant fashion as you would a man who has the run of life before him.

There is always an instinctive shrinking from decay. I should think that corpses must feel their position acutely.

It was entirely for Eleanor's sake that I refrained from taking her into my confidence. To her question I replied that I had not the right to tie her for life to a helpless valetudinarian. "Besides," said I, "as my health grows worse my jokes will deteriorate, until I am reduced to grinning through a horse-collar at the doctor. And you couldn't stand that, could you?"

She upbraided me gently for treating everything as a jest.

"It isn't that you want to get rid of me, Simon?" she asked tearfully, but with an attempt at a smile.

I took both hands and looked into her eyes -- they are brave, truthful eyes -- and through my heart shot a great pain. Till that moment I had not realised what I was giving up. The pleasant paths of the world -- I could leave them behind with a shrug. Political ambition, power, I could justly estimate their value and could let them pass into other hands without regret. But here was the true, staunch woman, great of heart and wise, a helper and a comrade, and, if I chose to throw off the jester and become the lover in real earnest and sweep my hand across the hidden chords, all that a woman can become towards the man she loves. I realised this.

I realised that if she did not love me passionately now it was only because I, in my foolishness, had willed it otherwise. For the first time I longed to have her as my own; for the first time I rebelled. I looked at her hungeringly until her cheeks grew red and her eyelids fluttered. I had a wild impulse to throw my arms around her, and kiss her as I had never kissed her before and bid her forget all that I had said that day. Her faltering eyes told me that they read my longing. I was about to yield when the little devil of a pain inside made itself sharply felt and my madness went from me. I fetched a thing half-way between a sigh and a groan, and dropped her hands.

"Need I answer your question?" I asked.

She turned her head aside and whispered "No."

Presently she said, "I am glad I came back from Sicily. I shouldn't have liked you to write this to me. I shouldn't have understood."

"Do you now?"

"I think so." She looked at me frankly. "Until just now I was never quite certain whether you really cared for me."

"I never cared for you so much as I do now, when I have to lose you."

"And you must lose me?"

"A man in my condition would be a scoundrel if he married a woman."

"Then it is very, very serious -- your illness?"

"Yes," said I, "very serious. I must give you your freedom whether you want it or not."

She passed one hand over the other on her knee, looking at the engagement ring. Then she took it off and presented it to me, lying in the palm of her right hand.

"Do what you like with it," she said very softly.

I took the ring and slipped it on one of the right-hand fingers.

"It would comfort me to think that you are wearing it," said I.

Then her mother came into the room and Eleanor went out. I am thankful to say that Mrs. Faversham who is a woman only guided by sentiment when it leads to a worldly advantage, applauded the step I had taken. As a sprightly Member of Parliament, with an assured political and social position, I had been a most desirable son-in-law. As an obscure invalid, coughing and spitting from a bath-chair at Bournemouth (she took it for granted that I was in the last stage of consumption), I did not take the lady's fancy.

"My dear Simon," replied my lost mother-in-law, "you have behaved irreproachably. Eleanor will feel it for some time no doubt; but she is young and will soon get over it. I'll send her to the Drascombe- Prynnes in Paris. And as for yourself, your terrible misfortune will be as much as you can bear. You mustn't increase it by any worries on her behalf. In that way I'll do my utmost to help you."

"You are kindness itself, Mrs. Faversham," said I.

I bowed over the delighted lady's hand and went away, deeply moved by her charity and maternal devotion.

But perhaps in her hardness lies truth. I have never touched Eleanor's heart. No romance had preceded or accompanied our engagement. The deepest, truest incident in it has been our parting.

Chapter VI

Dale's occupation, like Othello's, being gone, as far as I am concerned, Lady Kynnersley has despatched him to Berlin, on her own business, connected, I think, with the International Aid Society. He is to stay there for a fortnight.

How he proposes to bear the separation from the object of his flame I have not inquired; but if forcible objurgations in the vulgar tongue have any inner significance, I gather that Lady Kynnersley has not employed an enthusiastic agent.

Being thus free to pursue my eumoirous schemes without his intervention, for you cannot talk to a lady for her soul's good when her adorer is gaping at you, I have taken the opportunity to see something of Lola Brandt.

I find I have seen a good deal of her; and it seems not improbable that I shall see considerably more. Deuce take the woman!

On the first afternoon of Dale's absence I paid her my promised visit. It was a dull day, and the room, lit chiefly by the firelight, happily did not reveal its nerve-racking tastelessness. Lola Brandt, supple- limbed and lazy-voiced, talked to me from the cushioned depths of her chair.

We lightly touched on Dale's trip to Berlin. She would miss him terribly. It was so kind of me to come and cheer her lonely hour. Politeness forbade my saying that I had come to do nothing of the sort. To my vague expression of courtesy she responded by asking me with a laugh how I liked Mr. Anastasius Papadopoulos.

I replied that I considered it urbane on his part to invite me to see his cats perform.

"If you were to hurt one of his cats he'd murder you," she informed me. "He always carries a long, sharp knife concealed somewhere about him on purpose."

"What a fierce little gentleman," I remarked.

"He looks on me as one of his cats, too," she said with a low laugh, "and considers himself my protector. Once in Buda-Pesth he and I were driving about. I was doing some shopping. As I was getting into the cab a man insulted me, on account, I suppose, of my German name. Anastasius sprang at him like a wild beast, and I had to drag him off bodily and lift him back into the cab. I'm pretty strong, you know. It must have been a funny sight." She turned to me quickly. "Do you think it wrong of me to laugh?"

"Why shouldn't you laugh at the absurd?"

"Because in devotion like that there seems to be something solemn and frightening. If I told him to kill his cats, he would do it. If I ordered him to commit Hari-Kari on the hearthrug, he would whip out his knife and obey me. When you have a human soul at your mercy like that, it's a kind of sacrilege to laugh at it. It makes you feel -- oh, I can't express myself. Look, it doesn't make tears come into your eyes exactly, it makes them come into your heart."

We continued the subject, divagating as we went, and had a nice little sentimental conversation. There are depths of human feeling I should never have suspected in this lazy panther of a woman, and although she openly avows having no more education than a tinker's dog, she can talk with considerable force and vividness of expression.

Indeed, when one comes to think of it, a tinker's dog has a fine education if he be naturally a shrewd animal and takes advantage of his opportunities; and a fine education, too, of its kind was that of the vagabond Lola, who on her way from Dublin to Yokohama had more profitably employed her time than Lady Kynnersley supposed. She had seen much of the civilised places of the earth in her wanderings from engagement to engagement, and had been an acute observer of men and things.

We exchanged travel pictures and reminiscences. I found myself floating with her through moonlit Venice, while she chanted with startling exactness the cry of the gondoliers. To my confusion be it spoken, I forgot all about Dale Kynnersley and my mission. The lazy voice and rich personality fascinated me. When I rose to go I found I had spent a couple of hours in her company. She took me round the room and showed me some of her treasures.

"This is very old. I think it is fifteenth century," she said, picking up an Italian ivory.

It was. I expressed my admiration. Then maliciously I pointed to a horrible little Tyrolean chalet and said:

"That, too, is very pretty."

"It isn't. And you know it."

She is a most disconcerting creature. I accepted the rebuke meekly. What else could I do?

"Why, then, do you have it here?"

"It's a present from Anastasius," she said. "Every time he comes to see me he brings what he calls an 'offrande'. All these things" -- she indicated, with a comprehensive sweep of the arm, the Union Jack cushion, the little men mounting ladders inside bottles, the hen sitting on her nest, and the other trumpery gimcracks -- "all these things are presents from Anastasius. It would hurt him not to see them here when he calls."

"You might have a separate cabinet," I suggested.

"A chamber of horrors?" she laughed. "No. It gives him more pleasure to see them as they are -- and a poor little freak doesn't get much out of life."

She sighed, and picking up "A Present from Margate" kind of mug, fingered it very tenderly.

I went away feeling angry. Was the woman bewitching me? And I felt angrier still when I met Lady Kynnersley at dinner that evening. Luckily I had only a few words with her. Had I done anything yet with regard to Dale and the unmentionable woman? If I had told her that I had spent a most agreeable afternoon with the enchantress, she would not have enjoyed her evening. Like General Trochu of the Siege of Paris fame, I said in my most mysterious manner, "I have my plan," and sent her into dinner comforted.

But I had no plan. My next interview with Madame Brandt brought me no further. We have established telephonic communications. Through the medium of this diabolical engine of loquacity and indiscretion, I was prevailed on to accompany her to a rehearsal of Anastasius's cats.

Rogers, with a face as imperturbable as if he was announcing the visit of an archbishop, informed me at the appointed hour that Madame Brandt's brougham was at the door. I went down and found the brougham open, as the day was fine, and Lola Brandt, smiling under a gigantic hat with an amazing black feather, and looking as handsome as you please.

We were blocked for a few minutes at the mouth of the courtyard, and I had the pleasure of all Piccadilly that passed staring at us in admiration. Lola Brandt liked it; but I didn't, especially when I recognised one of the starers as the eldest Drascombe-Prynne boy whose people in Paris are receiving Eleanor Faversham under their protection. A nice reputation I shall be acquiring. My companion was in gay mood. Now, as it is no part of dealing unto oneself a happy life and portion to damp a fellow creature's spirits, I responded with commendable gaiety.

I own that the drive to Professor Anastasius Papadopoulos's cattery in Rosebery Avenue, Clerkenwell, was distinctly enjoyable. I forgot all about the little pain inside and the Fury with the abhorred shears, and talked a vast amount of nonsense which the lady was pleased to regard as wit, for she laughed wholeheartedly, showing her strong white, even teeth. But why was I going?

Was it because she had requested me through the telephone to give unimagined happiness to a poor little freak who would be as proud as Punch to exhibit his cats to an English Member of Parliament? Was it in order to further my designs -- Machiavellian towards the lady, but eumoirous towards Dale? Or was it simply for my own good pleasure?

Professor Anastasius Papadopoulos, resplendently raimented, with the shiniest of silk hats and a flower in the buttonhole of his frock- coat, received us at the door of a small house, the first-floor windows of which announced the tenancy of a maker of gymnastic appliances; and having kissed Madame Brandt's hand with awful solemnity and bowed deeply to me, he preceded us down the passage, out into the yard, and into a ramshackle studio at the end, where his cats had their being.

There were fourteen of them, curled up in large cages standing against the walls. The place was lit by a skylight and warmed by a stove. The floor, like a stage, was fitted up with miniature acrobatic paraphernalia and properties. There were little five-barred gates, and trapezes, and tight-ropes, and spring-boards, and a trestle-table, all the metal work gleaming like silver. A heavy, uncouth German lad, whom the professor introduced as his pupil and assistant, Quast, was in attendance. Mr. Papadopoulos polyglotically acknowledged the honour I had conferred upon him. He is very like the late Emperor of the French; but his forehead is bulgier.

With a theatrical gesture and the remark that I should see, he opened some cages and released half a dozen cats -- a Persian, a white Angora, and four commonplace tabbies, who all sprang on to the table with military precision. Madame Brand began to caress them. I, wishing to show interest in the troupe, prepared to do the same; but the dwarf scurried up with a screech from the other end of the room.

"Ne touchez pas -- ne touchez pas!"

I refrained, somewhat wonderingly, from touching. Madame Brandt explained.

"He thinks you would spoil the magnetic influence. It is a superstition of his."

"But you are touching."

"He believes I have his magnetism -- whatever that may be," she said, with a smile. "Would you like to see an experiment? Anastasius!"

"Carissima."

"Is that the untamed Persian you were telling me of?" she asked, pointing to a cage from which a ferocious gigantic animal more like a woolly tiger than a tom-cat looked out with expressionless yellow eyes. "Will you let Mr. de Gex try to make friends with it?"

"Your will is law, meine Konigin," replied Professor Papadopoulos, bowing low. "But Hephaestus is as fierce as the flames of hell."

"See what he'll do," laughed Lola Brandt.

I approached the cage with an ingratiating, "Puss, puss!" and a hideous growl welcomed me. I ventured my hand towards the bars. The beast bristled in demoniac wrath, spat with malignant venom, and shot out its claws. If I had touched it my hand would have been torn to shreds. I have never seen a more malevolent, fierce, spiteful, ill- conditioned brute in my life. My feelings being somewhat hurt, and my nerves a bit shaken, I retreated hastily.

"Now look," said Lola Brandt.

With absolute fearlessness she went up to the cage, opened it, took the unresisting thing out by the scruff of its neck, held it up like a door-mat, and put it on her shoulder, where it forthwith began to purr like any harmless necessary cat and rub its head against her cheek. She put it on the floor; it arched its back and circling sideways rubbed itself against her skirts.

She sat down, and taking the brute by its forepaws made it stand on its hind legs. She pulled it on to her lap and it curled round lazily. Then she hoisted it on to her shoulder again, and, rising, crossed the room and bowed to the level of the cage, when the beast leaped in purring thunderously in high good humour. Mr. Papadopoulos sang out in breathless delight:

"If I am the King of Cats, you, Carissima, are the Queen. Nay, more, you are the Goddess!"

Lola Brandt laughed. I did not. It was uncanny. It seemed as if some mysterious freemasonic affinity existed between her and the evil beast. During her drive hither she had entered my own atmosphere. She had been the handsome, unconventional woman of the world. Now she seemed as remote from me as the witches in "Macbeth."

If I had seen her dashing Paris hat rise up into a point and her umbrella turn into a broomstick, and herself into one of the buxom carlines of "Tam O'Shanter," I should not have been surprised. The feats of the mild pussies which the dwarf began forthwith to exhibit provoked in me but a polite counterfeit of enthusiasm. Lola Brandt had discounted my interest. Even his performance with the ferocious Persian lacked the diabolical certainty of Lola's handling. He locked all the other cats up and enticed it out of the cage with a piece of fish. He guided it with a small whip, as it jumped over gates and through blazing hoops, and he stood tense and concentrated, like a lion-tamer.

The act over, the cat turned and snarled and only jumped into its cage after a smart flick of the whip. The dwarf did not touch it once with his hands. I applauded, however, and complimented him. He laid his hand on his heart and bent forward in humility.

"Ah, monsieur, I am but a neophyte where Madame is an expert. I know the superficial nature of cats. Now and then without vainglory I can say I know their hearts; but Madame penetrates to and holds commune with their souls. And a cat's soul, monsieur, is a wonderful thing. Once it was divine -- in ancient Egypt. Doubtless monsieur has heard of Pasht? Holy men spent their lives in approaching the cat-soul. Madame was born to the privilege. Pasht watches over her."

"Pasht," I said politely in French, in reply to this clotted nonsense, "was a great divinity. And for yourself, who knows but what you may have been in a previous incarnation the keeper of the Sacred Cats in some Egyptian temple."

"I was," he said, with staggering earnestness. "At Memphis."

"One of these days," I returned, with equal solemnity, "I hope for the privilege of hearing some of your reminiscences. They would no doubt be interesting."

On the way back Lola thanked me for pretending to take the little man seriously, and not laughing at him.

"If I hadn't," said I, "he would have stuck his knife into me."

She shook her head. "You did it naturally. I was watching you. It is because you are a generous-hearted gentleman."

Said I: "If you talk like that I'll get out and walk."

And, indeed, what right had she to characterise the moral condition of my heart? I asked her. She laughed her low, lazy laugh, but made no reply. Presently she said:

"Why didn't you like my making friends with the cat?"

"How do you know I didn't like it?" I asked.

"I felt it."

"You mustn't feel things like that," I remarked. "It isn't good for you."

She insisted on my telling her. I explained as well as I could. She touched the sleeve of my coat with her gloved hand.

"I'm glad, because it shows you take an interest in me. And I wanted to let you see that I could do something besides loll about in a drawing-room and smoke cigarettes. It's all I can do. But it's something." She said it with the humility of the Jongleur de Notre Dame in Anatole Frances's story.

In Eaton Square, where I had a luncheon engagement, she dropped me, and drove off smiling, evidently well pleased with herself. My hostess was standing by the window when I was shown into the drawing-room. I noted the faintest possible little malicious twinkle in her eye.

During the afternoon I had a telephonic message from my doctor, who asked me why I had neglected him for a fortnight and urged me to go to Harley Street at once. To humour him I went the next morning. Hunnington is a bluff, hearty fellow who feeds himself into pink floridity so as to give confidence to his patients. In answer to his renewed inquiry as to my neglect, I remarked that a man condemned to be hanged doesn't seek interviews with the judge in order to learn how the rope is getting on. I conveyed to him politely, although he is an old friend, that I desired to forget his well-fed existence. In his chatty way he requested me not to be an ass, and proceeded to put to me the usual silly questions.

Remembering the result of my last visit, I made him happy by answering them gloomily; whereupon he seized his opportunity and ordered me out of England for the winter. I must go to a warm climate -- Egypt, South Africa, Madeira -- I could take my choice. I flatly refused to obey. I had my duties in London. He was so unsympathetic as to damn my duties. My duty was to live as long as possible, and my wintering in London would probably curtail my short life by two months. Then I turned on him and explained the charitable disingenuousness of my replies to his questions. He refused to believe me, and we parted with mutual recriminations. I sent him next day, however, a brace of pheasants, a present from Farfax Glenn. After all, he is one of God's creatures.

The next time I called on Lola Brandt I went with the fixed determination to make some progress in my mission. I vowed that I would not be seduced by trumpery conversation about Yokohama or allow my mind to be distracted by absurd adventures among cats. I would clothe myself in the armour of eumoiriety, and, with the sword of duty in my hand, would go forth to battle with the enchantress. All said and done, what was she but a bold-faced, strapping woman without an idea in her head save the enslavement of an impressionable boy several years her junior? It was preposterous that I, Simon de Gex, who had beguiled and fooled an electorate of thirty thousand hard-headed men into choosing me for their representative in Parliament, should not be a match for Lola Brandt. As for her complicated feminine personality, her intuitiveness, her magnetism, her fascination, all the qualities in fact which my poetical fancy had assigned to her, they had no existence in reality. She was the most commonplace person I had ever encountered, and I had been but a sentimental lunatic.

In this truly admirable frame of mind I entered her drawing-room. She threw down the penny novel she was reading, and with a little cry of joy sprang forward to greet me.

"I'm so glad you've come. I was getting the blind hump!"

Did I not say she was commonplace? I hate this synonym for boredom. It may be elegant in the mouth of a duchess and pathetic in that of an oyster-wench, but it falls vulgarly from intermediate lips.

"What has given it to you?" I asked.

"My poor little ouistiti is dead. It is this abominable climate."

I murmured condolences. I could not exhibit unreasonable grief at the demise of a sick monkey which I had never seen.

"I'm also out of books," she said, after having paid her tribute to the memory of the departed. "I have been forced to ask the servants to lend me something to read. Have you ever tried this sort of thing? You ought to. It tells you what goes on in high society."

I was sure it didn't. Not a duchess in its pages talked about having a blind hump. I said gravely:

"I will ask you to lend it to me. Since Dale has been away I've had no one to make out my library list."

"Do turn Adolphus out of that chair and sit down," she said, sinking into her accustomed seat. Adolphus was the Chow dog before mentioned, an accomplished animal who could mount guard with the poker and stand on his head, and had been pleased to favour me with his friendship.

"I miss Dale greatly," said I.

"I suppose you do. You are very fond of him?"

"Very," said I. "By the by, how did you first come across Dale?"

She threw me a swift glance and smiled.

"Oh, in the most respectable way. I was dining at the Carlton with Sir Joshua Oldfield, the famous surgeon, you know. He performed a silly little operation on me last year, and since then we've been great friends. Dale and some sort of baby boy were dining there, too, and afterwards, in the lounge, Sir Joshua introduced them to me. Dale asked me if he could call. I said 'Yes.' Perhaps I was wrong. Anyhow, voila! Do you know Sir Joshua?"

"I sat next to him once at a public dinner. He's a friend of the Kynnersleys. A genial old soul."

"He's a dear!" said Lola.

"Do you know many of Dale's friends?" I asked.

"Hardly any," she replied. "It's rather lonesome." Then she broke into a laugh.

"I was so terrified at meeting you the first time. Dale can talk of no one else. He makes a kind of god of you. I felt I was going to hate you like the devil. I expected quite a different person."

The diplomatist listens to much and says little.

"Indeed," I remarked.

She nodded. "I thought you would be a big beefy man with a red face, you know. He gave me the idea somehow by calling you a 'splendid chap.' You see, I couldn't think of a 'splendid chap' with a white face and a waxed moustache and your way of talking."

"I am sorry," said I, "not to come up to your idea of the heroic."

"But you do!" she cried, with one of her supple twists of the body. "It was I that was stupid. And I don't hate you at all. You can see that I don't. I didn't even hate you when you came as an enemy."

"Ah!" said I. "What made you think that? We agreed to argue it out, if you remember."

She drew out of a case beside her one of her unspeakable cigarettes. "Do you suppose," she said, lighting it, and pausing to inhale the first two or three puffs of smoke, "do you suppose that a woman who has lived among wild beasts hasn't got instinct?"

I drew my chair nearer to the fire. She was beginning to be uncanny again.

"I expected you were going to be horrified at the dreadful creature your friend had taken up with. Oh, yes, I know in the eyes of your class I'm a dreadful creature. I'm like a cat in many ways. I'm suspicious of strangers, especially strangers of your class, and I sniff and sniff until I feel it's all right. After the first few minutes I felt you were all right. You're true and honourable, like Dale, aren't you?"

Like a panther making a sudden spring, she sat bolt upright in her chair as she launched this challenge at me. Now, it is disconcerting to a man to have a woman leap at his throat and ask him whether he is true and honourable, especially when his attitude towards her approaches the Machiavellian.

I could only murmur modestly that I hoped I could claim these qualifications.

"And you don't think me a dreadful woman?"

"So far from it, Madame Brandt," I replied, "that I think you a remarkable one."

"I wonder if I am," she said, sinking back among her cushions. "I should like to be for Dale's sake. I suppose you know I care a great deal for Dale?"

"I have taken the liberty of guessing it," said I. "And since you have done me the honour of taking me so far into your confidence," I added, playing what I considered to be my master-card, "may I venture to ask whether you have contemplated" -- I paused -- "marriage?"

Her brow grew dark, as she looked involuntarily at her bare left hand.

"I have got a husband already," she replied.

As I expected. Ladies like Lola Brandt always have husbands unfit for publication; and as the latter seem to make it a point of honour never to die, widowed Lolas are as rare as blackberries in spring.

"Forgive my rudeness," I said, "but you wear no wedding ring."

"I threw it into the sea."

"Ah!" said I.

"Do you want to hear about him?" she asked suddenly. "If we are to be friends, perhaps you had better know. Somehow I don't like talking to Dale about it. Do you mind putting some coals on the fire?"

I busied myself with the coal-scuttle, lit a cigarette, and settled down to hear the story. If it had not been told in the twilight hour by a woman with a caressing, enveloping voice like Lola Brandt's I should have yawned myself out of the house.

It was a dismal, ordinary story. Her husband was a gentleman, a Captain Vauvenarde in the French Army. He had fallen in love with her when she had first taken Marseilles captive with the prodigiosities of her horse Sultan. His proposals of manifold unsanctified delights met with unqualified rejection by the respectable and not too passionately infatuated Lola. When he nerved himself to the supreme sacrifice of offering marriage she accepted.

She had dreams of social advancement, yearned to be one of the white faces of the audience in the front rows. The civil ceremony having been performed, he pleaded with her for a few weeks' secrecy on account of his family. The weeks grew into months, during which, for the sake of a livelihood, she fulfilled her professional engagements in many other towns. At last, when she returned to Marseilles, it became apparent that Captain Vauvenarde had no intention whatever of acknowledging her openly as his wife. Hence many tears. Moreover, he had little beyond his pay and his gambling debts, instead of the comfortable little fortune that would have assured her social position. Now, officers in the French Army who marry ladies with performing horses are not usually guided by reason; and Captain Vauvenarde seems to have been the most unreasonable being in the world. It was beneath the dignity of Captain Vauvenarde's wife to make a horse do tricks in public, and it was beneath Captain Vauvenarde's dignity to give her his name before the world. She must neither be Lola Brandt nor Madame Vauvenarde. She must give up her fairly lucrative profession and live in semi-detached obscurity up a little back street on an allowance of twopence-halfpenny a week and be happy and cheerful and devoted. Lola refused. Hence more tears.

There were scenes of frantic jealousy, not on account of any human being, but on account of the horse. If she loved him as much as she loved that abominable quadruped whose artificial airs and graces made him sick every time he looked at it, she would accede to his desire. Besides, he had the husband's right -- a powerful privilege in France. She pointed out that he could only exercise it by declaring her to be his wife. Relations were strained. They led separate lives. From Marseilles she went to Genoa, whither he followed her. Eventually he went away in a temper and never came back. She had not heard from him since, and where he was at the present moment she had not the faintest idea.

"So you went cheerfully on with your profession?" I remarked.

"I returned to Marseilles, and there I lost my horse Sultan. Then my father died and left me pretty well off, and I hadn't the heart to train another animal. So here I am. Ah!"

With one of her lithe movements she rose to her feet, and, flinging out her arms in a wide gesture, began to walk about the room, stopping here and there to turn on the light and draw the flaring chintz curtains. I rose, too, so as to aid her. Suddenly as we met, by the window, she laid both her hands on my shoulders and looked into my face earnestly and imploringly, and her lips quivered. I wondered apprehensively what she was going to do next.

"For God's sake, be my friend and help me!"

The cry, in her rich, low notes, seemed to come from the depths of the woman's nature. It caused some absurd and unnecessary chord within me to vibrate.

For the first time I realised that her strong, handsome face could look nobly and pathetically beautiful. Her eyes swam in an adorable moisture and grew very human and appealing. In a second all my self- denying ordinances were forgotten. The witch had me in her power again.

"My dear Madame Brandt," said I, "how can I do it?"

"Don't take Dale from me. I've lived alone, alone, alone all these years, and I couldn't bear it."

"Do you care for him so very much?"

She withdrew her hands and moved slightly. "Who else in the wide world have I to care for?"

This was very pathetic, but I had the sense to remark that compromising the boy's future was not the best way of showing her devotion.

"Oh, how could I do that?" she asked. "I can't marry him. And if I do what I've never done before for any man -- become his mistress -- who need know? I could stay in the background."

"You seem to forget, dear lady," said I, "that Captain Vauvenarde is probably alive."

"But I tell you I've lost sight of him altogether."

"Are you quite so sure," I asked, regaining my sanity by degrees, "that Captain Vauvenarde has lost sight of you?"

She turned quickly. "What do you mean?"

"You have given him no chance as yet of recovering his freedom."

She passed her hand over her face, and sat down on the sofa. "Do you mean -- divorce?"

"It's an ugly word, dear Madame Brandt," said I, as gently as I could, "but you and I are strong people and needn't fear uttering it. Don't you think such a scandal would ruin Dale at the very beginning of his career?"

There was a short silence. I was glad to see she was feminine enough to twist and tear her handkerchief.

"What am I to do?" she asked at last. "I can't live this awful lonely life much longer. Sometimes I get the creeps."

I might have given her the sound advice to find healthy occupation in training crocodiles to sit up and beg; but an idea which advanced thinkers might classify as more suburban was beginning to take shape in my mind.

"Has it occurred to you," I said, "that now you have assumed the qualifications imposed by Captain Vauvenarde for bearing his name?"

"I don't understand."

"You no longer perform in public. He would have no possible grievance against you."

"Are you suggesting that I should go back to my husband?" she gasped.

"I am," said I, feeling mighty diplomatic.

She looked straight in front of her, with parted lips, fingering her handkerchief and evidently pondering the entirely new suggestion. I thought it best to let her ponder. As a general rule, people will do anything in the world rather than think; so, when one sees a human being wrapped in thought, one ought to regard wilful disturbance of the process as sacrilege. I lit a cigarette and wandered about the room.

Eventually I came to a standstill before the Venus of Milo. But while I was admiring its calm, mysterious beauty, the development of a former idea took the shape of an inspiration which made my heart sing. Fate had put into my hands the chance of complete eumoiriety.

If I could effect a reconciliation between Lola Brandt and her husband, Dale would be cured almost automatically of his infatuation, and I should be the Deputy Providence bringing happiness to six human beings -- Lola Brandt, Captain Vauvenarde, Lady Kynnersley, Maisie Ellerton, Dale, and Mr. Anastasius Papadopoulos, who could not fail to be delighted at the happiness of his goddess.

There also might burst joyously on the earth a brood of gleeful little Vauvenardes and merry little Kynnersleys, who might regard Simon de Gex as their mythical progenitor. It might add to the gaiety of regiments and the edification of parliaments. Acts should be judged, thought I, not according to their trivial essence, but by the light of their far-reaching consequences.

Lola Brandt broke the silence. She did not look at me. She said:

"I can't help feeling that you're my friend."

"I am," I cried, in the exultation of my promotion to the role of Deputy Providence. "I am indeed. And a most devoted one."

"Will you let me think over what you've said for a day or two -- and then come for an answer?"

"Willingly," said I.

"And you won't -- -- ?"

"What?"

"No. I know you won't."

"Tell Dale?" I said, guessing. "No, of course not."

She rose and put out both her hands to me in a very noble gesture. I took them and kissed one of them.

She looked at me with parted lips.

"You are the best man I have ever met," she said.

At the moment of her saying it I believed it; such conviction is induced by the utterances of this singular woman. But when I got outside the drawing-room door my natural modesty revolted. I slapped my thigh impatiently with what I thought were my gloves. They made so little sound that I found there was only one. I had left the other inside. I entered and found Lola Brandt in front of the fire holding my glove in her hand. She started in some confusion.

"Is this yours?" she asked.

Now whose could it have been but mine? The ridiculous question worried me, off and on, all the evening.

Simon the Jester

Chapter III

Some letters in Dale's round handwriting lay on the library table awaiting my signature. Dale himself had gone. A lady had called for him, said Rogers, in an electric brougham. As my chambers are on the second floor and the staircase half-way down the arcade, Rogers's detailed information surprised me. I asked him how he knew.

"A chauffeur in livery, sir, came to the door and said that the brougham was waiting for Mr. Kynnersley."

"I don't see how the lady came in," I remarked.

"She didn't, sir. She remained in the brougham," said Rogers.

So Lola Brandt keeps an electric brougham.

I lunched at the club, and turned up the article "Lola Brandt" in the living encyclopaedia -- that was my friend Renniker. The wonderful man gave me her history from the cradle to Cadogan Gardens, where she now resides. I must say that his details were rather vague. She rode in a circus or had a talking horse -- he was not quite sure; and concerning her conjugal or extra-conjugal heart affairs he admitted that his information was either unauthenticated or conjectural. At any rate, she had not a shred of reputation. And she didn't want it, said Renniker; it would be as much use to her as a diving suit.

"She has young Dale Kynnersley in tow," he remarked.

"So I gather," said I. "And now can you tell me something else? What is the present state of political parties in Guatemala?"

I was not in the least interested in Guatemala; but I did not care to discuss Dale with Renniker. When he had completed his sketch of affairs in that obscure republic, I thanked him politely and ordered coffee.

Feeling in a gregarious, companionable humour -- I have had enough solitude at Murglebed to last me the rest of my short lifetime -- I went later in the afternoon to Sussex Gardens to call on Mrs. Ellerton. It was her day at home, and the drawing-room was filled with chattering people. I stayed until most of them were gone, and then Maisie dragged me to the inner room, where a table was strewn with the wreckage of tea.

"I haven't had any," she said, grasping the teapot and pouring a treacly liquid into a cup. "You must have some more. Do you like it black, or with milk?"

She is a dainty slip of a girl, with deep grey eyes and wavy brown hair and a sea-shell complexion. I absently swallowed the abomination she handed me, for I was looking at her over the teacup and wondering how an exquisite-minded gentleman like Dale could forsake her for a Lola Brandt. It was not as if Maisie were an empty-headed, empty- natured little girl. She is a young person of sense, education, and character. She also adores musical comedy and a band at dinner: an excellent thing in woman -- when she is very young.

"Why are you looking at me like that?" she asked.

"Because, my dear Maisie," said I, "you are good to look upon. You are also dropping a hairpin."

She hastily secured the dangling thing. "I did my hair anyhow to-day," she explained.

Again I thought of Dale's tie and socks. The signs of a lover's "careless desolation," described by Rosalind so minutely, can still be detected in modern youth of both sexes. I did not pursue the question, but alluded to autumn gaieties. She spoke of them without enthusiasm. Miss Somebody's wedding was very dull, and Mrs. Somebody Else's dance manned with vile and vacuous dancers. At the Opera the greatest of German sopranos sang false. All human institutions had taken a crooked turn, and her cat could not be persuaded to pay the commonest attention to its kittens. Then she asked me nonchalantly:

"Have you seen anything of Dale lately?"

"He was working with me this morning. I've been away, you know."

"I forgot."

"When did you last see him?" I asked.

"Oh, ages ago! He has not been near us for weeks. We used to be such friends. I don't think it's very polite of him, do you?"

"I'll order him to call forthwith," said I.

"Oh, please don't! If he won't come of his own accord -- I don't want to see him particularly."

She tossed her shapely head and looked at me bravely.

"You are quite right," said I. "Dale's a selfish, ill-mannered young cub."

"He isn't!" she flashed. "How dare you say such things about him!"

I smiled and took both her hands -- one of them held a piece of brown bread-and-butter.

"My dear," said I, "model yourself on Little Bo-Peep. I don't know who gave her the famous bit of advice, but I think it was I myself in a pastoral incarnation. I had a woolly cloak and a crook, and she was like a Dresden china figure -- the image of you."

Her eyes swam, but she laughed and said I was good to her. I said:

"The man who wouldn't be good to you is an unhung villain."

Then her mother joined us, and our little confidential talk came to an end. It was enough, however, to convince me that my poor little Ariadne was shedding many desperate tears in secret over her desertion.

On my way home I looked in on my doctor. His name is Hunnington. He grasped me by the hand and eagerly inquired whether my pain was worse. I said it was not. He professed delight, but looked disappointed. I ought to have replied in the affirmative. It is so easy to make others happy.

I dined, read a novel, and went to sleep in the cheerful frame of mind induced by the consciousness of having made some little progress on the path of eumoiriety.

The next morning Dale made his customary appearance. He wore a morning coat, a dark tie, and patent-leather boots.

"Well," said I, "have you dressed more carefully today?"

He looked himself anxiously over and inquired whether there was anything wrong. I assured him of the impeccability of his attire, and commented on its splendour.

"Are you going to take Maisie out to lunch?"

He started and reddened beneath his dark skin. Before he could speak I laid my hand on his shoulder.

"I'm an old friend, Dale. You mustn't be angry with me. But don't you think you're treating Maisie rather badly?"

"You've no right to say so," he burst out hotly. "No one has the right to say so. There was never a question of an engagement between Maisie and myself."

"Then there ought to have been," I said judicially. "No decent man plays fast and loose with a girl and throws her over just at the moment when he ought to be asking her to marry him."

"I suppose my mother's been at you. That's what she wanted to see you about yesterday. I wish to God she would mind her own business."

"And that I would mind mine?"

Dale did not reply. For some odd reason he is devotedly attached to me, and respects my opinion on worldly matters. He walked to the window and looked out. Presently, without turning round, he said:

"I suppose she has been rubbing it in about Lola Brandt?"

"She did mention the lady's name," said I. "So did Renniker at the club. I suppose every one you know and many you don't are mentioning it."

"Well, what if they are?"

"They're creating an atmosphere about your name which is scarcely that in which to make an entrance into public life."

Still with his back turned, he morosely informed me in his vernacular that he contemplated public life with feelings of indifference, and was perfectly prepared to abandon his ambitions. I took up my parable, the same old parable that wise seniors have preached to the deluded young from time immemorial. I have seldom held forth so platitudinously even in the House of Commons. I spoke as impressively as a bishop. In the midst of my harangue he came and sat by the library table and rested his chin on his palm, looking at me quietly out of his dark eyes. His mildness encouraged me to further efforts. I instanced cases of other young men of the world who had gone the way of the flesh and had ended at the devil.

There was Paget, of the Guards, eaten to the bone by the Syren -- not even the gold lace on his uniform left. There was Merridew, once the hope of the party, now living in ignoble obscurity with an old and painted mistress, whom he detested, but to whom habit and sapped will- power kept him in thrall. There was Bullen, who blew his brains out. In a generous glow I waxed prophetic and drew a vivid picture of Dale's moral, mental, physical, financial, and social ruin, and finished up in a masterly peroration.

Then, without moving, he calmly said:

"My dear Simon, you are talking through your hat!"

He had allowed me to walk backwards and forwards on the hearthrug before a blazing fire, pouring out the wealth of my wisdom, experience, and rhetoric for ten minutes by the clock, and then coolly informed me that I was talking through my hat.

I wiped my forehead, sat down, and looked at him across the table in surprise and indignation.

"If you can point out one irrelevant or absurd remark in my homily, I'll eat the hat through which you say I'm talking."

"The whole thing is rot from beginning to end!" said he. "None of you good people know anything at all about Lola Brandt. She's not the sort of woman you think. She's quite different. You can't judge her by ordinary standards. There's not a woman like her in the wide world!"

I made a gesture of discouragement. The same old parable of the wise had evoked the same old retort from the deluded young. She was quite different from other women. She was misunderstood by the cynical and gross-minded world. A heart of virgin purity beat beneath her mercenary bosom. Her lurid past had been the reiterated martyrdom of a noble nature. O Golden Age! O unutterable silliness of Boyhood!

"For Heaven's sake, don't talk in that way!" he cried (I had been talking in that way), and he rose and walked like a young tiger about the room. "I can't stand it. I've gone mad about her. She has got into my blood somehow. I think about her all day long, and I can't sleep at night. I would give up any mortal thing on earth for her. She is the one woman in the world for me! She's the dearest, sweetest, tenderest, most beautiful creature God ever made!"

"And you honour and respect her -- just as you would honour and respect Maisie?" I asked quietly.

"Of course I do!" he flashed. "Don't I tell you that you know nothing whatever about her? She is the dearest, sweetest -- -- " etc., etc. And he continued to trumpet forth the Olympian qualities of the Syren and his own fervent adoration. I was the only being to whom he had opened his heart, and, the floodgates being set free, the torrent burst forth in this tempestuous and incoherent manner. I let him go on, for I thought it did him good; but his rhapsody added very little to my information.

The lady who had "houp-la'd" her way from Dublin to Yokohama was the spotless queen of beauty, and Dale was frenziedly, idiotically in love with her. That was all I could gather. When he had finished, which he did somewhat abruptly, he threw himself into a chair and took out his cigarette-case with shaky fingers.

"There. I suppose I've made a damn-fool exhibition of myself," he said, defiantly. "What have you got to say about it?"

"Precisely," I replied, "what I said before. I'll repeat it, if you like."

Indeed, what more was there to say for the present about the lunatic business? I had come to the end of my arguments.

He reflected for a moment, then rose and came over to the fireplace.

"Look here, Simon, you must let me go my own way in this. In matters of politics and worldly wisdom and social affairs and honourable dealing and all that sort of thing I would follow you blindly. You're my chief, and a kind of elder brother as well. I would do any mortal thing for you. You know that. But you've no right to try to guide me in this matter. You know no more about it than my mother. You've had no experience. You've never let yourself go about a woman in your life. Lord of Heaven, man, you have never begun to know what it means!"

Oh, dear me! Here was the situation as old as the return of the Prodigal or the desertion of the trusting village maiden, or any other cliche in the melodrama of real life. "You are making a fool of yourself," says Mentor. "Ah," shrieks Telemachus, "but you never loved! You don't know what love is."

I looked at him whimsically.

"Don't I?"

My thoughts sped back down the years to a garden in France. Her name was Clothilde. We met in a manner outrageous to Gallic propriety, as I used to climb over the garden wall to the peril of my epidermis. We loved. We were parted by stern parents -- not mine -- and Clothilde was packed off to the good Sisters who had previously had care of her education. Now she is fat and happy, and the wife of a banker and the mother of children.

But the romance was sad and bad and mad enough while it lasted; and when Clothilde was (figuratively) dragged from my arms I cursed and swore and out-Heroded Herod, played Termagant, and summoned the heavens to fall down and crush me miserable beneath their weight. And then her brother challenged me to fight a duel, whereupon, as the most worshipped of all She's had not received a ha'porth of harm at my hands, I called him a silly ass and threatened to break his head if he interfered any more in my legitimate despair. I smile at it now; but it was real at two-and-twenty -- as real, I take it, as Dale's consuming passion for the lady of the circus.

There was also, I remembered, a certain -- -- But this had nothing to do with Dale. Neither had the tragedy of my lost Clothilde. The memories, however, brought a wistful touch of sympathy into my voice.

"You soberly think, my dear old Dale," said I, "that I know nothing of love and passion and the rest of the divine madness?"

"I'm sure you don't," he cried, with an impatient gesture. "If you did, you wouldn't -- "

He came to an abrupt and confused halt.

"I wouldn't -- what?"

"Nothing. I forgot what I was going to say. Let us talk of something else."

"It was on the tip of your impulsive tongue," said I cheerfully, "to refer to my attitude towards Miss Faversham."

"I'm desperately sorry," said he, reddening. "It was unpardonable. But how did you guess?"

I laughed and quoted the Latin tag about the ingenuous boy of the ingenuous visage and ingenuous modesty.

"Because I don't feverishly search the postbag for a letter from Miss Faversham you conclude I'm a bloodless automaton?"

"Please don't say any more about it, Simon," he pleaded in deep distress.

A sudden idea struck me. I reflected, walked to the window, and, having made up my mind, sat down again. I had a weapon to hand which I had overlooked, and with the discovery came a weak craving for the boy's sympathy. I believe I care more for him than for any living creature. I decided to give him some notion of my position.

Sooner or later he would have to learn it.

"I would rather like to tell you something," said I, "about my engagement -- in confidence, of course. When Eleanor Faversham comes back I propose to ask her to release me from it."

He drew a long breath. "I'm glad. She's an awfully nice girl, but she's no more in love with you than my mother is. But it'll be rather difficult, won't it?"

"I don't think so," I replied, shaking my head. "It's a question of health. My doctors absolutely forbid it."

A look of affectionate alarm sprang into his eyes. He broke into sympathy. My health? Why had I not told him before? In Heaven's name, what was the matter with me?

"Something silly," said I. "Nothing you need worry about on my account. Only I must go piano for the rest of my days. Marriage isn't to be thought of. There is something else I must tell you. I must resign my seat."

"Resign your seat? Give up Parliament? When?"

"As soon as possible."

He looked at me aghast, as if the world were coming to an end.

"We had better concoct an epistle to Raggles this morning."

"But you can't be serious?"

"I can sometimes, my dear Dale. This is one of the afflicting occasions."

"You out of Parliament? You out of public life? It's inconceivable. It's damnable. But you're just coming into your own -- what Raggles said, what I told you yesterday. But it can't be. You can hold on. I'll do all the drudgery for you. I'll work night and day."

And he tramped up and down the room, uttering the disconnected phrases which an honest young soul unaccustomed to express itself emotionally blurts out in moments of deep feeling.

"It's no use, Dale," said I, "I've got my marching orders."

"But why should they come just now?"

"When the sweets of office are dangling at my lips? It's pretty simple." I laughed. "It's one of the little ironies that please the high gods so immensely. They have an elementary sense of humour -- like that of the funny fellow who pulls your chair from under you and shrieks with laughter when you go wallop on to the floor. Well, I don't grudge them their amusement. They must have a dull time settling mundane affairs, and a little joke goes a long way with them, as it does in the House of Commons. Fancy sitting on those green benches legislating for all eternity, with never a recess and never even a dinner hour! Poor high gods! Let us pity them."

I looked at him and smiled, perhaps a little wearily. One can always command one's eyes, but one's lips sometimes get out of control. He could not have noticed my lips, however, for he cried:

"By George, you're splendid! I wish I could take a knock-out blow like that!"

"You'll have to one of these days. It's the only way of taking it. And now," said I, in a businesslike tone, "I've told you all this with a purpose. At Wymington it will be a case of 'Le Roi est mort. Vive le Roi!' The vacancy will have to be filled up at once. We'll have to find a suitable candidate. Have you one in your mind?"

"Not a soul."

"I have."

"Who?"

"You."

"Me?" He nearly sprang into the air with astonishment.

"Why not?"

"They'd never adopt me."

"I think they would," I said. "There are men in the House as young as you. You're well known at Wymington and at headquarters as my right- hand man. You've done some speaking -- you do it rather well; it's only your private conversational style that's atrocious. You've got a name familiar in public life up and down the country, thanks to your father and mother. It's a fairly safe seat. I see no reason why they shouldn't adopt you. Would you like it?"

"Like it?" he cried. "Why I'd give my ears for it."

"Then," said I, playing my winning card, "let us hear no more about Lola Brandt."

He gave me a swift glance, and walked up and down the room for a while in silence. Presently he halted in front of me.

"Look here, Simon, you're a beast, but" -- he smiled frankly at the quotation -- "you're a just beast. You oughtn't to rub it in like that about Lola until you have seen her yourself. It isn't fair."

"You speak now in language distinctly approaching that of reason," I remarked. "What do you want me to do?"

"Come with me this afternoon and see her."

My young friend had me nicely in the trap. I could not refuse.

"Very well," said I. "But on the distinct understanding -- "

"Oh, on any old understanding you like!" he cried, and darted to the door.

"Where are you going?"

"To ring her up on the telephone and tell her you're coming."

That's the worst of the young. They have such a disconcerting manner of clinching one's undertakings.

Chapter IV

My first impression of Lola Brandt in the dimness of the room was that of a lithe panther in petticoats rising lazily from the depths of an easy chair. A sinuous action of the arm, as she extended her hand to welcome me, was accompanied by a curiously flexible turn of the body. Her hand as it enveloped, rather than grasped, mine seemed boneless but exceedingly powerful. An indoor dress of brown and gold striped Indian silk clung to her figure, which, largely built, had an appearance of great strength. Dark bronze hair and dark eyes, that in the soft light of the room glowed with deep gold reflections, completed the pantherine suggestion. She seemed to be on the verge of thirty. A most dangerous woman, I decided -- one to be shut up in a cage with thick iron bars.

"It's charming of you to come. I've heard so much of you from Mr. Kynnersley. Do sit down."

Her voice was lazy and languorous and caressing like the purr of a great cat; and there was something exotic in her accent, something seductive, something that ought to be prohibited by the police. She sank into her low chair by the fire, indicating one for me square with the hearthrug. Dale, so as to leave me a fair conversational field with the lady, established himself on the sofa some distance off, and began to talk with a Chow dog, with whom he was obviously on terms of familiarity. Madame Brandt make a remark about the Chow dog's virtues, to which I politely replied. She put him through several tricks. I admired his talent. She declared her affections to be divided between Adolphus (that was the Chow dog's name) and an ouistiti, who was confined to bed for the present owing to the evil qualities of the November air. For the first time I blessed the English climate. I hate little monkeys. I also felt a queer disappointment. A woman like that ought to have caught an ourang-outang.

She guessed my thought in an uncanny manner, and smiled, showing strong, white, even teeth -- the most marvellous teeth I have ever beheld -- so even as to constitute almost a deformity.

"I'm fonder of bigger animals," she said. "I was born among them. My father was a lion tamer, so I know all the ways of beasts. I love bears -- I once trained one to drive a cart -- but" -- with a sigh -- "you can't keep bears in Cadogan Gardens."

"You may get hold of a human one now and then," said Dale.

"I've no doubt Madame Brandt could train him to dance to whatever tune she played," said I.

She turned her dark golden eyes lazily, slumberously on me.

"Why do you say that, Mr. de Gex?"

This was disconcerting. Why had I said it? For no particular reason, save to keep up a commonplace conversation in which I took no absorbing interest. It was a direct challenge. Young Dale stopped playing with the Chow dog and grinned. It behooved me to say something. I said it with a bow and a wave of my hand:

"Because, though your father was a lion-tamer, your mother was a woman."

She appeared to reflect for a moment; then addressing Dale:

"The answer doesn't amount to a ha'porth of cats'-meat, but you couldn't have got out of it like that."

I was again disconcerted, but I remarked that he would learn in time when my mentorship was over and I handed him, a finished product, to society.

"How long will that be?" she asked.

"I don't know. Are you anxious for his immediate perfecting?"

Her shoulders gave what in ordinary women would have been a shrug: with her it was a slow ripple. I vow if her neck had been bare one could have seen it undulate beneath the skin.

"What is perfection?"

"Can you ask?" laughed Dale. "Behold!" And he pointed to me.

"That's cheap," said the lady. "I've heard Auguste say cleverer things."

"Who's Auguste?" asked Dale.

"Auguste," said I, "is the generic name of the clown in the French Hippodrome."

"Oh, the Circus!" cried Dale.

"I'll be glad if you'll teach him to call it the Hippodrome, Mr. de Gex," she remarked, with another of her slumberous glances.

"That will be one step nearer perfection," said I.

The short November twilight had deepened into darkness; the fire, which was blazing when we entered, had settled into a glow, and the room was lit by one shaded lamp. To me the dimness was restful, but Dale, who, with the crude instincts of youth, loves glare, began to fidget, and presently asked whether he might turn on the electric light. Permission was given. My hostess invited me to smoke and, to hand her a box of cigarettes which lay on the mantelpiece, I rose, bent over her while she lit her cigarette from my match, and resuming an upright position, became rooted to the hearthrug.

With the flood of illumination, disclosing everything that hitherto had been wrapped in shadow and mystery, came a shock.

It was a most extraordinary, perplexing room. The cheap and the costly, the rare and the common, the exquisite and the tawdry jostled one another on walls and floor. At one end of the Louis XVI sofa on which Dale had been sitting lay a boating cushion covered with a Union Jack, at the other a cushion covered with old Moorish embroidery. The chair I had vacated I discovered to be of old Spanish oak and stamped Cordova leather bearing traces of a coat-of-arms in gold. My hostess lounged in a low characterless seat amid a mass of heterogeneous cushions. There were many flowers in the room -- some in Cloisonne vases, others in gimcrack vessels such as are bought at country fairs. On the mantelpiece and on tables were mingled precious ivories from Japan, trumpery chalets from the Tyrol, choice bits of Sevres and Venetian glass, bottles with ladders and little men inside them, vulgar china fowls sitting on eggs, and a thousand restless little objects screeching in dumb agony at one another.

The more one looked the more confounded became confusion. Lengths of beautifully embroidered Chinese silk formed curtains for the doors and windows; but they were tied back with cords ending in horrible little plush monkeys in lieu of tassels. A Second Empire gilt mirror hung over the Louis XVI sofa, and was flanked on the one side by a villainous German print of "The Huntsman's Return" and on the other by a dainty water-colour. Myriads of photographs, some in frames, met the eye everywhere -- on the grand piano, on the occasional tables, on the mantelpiece, stuck obliquely all round the Queen Anne mirror above it, on the walls. Many of them represented animals -- bears and lions and pawing horses. Dale's photograph I noticed in a silver frame on the piano. There was not a book in the place. But in the corner of the room by a further window gleamed a large marble Venus of Milo, charmingly executed, who stood regarding the welter with eyes calm and unconcerned.

I was aroused from the momentary shock caused by the revelation of this eccentric apartment by an unknown nauseous flavour in my mouth. I realised it was the cigarette to which I had helped myself from the beautifully chased silver casket I had taken from the mantelpiece. I eyed the thing and concluded it was made of the very cheapest tobacco, and was what the street urchin calls a "fag." I learned afterwards that I was right. She purchased them at the rate of six for a penny, and smoked them in enormous quantities. For politeness' sake I continued to puff at the unclean thing until I nearly made myself sick. Then, simulating absentmindedness, I threw it into the fire.

Why, in the sacred name of Nicotine, does a luxurious lady like Lola Brandt smoke such unutterable garbage?

On the other hand, the tea which she offered us a few minutes later, and begged us to drink without milk, was the most exquisite I have tasted outside Russia. She informed us that she got it direct from Moscow.

"I can't stand your black Ceylon tea," she remarked, with a grimace.

And yet she could smoke "fags." I wondered what other contradictious tastes she possessed. No doubt she could eat blood puddings with relish and had a discriminating palate for claret. Truly, a perplexing lady.

"You must find leisure in London a great change after your adventurous career," said I, by way of polite conversation.

"I just love it. I'm as lazy as a cat," she said, settling with her pantherine grace among the cushions. "Do you know what has been my ambition ever since I was a kid?"

"Whatever of woman's ambitions you had you must have attained," said I, with a bow.

"Pooh!" she said. "You mean that I can have crowds of men falling in love with me. That's rubbish." She was certainly frank. "I meant something quite different. I wonder whether you can understand. The world used to seem to me divided into two classes that never met -- we performing people and the public, the thousand white faces that looked at us and went away and talked to other white faces and forgot all about performing animals till they came next time. Now I've got what I wanted. See? I'm one of the public."

"And you love Philistia better than Bohemia?" I asked.

She knitted her brows and looked at me puzzled.

"If you want to talk to me," she said, "you must talk straight. I've had no more education than a tinker's dog."

She made this peculiar announcement, not defiantly, not rudely, but appealingly, graciously. It was not a rebuke for priggishness; it was the unresentable statement of a fact. I apologized for a lunatic habit of speech and paraphrased my question.

"In a word," cried Dale, coming in on my heels with an elucidation of my periphrasis, "what de Gex is driving at is -- Do you prefer respectability to ramping round?"

She turned slowly to him. "My dear boy, when do you think I was not respectable?"

He jumped from the sofa as if the Chow dog had bitten him.

"Good Heavens, I never meant you to take it that way!"

She laughed, stretched up a lazy arm to him, and looked at him somewhat quizzically in the face as he kissed her finger-tips. Although I could have boxed the silly fellow's ears, I vow he did it in a very pretty fashion. The young man of the day, as a general rule, has no more notion how to kiss a woman's hand than how to take snuff or dance a pavane. Indeed, lots of them don't know how to kiss a girl at all.

"My dear," she said. "I was much more respectable sitting on the stage at tea with my horse, Sultan, than supping with you at the Savoy. You don't know the deadly respectability of most people in the profession, and the worst of it is that while we're being utterly dull and dowdy, the public think we're having a devil of a time. So we don't even get the credit of our virtues. I prefer the Savoy -- and this." She turned to me. "It is nice having decent people to tea. Do you know what I should love? I should love to have an At Home day -- and receive ladies, real ladies. And I have such a sweet place, haven't I?"

"You have many beautiful things around you," said I truthfully.

She sighed. "I should like more people to see them."

"In fact," said I, "you have social ambitions, Madame Brandt?"

She looked at me for a moment out of the corner of her eye.

"Are you skinning me?" she asked.

Where she had picked up this eccentric metaphor I know not. She had many odd turns of language as yet not current among the fashionable classes. I gravely assured her that I was not sarcastic. I commended her praiseworthy aspirations.

"But," said I innocently, "don't you miss the hard training, the physical exercise, the delight of motion, the excitement, the -- -- ?" -- my vocabulary failing me, I sketched with a gesture the equestrienne's classical encouragement to her steed.

She looked at me uncomprehendingly.

"The what?" she asked.

"What are you playing at?" inquired Dale.

"I was referring to the ring," said I.

They both burst out laughing, to my discomfiture.

"What do you take me for? A circus rider? Performing in a tent and living in a caravan? You think I jump through a hoop in tights?"

"All I can say," I murmured, by way of apology, "is that it's a mendacious world. I'm deeply sorry."

Why had I been misled in this shameful manner?

Madame Brandt with lazy good nature accepted my excuses.

"I'm what is professionally known as a dompteuse," she explained. "Of course, when I was a kid I was trained as an acrobat, for my father was poor; but when he grew rich and the owner of animals, which he did when I was fourteen, I joined him and worked with him all over the world until I went on my own. Do you mean to say you never heard of me?"

"Madame Brandt," said I, "the last thing to be astonished at is human ignorance. Do you know that 30 per cent of the French army at the present day have never heard of the Franco-Prussian War?"

"My dear Simon," cried Dale, "the two things don't hang together. The Franco-Prussian War is not advertised all over France like Beecham's Pills, whereas six years ago you couldn't move two steps in London without seeing posters of Lola Brandt and her horse Sultan."

"Ah, the horse!" said I. "That's how the wicked circus story got about."

"It was the last act I ever did," said Madame Brandt. "I taught Sultan -- oh, he was a dear, beautiful thing -- to count and add up and guess articles taken from the audience. I was at the Hippodrome. Then at the Nouveau Cirque at Paris; I was at St. Petersburg, Vienna, Berlin -- all over Europe with Sultan."

"And where is Sultan now?" I asked.

"He is dead. Somebody poisoned him," she replied, looking into the fire. After a pause she continued in a low voice, singularly like the growl of a wrathful animal, "If ever I meet that man alive it will go hard with him."

At that moment the door opened and the servant announced:

"Professor Anastasius Papadopoulos!"

Whereupon the shortest creature that ever bore so lengthy a name, a dwarf not more than four feet high, wearing a frock coat and bright yellow gloves, entered the room, and crossing it at a sort of trot fell on his knees by the side of Madame Brandt's chair.

"Ah! Carissima, je vous vois enfin, Ach liebes Herz! Que j'ai envie de pleurer!"

Madame Brandt smiled, took the creature's head between her hands and kissed his forehead. She also caressed his shoulders.

"My dear Anastasius, how good it is to see you. Where have you been this long time? Why didn't you write and let me know you were in England? But, see, Anastasius, I have visitors. Let me introduce you."

She spoke in French fluently, but with a frank British accent, which grated on a fastidious ear. The dwarf rose, made two solemn bows, and declared himself enchanted. Although his head was too large for his body, he was neither ill-made nor repulsive. He looked about thirty- five. A high forehead, dark, mournful eyes, and a black moustache and imperial gave him an odd resemblance to Napoleon the Third.

"I arrived from New York this morning, with my cats. Oh, a mad success. I have one called Phoebus, because he drives a chariot drawn by six rats. Phoebus Apollo was the god of the sun. I must show him to you, Madonna. You would love him as I love you. And I also have an angora, my beautiful Santa Bianca. And you, gentlemen" -- he turned to Dale and myself and addressed us in his peculiar jargon of French, German, and Italian -- "you must come and see my cats if I can get a London engagement. At present I must rest. The artist needs repose sometimes. I will sun myself in the smiles of our dear lady here, and my pupil and assistant, Quast, can look after my cats. Meanwhile the brain of the artist," he tapped his brow, "needs to lie fallow so that he can invent fresh and daring combinations. Do such things interest you, messieurs?"

"Vastly," said I.

He pulled out of his breast pocket an enormous gilt-bound pocket-book, bearing a gilt monogram of such size that it looked like a cartouche on an architectural panel, and selected therefrom three cards which he gravely distributed among us. They bore the legend:

"There," said he, "I am always to be found, should you ever require my services. I have a masterpiece in my head. I come on to the scene like Bacchus drawn by my two cats. How are the cats to draw my heavy weight? I'll have a noiseless clockwork arrangement that will really propel the car. You must come and see it."

"Delighted, I'm sure," said Dale, who stood looking down on the Liliputian egotist with polite wonder. Lola Brandt glanced at him apologetically.

"You mustn't mind him, Dale. He has only two ideas in his head, his cats and myself. He's devoted to me."

"I don't think I shall be jealous," said Dale in a low voice.

"Foolish boy!" she whispered.

During the love scene, which was conducted in English, a language which Mr. Papadopoulos evidently did not understand, the dwarf scowled at Dale and twirled his moustache fiercely. In order to attract Madame Brandt's attention he fetched a packet of papers from his pocket and laid them with a flourish on the tea-table.

"Here are the documents," said he.

"What documents?"

"A full inquiry into the circumstances attending the death of Madame Brandt's horse Sultan."

"Have you found out anything, Anastasius?" she asked, in the indulgent tone in which one addresses an eager child.

"Not exactly," said he. "But I have a conviction that by this means the murderer will be brought to justice. To this I have devoted my life -- in your service."

He put his hand on the spot of his tightly buttoned frock-coat that covered his heart, and bowed profoundly. It was obvious that he resented our presence and desired to wipe us out of our hostess's consideration. I glanced ironically at Dale's disgusted face, and smiled at the imperfect development of his sense of humour. Indeed, to the young, humour is only a weapon of offence. It takes a philosopher to use it as defensive armour. Dale burned to outdo Mr. Papadopoulos. I, having no such ambition, laid my hand on his arm and went forward to take my leave.

"Madame Brandt," said I, "old friends have doubtless much to talk over. I thank you for the privilege you have afforded me of making your acquaintance."

She rose and accompanied us to the landing outside the flat door. After saying good-bye to Dale, who went down with his boyish tread, she detained me for a second or two, holding my hand, and again her clasp enveloped it like some clinging sea-plant. She looked at me very wistfully.

"The next time you come, Mr. de Gex, do come as a friend and not as an enemy."

I was startled. I thought I had conducted the interview with peculiar suavity.

"An enemy, dear lady?"

"Yes. Can't I see it?" she said in her languorous, caressing voice. "And I should love to have you for a friend. You could be such a good one. I have so few."

"I must argue this out with you another time," said I diplomatically.

"That's a promise," said Lola Brandt.

"What's a promise?" asked Dale, when I joined him in the hall.

"That I will do myself the pleasure of calling on Madame again."

The porter whistled for a cab. A hansom drove up. As my destination was the Albany, and as I knew Dale was going home to Eccleston Square, I held out my hand.

"Good-bye, Dale. I'll see you to-morrow."

"But aren't you going to tell me what you think of her?" he cried in great dismay.

The pavement was muddy, the evening dark, and a gusty wind blew the drizzle into our faces. It is only the preposterously young who expect a man to rhapsodise over somebody else's inamorata at such a moment. I turned up the fur collar of my coat.

"She is good-looking," said I.

"Any idiot can see that!" he burst out impatiently. "I want to know what opinion you formed of her."

I reflected. If I could have labelled her as the Scarlet Woman, the Martyred Saint, the Jolly Bohemian, or the Bold Adventuress, my task would have been easy. But I had an uncomfortable feeling that Lola Brandt was not to be classified in so simple a fashion. I took refuge in a negative.

"She would hardly be a success," said I, "in serious political circles."

With that I made my escape.

Simon the Jester

Chapter I

I met Renniker the other day at the club. He is a man who knows everything -- from the method of trimming a puppy's tail for a dog-show, without being disqualified, to the innermost workings of the mind of every European potentate. If I want information on any subject under heaven I ask Renniker.

"Can you tell me," said I, "the most God-forsaken spot in England?"

Renniker, being in a flippant mood, mentioned a fashionable watering-place on the South Coast. I pleaded the seriousness of my question.

"What I want," said I, "is a place compared to which Golgotha, Aceldama, the Dead Sea, the Valley of Jehoshaphat, and the Bowery would be leafy bowers of uninterrupted delight."

"Then Murglebed-on-Sea is what you're looking for," said Renniker. "Are you going there at once?"

"At once," said I.

"It's November," said he, "and a villainous November at that; so you'll see Murglebed-on-Sea in the fine flower of its desolation."

I thanked him, went home, and summoned my excellent man Rogers.

"Rogers," said I, "I am going to the seaside. I heard that Murglebed is a nice quiet little spot. You will go down and inspect it for me and bring back a report."

He went blithe and light-hearted, though he thought me insane; he returned with the air of a serving-man who, expecting to find a well- equipped pantry, had wandered into a charnel house.

"It's an awful place, sir. It's sixteen miles from a railway station. The shore is a mud flat. There's no hotel, and the inhabitants are like cannibals."

"I start for Murglebed-on-Sea to-morrow," said I.

Rogers started at me. His loose mouth quivered like that of a child preparing to cry.

"We can't possibly stay there, sir," he remonstrated.

"We are not going to try," I retorted. "I'm going by myself."

His face brightened. Almost cheerfully he assured me that I should find nothing to eat in Murglebed.

"You can amuse yourself," said I, "by sending me down a daily hamper of provisions."

"There isn't even a church," he continued.

"Then you can send me down a tin one from Humphreys'. I believe they can supply one with everything from a tin rabbit-hutch to a town hall."

He sighed and departed, and the next day I found myself here, in Murglebed-on-Sea.

On a murky, sullen November day Murglebed exhibits unimagined horrors of scenic depravity. It snarls at you malignantly. It is like a bit of waste land in Gehenna. There is a lowering, soap-suddy thing a mile away from the more or less dry land which local ignorance and superstition call the sea. The interim is mud -- oozy, brown, malevolent mud. Sometimes it seems to heave as if with the myriad bodies of slimy crawling eels and worms and snakes. A few foul boats lie buried in it.

Here and there, on land, a surly inhabitant spits into it. If you address him he snorts at you unintelligibly. If you turn your back to the sea you are met by a prospect of unimagined despair. There are no trees. The country is flat and barren. A dismal creek runs miles inland -- an estuary fed by the River Murgle. A few battered cottages, a general shop, a couple of low public-houses, and three perky red-brick villas all in a row form the city, or town, or village, or what you will, of Murglebed-on-Sea. Renniker is a wonderful man.

I have rented a couple of furnished rooms in one of the villas. It has a decayed bit of front garden in which a gnarled, stunted stick is planted, and it is called The Laburnums. My landlord, the owner of the villas, is a builder. What profits he can get from building in Murglebed, Heaven alone knows; but, as he mounts a bicycle in the morning and disappears for the rest of the day, I presume he careers over the waste, building as he goes. In the evenings he gets drunk at the Red Cow; so I know little of him, save that he is a red-faced man, with a Moustache like a tooth-brush and two great hands like hams.

His wife is taciturn almost to dumbness. She is a thick-set, black- haired woman, and looks at me disapprovingly out of the corner of her eye as if I were a blackbeetle which she would like to squash under foot. She tolerates me, however, on account of the tongues and other sustenance sent by Rogers from Benoist, of which she consumes prodigious quantities. She wonders, as far as the power of wonder is given to her dull brain, what on earth I am doing here. I see her whispering to her friends as I enter the house, and I know they are wondering what I am doing here. The whole village regards me as a humorous zoological freak, and wonders what I am doing here among normal human beings.

And what am I doing here -- I, Simon de Gex, M.P., the spoilt darling of fortune, as my opponent in the Labour interest called me during the last electoral campaign? My disciple and secretary, young Dale Kynnersley, the only mortal besides Rogers who knows my whereabouts, trembles for my reason. In the eyes of the excellent Rogers I am horn- mad. What my constituents would think did they see me taking the muddy air on a soggy afternoon, I have no conception. Dale keeps them at bay. He also baffles the curiosity of my sisters, and by his diplomacy has sent Eleanor Faversham on a huffy trip to Sicily. She cannot understand why I bury myself in bleak solitude, instead of making cheerful holiday among the oranges and lemons of the South.

Eleanor is a girl with a thousand virtues, each of which she expects to find in counterpart in the man to whom she is affianced. Until a week or two ago I actually thought myself in love with Eleanor. There seemed a whimsical attraction in the idea of marrying a girl with a thousand virtues. Before me lay the pleasant prospect of reducing them -- say, ten at a time -- until I reached the limit at which life was possible, and then one by one until life became entertaining. I admired her exceedingly -- a strapping, healthy English girl who looked you straight in the eyes and gripped you fearlessly by the hand.

My friends "lucky-dog'd" me until I began to smirk to myself at my own good fortune. She visited the constituency and comported herself as if she had been a Member's wife since infancy, thereby causing my heart to swell with noble pride. This unparalleled young person compelled me to take my engagement almost seriously. If I shot forth a jest, it struck against a virtue and fell blunted to the earth. Indeed, even now I am sorry I can't marry Eleanor. But marriage is out of the question.

I have been told by the highest medical authorities that I may manage to wander in the flesh about this planet for another six months. After that I shall have to do what wandering I yearn for through the medium of my ghost. There is a certain humourousness in the prospect. Save for an occasional pain somewhere inside me, I am in the most robust health.

But this same little pain has been diagnosed by the Faculty as the symptom of an obscure disease. An operation, they tell me, would kill me on the spot. What it is called I cannot for the life of me remember. They gave it a kind of lingering name, which I wrote down on my shirt-cuff.

The name or characteristics of the thing, however, do not matter a fig. I have always hated people who talked about their insides, and I am not going to talk about mine, even to myself. Clearly, if it is only going to last me six months, it is not worth talking about. But the quaint fact of its brief duration is worth the attention of a contemplative mind.

It is in order perfectly to focus this attention that I have come to Murglebed-on-Sea. Here I am alone with the murk and the mud and my own indrawn breath of life. There are no flowers, blue sky, smiling eyes, and dainty faces -- none of the adventitious distractions of the earth. There are no Blue-books. Before the Faculty made their jocular pronouncement I had been filling my head with statistics on pauper lunacy so as to please my constituency, in which the rate has increased alarmingly of late years. Perhaps that is why I found myself their representative in Parliament. I was to father a Bill on the subject next session. Now the labour will fall on other shoulders. I interest myself in pauper lunacy no more. A man requires less flippant occupation for the premature sunset of his days. Well, in Murglebed I can think, I can weigh the pros and cons of existence with an even mind, I can accustom myself to the concept of a Great Britain without Simon de Gex. M.P.

Of course, when I go I shall "cast one longing, lingering look behind." I don't particularly want to die. In fact, having otherwise the prospect of an entertaining life, I regard my impending dissolution in the light of a grievance. But I am not afraid. I shall go through the dismal formality with a graceful air and as much of a smile on my face as the pain in my inside will physically permit.

My dear but somewhat sober-sided friend Marcus Aurelius says: "Let death surprise me when it will, and where it will, I may be eumoiros, or a happy man, nevertheless. For he is a happy man who in his lifetime dealeth unto himself a happy lot and portion. A happy lot and portion in good inclinations of the soul, good desires, good actions."

The word eumoiros according to the above definition, tickles my fancy. I would give a great deal to be eumoirous. What a thing to say: "I have achieved eumoiriety," -- namely the quintessence of happy- fatedness dealt unto oneself by a perfect altruism!

I don't think that hitherto my soul has been very evilly inclined, my desires base, or my actions those of a scoundrel. Still, the negatives do not qualify one for eumoiriety. One wants something positive. I have an idea, therefore, of actively dealing unto myself a happy lot or portion according to the Marcian definition during the rest of the time I am allowed to breathe the upper air. And this will be fairly easy; for no matter how excellently a man's soul may be inclined to the performance of a good action, in ninety cases out of a hundred he is driven away from it by dread of the consequences. Your moral teachers seldom think of this -- that the consequences of a good action are often more disastrous than those of an evil one. But if a man is going to die, he can do good with impunity. He can simply wallow in practical virtue. When the boomerang of his beneficence comes back to hit him on the head -- he won't be there to feel it . He can thus hoist Destiny with its own petard, and, besides, being eumoirous, can spend a month or two in a peculiarly diverting manner. The more I think of the idea the more am I in love with it. I am going to have a seraph of a time. I am going to play the archangel.

I shall always have pleasant memories of Murglebed. Such an idea could not have germinated in any other atmosphere. In the scented groves of sunny lands there would have been sown Seeds of Regret, which would have blossomed eventually into Flowers of Despair. I should have gone about the world, a modern Admetus, snivelling at my accursed luck, without even the chance of persuading a soft-hearted Alcestis to die for me. I should have been a dismal nuisance to society.

"Bless you," I cried this afternoon, waving, as I leaned against a post, my hand to the ambient mud, "Renniker was wrong! You are not a God-forsaken place. You are impregnated with divine inspiration."

A muddy man in a blue jersey and filthy beard who occupied the next post looked at me and spat contemptuously. I laughed.

"If you were Marcus Aurelius," said I, "I would make a joke -- a short life and an eumoiry one -- and he would have looked as pained as you."

"What?" he bawled. He was to windward of me.

I knew that if I repeated my observation he would offer to fight me. I approached him suavely.

"I was wondering," I said, "as it's impossible to strike a match in this wind, whether you would let me light my pipe from yours."

"It's empty," he growled.

"Take a fill from my pouch," said I.

The mud-turtle loaded his pipe, handed me my pouch without acknowledgment, stuck his pipe in his breeches pocket, spat again, and, deliberately turning his back, on me, lounged off to another post on a remoter and less lunatic-ridden portion of the shore. Again I laughed, feeling, as the poet did with the daffodils, that one could not but be gay in such a jocund company.

There are no amenities or urbanities of life in Murglebed to choke the growth of the Idea. This evening it flourishes so exceedingly that I think it safe to transplant it in the alien soil of Q 3, The Albany, where the good Rogers must be leading an idle existence peculiarly deleterious to his morals.

This gives one furiously to think. One of the responsibilities of eumoiriety must be the encouragement and development of virtue in my manservant.

Also in my young friend and secretary, Dale Kynnersley. He is more to me than Rogers. I may confess that, so long as Rogers is a sober, honest, me-fearing valet, in my heart of hearts I don't care a hang about Rogers's morals. But about those of Dale Kynnersley I do. I care a great deal for his career and happiness. I have a notion that he is erring after strange goddesses and neglecting the little girl who is in love with him. He must be delivered. He must marry Maisie Ellerton, and the two of them must bring lots of capable, clear-eyed Kynnersleys into the world. I long to be their ghostly godfather.

Then there's Eleanor Faversham -- but if I begin to draw up a programme I shall lose that spontaneity of effort which, I take it, is one of the chief charms of dealing unto oneself a happy lot and portion. No; my soul abhors tabulation. It would make even six months' life as jocular as Bradshaw's Railway Guide or the dietary of a prison. I prefer to look on what is before me as a high adventure, and with that prospect in view I propose to jot down my experiences from time to time, so that when I am wandering, a pale shade by Acheron, young Dale Kynnersley may have not only documentary evidence wherewith to convince my friends and relations that my latter actions were not those of a lunatic, but also, at the same time, an up-to-date version of Jeremy Taylor's edifying though humour-lacking treatise on the act of dying, which I am sorely tempted to label "The Rule and Example of Eumoiriety." I shall resist the temptation, however. Dale Kynnersley -- such is the ignorance of the new generation -- would have no sense of the allusion. He would shake his head and say, "Dotty, poor old chap, dotty!" I can hear him. And if, in order to prepare him, I gave him a copy of the "Meditations," he would fling the book across the room and qualify Marcus Aurelius as a "rotter."

Dale is a very shrewd fellow, and will make an admirable legislator when his time comes. Although his highest intellectual recreation is reiterated attendance at the musical comedy that has caught his fancy for the moment and his favourite literature the sporting pages of the daily papers, he has a curious feline pounce on the salient facts of a political situation, and can thread the mazes of statistics with the certainty of a Hampton Court guide. His enthusiastic researches (on my behalf) into pauper lunacy are remarkable in one so young. I foresee him an invaluable chairman of committee. But he will never become a statesman. He has too passionate a faith in facts and figures, and has not cultivated a sense of humour at the expense of the philosophers. Young men who do not read them lose a great deal of fun.

Well, to-morrow I leave Murglebed for ever; it has my benison. Democritus returns to London.

Chapter II

I was at breakfast on the morning after my arrival in London, when Dale Kynnersley rushed in and seized me violently by the hand.

"By Jove, here you are at last!"

I smoothed my crushed fingers. "You have such a vehement manner of proclaiming the obvious, my dear Dale."

"Oh, rot!" he said. "Here, Rogers, give me some tea -- and I think I'll have some toast and marmalade."

"Haven't you breakfasted?"

A cloud overspread his ingenuous countenance.

"I came down late, and everything was cold and mother was on edge. The girls are always doing the wrong things and I never do the right ones -- you know the mater -- so I swallowed a tepid kidney and rushed off."

"Save for her worries over you urchins," said I, "I hope Lady Kynnersley is well?"

He filled his mouth with toast and marmalade, and nodded. He is a good-looking boy, four-and-twenty -- idyllic age! He has sleek black hair brushed back from his forehead over his head, an olive complexion, and a keen, open, clean-shaven face. He wore a dark-brown lounge suit and a wine-coloured tie, and looked immaculate. I remember him as the grubbiest little wretch that ever disgraced Harrow.

He swallowed his mouthful and drank some tea.

"Recovered your sanity?" he asked.

"The dangerous symptoms have passed over," I replied. "I undertake not to bite."

He regarded me as though he were not quite certain, and asked in his pronounless way whether I was glad to be back in London.

"Yes," said I. "Rogers is the only human creature who can properly wax the ends of my moustache. It got horribly limp in the air of Murglebed. That is the one and only disadvantage of the place."

"Doesn't seem to have done you much good," he remarked, scanning me critically. "You are as white as you were before you went away. Why the blazes you didn't go to Madeira, or the South of France, or South Africa I can't imagine."

"I don't suppose you can," said I. "Any news?"

"I should think I have! But first let me go through the appointments."

He consulted a pocket-book. On December 2nd I was to dine with Tanners' Company and reply to the toast of "The House of Commons." On the 4th my constituency claimed me for the opening of a bazaar at Wymington. A little later I was to speak somewhere in the North of England at a by-election in support of the party candidate.

"It will be fought on Tariff Reform, about which I know nothing," I objected.

"I know everything," he declared. "I'll see you through. You must buck up a bit, Simon, and get your name better known about the country. And this brings me to my news. I was talking to Raggles the other day -- he dropped a hint, and Raggles's hints are jolly well worth while picking up. Just come to the front and show yourself, and there's a place in the Ministry."

"Ministry?"

"Sanderson's going."

"Sanderson?" I queried, interested, in spite of myself, at these puerilities. "What's the matter with him?"

"Swelled head. There have been awful rows -- this is confidential -- and he's got the hump. Thinks he ought to be the Chancellor of the Exchequer, or at least First Lord, instead of an Under Secretary. So he's going to chuck it, before he gets the chuck himself -- see?"

"I perceive," said I, "that your conversational English style is abominable."

He lit a cigarette and continued, loftily taking no notice of my rebuke.

"There's bound to be a vacancy. Why shouldn't you fill it? They seem to want you. You're miles away over the heads of the average solemn duffers who get office."

I bowed acknowledgment of his tribute.

"Well, you will buck up and try for it, won't you? I'm awfully proud of you already, but I should go off my head with joy if you were in the Ministry."

I met his honest young eyes as well as I could. How was I going to convey to his candid intelligence the fact of my speedy withdrawal from political life without shattering his illusions? Besides, his devotion touched me, and his generous aspirations were so futile. Office! It was in my grasp. Raggles, with his finger always on the pulse of the party machine, was the last man in the world to talk nonsense. I only had to "buck up." Yet by the time Sanderson sends in his resignation to the King of England, I shall have sent in mine to the King of Hosts. I moved slightly in my chair, and a twinge of the little pain inside brought a gasp to my throat. But I felt grateful to it. It was saving me from an unconscionable deal of worry. Fancy going to a confounded office every morning like a clerk in the City! I was happier at peace. I rose and warmed myself by the fire. Dale regarded me uncomprehendingly.

"You look as if the prospect bored you to tears. I thought you would be delighted."

"Vanitas vanitatum," said I. "Omnia vanitas."

"Rot!" said Dale.

"It's true."

"I must fetch Eleanor Faversham back from Sicily," said Dale.

"Don't," said I.

"Well, I give you up," he declared, pushing his chair from the table and swinging one leg across the other. I leaned forward and scrutinised his ankles.

"What are you looking at?"

"There must be something radically wrong with you, Dale," I murmured sympathetically. "It is part of the religion of your generation to wear socks to match your tie. To-day your tie is wine-coloured and your socks are green -- -- "

"Good Lord," he cried, "so they are! I dressed myself anyhow this morning."

"What's wrong with you?"

He threw his cigarette impatiently into the fire.

"Every infernal thing that can possibly be. Everything's rotten -- but I've not come here to talk about myself."

"Why not?"

"It isn't the game. I'm here on your business, which is ever so much more important than mine. Where are this morning's letters?"

I pointed to an unopened heap on a writing-table at the end of the room. He crossed and sat down before them. Presently he turned sharply.

"You haven't looked through the envelopes. Here is one from Sicily."

I took the letter from him, and sighed to myself as I read it. Eleanor was miserable. The Sicilians were dirty. The Duomo of Palermo did not come up to her expectations. The Mobray-Robertsons, with whom she travelled, quarrelled with their food. They had never even heard of Theocritus. She had a cold in her head, and was utterly at a loss to explain my attitude. Therefore she was coming back to London.

I wish I could find her a nice tame husband who had heard of Theocritus. It would be such a good thing for everybody, husband included. For, I repeat, Eleanor is a young woman of fine character, and the man to whom she gives her heart will be a fortunate fellow.

While I was reading the letter and meditating on it, with my back to the fire, Dale plunged into the morning's correspondence with an air of enjoyment. That is the astonishing thing about him. He loves work. The more I give him to do the better he likes it. His cronies, who in raiment, manners, and tastes differ from him no more than a row of pins differs from a stray brother, regard a writing-chair as a mediaeval instrument of torture, and faint at the sight of ink. They will put themselves to all kinds of physical and pecuniary inconvenience in order to avoid regular employment. They are the tramps of the fashionable world. But in vain do they sing to Dale of the joys of silk-hatted and patent-leather-booted vagabondage and deride his habits of industry; Dale turns a deaf ear to them and urges on his strenuous career. Rogers, coming in to clear away the breakfast things, was despatched by my young friend to fetch a portfolio from the hall. It contained, he informed me, the unanswered letters of the past fortnight with which he had found himself unqualified to deal. He grasped the whole bundle of correspondence, and invited me to follow him to the library and start on a solid morning's work. I obeyed meekly. He sat down at the big table, arranged the pile in front of him, took a pencil from the tray, and began:

"This is from Finch, of the Universal Review."

I put my hand on his shoulder.

"Tell him, my boy, that it's against my custom to breakfast at afternoon tea, and that I hope his wife is well."

At his look of bewilderment I broke into a laugh.

"He wants me to write a dull article for his stupid paper, doesn't he?"

"Yes, on Poor Law Administration."

"I'm not going to do it. I'm not going to do anything these people ask me. Say 'No, no, no, no,' to everybody."

"In Heaven's name, Simon," he cried, laying down his pencil, "what has come over you?"

"Old age," said I.

He uttered his usual interjection, and added that I was only thirty- seven.

"Age is a relative thing," I remarked. "Babes of five have been known to die of senile decay, and I have seen irresponsible striplings of seventy."

"I really think Eleanor Faversham had better come back from Sicily."

I tapped the letter still in my hand. "She's coming."

"I'm jolly glad to hear it. It's all my silly fault that she went away. I thought she was getting on your nerves. But you want pulling together. That confounded place you've been to has utterly upset you."

"On the contrary," said I, "it has steadied and amplified my conception of sublunary affairs. It has shown me that motley is much more profitable wear than the edged toga of the senator -- "

"Oh, for God's sake, dry up," cried young England, "and tell me what answers I'm to give these people!"

He seemed so earnest about it that I humoured him; and my correspondents seemed so earnest that I humoured them. But it was a grim jest. Most of the matters with which I had to deal appeared so trivial. Only here and there did I find a chance for eumoiriety. The Wymington Hospital applied for their annual donation.

"You generally give a tenner," said Dale.

"This time I'll give them a couple of hundred," said I.

Dale earmarked the amount wonderingly; but when I ordered him to send five pounds apiece to the authors of various begging letters he argued vehemently and quoted the Charity Organisation Society.

"They're frauds, all of them," he maintained.

"They're poor necessitous devils, at any rate," said I, "and they want the money more than I do."

This was a truth whose significance Dale was far from realising. Of what value, indeed, is money to me? There is none to whom I can usefully bequeath my little fortune, my sisters having each married rich men. I shall not need even Charon's obolus when I am dead, for we have ceased to believe in him -- which is a pity, as the trip across the Styx must have been picturesque. Why, then, should I not deal myself a happy lot and portion by squandering my money benevolently during my lifetime?

It behooves me, however, to walk warily in this as in other matters, for if my actions too closely resemble those of a lunatic at large, trustees may be appointed to administer my affairs, which would frustrate my plans entirely.

When my part in the morning's work was over, I informed my secretary that I would go out and take the air till lunch-time.

"If you've nothing better to do," said he, "you might run round to Eccleston Square and see my mother."

"For any particular reason?"

"She wants to see you. Home for inebriate parrots or something. Gave me a message for you this morning."

"I'll wait," said I, "on Lady Kynnersley with pleasure."

I went out and walked down the restful covered way of the Albany to the Piccadilly entrance, and began my taking of the air. It was a soft November day, full of blue mist, and invested with a dying grace by a pale sunshine struggling through thin, grey rain-cloud. It was a faded lady of a day -- a lady of waxen cheeks, attired in pearl-grey and old lace, her dim eyes illumined by a last smile. It gave an air of unreality to the perspective of tall buildings, and treated with indulgent irony the passing show of humans -- on foot, on omnibuses, in cabs and motors -- turning them into shadow shapes tending no whither. I laughed to myself. They all fancied themselves so real. They all had schemes in their heads, as if they were going to live a thousand years. I walked westwards past the great clubs, moralising as I went, and feeling the reaction from the excitement of Murglebed-on-Sea. I looked up at one of my own clubs, a comfortable resting-place, and it struck me as possessing more attractions than the family vault in Highgate Cemetery. An acquaintance at the window waved his hand at me. I thought him a lucky beggar to have that window to stand by when the street will be flooded with summer sunshine and the trees in the green Park opposite wave in their verdant bravery. A little further a radiant being, all chiffons and millinery, on her way to Bond Street for more millinery and chiffons, smiled at me and put forth a delicately-gloved hand.

"Oh, Mr. de Gex, you're the very man I was longing to see!"

"How simply are some human aspirations satisfied!" said I.

"Farfax" -- that's her husband, Farfax Glenn, a Member on my side of the House -- "Farfax and I are making plans already for the Easter recess. We are going to motor to Athens, and you must come with us. You can tell us all about everything as we pass by."

I looked grave. "Easter is late next year."

"What does that matter? Say you'll come."

"Alas! my dear Mrs. Glenn," I said, with a smile, "I have an engagement at Easter -- a very important one."

"I thought the wedding was not to take place till June."

"It isn't the wedding," said I.

"Then break the engagement."

"It's beyond human power," said I.

She held up her bracelet, from which dangled some charms.

"I think you're a -- -- " And she pointed to a little golden pig.

"I'm not," I retorted.

"What are you, then?"

"I'm a gentleman in a Greek tragedy."

We laughed and parted, and I went on my way cheered by the encounter. I had spoken the exact truth, and found amusement in doing so. One has often extracted humour from the contemplation of the dissolution of others -- that of the giant in "Jack the Giant-killer" for instance, and the demise of the little boy with the pair of skates in the poem. Why not extract it from the contemplation of one's own?

The only disadvantage of my position is that it give me, in spite of myself, an odd sense of isolation from my kind. They are looking forward to Easters and Junes and summers, and I am not. I also have a fatuous feeling of superiority in being in closer touch than they with eternal verities. I must take care that I do not play too much to the gallery, that I do not grow too conceited over the singularity of my situation, and arrive at the mental attitude of the criminal whose dominant solicitude in connection with his execution was that he should be hanged in his dress clothes. These reflections brought me to Eccleston Square.

Lady Kynnersley is that type of British matron who has children in fits of absent-mindedness, and to whom their existence is a perpetual shock. Her main idea in marrying the late Sir Thomas Kynnersley was to associate herself with his political and philanthropic schemes. She is the born committee woman, to whom a home represents a place where one sleeps and eats in order to maintain the strength required for the performance of committee duties. Her children have always been outside the sphere of her real interests, but, afflicted, as such women are, with chronic inflammation of the conscience, she had devoted the most scrupulous care to their upbringing. She formed herself into a society for the protection of her own children, and managed them by means of a committee, which consisted of herself, and of which she was the honorary secretary. She drew up articles of association and regulations. If Dale contracted measles, she applied by-law 17. If Janet slapped Dorothy, by-law 32 was brought into play. When Dale clamoured for a rocking-horse, she found that the articles of association did not provide for imaginative equitation. As the children grew up, the committee had from time to time to revise the articles and submit them to the general body for approval. There were many meetings before the new sections relating to a University career for the boy and the coming out for the girls were satisfactorily drafted. Once given the effect of law, however, there was no appeal against these provisions. Both committee and general body were powerless. Dale certainly owed his methodical habits to his mechanical training, but whence he derived and how he maintained his exuberance and spontaneity has often puzzled me. He himself accounts for it on the score of heredity, in that an ancestress of his married a highwayman who was hanged at Tyburn under William and Mary.

In person Lady Kynnersley is lean and blanched and grey-haired. She wears gold spectacles, which stand out oddly against the thin whiteness of her face; she is still a handsome, distinguished woman, who can have, when she chooses, a most gracious manner. As I, worldling and jester though I am, for some mysterious reason have found favour in the lady's eyes, she manifests this graciousness whenever we foregather. Ergo, I like Lady Kynnersley, and would put myself to much inconvenience in order to do her a service.

She kept me waiting in the drawing-room but a minute before she made her appearance, grasped my hand, proclaimed my goodness in responding so soon to her call, bade me sit down on the sofa by her side, inquired after my health, and, the gods of politeness being propitiated, plunged at once into the midst of matters.

Dale was going downhill headlong to Gadarene catastrophe. He had no eyes or ears or thoughts for any one in the world but for a certain Lola Brandt, a brazen creature from a circus, the shape of whose limbs was the common knowledge of mankind from Dublin to Yokohama, and whose path by sea and land, from Yokohama to Dublin, was strewn with the bodies of her victims. With this man-eating tigress, declared Lady Kynnersley, was Dale infatuated. He scorched himself morning, noon, and night in her devastating presence. Had cut himself adrift from home, from society. Had left trailing about on his study table a jeweller's bill for a diamond bracelet. Was committing follies that made my brain reel to hear. Had threatened, if worried much longer, to marry the Scarlet One incontinently. Heaven knew, cried Lady Kynnersley, how many husbands she had already -- scattered along the track between Dublin and Yokohama. There was no doubt about it. Dale was hurtling down to everlasting bonfire. She looked to me to hold out the restraining hand.

"You have already spoken to Dale on the subject?" I asked, mindful of the inharmonious socks and tie.

"I can talk to him of nothing else," said Lady Kynnersley desperately.

"That's a pity," said I. "You should talk to him of Heaven, or pigs, or Babylonic cuneiform -- anything but Lola Brandt. You ought to go to work on a different system."

"But I haven't a system at all," cried the poor lady. "How was I to foresee that my only son was going to fall in love with a circus rider? These are contingencies in life for which one, with all the thought in the world, can make no provision. I had arranged, as you know, that he should marry Maisie Ellerton, as charming a girl as ever there was. Isn't she? And an independent fortune besides."

"A rosebud wrapped in a gold leaf," I murmured.

"Now he's breaking the child's heart -- -- "

"There was never any engagement between them, I am sure of that," I remarked.

"There wasn't. But I gave her to understand it was a settled affair -- merely a question of Dale speaking. And, instead of speaking, he will have nothing to do with her, and spends all his time -- and, I suppose, though I don't like to refer to it, all his money -- in the society of this unmentionable woman."

"Is she really so -- so red as she is painted?" I asked.

"She isn't painted at all. That's where her artful and deceitful devilry comes in -- -- "

"I suppose Dale," said I, "declares her to be an angel of light and purity?"

"An angel on horseback! Whoever heard of such a thing?"

"It's the name of a rather fiery savoury," said I.

"In a circus!" she continued.

"Well," said I, "the ring of a circus is not essentially one of the circles in Dante's Inferno."

"Of course, my dear Simon," she said, with some impatience, "if you defend him -- "

I hastened to interrupt her. "I don't. I think he is an egregious young idiot; but before taking action it's well to get a clear idea of the facts. By the way, how do you know she's not painted?"

"I've seen her -- seen her with my own eyes in Dale's company -- at the Savoy. He's there supping with her every night. General Lamont told me. I wouldn't believe it -- Dale flaunting about in public with her. The General offered to take me there after the inaugural meeting of the International Aid Society at Grosvenor House. I went, and saw them together. I shall never forget the look in the boy's eyes till my dying day. She has got him body and soul. One reads of such things in the poets, one sees it in pictures; but I've never come across it in real life -- never, never. It's dreadful, horrible, revolting. To think that a son of mine, brought up from babyhood to calculate all his actions with mathematical precision, should be guilty of this profligacy! It's driving me mad, Simon; it really is. I don't know what to do. I've come to the end of my resources. It's your turn now. The boy worships you."

A wild appeal burned in her eyes and was refracted oddly through her near-sighted spectacles. I had never seen her betray emotion before during all the years of our friendship. The look and the tone of her voice moved me. I expressed my sympathy and my readiness to do anything in my power to snatch the infatuated boy from the claw and fang of the syren and hale him to the forgiving feet of Maisie Ellerton. Indeed, such a chivalrous adventure had vaguely passed through my mind during my exalted mood at Murglebed-on-Sea. But then I knew little beyond the fact that Dale was fluttering round an undesirable candle. Till now I had no idea of the extent to which his wings were singed.

"Hasn't Dale spoken to you about this creature?" his mother asked.

"Young men of good taste keep these things from their elders, my dear Lady Kynnersley," said I.

"But you knew of it?"

"In a dim sort of way."

"Oh, Simon -- "

"The baby boys of Dale's set regard taking out the chorus to supper as a solemn religious rite. They wouldn't think themselves respectable if they didn't. I've done it myself -- in moderation -- when I was very young."

"Men are mysteries," sighed Lady Kynnersley.

"Please regard them as such," said I, with a laugh, "and let Dale alone. Allow him to do whatever irrational thing he likes, save bringing the lady here to tea. If you try to tear him away from her he'll only cling to her the closer. If you trumpet abroad her infamy he'll proclaim her a slandered and martyred saint. Leave him to me for the present."

"I'll do so gladly," said Lady Kynnersley, with surprising meekness. "But you will bring him back, Simon? I've arranged for him to marry Maisie. I can't have my plans for the future upset."

By-law 379! Dear, excellent, but wooden-headed woman!

"I have your promise, haven't I?" she said, her hand in mine.

"You have," said I nobly.

But how in the name of Astaroth I'm going to keep it I haven't the remotest conception.