SINFUL WASTE OF A PENNY STAMP

Ten minutes passed. Hughie, leaning heavily against the frame of the French window, gazed listlessly out at a squirrel which was inviting him to a game of hide-and-seek from the far side of a tree-trunk.

"One thing," he mused,—"I shall be able to go abroad again now. No more of this—"

There was the faintest perceptible rustle behind him. Joan must have come in very quietly, for the door was shut and she was sitting on the corner of the writing-table,—exactly where the recently-departed Haliburton had been posing,—swinging her feet and surveying her late guardian's back. In her hand she held a pink slip of paper.

Hughie never forgot the picture that she presented at that moment. She was dressed in white—something workmanlike and unencumbering—with a silver filigree belt around her waist. She wore a battered Panama hat—the sort of headgear affected by "coons" of the music-hall persuasion—with a wisp of pale blue silk twisted round it. The evening sun, streaming through the most westerly of the windows, glinted on her hair, her belt, and the silver buckles on her shoes. Hughie caught his breath.

Joan spoke first.

"Here's something for you, Hughie," she said.

Hughie took the proffered slip of paper. It was a cheque, made out to himself and signed by Jimmy Marrable.

"I think that covers all the expense to which you have been put on my account while Uncle Jimmy has been away," said Joan. Her voice sounded gruff and businesslike.

Hughie examined the cheque. "Yes," he said, "it does."

"It was very good of you," said Joan formally, "to advance me so much money. I had no idea you were doing it. Apparently you might never have got it back again."

Hughie gazed at her curiously. He began to grasp the situation. He was to be whitewashed: the compromising past was to be decently buried, and "Temporary Loan" was to be its epitaph.

"Never mind that," he said awkwardly. "All in the day's work, you know! Afraid I was a rotten trustee."

Suddenly Joan's demeanour changed.

"And now, my man," she said briskly, "will you be good enough to explain what you mean by compromising a lady in this way?"

Hughie looked at her for a moment in dismay. Then he saw that her eyes were twinkling, and he heaved a sudden sigh of incredulous relief. He was forgiven!

"Joey!" he said,—"Joey, you mean to say you're not angry?"

"Furious!" replied Miss Gaymer, smiling in her old friendly fashion.

"Thank God!" said Hughie.

Miss Gaymer changed the subject, rather hurriedly.

"There's something else I want to ask you," she said. "Will you kindly inform me what has become of my—ahem!—young man?"

"Who?" said Hughie. "Oh, that chap? He is gone."

"Gone? Where?"

"London, I should think."

"Why?"

"In the first place, because I told him about your—I mean—I wouldn't advise you to ask me, Joey. You see—I should hate—"

"You would hate," said Miss Gaymer, coming to his rescue, "to say 'I told you so!' I know, Hughie. It's like you, and I love you for it."

Hughie winced. These colloquial terms of endearment are sometimes rather tantalising. Still, he must not mind that. The girl, too, had had her disappointment, and was bearing herself bravely. At least—

"Joey," he said suddenly, "did you really care for that bloke?"

The lady on the table stiffened suddenly.

"What—that poisonous bounder?" She rolled up her eyes. "My che-ild!"

"But you let him make love to you."

"Did I? I suppose you were there," observed Miss Gaymer witheringly, "disguised as a Chinese lantern!"

"Well, what did you do, then?"

"He asked me to be his blushing bride," said the unfeeling Miss Gaymer, "and tried to grab my hand. I squinted down my nose, and looked very prim and sweet, and thought we had better be getting back to the ballroom, and he could talk to Mr. Marrable in the morning. If that's your idea of allowing people to make love, dear friend—"

"But you—you—promised to marry him!" said poor Hughie.

Joan stared at him.

"Do you mean to tell me, Hughie," she said slowly, "that he told you that?"

"Yes—with one or two corroborative details. That was why I had to tell him—everything, you know. It was the only way, I thought, to choke him off."

"O—o—oh!" Miss Gaymer wriggled indignantly. "The creature! And when he heard I had no money, he cried off?"

Hughie bowed his head. Joan gave a low gurgling laugh.

"There's no getting over it, Hughie!" she said. "He scored. A nasty slap for little me! But I deserved it, for trying to trifle with his young affections. Well, you have given me one reason for his departure. What was the other?"

Hughie eyed her in some embarrassment. Then he said,—

"He began to talk about you, Joey, in a way I didn't like, so I—"

His eye slid round towards the window, and then downward in the direction of his right foot. A smile crept over his troubled face, and he glanced at Joan.

"Oh, Hughie, did you?" she exclaimed rapturously.

"Yes. He landed in that rose-bed. Look!"

Joey shuffled off the table and joined him by the window. A few feet below them, on the rose-bed, lay the unmistakable traces of the impact of a body falling from rest with an acceleration due to something more than the force of gravity.

Joan cooed softly, evidently well pleased. Hughie turned and regarded her with a puzzled expression. No man ever yet fathomed the workings of the feminine mind, but he never quite gives up trying to do so.

"Are you glad that he got thrown out?" he asked.

Joan pondered.

"It's not exactly that," she said. "I'm not glad he was thrown out: it must have hurt him, poor dear! But I'm glad you threw him out, if you understand the difference."

Hughie was not at all sure that he did, but he nodded his head in a comprehending manner. Then he continued:—

"Tell me, Joey, if you didn't care for him, why did you send him to me, instead of giving him the knock direct?"

Joey surveyed her retired "warder" with eyes half-closed.

"Well," she said reflectively, "there were heaps of reasons, but you are a man and wouldn't understand any of them. But, roughly speaking, it was because I wanted to see how you would handle him. I knew you wouldn't let him marry me, of course, but I wanted to see how you would play your cards. (You simply don't know how fascinating these things are to watch.) Besides, I thought it would be good for him to come face to face with—a man," she added, almost below her breath.

"I only got the best of him," said Hughie humbly, "by laying all my cards on the table. There's not much finesse required for a game like that."

"Still, you won," said Joan.

Hughie sighed.

"Haliburton lost, if you like," he said; "I don't quite see what I—"

"No—you won!" said a very small but very insistent voice by his side.

Hughie turned sharply. Miss Gaymer was breathing expansively upon the glass of the window, and assiduously scribbling a pattern thereon with her finger—an infantile and unladylike habit of which her nurse thought she had cured her at the age of eight. Also, her cheeks were aglow, and that with a richness of colouring which sufficed to convey some glimmerings of intelligence even into the brain of the obtuse young man beside her. Hughie suddenly felt something inside his head begin to buzz. His gigantic right hand (which still contained Jimmy Marrable's cheque tucked in between two fingers) closed cautiously but comprehensively upon Joan's left, which was resting on the window-frame, much as a youthful entomologist's net descends upon an unwary butterfly.

"Joey," he said unsteadily,—"Joey, what do you mean?"

Miss Gaymer sighed, in the resigned but persevering fashion of a patient Sunday-school teacher. Then she slipped her hand from under Hughie's, extracting as she did so the folded cheque from between his fingers. Hughie watched her dumbly.

Joan unfolded the cheque, and perused it in a valedictory sort of manner. Then she kissed it softly. Then she tore it up very slowly into small pieces.

She sighed again pensively, and said:—

"There goes my ransom! It's a wicked waste—of a cheque-stamp! Now," she added cheerfully, "I am compromised worse than ever. Hughie, dear, I really think, after this, that you'll have to—Ough! Hughie! Hughie!"

For blind, groping Hughie's eyes were open at last. With an exultant whole-hearted roar he initiated a sudden enveloping movement; and then, turning away from the fierce light that beats upon actions performed at a window, strode majestically (if rather top-heavily) towards a great leather sofa in a secluded corner beyond the fireplace. The scandalised Miss Gaymer, owing to circumstances over which she had no control, accompanied him.