Why did I not say straight out to him, "Look here, my young friend, this is all extremely interesting, but what I don't understand is why you shoot a man and then carry his picture on your wrist. In plain English, now, why did you shoot him—always supposing you did?"

Well, I was trying to put myself in his place—trying to picture a friendship such as he had had with this wistful, self-effacing young fatalist whose picture I had just handed back to him. I have told you how the more poignant of these experiences between man and man have been denied me; a flying-friendship I could never by any possibility have had; but I could reach out to it in my fancy. I could imagine with what fierce jealousy I should have guarded a treasure so rich. Not a word, not a breath from outside would I have suffered with regard to it. It was not a question of mere impertinence. It was rather one of the violation of a sacred place.

And it seemed to me that I now owed him no less than I would have claimed for myself. It made no difference that he was twenty-four and I within hand's-reach of fifty. Less than an hour had swept these conventions aside, and thenceforward he was entitled to the full honors of friendship and respect. He might tell me what he chose. Ply him with questions, however, I could not.

Nay, it even seemed to me now that I should have to drop my point before Philip also. However much I had been put on my mettle by those discoveries I had made on that Sunday afternoon in his studio, to drag them up again now would merely be to attack Chummy at one remove. If I could not have it from himself I could hardly have it at all, and the Case, which had unfolded as a conjuror's pilule unfolds into a flagrant and morbid-hued passion-flower, looked like shutting itself up again and being as if it had never been.

Yet the discoveries of that Sunday had been much on my mind. Especially that gold ring that had once belonged to Audrey Cunningham had been on my mind. That the circumstances in which I had found it were directly connected with the rupture between her and Monty I could hardly doubt, and several times, as a mere man, I had been on the point of confessing my share in the incident to Mollie Esdaile.

If Mollie has a little dropped out of the picture, let me now bring her in again as she brought herself in as Chummy Smith and I lay on the turf that morning.

I forget for what delinquency Alan and Jimmy had spent some hours in disgrace; I think they had been cutting one another's hair. But apparently all was now expiated. With joyous cries they dashed over a low brow, Mollie's head and shoulders rising behind them, and flung themselves upon us with the jubilant announcement that they were good again and that the hens had laid eleven eggs.

"One's a duck's——"

"Two's duck's——"

"I'll bet you——"

"I'll bet you my purple pencil——"

"I'll bet you my Bible an' all my shells——"

"Where's daddy?"

"Hasn't he finished painting Auntie Joan yet?"

Mollie was laughing and telling Chummy not to get up. She "goes to pieces" a little in the country in the matter of dress, and wore her mallow-flower of an old sunbonnet and her gray sandshoes. As Smith reached for his stick and got up on to his feet she caught my eye and laughed again. She had suffered from big-ends and magnetos too.

"Did Philip bundle you both out?" she asked.

"He bundled this man out. I was behaving myself."

"Well," quoth Smith, "we only gave him till twelve o'clock, and it's five to now. You coming, kids?"

They were not merely coming; they were already twenty yards on the way, with Chummy pegging after them. Had Mollie and I followed, Philip would merely have commandeered us for the carrying home of his painting-tackle. Instead we turned along the cliff-tops in the opposite direction, towards the zigzag path that dropped steeply to the beach.

Since that impetuous dash of hers to London she had shown herself from time to time—I will not say brooding (that is too strong a word), but frequently withdrawn, pensive, rÊveuse. She was as brisk and practical as ever about the house or in the arranging of picnics and excursions, but somehow the routine of her daily life struck me as a series of detached and separate efforts, that for some reason or other never acquired momentum. I admit, however, that it would be easy to make too much of this change in her, if change there was.

"Shall we go down?" she said as we paused at the top of the path. "I haven't seen the sands for two days. 'Man works till set of sun——'"

"Come along," I said, giving her a hand; and we began the descent.

The Santon sands were a rather wonderful sight that morning. The tide was at its farthest out, and some mysterious wave-action had rolled out the wide spaces, not to an even flatness, but into regular parallel striations of wet and dry, the wet so mirror-like and shining that the sky was perfectly reduplicated in it and the flight of the seabirds far under our feet could be distinctly seen, the dry portions the intervening footings from one to the next of which we stepped. Our feet left no prints on the firm surface, so that looking behind the illusion was still the same—the dry stripes, the sudden brilliant chasms in between, everywhere the interrupted inversions of blue and white and dazzling sun.

"Well, I've been having my first real talk with your Chummy," I remarked as the alternations slowly flowed under our feet.

"Oh? What about?" she asked.

"About his aims and so on—what he wants to do. Apparently he wants to get on some sort of an Expedition. But is it likely he'll ever fly again?"

"I don't know," she said; and walked a little way before adding, "I shouldn't think he'd want to."

"He does."

She looked straight before her, as if to rest her eyes from the passing immensities underfoot. There was indeed a fantastic sort of consonance between flight and the phenomenon of the shore that midday. I do not know, however, whether this vague association prompted the huge implication of her very next words—an implication which I now had from her for the first time.

"You know what I mean," she said quietly.

I tried to steal a glance at her face, but saw only the folds of the sunbonnet.

"And that it isn't the kind of thing anybody wants to talk about," she added, leaving me to take the hint.

"No," I agreed mechanically; but for all that I needed a few moments in which to think.

Obviously I was not there to get out of Philip's wife something that Philip himself refused me; but the immensity of her quiet assumption had pulled me up short. I was assumed to know the whole—the whole—of "what she meant." It was left to my good sense to see that it was not a thing to talk about. There was to be no argument; she merely expected an equal simplicity in return, and with a woman like Mollie to expect such a thing is to get it. I watched a cloud of sheldrake that wheeled and broke over their own images a few yards away to our left, and then I turned to her.

"My dear, I'm not sure that I do understand altogether, but we certainly won't talk about it. I should, however, like to mention one little thing that I don't think even Philip knows."

She turned quickly. "What is that?"

"Nor Smith."

"What is it?"

"Nor, I should say, you yourself."

"If only you'll tell me what it is——!"

I looked into her eyes. "Where is Mrs. Cunningham now?" I asked.