Half an hour later Toby was on his way to Stanborough, where he was to meet a friend at the club-house, and play a round of golf with him. As soon as that was over, he proposed to make a call at the Links Hotel and demand an interview with Ted Comber. Lily, in this as in all else above the common level of womankind, made no suggestion that she should come round with them. In fact, she voluntarily repudiated such a possibility.

"No proper man wants a girl hanging about when he is playing a game," she had said. "So if you ask me to come with you—if, in fact, you don't forbid me to—you'll be no proper man. Now, shall I come with you? I want to, awfully."

"Yes—I mean, no," said Toby, wavering, but deciding right.

Toby was playing with a friend after his own heart, who had just left Oxford, more to the regret of undergraduates than of tutors, and so presumably his departure was really regrettable. He was a hater of cities and five-o'clock teas, capable of riding whatever on this unruly earth had been foaled, but perfectly incapable of what he called "simpering and finesse," meaning thereby the pretty little social gifts. Furthermore, he was possessed of so much common-sense that at times he might have been unjustly suspected of being clever. Him, as they played, Toby determined to consult under secrecy as to what must be done with the ineffable Comber, and "If Buck and I," thought he, "aren't a match for that scented man, I'll brush my teeth with my niblick. Lord, what a lark!"

Toby, it must be confessed, rather enjoyed the mission with which his mother had entrusted him. He was not naturally of a punitive or revengeful disposition, and, indeed, Lord Comber, had never done anything to him, except exist, which called for vengeance. But the thought of his discomfiture was sweet in his mouth, and, though he had not yet formed the vaguest idea as to how it was to be accomplished, he felt a serene confidence that he and Buck would be able to hatch something immensely unpleasant between them.

Here was no case, he thought gleefully to himself, that called for tact or diplomacy, or any lady-like little weapons, which Comber probably possessed. Brutal means must be used, and he should use them. He regretted intensely that both he and Comber were past the age when their difference could be settled with the straightforward simplicity which says, "Will you go of your own accord, or do you prefer to be kicked?" Dearly would he have liked that, for, indeed, his fists itched after the man.

Anyhow, the cause was good. Comber was to be sat upon, and Kit saved from making an egregious fool of herself. Married women of her age and appearance, reasoned Toby, do not stay alone with people like Comber at watering-places like Stanborough, and Kit's brother-in-law did not intend that she should do risky things of this description if he could prevent it. Toby's laudable determination on this point was not due, it must be confessed, to moral scruples. He did not know, and he did not care to know, whether Kit's flirtation with this man was serious or not. But people, he was aware, talked about them, and certainly, if she and he stayed in a Stanborough hotel for a week in August together, people would have an excellent reason for talking. Still less had he any fancy, supposing the worst came to the worst, for seeing, as his mother said, Conybeare linen, marked very plain, in the public wash-tub.

Also he hated Comber with all the fine intensity with which a healthy, normal young man hates, and is right to hate, those smiling, wobbly, curled and scented of his sex, who powder themselves and take pills, and read ladies' papers, and are at their best (or worst) in a boudoir—lap-dogs of London. Some women, and perhaps their Creator knows why, appeared, so Toby thought, to like them. Kit liked Comber—here was an instance of it that thrust sore at him. Now, Jack was no saint (here again Toby was not judging on moral grounds), but he was a man. He would shoot straight or ride straight all day, and in the evening he would make himself, it might be, quite scandalously agreeable to other people's wives. It was not right, and Toby did not defend him, but, anyhow, he behaved like a male. That was where the difference lay.

He remembered how they had all howled at Kit when one evening she had announced that she was going to Stanborough for a week in August to get braced. No, she was not going to take any of her friends with her, and very likely she would not even take a maid. She proposed to live in some stark hotel swept by all the winds that blow, in a bedroom with only a small square of carpet, one damp sandy towel, and windows looking due north, and kept always wide open. She intended to bathe daily before breakfast in the cold, salt, terrible German Ocean, to sit and walk on the sands all day, and go to bed directly after an eggy high tea, about seven. She would have eggs with her tea, and eggs with her breakfast, and cold roast beef for lunch, and possibly beer. She would not go to stay with Jack's mother, which was the obvious thing to do, because the house was so comfortable, and she knew she would only sit indoors, and get up late and go to bed late if she did. She wanted to be cold and uncomfortable and early-birdish, and come back braced with a bronzed complexion like a sailor, and blowzy hair. It would be immensely healthy and exceedingly unpleasant.

Toby recollected these amazing plans of Kit's very precisely. Ted Comber, he also remembered, had been there when she had enunciated them, and when he asked if he might come too, had received an unqualified negative. Thus, whether Kit had or had not made this subsequent arrangement with him mattered not at all. If she had, the Perseus-Toby was coming hot-foot over the downs to deliver her from her self-forged fetters; and if Comber had come without being asked, still more peremptory should be his dismissal. What was to be done was clear to demonstration; how it must be done was a matter for council.

Toby found several friends at the club-house—it was of common occurrence that he found friends in casual and unlikely places—and got generally chaffed and slapped and offered various mixed and stimulating drinks warranted to improve his putting and shut the jaws of the bunkers. But in the course of time they got clear, and drove up the steep hill leading to the first hole. Once started, Toby gave the outlines of the problem to Buck, who was highly and justifiably indignant with him.

"It's a shabby trick, Toby," he said, "to bring me up on to this fine turf under the pretence of playing golf, if you want to talk morals. Good God! fancy talking moral problems on a golf links! If this was a lawn-tennis court, and you were a parson, I could understand it."

"Oh, don't be a fool, Buck!" said Toby; "the whole thing is stated—I have told you all—in ten words, and you needn't allude to it again till we get in. Then you shall say what you advise me to do. But it must be settled to-day; my sister-in-law comes to-morrow. Just let it simmer."

Buck grunted, waggled, frowned heavily at his ball, and laid the iron shot dead.

"There, it's all rot saying that to think of something puts you off," said Toby. "Blast it all!" and his scudding half-topped ball ran very swiftly into the bunker.

"Of course, talking is one worse," said Buck, a little soothed.

Fifty yards separated the first green from the second tee, and Toby recapitulated the salient points of the problem. The man of few words answered nothing, and immediately afterwards drove a screamer.

These great sea-blown downs, over which the wind scours as shrill and salt as in a ship's rigging, are admirably predisposing towards lucidity of thought. The northern airs cleanse and vivify the brain; they set the blood trotting equably through the arteries, they tone down overstrung nerves, and raise the slack to the harmonious mean, and in a naturally sane mind lodged in an extremely sane body they produce extraordinarily well-balanced results. And golf above all human pursuits gives full play to what is known as the subliminal self, a fine phrase, denoting that occult and ruling factor in man's brain—unconscious thought. The body is fully and harmoniously occupied; so, too, the conscious mind. The eye measures a distance; the hand and muscles take its order, and direct the swinging of the club. Meantime that mysterious twin of entity, the inner brain, goes scenting along its private trails, without let or hindrance from the occupied conscious self. Each goes his own way, on roads, maybe, as diverse as those of Jekyll and Hyde, unharassed by the other. Once only in the round did Buck laugh in a loud and appreciative manner for no clear cause. His inner brain had caught a hare, and sent the message to the golfer.

It was still only a little after five when they returned to the club-house, and Toby ordered tea in a sequestered corner.

"Of course you'll go and call on this worm now," remarked Buck.

"Yes, that is what I meant to do. Got anything for me to say?"

"Toby, can you lie?"

"Like the devil, in a good cause."

"Well, tell the Comber man that you are coming to stay at the Links Hotel with your sister-in-law by her invitation. Do the thing properly, and be prodigal of details. It's a pity you have such a despicable imagination. Say that she wrote to you in despair because she would be bored to death with no one there to speak to, but that Conybeare insisted on her going. Nasty for the worm that? Eh?"

Toby pondered a moment.

"That's not up to much, Buck," he said. "It wouldn't drive the man away unless he went simply from pique. And supposing he tells me Kit didn't write to me? Perhaps he has had a letter from her saying what fun they'll have."

"Oh, of course, if he says you lie," said Buck suggestively.

"Do you know the man?" asked Toby with rapture. "He is quite beautiful, with curly hair, rings, and scent, and I expect, if we knew all, stays."

Buck, it is idle to blink the fact, spat on the ground.

"Yes, I know him," he said. "Hell is full of such. By the way, I haven't seen you since you were engaged to be married. What an idiotic thing to do!"

"That happens to be your opinion, does it?" asked Toby mildly.

"Yes. I'm delighted, really. Congratulations. But the plan doesn't seem to suit you."

"No; it's rotten," said Toby. "I want something certain. This easily might not come off."

"He's a real worm, is he?" asked Buck. "I only know him by sight."

"Genuine, hall-marked," said Toby.

"Well, then give him a chance. Oh, not a chance of getting off. I mean, give him a chance of lying to you. Tell him as news that Lady Conybeare is coming here to-morrow, and perhaps he may appear surprised to hear it. That will give you an opportunity. You can say things to him then."

"Yes, there's more sense in that," said Toby. "Oh! come and dine to-night."

"All right. Is the She there?"

"Yes; you'll like her."

Buck looked at him enviously.

"What infernal good luck you have, Toby!" he said.

"Oh, I know I have," said Toby. "Lily——"

"Don't know her yet. But about the worm. Probably there will be a row. You've got to frighten him away, remember that. Worms are always nervous."

"There'll be a row afterwards with Kit, I'm afraid," said Toby.

"Oh, certainly. But it's all for her good. Introduce me when she comes, and I'll say I have been her guardian angel."

Toby looked at Buck's strong brown face for a moment in silence.

"You'd look nice with wings and a night-shirt," he remarked. "Pity Raphael or one of those Johnnies isn't alive."

"If by Johnnies you refer to the Italian school of painters," said Buck, "it isn't worth while saying so."

"I know; that's why I didn't say so. Good-bye; I'm off to the Links Hotel. Dinner at eight."

Lord Comber was in, and would Toby come up to his sitting-room? He met him at the top of the stairs, like a perfect hostess, and took him down the broad passage, stopping once opposite a big glass to smooth his carefully-crimped hair. Then he took Toby's arm, and Toby bristled, for he did not thrust his hand inside the curve of his elbow and let it lie there, but inserted it very daintily and gently, as if he was threading a needle, with a slight pressure of his long fingers.

"It's quite too delightful to see you, Toby," he said; "and how splendid you are looking! I wish I could get as brown as that. You must let me do a sketch of you. Yes, I'm here all alone, and I've been terribly bored. I wonder if your mother would allow me to come and see her. Is Miss Murchison there, too?"

"Yes; she came a couple of days ago."

"How nice! I do want to see more of her. Everyone is frightfully jealous of you. And I hear your mother's house is quite beautiful. Round to the right."

Ted Comber firmly held the creed that if you flatter people and make yourself pleasant you can do anything with them. There is quite an astonishing amount of truth in it, but, like many other creeds, it does not contain the whole truth. It does not allow for the possible instance of two personalities being so antagonistic that every effort, even to be pleasant, on the part of the one merely renders it more obnoxious to the other. This is a very disconcerting sort of exception, and the fact that it may prove the rule is a very slight compensation, practically considered.

"You have some wonderful Burne-Jones drawings, someone told me," went on Ted, innocently driving the exception up to the hilt, so to speak, in his own blood. "Your father must have had such taste! It is so clever of people to see twenty years before what is going to be valuable. I wish I had known him. Here's my den."

Toby looked round the den in scarcely veiled horror. Daniel's den with all its lions, he thought, would be preferable to this. There was a French writing-table, and on it signed photographs of two or three women in silver frames, an empty inkstand, a gold-topped scent-bottle (not empty), and a small daintily-bound volume of French verse. Against the wall stood a sofa, smothered in cushions, and on it a mandolin with a blue ribbon. A very big low armchair stood near the sofa, on the arm of which was cast a piece of silk embroidery, the needle still sticking in it, a damning proof of the worker thereof. There was a large looking-glass over the fireplace, and on the chimney-piece stood two or three Saxe figures. A copy of the Gentlewoman and the Queen lay on the floor.

"I can't get on without a few of my own things about me," said Lord Comber, fussing gently about the room. "I always take some of my things with me if I am going to stay in a hotel. This place is quite nice; they are very civil, and the cooking isn't bad. But it makes such a difference to have some of one's things about; it makes your rooms so much more homey."

And he drew the curtain a shade more over the window to keep the sun out.

"How long are you going to stop here?" asked Toby.

"Oh, another week, I expect," said Comber, removing the embroidery, and indicating the armchair to Toby. "Of course, it is rather lonely, and I don't know a soul here; but I'm out a good deal on these delicious sands, and another week alone will be quite bearable."

"I wonder you didn't arrange to come with somebody," said Toby quietly.

Lord Comber took up the gold-topped scent-bottle and refreshed his forehead. This was a little awkward, but Kit had told him to tell none of the cottage-party that she would be there. He remembered vaguely that Kit had, one evening in July, announced her intention of coming to Stanborough, but he could not recollect whether Toby was there, and, besides, at the time she had not really meant to do anything of the kind. It was only afterwards that they had made their definite arrangements. The worst of it was, that there was a letter from Kit lying on the table, and Toby might or might not have seen it.

"Everyone is engaged now," he said. "It is hopeless trying to get people in August. Oh, I heard from Kit this morning," he added, by rather an ingenious afterthought. "She asked me to come down to Goring in September."

"Was that all she said?" asked Toby.

"Oh, you know what Kit's letters are like," said he. "A delicious sort of hash of all that has happened to everybody."

Toby paused a moment. God was good.

"She didn't happen to say by what train she was going to arrive to-morrow?" he asked.

Lord Comber made a little impatient gesture, admirably spontaneous. He had often used it before.

"Oh, how angry Kit will be!" he said. "She told me particularly not to tell anybody. How did you know, Toby?"

"She wrote to my mother some days ago declining her invitation to come to the cottage," he said. "Also the thing was discussed at length in my presence. There was no question of concealment. I remember you asked if you might come too, and she said no."

Lord Comber laughed, quite as if he was not annoyed.

"Yes, I remember," he said. "What fun Kit was that night! It was at the Haslemeres', wasn't it? I never saw her in such form."

Toby sat as stiff as a poker in the armchair.

"I can't quite reconcile your statement that you were going to be all alone with the fact that you knew Kit was coming to-morrow," he said. "Not off-hand, at least."

Ted Comber began to be aware that the position was a sultry one. Kit had distinctly told him not to tell any of the people at the cottage that she was coming, and he had said that this was the wrong sort of precaution to take. They would be sure to know, and a failure in secrecy is a ghastly failure, and so difficult to explain afterwards, for people always think that if you keep a thing secret there is something to be kept secret. No doubt she had come round to his way of thinking, and had told them herself, forgetting the prohibition she had laid on him. Altogether it was an annoying business. However, this scene with the barbarous brother-in-law had to be gone through with at once. He shrugged his shoulders.

"Kit told me not to mention it," he said. "We were going to have a rustic little time in all our worst clothes and no maid. That is all."

"You have lied to me—that is all," said Toby, with incredible rudeness.

"That is not the way for one man to speak to another, Toby," said Lord Comber, feeling suddenly cold and damp. "I followed Kit's directions."

"Of course, it is the fashion to say that it is the woman's fault," observed Toby fiendishly.

Lord Comber was quite at a loss how to deal with such outrageous behaviour. People did not do such things.

"Did you come here in order to quarrel with me?" he asked.

"No, I don't want to quarrel," said Toby, "but I intend that you shall go away."

"That is so thoughtful of you," said Comber.

He was getting a little agitated, and had recourse to the scent-bottle again. He did not like fencing with the buttons off.

Toby did not answer at once; he was thinking of the suggestion he had made to his mother. He determined to use it as a threat, at any rate.

"Look here," he said; "Kit may choose her own friends as much as she pleases, but she cannot go staying alone with you at a place like this. Either you go or I telegraph to Jack."

Lord Comber laughed.

"Do you really suppose Jack would really mind?" he said.

"And do you know that you are speaking of my brother?" asked Toby.

"I'm sure that is not Jack's fault," remarked Comber.

"No. Then, as you say, if Jack won't mind, I'll telegraph to him at once. Have you a form here? Oh, it doesn't matter; I can get one in the office."

"The fact that you telegraph to Jack implies that there is something to telegraph about," said Comber. "There is nothing."

Toby did not choose to acknowledge that there could be any truth in this.

"I don't care a damn," he observed. "Either you go or I telegraph. Take your time, but please settle as soon as you can. I don't want to make things unpleasant, and if you say that your only aunt is very ill, and that you have been sent for, I won't contradict it—in fact, I'll bear you out if Kit makes a fuss."

"That is extraordinarily kind of you," said Lord Comber. "And since when have you become your sister-in-law's keeper in this astounding manner?"

Toby got quickly out of his chair, and stood very stiff and hot and uncompromising.

"Now, look here," he said: "my name is Massingbird, and so is Jack's, and I don't wish that it should be in everybody's mouth in connection with yours. People will talk; you know it as well as I do, and there is going to be no Comber-Conybeare scandal, thank you very much."

"You seem to be doing your level best to make one," said Lord Comber.

"Oh, I don't mind a Ted-Toby scandal," said Toby serenely. "I can take care of myself."

"And of Kit, it seems."

"And of Kit—at least, it seems so, as you say."

There was a long silence, and Toby drew a vile briar pipe out of his pocket. He noticed that Lord Comber, even in his growing agitation, cast an agonized glance towards it, and, putting it back in his pocket, he lit a cigarette.

"You don't like pipes, I think?" he said. "I forgot for the moment."

Toby sat down again in the big chair and smoked placidly. He intended to get an answer, and if it was unsatisfactory (if the worm turned and refused to go), he would have to consider whether he should or should not telegraph to Jack. He felt that this would be an extreme step, and hoped he should not have to take it.

Lord Comber's reflections were not enviable. To begin with, Toby had a most uncomfortable, angular mind and an attitude towards life which will not consent to be fitted into round holes nor adapt itself to nice easy compromises and tactful smoothings over of difficult places. He was all elbows, mentally considered—elbows and unbending joints. If he intended to carry his point, he would not meet one half-way; he held horrible threats over one's head, which, if defied, he might easily carry out. His own argument he considered excellent. To telegraph to Jack implied that there was something to telegraph about, but this square, freckled brute could not or would not see it. It really was too exasperating. He himself conducted his own life so largely by the employment of tact, finesse, diplomacy (Toby would have called these lies), that it was most disconcerting to find himself in conflict with someone who not only did not employ them, but refused to recognise them as legitimate weapons. Indeed, he was in a dilemma. It was impossible to contemplate a telegram being sent to Jack: it was equally impossible to contemplate what would happen if Kit came and found him gone. And the annoyance of going, of missing this week with her, was immense. It gave him a sort of cachet to be seen staying with Kit alone at a watering-place. She was more indisputably than ever on a sort of pinnacle in his world this year, and everyone would think it so very daring. That was the sort of fame he really coveted—to be in the world's eye doing rather risky things with an extremely smart woman.

Moreover, in his selfish, superficial way, he was very fond of her. She was always amusing, and always ready to be amused; they laughed and chattered continually when they were alone, and a week with her was sure to be an excessively entertaining week. She had proposed that they should do this herself, and written a charming note, which he kept. "We shall be quite alone, and we won't speak to a soul," she had said. And that from Kit, who, as a rule, demanded a hundred thousand people around and about, was an immense compliment.

But because all his thoughts as he debated these things, while Toby sat smoking, were quite contemptible, the struggle was no less difficult. A despicable man in a dilemma, though the motives and considerations which compose that dilemma are tawdry and ignoble, does not suffer less than a fine spirit, but, if anything, more, for he has no sustaining sense of duty to guide and reward him. Ted Comber's happiness and pleasure in life, of which he had a great deal, was chiefly composed of trivial and unedifying ingredients, and to be intimate, not only privately, but also publicly, with Kit was one of them. And her unutterable brother-in-law sat smoking in his best armchair, after presenting his ultimatum. If a word from him would have sent Toby to Siberia, he would have gone. It would be a good deed to rid society of such an outrage.

Again, yielding with a bad grace had its disadvantages, for though he had no personal liking for Toby, a great many people, with whom he desired to be on the best of terms, had. There were certain houses to which he liked to go where Toby was eminently at home, and though he had enemies in plenty, and thought little about them, Toby would be a most undesirable addition to them. He was perfectly capable of turning his back on one, assigning reasons, and of behaving with a brusqueness which ought, so Lord Comber thought, to be sufficient to ensure anybody's being turned neck and crop out of those well-cushioned society chariots in which he lounged. But he knew very well, and cursed the unfairness of fate, that Toby's social position was far firmer than his own, while, whereas he cared very much for it, Toby did not care at all. Ted made himself welcome because he took great pains to be pleasant and to amuse people, and had always a quantity of naughty little stories, which had to be whispered very quietly, and then laughed over very loud, but the whole affair was an effort, though its reward was worthy. Men, he knew, for the most part disliked him, and men are so terribly unreasonable. Once last year only, his name had been cut out of a house-party by his hostess's absurd husband, and it was not well to multiply occasions for such untoward possibilities.

He took up his gold-topped scent-bottle for the third time, and by an effort almost heroic, though there was so little heroic in its cause, resumed a frank and unresentful manner.

"I disagree with you utterly, Toby," he said, "but I will do as you suggest. You don't mind my speaking straight out what I think? No? Well, you seem to me to have interfered in a most unwarrantable manner; but as you have done so, I dare say, from excellent motives, though I don't care a straw about your motives, I must make the best of it. I will go to-morrow morning, and I will telegraph now to Kit, to say I can't stop here. Now, you said you didn't wish to quarrel with me. That I hold you to. Let us remain friends, Toby, for if anyone has a grievance it is I. What I shall say to Kit, God knows; she will be furious, and if the thing comes out I shall tell her the whole truth, and lay the whole blame on you."

Toby rose.

"That is only fair," he said. "Good-bye."

Lord Comber smoothed his hair before the glass, when suddenly an idea struck him, so brilliant and so simple that he could hardly help smiling. He opened the door.

"I shall just walk with you to the top of the stairs," he said, again taking Toby's arm. "Really I am quite sorry to leave; I have got quite attached to my dear little room, and don't you think it's rather pretty? So sorry I shan't be able to come and see your mother at the cottage, and it's all your fault. Good-bye, Toby."

Toby went downstairs, and Lord Comber hurried back to his room. He had no longer the smallest resentment against Toby, and a smile of amused satisfaction testified to his changed sentiments. He rang for his man, and sat down to write a telegram. It was addressed to Kit, and ran as follows:

"Impossible to remain here. Excellent reasons. Do come to Aldeburgh instead. I arrive there to-morrow afternoon, and go to hotel."

He read it over.

"Poor Toby," he thought to himself. "What a lesson not to interfere!"