"The nobles ... have nearly ceased either to guide or misguide; ... the Noble has changed his fighting sword into a court rapier; and now loyally attends his King as ministering satellite; divides the spoil, not now by violence and murder, but by soliciting and finesse.... For the rest, their privileges every way are now much curtailed.... Close-viewed, their industry and function is that of dressing gracefully and eating sumptuously.... Nevertheless, one has still partly a feeling with the lady MarÉchale: 'Depend upon it, Sir, God thinks twice before damning a man of that quality.' These people, of old, surely had virtues, uses; or they could not have been there."—Thomas Carlyle, "The French Revolution."

I

Somewhere in my library at Lake House there is a little volume of essays entitled "History Re-written." It is a collection of jeux d'esprit exhumed from a dozen reviews by an author whose imagination loved to annihilate a single historical fact and reconstruct the changed consequences. There is one picture of the Greeks flying in disorder before the triumphant Darius on the plain of Marathon, and the subjection of Europe to an Eastern despotism; another of Julius CÆsar successfully defending himself against his would-be assassins; a third of Mahomet dying of starvation during the Hegira. I recall a study of Luther overwhelming the Vatican in argument, Columbus shipwrecked in mid-Atlantic, the Regiment of Flanders firing on the Paris mob, Napoleon leading the Grand ArmÉe to luxurious winter quarters in Moscow.

Sometimes I wonder whether history would have had to be much re-written if the King of England and the German Emperor had been personally more cordial from 1901 to 1910; whether, too, destiny could have been cheated if Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman had lived another five years. "C.-B." laboured for peace, and his honesty was not called in question; there was always the certainty that democracy the world over would one day grow strong enough to forbid war; there was always the chance that this decisive strength would come before a military party could issue its mobilization orders.

I know I speak in a minority of one: a thousand pens have shown that war was pre-ordained: yet—I wonder if the writers guess how nearly it was avoided. When Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman resigned, there was no one of equal authority to carry on his work. For a space the unconvinced preached disarmament to the unbelieving, then impatiently girded themselves for war. The Japanese Alliance, the French Entente, the Russian rapprochement were good platform points for a German scaremonger. If we had continued working for peace and keeping free of continental engagements, I wonder whether our teaching would have had time to bear fruit. My uncle Bertrand thought so and, though my political beliefs are too unstable to matter, he converted me from a showy Liberal Imperialism to an old-fashioned peaceful insularity. The change came gradually. My allegiance to the party weakened when Bill after Bill was contemptuously rejected in the House of Lords, and our leaders fulminated and declined battle. Thereafter a certain uneasiness was occasioned by the vagaries of the Foreign Office. Ostensibly our French Entente was formed to facilitate the settlement of outstanding questions in North Africa; and, though we were told from the Treasury Bench that militarily we were still uncommitted, Lobby gossip had a dozen disquieting theories of new secret engagements. Bertrand used to get his knuckles rapped for indiscreet questions to the Foreign Secretary, but rebuffs from mandarins only increased his suspicion that the whole truth was being withheld from the House of Commons.

Growing distrust of a brilliant and exasperatingly Celestial Ministry determined the course of my later years in Parliament. O'Rane left England at the end of 1906, my constituents rejected me in the first election of 1910; in the intervening time I joined an advanced Radical group in advocating better international understandings and immediate war on the House of Lords. They were the three busiest years of my life, and, when my uncle set his peace organization to work, a day of sixteen hours was divided equally between Fleet Street, the House, and the Central Disarmament Committee in Princes Gardens.

Of the outside world I saw even less than in my first session when I was a loyal party man; and, if there had been no Liberal Bills for Loring to wreck, I should have lost touch with all my former friends. As it was, he would ask me with exaggerated fear how much time I gave him to make peace with his Maker. I would expound the only possible solution of the House of Lords problem—(there were always six at any given time, all mutually destructive)—and under the shadow of the guillotine we would adjourn for dinner and inquire whether anything had been heard of Raney. It is almost superfluous to say that no letter was ever received from him, but Summertown cabled laconically at two-month intervals, and distorted messages reached us from Sally Farwell or Lady Marlyn. It was agreed that whichever first received news of the wanderers should immediately communicate with the other, and the formula—"Lord Loring's compliments, and will you dine with him to-night?"—nine times out of ten meant that the long-suffering Lady Marlyn had recently been handed a flimsy sheet with some such words as "All well Raney married to Dowager Queen of Siam leaving to-day for Java."

When I think of Loring at this time I always recall Burgess's parting advice on our last day at Melton. Few men who prophesied so freely could boast of making so few mistakes; he had predicted that there was no third course beyond a definite career such as the Diplomatic Service and a dilettante politico-social existence of drift such as Loring now pursued. It does not lie in my mouth to pass judgement, but I was sorry to see a man with ten times my ability dabbling in life as negligently as he did. His whole energy was devoted to recapturing the last enchantments of the Middle Ages: ecclesiastically, politically and socially he stood for a vanished order and, when his own generation declined to jump backward across the centuries, he shrugged his shoulders in good-humoured contempt and walked his road alone—obstinate, aloof and correct to the last button of his boot. In the Lords he led the wildest of the Backwoodsmen groups, in Society he fluttered with a swarm where all were called by the Christian name and each took pride in the large number of people he did not know.

Failure is so little honoured that there is something pathetic in the sight of a man refusing to be modernized. At the same time, though my instincts are Bohemian, I am glad to think that at least one section of society refused to be bought up by the invaders who now assailed London with a handful of bank cheques. These years were the era of Adolf Erckmann and his retainers; their war-paint and war-cries, their ruthlessness and ferocity of attack led Loring to dub them "les Apaches," and for seven or eight years before the outbreak of war there was truceless fighting between the old order and the new. Before it was over, Loring was beaten. He kept his own house free of the invaders and occasionally raided their camp and rescued a prisoner. Summertown, for example, had been captured for a time and came near to swelling the number of Peerage and Stage romances. It is to Loring's sole credit that the indiscretion was scotched. But a few local successes could not be magnified into a general victory, and by 1914 London lay at the feet of Erckmann, Pennington, Mrs. Welman and a few other chiefs with their followers drawn from every quarter of England.

Erckmann's first purchase was Lord Pennington—who indeed was on sale for anyone who would give him five meals a day, excitement, noise, youth and not too intellectual conversation. Next came Mrs. Welman, whose spirit yet lived amid the dusts and draughts and dressing-rooms of that Avenue Theatre she had forsaken to marry her wealthy paralytic husband. Thereafter it was simply a question of capillary attraction. The titles glamoured the stage, the stage fascinated the titles, and Erckmann, if he did not attract, at least paid for all. It was a motley gathering with a sadly draggled reputation here and there: you would find one or two Americans, several Jews, a few Germans and an astonishing number of young-men-about-town getting rich without undue toil on the wizard Erckmann's advice. "You wand a good dime, hein?" he would say invitingly. "You gome with me, my vriend." And they came.

According to their lights, too, they had the best time in the world. Ever trooping together from limelight to limelight, you would find a row of them in the stalls for any first night: the Royal Box was always theirs for a costume ball, and visitors to a regatta would punt half a mile to see the splendour of their house-boat. Should you enter a restaurant, their presence would be betrayed by the free-and-easy relations existing between themselves and the waiters—whom they called by nicknames: and, were you a recluse, the "Tickler" would portray the whole horde on Erckmann's lawn at Marlow, or you could sit by your fireside, the "Catch" open on your knees, envying them their presence in "Lord Pennington's house-party in Buckinghamshire."

I give them all credit for their powers of organization. A charity ball in their prehensile hands went with an undoubted swing, and no one who spent a week-end in their company could reasonably complain of dullness. I remember that the papers for some months were full of "Ragging in Country House" cases; there was the mock burglary at Pennington's place, Erckmann's launch tried to shoot Marlow Weir at three o'clock in the morning, and the unexplained fire in Mrs. Welman's Surrey cottage burned one of her maids to death. Some thought that they went perhaps a little too far in this last escapade, and for a time the Smart Set dropped out of the public gaze. Then the Dean of St. Pancras, struggling into the mantle of Savonarola, devoted a course of Advent sermons to anathematizing them on the curious ground that they were responsible for a falling birth-rate, and the discussion—with this decanal benediction on it—became brisk and general.

There were houses in London where I met them, and tables where I supped with voluble, fluffy little footlight favourites whose accent and choice of language were notably more literary at the beginning of the meal than at the end. Dozens of carmined lips used to ask whether I had seen their "show"; other dozens described their next engagements and the number of pounds a week they had just refused. I floundered by the hour in contemporary theatrical history and daringly discussed actor managers by their Christian names.

Loring had no taste for such adventures. To be an Apache was to be refused admission to his house. He complained of their vitality and confessed weakness in repartee when accosted as a "sport" or informed that he "must have a drink."

"We get at cross-purposes," he sighed, stretching himself to his full, handsome, six foot three and smoothing his moustache. "The fault's mine, but there it is. I've arrived fainting at the end of a long journey because I've not got the buffet manner with barmaids."

As a fellow-member of the "Eclectic," I was on nodding terms with Erckmann, but to the end he and Loring never met. Perhaps a dozen other hosts and hostesses ranged themselves on the side of old-fashioned prudery, including for a time Lady Dainton, who assured me that she did not know what Society was coming to. I was dining with her one evening towards the end of 1907 to meet the girl Tom had just engaged himself to marry.

"I mean I would never dream of letting Sonia know such people, don't you know?" she told me.

"I share your view," I said, finding time to recall that in the Daintons' first London Season Sonia had habitually attended the meetings of the Four-in-hand Club on Erckmann's box seat.

"You wait till I'm married, mother!" said Sonia, who had overheard the conversation.

"When's the great event coming off?" I asked.

"Oh, not at present," said Lady Dainton rather hurriedly. "I don't want two weddings in the family at the same time. Besides, Tony's only been at the Bar a short time. We must wait till his position's a little more established, don't you know?"

I agreed, as I always agree with Lady Dainton. Yet as I walked home that night I murmured to myself some hackneyed lines from Robert Burns. If there was one thing more certain to my mind than another, it was that the ever-shrewd Anthony Crabtree relied on the Daintons and the "desperate thing" of marriage to establish his position.

I saw and heard no more of the family until the autumn. One morning in October Loring rang me up with the news that Summertown was in London, dining that night at Hale's. I was invited to meet him and found that eleven months' travel had altogether failed to mature him. A spasmodic, sandy moustache hinted at increasing age, but in other respects he was the same freckled, snub-nosed embodiment of irresponsibility as ever. The same taste for local colour characterized him as when on his return from America he lisped of candy, cocktails, dollar-bills and the art of clubbing as practised by the New York police: he was now the completest Anglo-Indian I have ever met, and his conversation sparkled with sahibs and white men, the Rains and the Hot Weather, the Hills in general and half-sacred Simla in particular. Mr. Warren Hastings, looking sourly down from the wall of Hale's coffee-room, must have seen us as seated at endless Tiffin—paid by means of Chits—where Saises, Khitmutgars and Ayahs entered and salaamed, and twenty-one gun salutes boomed faintly in the distance—as men have politely sat for years round any returned traveller or student of Kipling's Indian stories.

"What have you done with Raney?" Loring asked as the Odyssey drew to its close.

"I left him in Paris," was the answer. "We were going on to Spain, but the guv'nor don't think he's a suitable companion for a simple, unspoiled lad like me. My own adored mother's choice, too, mark you."

"What happened?" I asked.

"Phew! What didn't?" Summertown leant back with his thumbs thrust importantly into the arm-holes of his waistcoat, "I suppose you fellows don't appreciate it's been touch and go for a European War? Nothing but the well-known family tact of the Marlyns——"

"Get to the point," Loring ordered him.

Summertown bowed his head to the reproof.

"We came back overland from Vladivostock to Moscow," he said, "and about that point Raney recollected that his foot was on his native heath and all that sort of thing. We sprang lightly out of the train, seized our grips and Baedeckers, and sauntered round Russia and Poland, eventually bringing up at a spot called Hungary—where, by the way, there's a drink called Tokay ... All right, but you do spoil a good story, you know. From Hungary it is, as they say, a mere step to Austria. So we stepped. Raney's a most astonishing fellow, you know," he explained, in a short digression. "He's lived in all these places and talks the lingo like a beastly native. However, to resume my absorbing narrative, the moon shone out one night and discovered us eating scrambled eggs at a cabaret called the 'Chat Noir,' which being interpreted is 'Black Cat'——"

"Thank you," I said.

"The fruits of travel," he answered, with a bow. "To us enters, as they say in the stage directions, a flat-nosed brute who craves the favour of a match. Raney gave him some chat in Hungarian—which for some dam' silly reason I could never understand is called Magyar—and in a moment they were thick as thieves. I didn't know what all the eloquence was about, but they kept dragging in a chap called Kossuth——"

"I think I've heard the name somewhere," said Loring.

Summertown looked at him with admiration.

"I thought it was one of the filthy waters they give you when you're doing a cure. Kossuth, yes. If you're one of the heads you pronounce it Koshoot and spell it Metternich. Well, these lads spat Magyar at each other and clinked glasses till the band broke down and everybody was staring at our table. Then an Austrian officer in a dream of a grey cloak strolled up and made some offensive remark. Of course, in mere vulgar abuse, dear old Raney's a pretty tidy performer, and they did 'emselves proud. I heard the name O'Rane sandwiched in between the gutturals, and then the Austrian got home with some pretty phrase. Raney went white as the proverbial sheet, picked up his glove from the table and gave that officer the most God Almighty welt across the face that I've ever seen. There—was—the—devil of a scene. I thought you exchanged cards about this point and then nipped over the frontier, leaving the other chap and the seconds and doctors and grave-diggers to keep the appointment for you. Not a bit of it here! Every cursed Austrian in that place jumped up, yelling his damnedest; every dog of an Hungarian did the same. One of the orchestra was a Bohemian, and he broke his 'cello over an Hungarian's head, and there was an Italian behind the bar who walked into the Austrians with a cocktail shaker. I picked up a chair and shouted, 'Vive Kossuth!' never dreaming the poor chap had been dead for years, and then tables and sofas hurtled through the air till the police came in and killed anybody who hadn't been killed already—I'm free to admit I faded away as soon as I'd smashed the last lamp. I thought Raney'd come, too, but he saw it out and was duly marched away with his flat-nosed friend through a perfect forest of drawn swords. It was about one o'clock in the morning, and I didn't think it was healthy to stay up any longer."

He paused to refresh his parched throat.

"Next day I went round to the Embassy," he continued, "and there I had the surprise of my life. While I was improving my mind in the East, that eminently respectable Councillor of Embassy, my father, had been shifted from Paris and sent to Vienna as ChargÉ d'Affaires. He was very glad to see me, of course, and all that sort of thing, but I couldn't help feeling I should have preferred to carry my little troubles to another man. I toned my story down a good bit, and after some agitated notes and interviews Raney was brought up for judgement with an armed escort. Most of him was in a sling, and the rest just hung down in strips from the bones. As soon as they started talking I found we'd fairly done it in the night before. Our flat-nosed Hungarian friend was mixed up with a Secret Society and pretty consistently shadowed by the police. He and Raney had fraternized and exchanged cards, and, apparently old O'Rane wasn't much of a popular favorite in Austria. He and Vive Kossuth had caused the Government all kinds of vexation which weren't forgotten though both of them were dead, and when the flat-nosed man drank to their pious memory and Raney held forth on Hungarian Independence, you can imagine the Austrian contingent was no end restive.

"The poor old Guv'nor had his work cut out to smooth things down. For about an hour he buttered 'em all up and apologized to everybody, swearing that Raney was tight—which was an absolute lie. There was a fine recommendation to mercy and an allusion to a father's feeling—lump in the throat, all that sort of thing—and then the Guv'nor closed down. I hoped it was all over, but the Austrian lads were out for blood—we had to pay for all the damage, and our friend the officer was trundled along in a wheeled chair to receive our apologies, and then the Minister of the Interior, or the Prefect of Police, or some bug like that, popped into another room with the Guv'nor and dictated terms for the future. I got off with a caution, but poor old Raney took it in the neck. They stripped him and measured him and took his finger-prints and photographed him about a dozen times. And in the afternoon an escort of soldiers frog's-marched us to the Bavarian frontier and took a tender farewell, with a plain statement in writing that, if ever Raney put one toe of either foot on an inch of his Imperial Majesty Franz Josef's territory from now till the end of time, he'd first of all be shot and then disembowelled and then confined in a fortress for the rest of his days. The Guv'nor don't fancy me for the Diplomatic; he says I want discipline, so the Army's going to try its hand on me." He shrugged his shoulders tolerantly. "I don't mind, it's all in the day's work, but I'd have you observe the kind of man my sainted mother sends me abroad with on the grounds that I should only get up to mischief if I went alone."

Of O'Rane's future movements Summertown could tell us nothing beyond the fact that he was shortly starting for Mexico, and that letters to his bank would, in due course, be forwarded.

"I shall write to him to-night," said Loring, as we walked up St. James's Street. Summertown had heard that roulette was being played illicitly somewhere in Chelsea and was anxious to check the accuracy of the report.

"At this hour?" I asked, glancing at my watch. It was past one o'clock.

"I can do it in three lines," he answered. "It's about his friend Crabtree. Have you heard?"

"I can believe anything of him," I said, as I resigned myself to listen.

"Then you haven't heard. Well, the engagement's off. I met your cousin Violet at lunch to-day, and she had it from Lady Dainton. No reason given."

"Either of us can supply it," I said.

Loring made no comment.

"Sonia can do better than that," he said, after we had walked for some time in silence.

"So, possibly, can Crabtree," I suggested. "In her present state——"

"My dear George, she's still a child," he answered, with some warmth.

"There are children and children." I had neither forgiven nor forgotten her behaviour to O'Rane for a year or two.

"I don't think the man who marries Sonia is at all to be pitied," Loring said rather aggressively.

The words may have meant that such a man was to be envied—or equally that he took the risk with his eyes open. But we were at the corner of Half Moon Street, and Loring had waved good-night and was walking towards Curzon Street before I was ready to ask him.

II

I look back on my life between 1907 and 1910 as three years' hard labour. The sentence began to run about a week after Summertown's return from the Continent, and it was only when he had been coaxed and pushed into a commission in the Third Grenadier Guards and I was dining with the King's Guard in St. James's Palace, six months later, that I heard news of O'Rane's strangely devious progress to the New World.

Devious, and yet perhaps not strange. He went by way of British East Africa, though what he did and how long he remained there, no man has discovered. The documentary evidence ended with a two-line postcard from Mombasa, and anyone could interpret it as he pleased. Summertown's explanations grew more and more picturesque as dinner went on. O'Rane, he assured me, was a Great White Rajah holding sway from the Lakes to the Sudan and from the Desert to the now empty throne of Zanzibar; later, he had "gone black" and was living patriarchally in a kraal with scores of natives wives and one immaculate silk hat between himself and unashamed nudity; later still, he had proclaimed himself Mahdi, and was leading frenzied hordes of Dervishes to the recapture of Khartoum. Raney himself told me afterwards that he was at one time bar-tender in the Nairobi Club and the rest of the while turning his hand, not altogether without success, to anything in heaven above or the waters beneath that had money in it. When he left Africa I have no idea, but the next time I heard of him he had unquestionably reached Mexico.

In the meantime I was wearily serving my sentence in London. I have mentioned the guerilla warfare carried on by Bertrand against the Foreign Office from the time of the Franco-British entente. Secret treaties or understandings were new and amazingly distasteful to the Radical wing, the Lobby rumours only increased the general uneasiness, and something of a crisis was reached when the undefined alliance was joined by Russia. We fire-eaters had lavished invective on the Czar's Government at the time of "Red Sunday," and a fainÉant Duma hardly availed to drive Father Gapon and the litter of dead in the Petersburg streets from our memory. If, of course, one country after another was to be drawn into the entente, well and good; there could be no need for so much bated breath and mystery. If, on the other hand, we were dividing Europe into two groups,—at best for a competition in armaments, at worse for a trial of strength,—then the men and women whose lives were handed out as stakes had the right to know the gamble their rulers were meditating.

In this connexion I make free recantation of one heresy: I no longer desire open diplomacy. Had it obtained for the last generation, war might have been postponed; but, if war was as consistently intended by Germany as I am assured on all hands, it would only have been postponed till a less formidable alliance opposed her. To the other half of my creed I remain loyal, though my loyalty be tinged with despair. Now, as then, I look forward to an era of universal arbitration, a pro rata reduction of armaments leading in time to the abolition of national armies and navies and the establishment of a United States of the world with federal control of the world's constabulary. The ideal will not materialize to-day or to-morrow, but—as O'Rane was fond of saying—slavery and torture died hard, the rule of law between individuals did not come in a night.

Bertrand's motives in launching his propaganda I am not competent to judge. Perhaps his attitude of eternal scepticism was beginning to pall; perhaps he was as alarmed as he pretended to be—and there is little doubt that for half a dozen years before the war there was a latent diplomatic crisis whenever the harvest had been gathered in and the armies of the Continent were mobilized for autumn manoeuvres; certainly a personal animus towards the Foreign Office, a resentment for the Government's lofty practice of driving the Commons in blinkers provided a stimulus to his activity. And for all the routine and drudgery, there was excitement and a great novelty in the campaign; l'appÉtit vient en mangeant, and to some extent we succumbed to the enthusiasm we tried to inspire in others.

Princes Gardens saw the birth of this, as of half a hundred similar movements. We christened our association the "Disarmament League," floated a weekly paper with the evangelic title of "Peace," organized an army of itinerant lecturers, appointed corresponding members in every quarter of the globe, affiliated ourselves to any foreign body that would have us, and arranged broad-minded visits of inspection to the lands of sympathizers and suspects.

The work was enormous. Nothing was too great or too small for our attention, and Bertrand had all a great commander's capacity for delegating work to others. As editor of "Peace" he would sketch out a few general ideas, leave me to turn up references and fill in details, and on Thursday, as we were going to Press, stroll round to the draughty, gas-lit office in Bouverie Street with luminous and urgent suggestions for altering the tone of the leading articles or including lengthy contributions from his own pen in an already overset paper.

I imagine there is no man born of woman who does not believe himself qualified to found and run an important daily, weekly or monthly paper. We were no exception, and my uncle's self-confidence was fortified by hazy and idealistic memories of the Fleet Street he had served half a century before. We had the saving prudence to employ one or two trained journalists and a Scotch sub-editor of infinite patience to guide—but never thwart—our amateur inspiration. In time we settled down to conventional newspaper tradition, moderated our transports and eliminated from the columns of "Peace" the traces of our first fine careless rapture. In time our patient M'Clellan was promoted to the position of business manager, and in his capable hands the advertisement revenue leapt and bounded until, by the end of 1908, our weekly loss on the production of the paper sank to the negligible figure of sixty pounds. In time, too, Bertrand and I found the spade-work distasteful, and from the beginning of 1909 the professional journalists did more and the inspired amateurs considerably less. We no longer said that nothing was too great or too small for our attention....

Of the effects of our noisy dive into journalism I must leave others to speak; the time actually spent in "Peace" office, "the great movement of men" in the purlieus of Fleet Street, I have never had occasion to regret. The project was kept as secret as the sailing orders of the "Hispaniola" in "Treasure Island"; and the out-of-work gutter-scribes knew as much of our intentions as Flint's scattered pirates on the quayside of Bristol. Mayhew waylaid me in the Club, stammering with excited suggestions.

"I'm just off to Budapest as special correspondent for the 'Wicked World,'" he told me. "If you'll make it worth my while to stay—I don't mind telling you there's not much you can teach me about running a paper...."

And he sketched the lines of the ideal new weekly, abolishing our title, suppressing our propaganda and limning forth a hybrid which was to pay its way by white mail and the ventilation of grievances. We were never to threaten the disclosure of ugly indiscretions but to ask our own price for baseless panegyric. "How much will you give us to say this about you?" was to be our formula, and, when an under-housemaid was discharged for theft or a clergyman refused to celebrate marriage with a deceased wife's sister, the aggrieved party was urged to "write to the Watchman about it."

Finding no common ground between us, Mayhew hurried away to Budapest with an omniscient headshake of misgiving. His place on my doorstep was promptly taken by one after another of Sir John Woburn's contract-expired young men. In those days the Press Combine was descending on journalism with the sideways glide of the octopus. Newspapers throughout England came one by one within reach of the waving tentacles: stolid, old-fashioned thunderers were silenced and flung into the street, while the young men of promise had their salaries trebled for three years until their brains were picked and themselves could be tossed aside like a sucked orange. They came to me boasting of the Sensations they had effected—the "Lamplighter" treasure-hunt, the "Cottage and Castle" campaign in favour of sterilized milk, the "Echo" carnation-growing competition. One and all would have made as Épatant a sensation of universal disarmament—or, for the matter of that, bimetallism, Esperanto, female suffrage or food reform—but a narrow Oxford fastidiousness, "a toy of soul, a titillating thing," set me shivering at sight of their newsbills and head-lines. For better or worse we had to get on without them.

Sir John Woburn himself I never met—and am the first to regret the loss. A man who rose from nothing to a baronetcy and the controlling interest in the august "London and Westminster Chronicle" is probably worth meeting; a man who cornered public opinion with his Press Combine was no ordinary man; and to drug the sense of a nation, to render an impassive people neurotic, to debauch the mind of a generation was no ordinary task. But, if I never met Woburn, I came once or twice in contact with Gerald Harness, his principal galvanizer and the one man who survived his chief's successive 'witch-hunts for incompetents,' as they were called, in the ranks of the Press Combine.

The career of Harness was without parallel in English life; under Woburn's direction he edited the "Morning Bulletin" and the "Evening Dispatch"; in the office of the second he unravelled—Penelope fashion—the web he had woven overnight in the office of the first. His was an amazingly effective dual personality: in the "Bulletin" he was a Jingo, a Tariff Reformer, a Brewers' Champion, a House of Lords man and an Ulster stalwart; in the "Dispatch" a Little Englander, Free-Trader, Licensing Bill supporter, House of Commons man and Home Ruler. The war, which washed away most things, spent its violence in vain on his impervious figure; he still fought for conscription by night and the voluntary system by day.

"A newspaper," he told me when "Peace" was almost paying its way and might advantageously be acquired by the Combine, "a newspaper must give its readers what they want. And an association of newspapers must cater for all kinds of readers. That's the ABC of commercial journalism."

"I suppose it is," I said. It would have been irrelevant and in questionable taste to discuss a journalism that was not primarily commercial.

After Mayhew the scrappings of the Press Combine; after them the real Grub Street that I believed to be long dead. On the Monday after our first issue, Bouverie Street looked like the Out-Patients' entrance to a hospital. Bluff, red-faced men with husky voices swept me off my feet with their eloquence and were sent to report by-elections in the provinces—which in two cases I found them doing with a wealth of local colour in the upstairs room of the "White Friars' Tavern" when I hurried in there for a late luncheon; quick-eyed lobby correspondents, with a telling "Man to man! Put your cards on the table!" manner, reconstructed the inner counsels of the Cabinet with the accuracy of forecast which staggered and continues to stagger me. And there were faded women, no longer young, with shabby boots and carefully mended gloves, who brought me sentimental and curiously invertebrate "middle" articles—and seemed pathetically unsurprised by the rejection of their dog's-eared manuscripts.

M'Clellan, a pressman first and a man some time afterwards, looked with lofty contempt on my gullibility and softness of heart. It was not long, I must admit, before I acquired something of his own hardness: when Valentine Arden rang me up to say, "One was wondering whether you would lunch with one at the Carlton to-day?" I asked brutally whether the invitation meant that he had a new novel waiting to be launched. And, when casual friends wandered in and were struck with the beauty of some new Édition de luxe, I no longer harkened to their "I say, old man, don't you think you could give me some reviewing to do?" Publishers at one time embarrassed me by threatening to withdraw their advertisements in consequence of an unfavourable notice, but M'Clellan shook his head knowingly and reassured me.

"Mr. Oakleigh," he would say, "ye've no call to mind yon fulish buddy. He kens well—if you don't—that good reviews never yet sold a bad book, nor bad reviews killed a good one, neither."

The journalistic side of our work was the most interesting, and I was sorry to drop more and more out of it as my uncle's foreign propaganda developed. One or other had to be sacrificed, however, and Bertrand could not run the Central Disarmament Committee single-handed. One of the chief bedrooms at Princes Gardens was turned into an office, and there we installed a paid secretary, who, we decided, must be Swiss, as his German was too bad for anyone but a Frenchman, and his French too bad for anyone but a German. His noncommittal name was Ruhler, his function to conduct long ceremonial correspondence with The Hague, the Internationale, Mr. Secretary Judd of the United States of America, and a host of less ornate persons and bodies throughout the world.

No sooner was M'Clellan in charge of "Peace" office and Ruhler of the Central Committee than my uncle and I took the road. I shall say little of our lecturing tours for two reasons: first, they exactly resembled every other organization conducted for similar purposes, be it the 1909 Budget League or the earlier Anti-Licensing Bill Crusade; secondly, there can be hardly a man or woman of full age in England this day who did not either attend one of our meetings or read reports of our oratorical flights in the daily press. The British Isles were divided into suitable areas and submerged with earnest speakers. Members of Parliament, Liberal candidates, Nonconformist pastors and unspecialized publicists with a taste for improving their platform style at someone else's expense swarmed in answer to our call.

The money poured in as liberally as the men. Quakers from principle, international bankers from interest, and a large, unorganized non-party group of pacificists, because we made their flesh creep, pressed forward, cheque in hand. I recall that one of our largest donations came from Sir Adolf Erckmann, and in the early months of the war we were bitterly criticized for accepting money from a Jew of German birth for the propagation of doctrines calculated to weaken the national power of resistance. I reply that we aimed at weakening in equal measure the capacity of all nations for mutual destruction; and in justice to Erckmann, whom I have little cause to love, he was neither Jew nor Gentile, bond nor free, but an international banker with everything to lose by war.

Hard on this criticism followed the question propounded in the late summer of 1914 by a hundred papers and a hundred thousand tongues, what—if anything—the Disarmament League had achieved for all its pamphlets, its speeches and its international propaganda. Well, I think we killed the Chauvinism that plunged this country in the South African War; the criminal Teutonic doctrine that war is a fine thing in itself and the necessary purging of a nation's fatty degeneration found no audience in these islands: we won respect for The Hague Tribunal, and can claim some credit for the Taft Arbitration Treaty with the United States. Perhaps, too, we postponed war when a more bellicose people might have plunged blood-thirstily into the Balkan embroglio. That we impaired the national power of resistance by opposing Lord Roberts' national service propaganda, I resolutely deny. The Haldane Army Reorganization rightly contemplated a naval screen behind which an army of any size could be built up. I for one never committed the illogicality of trying to reduce the Government's ship-building programme without proportional reduction on the part of other countries. Whether I should have embarked on the peace propaganda if the Government had told me its foreign obligations of honour, is another question.

Of course, if anyone asks me to explain away the present fact of war, I must ask in my turn whether a law against duelling had abolished the present fact of assault or isolated murder. Our League had a life of some seven years, the Internationale perhaps six times as long; both these organizations were as powerless to prevent war as two thousand years of Christian teaching.

But my present task is to describe and not to defend or speculate. If I have dealt at some length with the activities of the League, my excuse must be that it monopolized so much of my time between 1908 and 1910. When the paper and the correspondence bureau and the lecturing tours had been organized and set on their feet to stand alone, we were engaged in promoting a better understanding with the principal powers on the Continent. In 1909 my uncle arranged for an extended tour to be undertaken through the principal towns of France, Germany, Austria, Italy and Russia by representatives of the principal newspapers in the kingdom; on their return at the end of six months, he sent them to the United States, Canada and certain of the South American Republics. In the meantime, a return visit was paid by a hundred and fifty continental journalists, and my uncle and I escorted them round London, introduced them to some of the chief manufacturing centres, divided them into groups of ten and billeted them on sympathetic country houses, with results that were occasionally embarrassing and had not a few of those unrehearsed effects which constitute sometimes the success, sometimes the disaster, but always the comic element in such campaigns of strenuous goodwill.

The return visit of the journalists was followed by a mission of British Trades-Unionists to the Continent; we received a deputation representing Continental Labour in our turn. The Bar went next, and then a Committee of the House of Commons, then a sprinkling of the British Medical Association, and lastly a number of Church of England clergy and Free Church ministers. When I say that each visit called forth a return visit, and that Bertrand and I bore the brunt of entertaining and shepherding our visitors; when I add that my uncle was a member of the House the whole time (and an assiduous attendant), while I kept him company till my defeat in the first election of 1910, it is not wonderful that we both tended to drop out of London social life and to lose touch with all but our most intimate friends and relations.

It was not until the autumn of 1909 that I could find time to spend a fortnight with Loring at House of Steynes. I remember him telling me that the Daintons would be of the party, but it was so long since I had seen them that I had no idea even whether they had spent the intervening time in England. Sonia's engagement was broken off late in 1907, and almost her first appearance in public after the rupture was when we met in Scotland two years later. I gather that Loring, who was lazily attracted by her, paid several visits to Crowley Court, but he and I played Box and Cox so far as London was concerned. When I came back for the opening of Parliament, he moved unobtrusively away to the Riviera, only returning in the height of the season when my hands were full of foreign visitors and my mouth of polyglot civilities and explanations. We no longer met to exchange news of O'Rane, because there was no news to exchange. After his single postcard to Summertown from Mombasa, the silence of the grave descended upon him, and nothing but my conviction of his material indestructibility kept me from fearing that he might in very truth be dead.

And then without warning I was called upon to fulfil my part of the old covenant. On a summer night in 1909 an invitation sang its way over the wires from Knightsbridge to Curzon Street.

"My compliments to Lord Loring, and, if he will dine with me to-night at the Eclectic, I can give him news of Mr. O'Rane."

III

"If you tell me the little man's been writing to you," were Loring's first words, "I'm afraid I shan't believe you."

I helped him to take his coat off and led the way into the dining-room.

"I wouldn't insult your intelligence with such a story," I answered. "It was infinitely more Raneyesque."

"Well, where is he and what's he doing?"

"Where did he say he was going? What did he say he would do?" I asked in turn. "My dear Jim, Raney's one of those people whose dreams come true. He told us he was going to Mexico, and he's gone to Mexico; he told us he was going to make money, and I gather he's making the devil of a lot."

"When's he coming home?" Loring asked.

I was about to admit ignorance when an old recollection stirred in my brain and I completed the history.

"He told me he would dine with me in this room on the first of May next year. He will dine—at that time—in this place."

Loring helped himself to plovers' eggs and began slowly to remove the shells.

"The little man's born out of time, you know," he said, with a laugh. "He belongs to the spacious days of Elizabeth. I'm glad he's in luck. God knows, if ever a man deserved it, if ever there was poetic justice for real pluck ..." he left the sentence eloquently unfinished. "Drive ahead, George."

"In time," I said, "and at a price."

Nearly four years in the House of Commons had made me quite shameless in the matter of log-rolling. I held Loring to ransom and refused to utter another word about O'Rane until he had promised to let me descend on House of Steynes with a party of ten French journalists who were arriving in England in two months' time and had to be shown every side of English social life. It was a preposterous request for me to make, and Loring very properly refused it—not once but several times. Only at the end of a long and—if I may say so—well chosen dinner, when I declined even to mention O'Rane's name, did he show a willingness to compromise.

"Have it your own way!" he exclaimed impatiently. "I shan't be there, though."

"My dear Jim, unless you're there from start to finish——"

"This is sheer blackmail!" he cried.

"As you will," I answered, folding my arms obstinately.

"You're a dirty dog, George," he answered, with slow scorn. "I suppose I shall have to promise, though."

Before telling my tale, I had to explain how it had reached me. The previous evening had been devoted to one of many all-night sittings on the interminable 1909 Budget. I walked home between five and six o'clock in the morning, as the returning market-carts rumbled sleepily westward along Knightsbridge, and belated revellers in vivid dresses and with tired, white faces flashed by in taxis and private cars. My head was aching, my lungs seemed charged with the poisoned air of the House, and I was chilled to the marrow of my bones; cursing a factious Opposition, I had reached the door of my uncle's house in Princes Gardens and was fumbling for my latch-key, when I noticed a man sitting on the steps with his head on his knees and his hands clasped round his legs. He awoke as I tried to squeeze by him, rubbed his eyes, yawned, gazed round him, and then scrambled stiffly to his feet.

"Maybe you're Mr. George Oakleigh?" he asked, with an American intonation almost too strong to be natural. And then, when I bowed in assent, "Gee, but it's cold waiting. D'ye think I could come in for a piece? I've been sitting here since ten last night."

My first desire was for a hot bath, my second for bed. Both points were clearly propounded to the American.

"Guess that'll keep," he answered easily. "I've a message from your friend David O'Rane." He felt in his pocket and produced a card with the name "James Morris." and some address that I have forgotten in Mexico City. On the back was pencilled, "Please give bearer any assistance he may require. D. O'R."

"What can I do for you, Mr. Morris?" I asked unenthusiastically, fingering the card and then glancing at my watch.

"A warm room and something to eat," he answered, with a shiver. "My name's not Morris, by the way, but it'll serve. And I'm not a native of Mexico, but that'll serve. My folk come from this side of the water, but they're not proud of me for some reason. By the same token, I shan't keep you long from your bath. I'm known in Knightsbridge. 'Late to bed and early to rise, Is the rule for Knightsbridge, if you're wise.' All right, I'm not jagged."

Mr. Morris's manner was so unprepossessing that nothing but my regard for O'Rane would have induced me to admit him to the house at this—or any—hour. In appearance, the man was of medium size with powerful hands and thin, riding legs. His hair and skin were fair, his eyes grey, and his features regular though weak. All pretension to good looks, however, was ruined by his expression, which was an unattractive blend of cunning and effrontery. His lower lip shot out at the end of a sentence, as though to conceal the weak line of his chin: deep furrows from nose to mouth formed themselves into a perpetual sneer; the pale eyes were half hidden under their insolent, drooping lids. And with it all there was something pitiful about the man: he was so young, not more than two and twenty; the recklessness was so crude, the frailty of character so patent. He seemed like a highly strung child who had been bullied into obstinacy and violence by an unsympathetic nurse. And that, I believe, was in fact one part of his history.

"Come in, Mr. Morris," I said, opening the door. "I shall be glad to hear any news of O'Rane and to do anything I can for a friend of his."

"A name to conjure with, seemingly," said Morris, with a malicious smile.

"O'Rane's?"

"I reckon so. You'll admit you didn't precisely freeze on to me at first sight. However, no ill feeling."

"It was an unusual hour for a call," I replied.

"And I looked an unusual sort of a customer, eh? Well, never mind. What's this? Cheese? I can do with some of that. No whiskey! I don't use spirits nowadays, not since I met O'Rane."

We sat in silence while he munched bread and cheese, contentedly glancing round the room at the pictures or, when he thought I was not looking, letting his eyes rest on me. The curtains were still drawn, and the yellow light from the chandelier, feeble by contrast with the cold, diamond clarity of the dawn outside, lent an added element of the fantastic to our meeting. I lit a cigar, settled wearily into my chair and told him not to hurry himself.

"Well, start at the beginning," he said at length, "I met him eighteen months ago in Tomlinson's Saloon, Acacia Avenue, Mexico City. He hadn't been in the country more than a few days—landed with five thousand dollars he'd made out Africa way and was looking for likely oil propositions. I was with the Central Syndicate in those days. No need to ask why I was in the accursed country at all, or what I was doing. The Syndicate made me cashier in their innocence of heart, and, though I wasn't overpaid, their bookkeeping left loopholes for a man of enterprise. I used those loopholes some. By the time I met O'Rane, the Syndicate had lent me 4000 dollars—more'n eight hundred pounds—without knowing it. We weren't in sight of an audit, I'd got months to doctor the entries, it was roses all the way." Truculently he thrust forward his lower lip, every inch of him the bragging schoolboy. "Then—I had ninety minutes' warning—the Syndicate started in for amalgamation with the Southern Combine, the accountants rolled up for the valuation—and I thought Mexico City wasn't good for my health."

He paused dramatically, finished his soda water and put down the empty glass.

"That's when I met O'Rane," he went on. "There wasn't much packing or leave-taking to get through. I booked express for New Orleans and turned into Tomlinson's till it was time to get under way for the depot. That's where they took me—I was a fool to run before evening, it was bound to arouse suspicion. I'd been talking to O'Rane a matter of half an hour—oil prospects and such like—when I felt a hand on my shoulder and a shiver down my spine."

He paused again and helped himself to a cigar.

"To this day I don't know why he did it," he resumed, "but I'd not been four and twenty hours in my cell when they told me there was a visitor wanting to speak with me.

"'Tell him I'm only at home on the sixth Friday of the month,' I said.

"I didn't want any durned visitors. He came in, though—leastways he came to the door and peeked through the grille.

"'Morning,' says he, 'you remember we met in Tomlinson's yesterday. My name's O'Rane.'

"'I've not got a card,' says I, 'but you'll find full particulars in the book upstairs.'

"I wasn't out to be civil and I thought he'd taken the hint and cleared. He was still at the grille, though, next time I looked up.

"'Which college were you?' he asks after a bit—for all the world as if we were still drinking cocktails in Tomlinson's. College! If he'd asked my views on Bacon and Shakespeare....

"'What the hell's that to you?' I blazed out.

"'It was Merton or Corpus, but I can't remember which,' he says.

"I didn't say anything to that.

"'I was at the House,' he went on. 'I wanted to see if I couldn't give you a lift up. What's the amount in dispute?'

"'Four thousand,' I answered and heard him whistle.

"'Pounds?' he asks.

"'No such luck,' I said. 'Dollars.' I mean, to be lagged for that....

"Believe me or not, that man O'Rane sighed with relief.

"'I can manage that,' he said. 'So long.'

"Next morning they let me out. There may have been more surprised men in Mexico City, but, if there were, I didn't meet 'em. How he squared the Syndicate and the officials and the whole durned Criminal Code of Mexico, I don't know. I didn't ask. I had a bath and a shave at his hotel, then he gave me breakfast, then a cigar, and then we put up our feet and talked.

"'You'd better quit Mexico City for a piece,' he began.

"I nodded. The same great thought had occurred to me.

"'I'm out for oil,' he went on, 'd'you care to come?'

"'D'you care about having me?' I suggested.

"'I shouldn't have asked you if I didn't,' he says.

"'I'd look for oil in hell for you,' I said.

"We shook on that.

"'We shall rough it some,' he warned me. 'Better hear the terms first. Item one: I'll never ask you to do a thing I won't do myself.'

"'Done!' I said.

"'Then that's about all,' says he, taking his feet off the table and looking at his watch. 'Half profits for each, and I'm to say when the proposition's worked out.'"

Mr. James Morris, as he chose to call himself, late of Merton (or Corpus Christi) College, Oxford, knocked the ash off his cigar and looked round the library.

"You've not got such a thing as a large scale map of Mexico, have you?" he asked. "Well, it doesn't matter. I guess the places would mostly be only names to you. We started West—Gonsalo way—and we worked some. Living Springs was our first success, and we let the Southern Combine have an option on that so as we could buy plant for the St. Esmond concession, and six months' working of St. Esmond gave us capital to buy out the Gonsalo Development Syndicate and round off our holding. Since then we've struck oil at Pica, Melango and Long Valley."

He paused considerately to let the unfamiliar names sink into my memory.

"In eighteen months we've never looked back," he went on, with rising enthusiasm. "Every dollar we made went back to the business—barring what we needed to live on, and that was mostly bread, meat and tobacco, with an occasional new pair of boots or breeches to keep us decent. And then three months ago we started prospecting in new territory—I can't tell you where it is, 'cos we're still negotiating. I found the oil, and O'Rane did the rest. He thinks it's the richest thing we've ever struck and he's going to collar the proposition. The territory's about the size of Scotland, and the concession will run to anything between one and two million dollars."

He pulled an envelope from his pocket and scribbled some figures on the back.

"We're selling our shirts to get it," he told me. "O'Rane never borrows money, but he's sent me over here to float a company to buy everything we've found or made in the last year and a half. He couldn't come himself: the sweepings of God's universe that we call our labour would be drunk by ten and knifing each other by ten-thirty without him to get a cinch on 'em. If I bring it off, we shall have enough for the concession. Maybe it won't pan out as rich as we hope, and then we start again at the bottom. That's the sort of risk he loves taking. That's—that's just O'Rane. Maybe he's right, and there's oil enough to flood Sahara. Put the concession at a million dollars and the average yield at ten per cent on your capital. A hundred thousand dollars per annum—gross. Take half of that away for working expenses—fifty thousand, net. Half profits on that, twenty-five thousand dollars a year—£5000 for each of us.

"O'Rane says he'll be satisfied with that. When we touch total net profit of fifty thousand dollars, he'll sell out or turn the proposition over to a company. Then he'll come back to England and go into Parliament and cut a dash. And I—well, I'll have to say good-bye to him, I guess."

He stopped abruptly as though there were much more that he would have liked to say. We sat smoking in silence for a few moments. Morris's raw, ill-regulated susceptibilities had made him an easy victim to Raney's personality: perhaps he was already wondering what to do when the strange partnership dissolved, and Raney returned alone—perhaps he recognized his own inability to continue the work single-handed when the inspiration and driving force were removed: perhaps, as his eyes glanced out on the silence and desolation of Knightsbridge, he was weighing the possibility of starting afresh and making a new home for himself in a Western capital.

For myself, I had no other thought than that I should have liked a man to speak of me as Morris had spoken of O'Rane. I should have welcomed a little of his humanity, his singleness of heart and his unshakeable faith in himself. While he worked in shirt and trousers or ventured his last hundreds on an admitted scamp or staked everything he had won on the chance of greater winnings, I was sitting tired and chilled by my late hours at the House, ruling Morris out from my list of desirable acquaintances on the ground that I disliked his manner and appearance, possibly even wondering if he were to be trusted to put down the silver cigar cutter before he left....

"Is there anything I can do for you, Morris?" I asked with a sudden shock of penitence at my own insular prejudice.

He noticed that I had dropped the 'Mister' and seemed gratified.

"Guess not, thanks," he answered, yawning and stretching himself. "I've got the proposition pretty nigh fixed. I'll take any message you like to send O'Rane. He sent love to everybody and would like to hear from you. There's not much time or accommodation for writing out there. Our first camp was two blankets, a packing case and a banjo. When I went down with fever he gave me ragtime back-numbers and stories from the 'Earthly Paradise.' The man could make his pile doing memory stunts at a dime show. God! if I hadn't been so weak I could have laughed some. William Morris in Central America, in a bell tent bunged up with oil samples and quinine bottles." He glanced round the room at the shining mahogany furniture, and his toe tested the thickness of the carpet. "Well, good-bye," he said. "I'm pleased to have met you."

As he stood with outstretched hand, there was little enough of the American about him for all his laboured transatlanticisms.

"Are you and he all alone?" I asked.

"God! no. Not now. We've got the off-scourings of every nation and most of the saloons of Mexico City working for us. They're a dandy lot, but it's pretty to see O'Rane handling them. If ever you lose your faith in human nature, come and see him licking half-castes and Gringoes into shape. They'd string up old man Diaz and make O'Rane president for the asking. Well, I must be going."

"Look here," I said, as we shook hands again, "you must come and dine with me——"

He stopped me with a shake of the head.

"Thanks. I don't show up in the West End by day. I spend my mornings down town—Mincing Lane way—and then I retire up stage. 'Sides, I'm due to sail on Friday if I can get fixed by then."

I walked with him to the front door and watched him appreciatively sniffing the early morning air.

"Good old London!" he exclaimed, and then with a return of his former sneering arrogance, "D'you ever see X——?"

The name he mentioned was borne by a well-known Permanent Under-Secretary in one of the Government offices. He was a regular visitor at my uncle's house.

"And his wife?" Morris pursued. "Well, next time you run across her, just tell her that all's well in the New World. Good-bye."

When I had finished my story, Loring threw away the stump of his cigar and stretched himself.

"As I told you earlier in the evening," he observed, "the little man has been born about three centuries too late."

IV

I always regarded Loring as the possessor of one sterling quality. Selfish he might be, or indolent, or inconsiderate, an old maid in his fussy little rules of everyday existence and an incurable romantic in his attitude to the life of the twentieth century. With it all he was a man of his word. Under blackmail he had pledged himself to entertain my French journalists, and when the time came for fulfilling the pledge he smiled welcome on them in the hall of House of Steynes.

Indeed, so admirable was his manner that I retired unreluctantly from competition. Raney's messenger, the self-styled "James Morris," had called on me in June; the evangelists of Universal Brotherhood arrived in July, and for more sweltering weeks than I like to count, mine was the privilege of giving them tea and speeches on the Terrace, escorting them in unsuitable clothes to Goodwood and more speeches and misinforming them on subjects of historical interest in Westminster Abbey and St. Paul's—a course which afforded them opportunity of correcting me in further speeches, to the sluggish perplexity of the vergers.

In August, the hoarse, limp mass of us repaired to Euston and House of Steynes. Old Lady Loring was, perhaps fortunately, with Amy at Baden-Baden, though four days can be interminably long even in a bachelor party. Our host, however, put his heart into the work; with a grim thoroughness we visited Holyrood and Arthur's Seat, the Highlands and Islands and dismissed our guests fraternally with the clang of Clyde hammers resounding in their ears and an obstinate conviction that they had enjoyed themselves.

"And now," said Loring to my uncle as we walked out of the Waverley Station, "now for an All-British holiday. You can stay another week, sir? No women till my mother comes back—I thought that would appeal to you. You, George? Then the only thing to do is to find a telegraph office and invite everybody we can think of."

Two days later, by persuasion on our part and perjury on theirs, we had snatched a dozen men from the same number of protesting hostesses. Tom Dainton was on his honeymoon—surely the least romantic of its kind for anyone who knew Tom or could imagine an ox-eyed wife yet more silent than himself!—but Sam came up to say good-bye before sailing for India with his regiment, and we had the luck to catch Mayhew on leave from Budapest. Summertown escaped the vigilance of his Colonel for half the time, and Arden telegraphed at some expense: "One resents these short notices but if one can be assured that the Waterloo brandy is not yet finished one may perhaps sacrifice oneself for one's friends but one cannot allow ones' acceptance to be taken as establishing a precedent."

The party was a rare antidote for anyone suffering from too much House of Commons and general propaganda. We bathed and lay about in long chairs and bathed again and enjoyed the delicious, lazy conversation wherein the speakers fall half asleep between the drawling sentences, and nobody makes epigrams or debating points, and nothing matters. Valentine Arden, exquisite, precious and inscrutable as ever, would unbend from time to time and speak as though he no longer feared a charge of enthusiasm. His books were attracting considerable attention with their sparkle and passionless satire, and his talk left the impression on my mind that for all his youth the satire was not wholly cheap effect.

He analysed contemporary literature with the eyes of a man whose profession is to study technique, emphasizing the essentially derivative character of modern writing with its sex psychology borrowed from France, its Pottery School and Dartmoor School imitating Hardy, its intensive vision applied by the admirers of James. His final judgement was depressing, for there was nothing new except Wells and Conrad and little that was good. We were too much obsessed by our environment to produce or care for great books. Nothing was worth achieving or describing, unless it were an invitation to dine with royalty or a treatise on sexual pathology.

The childlike preoccupation of grown men and women in the infinite littleness of social life was an irresistible mark for the satire of a man whose deliberate and effective pose was to exaggerate the fastidious artificiality of his generation. Valentine Arden had a courageous and altogether scornful soul. I have seen him enter the Ritz, thin and white as an Aubrey Beardsley pierrot, in a black coat lined with heliotrope silk. I have watched strong-minded young women humbling themselves before him because they knew his indifference to their charms, and I have marked the haughtiest of nervous hostesses exerting themselves to secure his comfort. In his early days no man of my time was so successful in getting taken at his own valuation. Later when his position was assured, half London was civil in the expectation of appearing in his next book; the other half in hopes of being left out.

Mayhew's riotous fancy was little subdued by twelve months in a foreign capital devoted to special correspondence by day and the study of Austro-Hungary's myriad tongues by night. He was hardly less omniscient than in the old Fleet Street days when he dined with me at the Eclectic and prefaced preposterous stories with "The Prime Minister said to me in the Lobby only this afternoon, 'My dear Mayhew, I don't want this to go any further, but ...'" I remember the late absorption of Bosnia and Herzegovina left him tolerably sagacious.

"I don't think people in this country realize what a near thing it was," he said, with a grave shake of the head. "It's a diplomatic triumph for the old Emperor, but he'd better not try to repeat it. Russia's got a long memory. At present she's recovering slowly from the Japanese War and wasn't equal to taking on Austria and Germany at the same time. Devil of it is, you never know where the thing'll stop. Russia brings in France, France may bring us in.... It's a great pity someone can't hold the Balkans under the sea for five minutes."

I have a fairly long memory, and five years later I quoted Mayhew's words to him. He was honest enough to say that he had forgotten them and that the two Balkan wars had converted him to my own belief that a European war was too big a thing for any power to begin.

House of Steynes was an asylum from the House of Commons, but we could not keep altogether free from politics. No one who remembers the 1909 Session will be surprised. I believe my record for divisions under the famous Budget was equalled by two men and beaten by three. It was the great fight of our time. I had been getting a bad name with the Whips, and observant eyes on the opposite side were already marking me down a possible renegade. That wicked old wire-puller, the Duchess of Ross, on ten minutes' acquaintance at a Foreign Office reception invited me to stay at Herrig Castle to complete the conversion. I would have accepted in a spirit of adventure had it not been for the Budget; but any man with one drop of Radical blood in his veins felt, as I did, that Democracy was fighting for its life.

I shall not revive the old battle that we fought in the House and refought with Loring. I only allude to it because of the change that controversy wrought in his life, a change he was already beginning resignedly to contemplate.

"There is good in all things, even your Budget," he told my uncle ironically. "One irresponsible, hereditary legislator will be able to retire with dignity."

"Our whole democratic development for fifty years is based on the financial monopoly of the Commons," Bertrand answered.

To my mind the saddest effect of political life is the ease with which even considerable intellects come to live by catch-phrases.

"That's little recommendation in my eyes, sir," Loring answered. "Come! Come! Let's die fighting! If we let this through—to the tune of the Land Song—there's nothing you won't be able to pass as a Money Bill. And there's always the chance that the country may support us."

"And you'd make every future Budget fight for its life like this one—against an irresponsible House?"

Not lightly did my uncle forget his all-night sittings and endless perambulations through the lobbies.

"If you choose to call us irresponsible," said Loring, with a shrug of the shoulders. "I submit there's still room for a long view, a patience, an aloofness from the heated quarrel of the moment. Tradition should be represented, sir—as it's represented by college Fellows or Benchers——"

"The two most reactionary, uncontrolled, mediaeval-minded bodies you could have chosen," my uncle commented in one hurried breath.

"And aren't you proud of them both, sir?" Loring flashed back. "As they were and are and always will be? Aren't you proud to be a T.C.D. man and a member of the Inner Temple?"

"No!" said Bertrand contemptuously.

"Your hand on your heart, sir?" Loring persisted.

My uncle laughed and made no reply.

When the Budget went to the Lords, Loring voted for its rejection. When the Parliament Bill was presented, he continued his opposition; not even the threat of five hundred new creations shook his consistency. I sometimes think his whole life was symbolized by his struggle in the dwindling ranks of the "Die Hards." His last words—"This is the appeal I make to your Lordships. It is unlikely that I shall have the honour again to address your Lordships' House...."—were characteristic of his refusal to compromise with modernity. When the Parliament Bill secured its final reading, Loring left the House of Lords for ever.

After the rest of the party was dispersed I stayed on for a couple of days until Lady Loring and Amy arrived. One of the two days was Loring's birthday, and I found him in a state of altogether ridiculous depression when we met after breakfast.

"Twenty-nine!" he exclaimed in acknowledgement of my good wishes. "It's the devil of an age, George."

"Not for a confirmed pessimist," I said. "Every hour brings release nearer."

"I shall have to get married, you know," he observed reflectively.

"As one goes misÈre in Nap?" I inquired.

He was really thinking aloud and quite properly ignored my question.

"I suppose it's the right thing to do," he said. "The Cardinal's my heir at present, and after him there's no one to succeed. George, it must be a damned uncomfortable state, in spite of the novelists. Think of having a woman always living with you——"

"According to the modern novelists," I said, "they always live with someone else."

"Well, even that seems uncomfortable."

"For you or the other man? It depends on the wife, and in any case I don't know that you need consider him except on broad humanitarian principles. Jim, if I may advise you, don't be glamoured by the idea of being faithful to one woman all your life. You have formed certain habits——"

"My dear George, don't rub it in! I don't envy the woman who marries me. But I'm not likely to grow more domesticated by remaining a bachelor."

"Have you anyone in mind?" I asked, as I poured myself out a cup of tea.

"Several," he answered vaguely.

"Then why not leave it at that?" I suggested.

When Amy arrived the following day I found her alone in the morning-room and asked whether she was responsible for turning her brother's thoughts into this channel. For answer she frowned slightly and brushed the curls away from her forehead.

"In other words, you don't approve of her?" I said.

"I approve of anyone Jim marries," she replied, with a touch of loyal defiance. "That doesn't mean I shan't do all I can to prevent a great mistake being made."

"It would simplify things enormously," I observed, "if I knew who was being discussed."

"There are two of them. You must learn to use your eyes, George."

"But till a fortnight ago I hadn't seen Jim for years."

"Well, if you stay here another fortnight—— You're not really going to-morrow, are you?"

"I'll stay a week to save Jim from bigamy," I said.

"Oh, it isn't that." She walked over to the writing-table and came back with a sheet of paper containing the names of the following day's party. "He wants to marry one of them, and I want him to marry the other."

I glanced at the list, and "Miss Hunter-Oakleigh" caught my eye.

"Violet's one," I said. Then I observed another name and handed the sheet back to Amy. "Thanks. I have seen indications."

Amy fretted the paper with her fingers.

"I haven't a word against Sonia," she said. "If Jim marries her, I—all of us, mother and I and everybody—shall try to make a success of it." She stopped, and shook her head with misgiving. "I'm sure it's a mistake, though. She's got very little heart, and Jim's nothing like brutal enough to keep her in order. And I'm afraid he'll find she's got nothing but her looks. That's what's attracted him. Violet's pretty enough, Heaven knows, but Sonia——" She shrugged her shoulders helplessly. "I can understand any man being mad about her. And she knows it, and expects men to go mad about her. I don't think she'll be content with one man's devotion. Someone will come along.... George, I hate to talk like this, but a lioness and her cub aren't in it with me where Jim's concerned. He and mother are all I've got in the world, and if anyone came along and spoiled his life ... I should be quite capable of murder."

"Who invited Violet?" I asked. Before leaving London I had dined with her and her young brother. She had said nothing about coming to Scotland.

"I did," Amy answered. "I wrote to her from Baden-Baden."

"I suppose she would marry Jim?"

"That's one of the questions you musn't put to a woman," Amy answered, with a laugh.

The following day brought Violet and the Daintons, as well as a number of other people in whom I was not so immediately interested.

There was a certain want of ease about our meeting, for I fancy Sir Roger was as frightened of his host as I was of Lady Dainton. The two of us withdrew without prearrangement to the smoking-room and exchanged quiet confidences till it was time to dress for dinner. I sat next to Sonia at that meal and was sensible of an agreeable change in her manner. We had not met since her rupture with Crabtree, and I imagine that two years' retirement had given her leisure for salutary reflection. She was subdued and polite to people older than herself—cordial even to members of her own sex; and so little attention had she received in her exile that she was gracious to quite inconsequential men whose function in the old days would have been to hover deferentially around her, awaiting orders.

"I'm so glad its you and not a stranger," she was good enough to tell me as we went in. "How's everybody and what have you all been doing?"

I dealt with the comprehensive question through three courses, and at the end she asked with a momentary heightening of colour whether I had heard anything of O'Rane.

"I'm glad he's doing well," she remarked indifferently, when I had sketched his career from the Imperial Hapsburg cells by way of Mombasa to Mexico. "George, I suppose you thought I treated him very badly?"

"Even if I thought so, I shouldn't say so," I answered. "I imagine there are easier and more restful things in life than to be loved by Raney. Not that his devotion has aged you noticeably."

"My dear, I'm twenty-two!" She studied her own reflection in the silver plate before her. "When you see him, tell him to shed a tear over my remains," she went on mournfully.

"He's twenty-six himself," I said. "And Jim and I are twenty-nine, which is far more important, though I may say I now look on thirty without a tremor."

"Oh, age doesn't matter for a man," she answered, with a touch of impatience. "You've got work to do. When you're simply waiting for someone to take compassion on you ..."

"There is still hope even at twenty-two," I said.

"But when twenty-two becomes twenty-three, and then twenty-four, and then twenty-five.... It's rot being a girl, George!" she exclaimed, with something of the old fire in her brown eyes. "I always think—I'm not a Suffragette, of course—I always think if we could look forward to any kind of career——"

"But there are scores," I said.

"Not for—for us," she answered. "Talk to mother about it. Girls like Amy or Violet or me, you understand."

Lady Dainton was sitting on my left, and when opportunity offered I opened with a platitude on the economic position of woman. It took her a moment to get her bearings, for she and Loring had been discussing the misdeeds of the Apaches. A very pretty quarrel in their ranks had been extensively reported for some months, starting from the night when Erckmann charged Crabtree's vaunted cousin, Lord Beaumorris, with cheating at baccarat. Beaumorris, whose bankruptcy discharge had been suspended in consequence of a technicality concerned with undisclosed assets, had frankly joined the Apaches for what he could make out of them. Erckmann felt that rules must be observed even in baccarat, even as played by Beaumorris. "Ve vos all chentlemens here, yes, no," as Summertown, who had witnessed the scene, informed me.

Not content with the verbal charge, Erckmann laid indiscreet pen to paper and was in immediate receipt of a writ for libel. The jury disagreed, and Beaumorris, venting his feelings in the Press, took occasion to call Erckmann an Illicit Diamond Buyer. Proceedings were promptly taken for criminal libel aggravated by attempted blackmail. The jury again disagreed, and, though both Erckmann and Beaumorris now left the court with equally tarnished records, nothing would satisfy Beaumorris but an action for malicious prosecution.

It required the time of one judge sitting six days a week to keep abreast of Apache litigation. As a taxpayer, I sometimes wondered whether either reputation was worth five thousand pounds a year of public money.

"The position of women?" Lady Dainton repeated in answer to my question. "It depends so much on the woman, don't you think? If a girl's young and pretty and has a little money and goes about in Society, don't you know? she usually makes a good match." Her eyes looked past me for a moment and rested on Sonia. "As for the others...."

I really forget what their fate was to be. No doubt their prospects, too, depended on the possession of a determined mother. Evil associations corrupt good manners, and I heard Lady Dainton issue herself an invitation at Loring's expense in a way Crabtree himself could not have bettered. We were discussing plans for the winter, and Loring mentioned the possibility of taking his yacht for a three or four months' cruise in the Mediterranean. I was invited, but had to refuse, because a general election was impending; Lady Dainton invited herself and Sonia, leaving Sir Roger behind to recapture the Melton seat; despite the superhuman efforts of Amy Loring, my cousin Violet was not approached.

"That absolutely decides it," Amy said ruefully. "I shan't give in. I shall go too and do everything in my power to stop it, but I'm afraid he's caught."

"'There's many a slip 'twixt the cup and the lip,'" I announced, in my more banal manner.

V

I had occasion to envy Loring and the passengers of the "White Seal" during the next few months. A second winter election, the false enthusiasm and cheap victories of the platform, the endless canvass and cold wet nights and days as my car splashed through the crumbling lanes of Wiltshire—all would have been a heavy price to pay even had I been returned. But the shrewd voters of the Cranborne Division were not a second time to be gulled—at least by me. There was a clear House of Lords issue: my old opponent, the Honourable Trevor Lawless, fought on the anti-Home-Rule "ticket," I once again on the sanctity of Free Trade reinforced by Land Reform. He was elected by a twelve-hundred majority, and I, in an interview with the spirituous, rain-soaked reporter of the "Cranborne Progressive and East Wilts Liberal Gazette," claimed a moral victory for the House of Commons control of finance.

To anyone who knew the 1906 Parliament when there was not room on the Government side for all the ministerialists, the first 1910 election was profoundly depressing. My uncle's majority was brought down to forty-seven, and many a Unionist, returned like Sir Roger Dainton after four years' absence, could say that the country was perceptibly returning to its senses.

"There's no victory without its casualty list," I replied to my friend Jellaby, the Whip, when he telegraphed a message of sympathy. There seemed nothing amiss with the sentiment, and I consoled myself with the prospect of wintering at San Remo with my mother.

"Can give you another seat to fight," Jellaby wired back, as my packing came to an end, and I ordered myself a place in the train-de-luxe.

"Must resist casualty habit," I returned and abandoned England for two months.

April was well advanced by the time I came back to Princes Gardens. When the bitterness of defeat is past, I know few sensations sweeter than that of not being in the House of Commons. It was irritating at first to be debarred from the smoking-room, but, as master of my own time, with no more interrupted dinners, no autumn sessions and no deputations to Ministers, I wondered what frenzy of enthusiasm could have made me for four years the slave of an urbane but vigilant young man like Jellaby, whose one duty in life was to lay me by the heels if I tried to leave the House unpaired.

"I said you'd outgrow the phase," my uncle commented one morning at breakfast. His daily post-bag brought him hundreds of letters; mine, since I had parted from Westminster, a couple of dozen at the outside.

"I may stand again if I can arrange always to winter on the Mediterranean," I said, "or if I can get returned unopposed. London in March and the Great Movement of Men in the Cranborne Division don't appeal to me, Bertrand, as they once did."

"What are you going to do with yourself?" he asked.

"Enjoy life," I answered appreciatively. "Read books again, dine at the Club a bit, run over to Normandy in the summer, see my friends.... By the way, the Lorings are back. He wants me to lunch with him today."

The note of invitation had piqued my curiosity. With his instinctive fear of giving himself away Loring had written no more than: "Lunch 2 p.m. here. Help me with heavy case of conscience." I sent an acceptance by telephone, sat half the morning in the Park watching the passers-by and in due course made my way to Curzon Street. The air was redolent of spring, and in its fire the whole world seemed to have flung its winter garment. Light dresses fluttered in the warm breeze, everything was new and clean and young; the very cart-horses welcomed the advent of May with shining harness and gay ribbons.

"You don't look as if your conscience were troubling you," I said to Loring when luncheon was over, and we were sitting alone over our coffee and cigars. He had come back with a clear eye and bronzed cheek, radiant with health and good spirits. "Did you have a good time?"

"Wonderful!" His enthusiasm was rare and strange. "Incredibly wonderful!"

"I forget who was there," I said.

"Oh, a mob of people. The only ones that mattered were Lady Dainton——"

"Who petrifies me," I interrupted.

"And Sonia."

He paused. I knocked the ash from my cigar and said nothing.

"George, Sonia and I are engaged."

I still said nothing.

"For God's sake take some notice!" he exclaimed.

"Is this your case of conscience?" I asked. "You want to get out of it?"

Loring clasped his forehead with both hands in utter despair.

"And you used to be quite intelligent!" he groaned. "I'm serious, George. Sonia's promised to marry me; Lady Dainton's good enough to make no objection——"

"She wouldn't," I murmured.

" ... My mother and Amy are simply in love with her...."

Mentally I congratulated Lady Amy on her loyalty.

"And now you want my blessing?" I hazarded. "Well, best of luck to you, Jim."

"Thanks, old man. I want more than that, though. Something that Amy said made me think that little Raney had once been rather in love with Sonia. You know him better than I do: what does it amount to? Whenever I've seen them together, they were fighting like cats."

"Amy was referring to something that happened a good time ago," I answered. In retrospect I am still struck with the diplomacy of my words.

"Oh, it's ancient history?" Loring looked relieved. "I was afraid—I mean, short of giving up Sonia, there's nothing in the world I wouldn't do to avoid hurting the little man's feelings."

"If you'd care for me to write," I began, in off-hand fashion.

"That's what I was going to ask you to do. George, you've never been in love...."

"For some unaccountable reason, all newly engaged men pay their bachelor friends that compliment," I said.

"Well, you haven't, or you wouldn't be so damned cold-blooded about it. Honestly, until last night I didn't know what happiness was——"

"This is all rather vieux jeu," I objected.

"It was just as we got into the Channel." The expression in his eyes had grown dreamy and distant. "We were on deck, she and I——"

"I will not submit to this, Jim!" I said.

He laughed as a drunken man laughs.

"If you won't, somebody else will have to," he said. "I'm—I'm simply bursting with it. For sheer dullness—on my soul, George, I'll never ask you to lunch with me again, in this world or the next."

"The veiled compliment is wasted on you," I said.

As I walked home, I took stock of the position. Granted that I had been dull, I was no actor and could affect little rapture at the prospect of losing my best friend, however deep his momentary intoxication. And every word that Amy had said to me at House of Steynes the previous summer stood as true as when she spoke it, and I added my endorsement. Sonia had been as entirely charming on that occasion as she had been exasperating in the same place some years earlier when Crabtree first proposed to her. If I have suggested corporal punishment for her, it must be remembered that bachelors are sometimes lacking in the finer chivalry; but which Sonia Jim was marrying remained, I felt, to be seen. There would, indeed, be discoveries, on both sides, for Loring at nine-and-twenty had his share of angularity.

And I was not easy in my mind about the way O'Rane would take the news. It is true I had never regarded his attachment very seriously from the time when the undergraduate of twenty became engaged to the temporary debutante of sixteen; true also that three and a half years abroad had probably made a very different man of him. At the same time, I recalled his passionate outburst on the lawn at Crowley Court when Lady Dainton declined to recognize the engagement; and it did not need a man who knew him as well as I did to appreciate his curious tenacity of character. I came to feel that the news would hit him hard.

My letter of explanation was not easy to write. I roughed out one draft and tore it up; then a second, then a third. Bertrand put his head in at my door to say he was dining at the House, and I hurriedly changed my clothes and drove down to the Club. There I made a fourth attempt as unsatisfactory as the first three, thrust it impatiently into my pocket, and walked into the hall to read the latest telegrams.

"You said eight o'clock. I'm before my time, but I'll wait out in St. James's Street if you like."

I spun round at the touch of fingers on my shoulders. Only one voice in the world held as much music in it—low and vibrant, setting my nerves a-tingle.

"You are as dramatic as ever, Raney," I said.

"Shall I go and wait outside? You might answer my question."

"And in other respects you don't seemed to have changed." I looked him up and down and turned him to the light. His fingers as he shook hands were as hard and strong as steel cable; he was slender and wiry as a greyhound, with the big eyes, smooth features and bodily grace of a girl.

"You're trained down pretty fine," I said. "And your hair's as untidy as ever—my dear fellow! don't touch it! It's one of your charms. You have also reverted to a hybrid twang reminiscent of twelve years ago in a certain great public school——"

He handed his hat and coat to a page-boy and pointed to the dining-room door.

"I've had nothing to eat since breakfast, George."

"Two Hoola-Hoolas, please," I called out to a waiter. "In the strangers' room. Raney, it's the devil of a long time since I saw you last."

"Did you expect me?" he demanded, with a child's eagerness to find out whether his little piece of theatricality had succeeded.

"The very cart-horses of London expected you," I said. "I observed them with ribbons on their tails as I went to lunch with one Loring. 'It is the first of May,' I said. I suppose you'd like me to order you some dinner."

"Then you didn't really think I should turn up?" he asked, glancing up from the bill of fare I had handed him.

"Not wanting to eat two dinners in one night, I forbore to order anything until I'd seen whether you were alive."

His deep-set black eyes became charged with laughter.

"Alive!" he exclaimed. "I'm not twenty-seven yet, George, and I've done all my work in life. I've made all kinds of money. I could eat two dinners every night if I wanted to. I can start seriously now; I'm the equal of you or Jim or anyone. Not literally, of course; he'd call me a pauper. It's a matter of degree, but I shall never again be handicapped by not having money." The waiter arrived with the cocktails: O'Rane raised his glass and bowed: "Say you're glad to see me, old man."

"I don't think the point was ever seriously challenged," I said. "Continued prosperity! I don't use the word luck with you."

As we sat down to dinner his eyes were brimming with tears.

Some day I should like to write a series of books about O'Rane. I should not mind if they were little read, I should not mind if they were read and disbelieved; they will never come from his pen, and, as he confided more in me than in anyone else, I feel a responsibility to the half-dozen of his friends who may survive the war. Midnight was long past before the tale of his adventures was done—the selected tale of such adventures as he thought would interest me.

"And now?" I asked, as the smoking-room waiter came in and looked pointedly at the clock.

He walked to the window and gazed down on the stream of cars, their dark paint gleaming in the lamplight as they glided down Pall Mall from the Carlton and hummed richly up St. James's Street or disappeared into the silence of the Park.

"I'm going to have a long night in a real bed," he announced, "as distinct from either a berth or bare boards in a tent——"

"I can give you all that in Princes Gardens," I interrupted.

"Later, old man, if I may. I've sent my baggage to the Charing Cross Hotel. To-morrow I shall call on Loring, see who else is in town——"

His words brought me face to face with the problem I had been shirking all the evening.

"I wrote you a letter to-night before dinner," I said as we walked down to the hall. "I'll post it so that it reaches you to-morrow morning. Raney, I'm afraid you won't care much about the contents."

He raised his eyebrows in surprise.

"Why not give it me now?" he asked.

"You may prefer to digest it alone," I said.

He held out his hand with a determined little smile.

"I'll take it home and read it," he promised. "I can't sleep with unknown perils hanging over me."

I gave him the letter, and we parted on the understanding that he was to call round in Princes Gardens as soon as he was sufficiently rested.

I have no idea how he slept that night. Next morning there was no sign of him, and in the afternoon when I went to make inquiries at the Charing Cross Hotel I was handed a pencil note scrawled on the back of my own envelope to him.

"My apologies to your uncle. Just off to Flushing to complete my rest cure."

When I met Sonia and Loring at dinner the following night, I told them that I had caught a glimpse of O'Rane on his way through London from Mexico to the Continent. They were politely interested.

VI

I have reached an age when some four-fifths of my contemporaries are married. It is a melancholy exercise familiar to all bachelors to count the number of friendships that have closed on one side with a silver cigarette-box and on the other with an invitation to dinner in a very new house. "I want you and my wife to be great friends," Benedict has written. Usually I have wondered what he could see in his common-place partner, and always the little woman has marvelled that Benedict and I have any bond of union. Sometimes I can see him growing wistful in recollection of old times—and this makes her jealous; sometimes marriage obliterates the past, and we both decide, without a word exchanged, to leave our friendship in its grave. The little dinners end early—and yet seem strangely long. We meet perhaps once a year after that, and I affect interest in curiously raw babies; but the Benedicts, man and wife, as a rule become too much absorbed in their family to care for interlopers. Sometimes I give a christening present and make rash promises by the font; and then nothing happens until half a generation later my god-children present themselves for confirmation....

In one or two instances the intimacy has endured by my keeping out of the way in the early years. Anyone who knew Loring or Sonia at all could guess that they would require time and infinite patience to arrive at a modus vivendi; and I knew both so well that I felt sure they wanted no spectators. Two days after the engagement I invited them to dine with me at the Ritz; four months later Lake House was thrown open to them if they cared to come. My services were at their disposal, but I could see from our first meeting that there was no easy time before them. The pace was too hot, and they both had too much mettle. I recall that my excellently served dinner was of the gloomiest, though the Ritz was newly opened and still amusing at this time. Loring would gaze raptly at Sonia, his soup-spoon half-way to his lips; Sonia for no visible reason would touch his hand, and they would both smile mysteriously. Not till dinner was over, and we were seated in the lounge with our coffee, could I rouse them from their dream.

"The great event?" Loring echoed, when I asked if any date had been fixed. "There you rather have me."

"In about three years," murmured Sonia, with a note of discontent in her voice.

"What are you waiting for?" I asked as I offered him a cigar.

He accepted it and then replaced it in the box, saying he would prefer a cigarette. So many cheap jokes are made at the expense of the newly engaged that I refrained from comment when a confirmed cigar-smoker reformed and wasted his time on cigarettes. The reason was never a moment in doubt, for he was rewarded with a smile as the cigar was returned.

"We neither of us want a long engagement," he explained, and then to Sonia, "Do we, darling?"

"There's no point in it," answered Sonia, whose experience was discouraging to procrastination.

"Well, this is May," Loring reckoned. "Lady Dainton won't have a May marriage. June? The only thing is, there's such a devil of a lot——"

"Jim!"

Loring laughed.

"Sorry! There's such a lot to do first. The place at Chepstow's in a fearful state; I must put electric light in the Dower House before my mother can move in. As for the barrack in Roscommon——"

"But we can't live in more than one place at a time," Sonia objected.

"I only want to make them fit for you, darling," he protested.

"I should have thought your agent——" sighed Sonia; then, turning ruefully to me, "and of course I've got to be sent out on approval for everyone to find fault with——"

Loring pressed her hand reassuringly. "Don't you worry about that," he begged.

"But it's you I want to marry, dear!" she answered, putting her face close to his and looking into his eyes.

"It's always done," Loring protested weakly. "We don't want to give offence, do we, sweetheart? And it's only three or four houses——"

Sonia shook her head, unconvinced by his understatement. To be related to half the Catholic families in England has its drawbacks, and it was not easy to shorten the list of unavoidable visits. From Yorkshire and the Fleming-Althorps they would have to go on to the Wrefords of Wreford Abbey, and once in Northumberland there was no excuse for not visiting the Knightriders in Inverness—Lady Knightrider and Lady Loring were sisters—and from Scotland to Ireland and Ireland back to Wales.... It was a formidable tour, and I began to regard Sonia's estimate of three years as not unreasonable. On the principle that one more or less made little difference, Lake House was included in the itinerary en route for the Hunter-Oakleighs in Dublin. A woman might say that Sonia was not reluctant to drive in triumph to my cousin's door; as a man I have no hesitation in saying that Loring and Violet had been such good friends in the past that he was not in the least anxious to meet her for the present.

Sonia suddenly laid her hand caressingly on his arm.

"Jim, dear," she pleaded, "why can't we be married at once—quite quietly—and then stay with all these people afterwards?"

"I promised your mother we'd have the wedding at the Oratory," he reminded her.

"Yes, but we needn't invite anyone."

"They'll be awfully hurt if they're not asked."

"Oh! what nonsense!" she exclaimed. "Who is there? George, will you be offended if you're not invited?"

"It would be the truest kindness," I said. By old-fashioned standards her anxiety to get married was hardly decent, but Sonia paid scanty respect to old-fashioned standards.

"What did I tell you, Jim?" she cried triumphantly. "You go to mother and tell her it's all fixed for the first of June and nobody's to be invited."

Two days later I met Lady Dainton at luncheon and asked her what had been decided.

"It'll be some time in June or July," she told me, adding with emphasis, "at the Oratory, as we arranged at first. Jim had an absurd idea of not inviting anyone. So like a man, don't you know? making a hole-and-corner business. Anyone in his position, don't you know?—it's expected of them."

So it was decreed that fitting publicity should be given to the ceremony, but the date was not to be either in June or July. On the sixth of May King Edward died, and England was plunged into mourning.

When the funeral was over, I discussed with Bertrand the desirability of spending the summer in Ireland. The House of Commons had no longer a claim on me, and there would be no London Season. He was strongly opposed to the idea, however, and urged me to stay in town and try to make capital out of the sobered state of the public mind. A eulogistic Press was for ever talking of the late King's diplomacy and peaceful arts; my uncle wished to test the sincerity of the panegyrists and encourage the Government to make some offer of proportional disarmament.

So for three summer months I went back to Bouverie Street and the Committee Room in Princes Gardens. The results of our renewed campaign are a matter of common knowledge: representations were made to Germany, a tortuous diplomatic debate was carried on and a year later, before any conclusion could be reached, the gunboat "Panther" steamed south to Agadir. There were wild stories of a German plan to occupy Northern France, wilder projects of landing British troops on the Belgian coast; a Mansion House speech less euphuistic and platitudinous than most, gossip at the Eclectic Club about an ultimatum.

Bertrand was silent and uncommunicative in these days, but, as the menace of war withdrew, I could see him deriving philosophic satisfaction from the crisis.

"That's twice in three years, George," he observed one night when I was dining with him at the Club. "Is modern war too big a thing? Are they all afraid to start it? You remember when Bosnia and Herzegovina were grabbed in 1908? Russia threatened Austria, Germany threatened Russia—and Russia backed down. Diplomacy's like poker, you know, the hands are not played. The same thing's happened now; we've threatened Germany, and she's counted her army corps and battleships and decided she isn't strong enough. Well, George, if the cards are never to be played, why should sane governments go on raising each other? Four aces bear the same relation to two as two to one-why can't we stop this ruinous armament race?"

But the Agadir incident was still a year ahead of us when O'Rane returned from the Continent at the end of July and stayed behind for a last cigar at the end of a Thursday dinner.

"I've been a Breslau merchant the last few months, sir," he told us when my uncle asked for news. "I've been eating, drinking, smoking German——"

"You'll end your days in a fortress, Raney," I observed.

"I think not. That paper of yours, 'Peace,' has a large circulation. All the politicians and most of the Army read it."

"This is fame," I said to Bertrand.

"They regard it as the swan-song of the effete British," said O'Rane. "The merchants and journalists and so on are with you because Germany's so hard-up with all her insane preparations that a tax on capital may come any day. The German government's different: it thinks you're either not equal to the strain or else you're hypnotizing them to drop their weapons before you strike. The German's an odd creature, sir; he thinks everyone's like himself without any of his virtues. King Edward and Grey have made something of a ring-fence round Germany; if Bismarck and the old Emperor had done the same thing, they'd be declaring war now. Ergo, we're going to declare war. I'm afraid it will come, sir. I've brought you back some books on Pan-Germanism by a miscreant called Bernhardi: the Bernhardi temperament can only be destroyed by an unsuccessful war or a revolution or State bankruptcy. So far as I can see, our job for the next few years will be to wake up this country and make it prepared for all emergencies."

"How'd you set about it?" I asked.

"I'm going to wander round England and see what people are saying. I'm out of touch with politics here, but some years ago I prophesied a revolution in this peaceful land and I want to see if the temper of the working classes is different from what it was in the old days when I was a manual labourer here. Will you be in Ireland later on, George? I should like to come and see you if I may."

"Fix your own time," I said. "I've got a half-promise from Loring and Sonia, but nothing's decided."

He thought over my words for a few moments and then got up to go.

"After all," he said, as I helped him into his coat, "if they don't mind meeting me, I oughtn't to mind meeting them."

For three months I had had a certain want of sympathy on my conscience.

"Raney!" I began, and then stopped.

"Don't trouble, old man," he answered, reading my thoughts. "That book's closed—for the present, at least. They're not married yet, either."

"Good night, Raney," I said, shaking hands.

He laughed a little sardonically and ran down the steps into the night.

At the beginning of September I received a wire from O'Rane to say that he would be with me on the tenth. Two days later Loring telegraphed from Fishguard Harbour that he and Sonia were actually on their way to Ireland. I should not have deliberately timed their visits to coincide, but Loring's arrangements had been so unsettled that at his request I made my own independently. Twice during August Sonia had fixed a date, twice Loring had written with contrite apology to cancel it and suggest another. It was all his fault, circumstances over which he had no control.... The excuses ran so smoothly that even my mother, most charitable and unsuspicious of women, became convinced that it was not his fault.

I had no one staying with me when they arrived, white and tired after their journey, and Sonia sighed with relief when my mother told her so the first night.

"I'm worn out with trying to keep new people distinct," she said. "As for Jim, his hair's falling out under the strain."

He had shaved off his moustache—as I advised him to do five years before—but otherwise seemed unchanged save for a tired look about the eyes and a slightly subdued manner of speaking.

"Mr. O'Rane's coming the day after to-morrow," said my sister. "It won't be so quiet when he's here."

Sonia made no comment and plunged into a description of the houses they had visited during the last three months.

"Jim's uncle, Lord Deningham, is the next," she said. "Down in Clare. All the clan's being gathered to receive us, and I'm simply petrified at the thought of it. They'll all hate me——"

"Darling!" Jim interposed.

"They will," she repeated obstinately. "That's next Wednesday. Can you stand us for five days, Mrs. Oakleigh?"

"As long as you can stop," said my mother.

When the ladies had left us after dinner I congratulated Loring on the absence of his moustache.

"Sonia didn't like it," he explained. "Port? By all means. I'm as tired as a dog. It's gone off thundering well, and they all loved her, as I knew they would. All the same, a long engagement's a strain."

"It isn't the long engagement," I said. "It's being in love. When you're safely married and don't have to sprinkle 'darlings' like a pepper-pot and can take the best chair and be snappy at breakfast——"

"Oh, you bachelors," he interrupted with a laugh. "A long engagement has its points, though." Quite frequently it prevents marriage, but I saw no object in putting this view before him. "We've been rubbing off the corners, weeding out undesirable friends—— Oh, you're safe, but Sonia rather bars Val Arden, and young Summertown's developing into too much of an Apache for my taste. We're shaking down."

"And how soon will you both be purged of all your sins?" I asked.

He did not hear the question and sat staring thoughtfully at the decanter.

"I'm afraid she finds the religious part rather hard to pick up," he said. "She will call all Catholics 'Papists.' I don't mind, but some of my people.... And when she first met the Cardinal, she insisted on shaking his hand. Of course, it's a very small point; you musn't think I'm finding fault with her. How did you think she was looking?"

"Very well," I said. "The new pearl-collar suits her."

"It isn't new," he corrected me. "We've had it in the family for some time." His voice became confidential and his manner eager, as with a man mutely asking for sympathy. "Absolutely between ourselves, George, there was rather a row about it. I got the bank to send all our stuff down to House of Steynes, and she insisted on wearing some of it. My poor mother was fearfully shocked—and said she oughtn't to have touched it till she was married. Once again, it's a very small point."

His vigorously defensive tone, adopted to answer criticisms I had not made, led me to think there had been numerous small points for arbitration and diplomacy—as when Sonia wished to modernize the 'Mary Queen of Scots' room at Steynes that had been untouched since the young queen slept there in the second year of her reign.

"You'll shake down," I agreed encouragingly when he made me throw away a half-smoked cigar because the people in the drawing-room would be wondering what had happened to us.

"Oh Lord, yes!" he answered cheerfully over his shoulder as he pulled up a chair and began to talk to my mother.

Sonia was standing by the window looking out over the lake. Presently she walked out on the terrace and called to Loring to join her. For a few minutes I watched them standing on the lowest terrace in earnest conversation, then they returned to the house and Sonia asked to be allowed to go to bed.

"Tell me when you'd like to turn in yourself," I said to Loring when we were alone in the smoking-room for a last drink.

He walked up and down restlessly, glancing at the pictures and books, and finally coming to anchor opposite my chair.

"Did Beryl say you were expecting Raney here?" he asked, sipping his whiskey and soda and staring rather hard at the floor.

"The day after to-morrow," I said.

"The deuce you are!" He put down his tumbler and resumed his restless walk. "This is devilish awkward, George. Not to put too fine a point on it, Sonia refuses to meet him."

"What's the trouble?" I asked. It would be interesting to hear her reasons as expressed to Loring.

He tramped up and down until I pushed a chair in his way and made him sit down.

"Women are beyond me," he complained. "I don't know the rights of the case, but she says he was very insulting to her."

"But when was all this?" I asked. "I didn't know she'd seen him."

"Oh, it was years ago—down at Crowley—before he went abroad. Raney's got a very sharp tongue and keeps no sort of check on it, you know."

"Yes, I don't defend what he said on that occasion," I put in.

Loring looked at me in surprise.

"You knew about it?"

"I was in the room," I said, "and anything I didn't hear he came and told me in my bedroom that night."

"Well, what the devil did he say?" he demanded indignantly.

"It's ancient history now, Jim."

"Sonia's kept it pretty fresh in her mind," he retorted.

I might have recalled to them both a dinner-table scene at House of Steynes thirteen months before when Sonia inquired how Raney was getting on in Mexico and expressed a more than friendly desire to see him on his return. That was, of course, before the engagement to Loring.

"What d'you suggest?" I contented myself with asking.

"I think we'd better clear out," he answered, with emphasis on the pronoun.

"To the Deninghams?"

"They can't take us till Wednesday. Sonia talks about going to an hotel, but that's out of the question. I'd better take her back to London——"

"And cut the Deninghams?"

"Oh, I can't do that. He's my mother's only brother, you know."

"Do I understand you're proposing to take her from Kerry to London and back again from London to Clare in five, four days?" He was silent. "What does she say, Jim?"

"Refuses point-blank," he answered despairingly.

I walked over to the writing table and took out a telegraph form.

"The simplest thing is to put Raney off for the present," I said.

He made no answer, but, when my tea was brought me next morning, there was a pencilled note lying on the tray, "Thanks, old man.—L."

It was a clear victory for Sonia, but she was sufficiently shame-faced for the remainder of the visit to make me think she was getting little pleasure out of her triumph. From time to time my mother asked me why they did not advance the date of the wedding, but, according to Sonia, a mischievous fairy seemed to be playing tricks with the calendar. For a marriage in Advent Jim would require dispensation; Lady Loring always had to spend the early months of the year abroad; "and his old Pope would excommunicate him," Sonia told me, "if he tried to have the wedding in Lent. And then it would be May, and then some other Royalty would go and die...."

Until my conversation with her I had in my ignorance never appreciated how strongly the position of the celibate was entrenched.

O'Rane arrived at the end of the following week and asked whether Jim and Sonia were still with me.

"So that was the reason of your wire," he observed, when I told him they had left on the Wednesday. "Which was it?" I asked him whether he had had a good crossing. "Oh, well, I know it wasn't Jim," he said. "'Nous devons adorer Dieu, mon fils, mais c'est un grand mystÈre de sa providence qu'il ait crÉe la femme.'"

"Perhaps Jim is thinking that at this moment," I said, and the subject was dropped.

O'Rane's visit gave me my first opportunity of following up the Mexican adventure from the point at which "Mr. James Morris" had left it. The company, I found, had been launched successfully, if not quite at Morris's optimistic valuation; the mysterious new concession—"about the size of Scotland"—was promising well, though the working expenses were unexpectedly heavy. I gathered that the partnership was drawing a profit of 15,000 dollars a year, or, in English money, about fifteen hundred pounds for each partner.

"But that's all in Morris's hands," said O'Rane. "I've cut my connexion and I'm going into English politics. All this time since I met you I've been wandering about, listening and watching. This country is disgustingly rich, George, demoralized by it—from the Government that flings millions about in fancy social reforms to the mill-hand who wastes shillings a week on cinematograph shows and roller-skating rinks. Utterly demoralized! Nobody cares for anything but extravagant pleasures; they are not even interested in the House of Lords fight. And the more that's spent on top the more they want to spend below. That revolution's coming all right."

"I shall believe in it when I see it," I said.

At the end of a week he left me, as ever, without a hint where he was going or what he proposed to do. I stayed at Lake House till the second election of 1910, when Bertrand telegraphed to me to come and help him. Loring dined with me at the Club one night when the election was over, and suggested that I should accompany his mother, sister, the Daintons and himself to the South of France. The invitation was half-hearted, and I felt I had better wait until the process of rubbing off the corners was nearer completion. They left in January and returned in the first week in March. I was apprised of their presence in London by a special messenger, who pursued me, note in hand, from Princes Gardens to the House, where I had been dining with my uncle, and from the house to the Eclectic Club.

The note was in Loring's writing and begged me to come at once to Curzon Street.

"I suppose they've fixed the date at last," I said to Bertrand as he dropped me on his way home. "Now I shall be stuck with the privilege of being best man."

VII

It was after midnight when I arrived at Loring House. Jim was in the library, walking restlessly up and down and filling the fireplace with half-smoked cigarettes. He was in evening dress, and an overcoat and silk hat lay on the arm of a sofa.

"Come in!" he exclaimed, without interrupting his caged-lion walk. "Sorry to drag you out at this time of night. Have a drink? Have something to smoke. Sit down, won't you?"

He spoke in short, staccato sentences, waving a hand vaguely in the direction of the tantalus and cigars. The intensity of his manner was infectious: I pulled up a chair and settled myself to listen.

"Now then——" I began, as the door closed.

"It's ... it's come, George!" he stammered. "I'm up to my neck, and you're the only man who can pull me out."

"Drive ahead!" I said.

"Sonia's broken it off!"

It would be affectation for me to pretend I was as much surprised as Loring expected me to be. The engagement had, in my eyes, been singularly unsuitable from the first, and one or both seemed destined to lead a life of misery; but I half thought that both parties would go through with the marriage out of pride or obstinacy. Loring was as much in love with Sonia as Sonia's mother was in love with his position. Seemingly I had underestimated the havoc wrought in the girl's nerves by her years of crude excitement.

"Tell me as much as you think fit," I said. "I'll do anything I can."

He thought for a moment, as if uncertain where to start.

"It's my fault," he began. "I can see that now. We oughtn't to have made the engagement so long—neither of us could stand the strain. I hurried things on as much as I could, but Sonia ... I don't know, she must have wondered where it was all leading to. I rather sickened her, I'm afraid. You see, I don't know much about women.... I've met any number, of course, but I haven't had many intimate women friends. They never interested me much till I got engaged to her. Consequently I've never appreciated their likes and dislikes. Case in point, Sonia told me last week that she'd scream if I called her 'darling' again. Now I should have thought.... Well, anyway, it seemed quite harmless and natural to me.... A small point, but it just shows you what a lot of knowing women take.... Got a cigarette on you?"

I threw him my case.

"What was the casus belli?" I asked, but for the moment he would not be drawn from his generalizations.

"I think it was partly physical, too," he went on. "I tired the poor child out—rushing round and seeing people. She couldn't stand the strain. And she saw too much of me.... I was always there, dogging her steps.... She couldn't get away from me. This last visit to the Riviera was a hopeless mistake from every point of view."

He flung away the cigarette he had just lighted. We seemed to be getting gradually nearer something tangible, and, as he gazed bewilderedly round to see where he had put my case, I asked, "What happened out there?"

"Nothing," he answered. "It was to-night. We got back this afternoon and all went for a farewell dinner to Brown's Hotel. The Daintons are stopping there. Sonia was very quiet all through the dinner and, when my mother and Amy went home and we were left alone to say good-night, she said she'd got something to tell me. I waited, she hummed and hawed a bit and then asked me what the rule in our Church was about the children of mixed marriages. I told her they had to be brought up as Catholics.

"'And what happens if I object?' she asked.

"I told her I couldn't get a dispensation for the marriage at all unless she gave me an undertaking to this effect." He paused in pathetic bewilderment. "I can't understand her raising the question at all at this time of day; I explained the whole position to her before we became engaged, and she didn't object then.

"'Well,' she said, 'I can't consent to have my children brought up in a different faith.'"

Loring passed his hands over his eyes and dropped limply into a chair.

"That was rather a facer for me, George," he went on. "Either we had to marry without a dispensation—and that meant excommunication for me—or we couldn't get married at all. I thought it over very carefully. I'm a precious bad Catholic.... I mean, I've been brought up in the Church, and we all of us always have been Catholics, but I don't believe half the doctrines and I don't go to church once in a blue moon. I call myself one, just as you call yourself a member of the Church of England. We're probably both of us 'Nothing-arians,' only we don't recant or make a fuss about it.... I began to wonder if I could tell 'em to excommunicate me and be damned. It would mean an awful wrench. My mother takes it all very seriously, and we English Catholic families all hang together rather, and I'm a Count of the Holy Roman Empire, and all that sort of thing. I tell you, I didn't half like doing it, but it seemed the only thing, and eventually I told Sonia I'd lump the dispensation and risk the consequences."

He paused and lit another cigarette.

"I thought that would have ended the trouble," he went on, with a sigh. "It seemed to be only the beginning. She was awfully good about it at first and said she couldn't make discord between my family and myself. I told her I was very fond of my mother, but that I was fonder of her than of anybody in the world. Then ... I don't know, I couldn't follow her ... she started on another tack altogether and said I should always be a Catholic at heart and that I should try to go back to the Church and take the children with me.... These damned unborn children ...! I told her—as much as I could cram into three sentences—what my whole attitude towards religion boiled down to. And then the row started. We both of us talked together, and neither of us listened to the other or finished our arguments, and at the end of half an hour Sonia began to cry, and I felt a perfect brute, and it ended with her sending me away and saying she could never marry a man who didn't believe in God."

Loring mopped his forehead.

"I feel absolutely done in," he murmured.

I mixed him a generous whisky and soda and asked what he wanted done. His face was haggard, and for a big man he seemed suddenly dried up and shrivelled.

"You must go round and talk to her," he said. "You've known her since she was a kid. Explain that I didn't mean what I said, apologize for me——"

I shook my head.

"It'll do no good," I said. "You're not to blame."

"But my dear fellow——!" he began excitedly, as though I had paid no attention to what he had told me.

"Look it in the face, Jim," I said, shaking my head again. "She's tired of you."

He picked up his tumbler and then put it down untasted.

"I don't believe it," he answered, with sublime simplicity.

"You've got to."

"But—but—but," he stammered. "We've never had a shadow of a disagreement until to-night."

"You didn't see it and you always gave way and smoothed things over."

"There never was anything to smooth over. Till this infernal religious question started——"

"It was religion to-day, it'll be the colour of your eyes or the shape of your nose to-morrow."

Loring stared at me as though suspicious of an ill-timed humour.

"You're wrong, George, absolutely wrong. I know you're wrong."

I shrugged my shoulders and left it at that.

"I'll do whatever you think best," I said.

"I knew you would!" he exclaimed eagerly. "Well, I've told you. You must go round to-morrow morning——"

"And if she refuses to see me?"

"She won't!"

"If," I persisted.

Loring jumped up excitedly.

"My dear chap, she simply musn't break off the engagement! Leave me out of it, tell her only to consider her own position." He paused in fresh embarrassment. "You remember the trouble over that swine Crabtree?" he went on diffidently. "We can't have a repetition of that! You know as well as I do, a girl who's always breaking off engagements.... Get her to look at it from that point of view!"

I rose up and dusted the ash from my shirt-front.

"She's tired of you," I repeated, with all the brutal directness I could put into my tone.

"Well—and if she is?" The tone no less than the words hinted that he might be beginning to share my opinion.

"You want the engagement renewed on those terms?"

"I don't want the Crabtree business over again?" he answered, fencing with my question.

"I'll call on her to-morrow," I said, "unless you ring me up before ten."

At eleven next morning I called at Brown's Hotel. The porter who sent up my name brought back word that Miss Dainton regretted she was unable to see me. On receipt of my report Loring sent round a letter by the hand of one of his footmen. Lady Dainton drove to Curzon Street between twelve and one and was closeted with Loring for half an hour. What took place at the interview I have never inquired. Loring came into the library at the end of it with a sheet of notepaper in his hand. His face was white, and there were dark rings under his eyes.

"Get this into the papers for me, will you?" he said dispassionately. "It's no good, she's immovable. I'm going away for a bit. We'd better not run the risk of meeting for the present. I'm starting at once, by the way, so I'm not likely to see you again before I go. I'm more grateful than I can say for all you've done. Good-bye."

As I drove down to Printing House Square I glanced at the sheet of paper. "The marriage arranged between the Marquess Loring and Miss Sonia Dainton," it ran, "will not take place."

That night I had some difficulty in getting to sleep. The "Maxims" of the Duc de la Rochefoucauld lay on the table by my bed, and I opened the book at random.

"It is commonly the Fault of People in Love," wrote that polished cynic, "that they are not sensible when they cease to be beloved."