Chapter I

(i)

TI/TISS MARY MAPLE was looking out of her -LJ-J- bedroom window at Crowston shortly before half-past nine in the morning, and wondering what she should talk about at breakfast. It was not an encouraging morning, for it had absolutely no distinctive character whatever. The sky was grey and dull; the grass was of a usual green; and the woods to right and left were hesitating as to whether it was still late summer or whether they should vote for early autumn, and dress accordingly; in fact, a few impulsive spirits had already decided that it was absurd to remain quite green any longer. She thought she would say this, as she fingered the curtains a moment; then she reflected that it was really too elaborate for breakfast; it might possibly serve at a genial tea. In any case she was not sure that the Banister circle would in the least understand what she was talking about.

She too stood rather in the position of the woods. Hitherto she had been certainly summer, a pleasant, flushed-faced summer, with brown-gold hair; but she was beginning to hesitate — her age was twenty-nine.

It seemed to her sometimes as if she was being hardly treated by the Authorities. Certainly she looked her part all right, in a brown tailor-made dress, upright, steady-faced, sufficiently pretty, and certainly dignified. She could act it, too, and loved it. She rode magnificently, shot on occasion just well enough to make men pleased with her, was competent at golf, could drive a motor, and was quite good at parlour tricks and amateur theatricals; but the difficulty was that she did not really know her spoken part. She was subject to moods which she could not control. Occasionally she felt so desperately bored that she sat almost dead-silent; occasionally she talked just too cleverly for her friends. She positively read poetry now and then, and knew a few arguments of the other side. It was very hard to hit the mean.

Yet here she was planted by destiny in a succession of country houses from July to March, and in town from March to July, and time was passing. She had acknowledged to herself quite frankly by now that she wanted to be married; in fact, she had known this for at least five years; and she knew also that nothing but a really comfortable kind of life would suit her. There must be no nonsense about younger sons.... Theo Banister would have done very well. Her will, instructed by her understanding, had singled him out a year ago, and her affections had followed obediently though tranquilly; but it seemed there was no reciprocation. Theo was a perfectly harmless, proper kind of man.

She had met him a dozen times in town; it was undoubtedly through his means that she had been asked here a second year in succession; and now this fool Algy had spoilt it all. It was impossible to preserve dignity with an uncouth schoolboy making eyes at her all day.

This was what she said to herself in her severer moods, on such occasions as before breakfast or immediately after lunch; but there were other times when she felt rather sorry for him. He was plainly an excellent boy; he was shy, rather incompetent— obviously considered the fool of the family — and entirely devoted. Even her irritation with him showed her interest, though she did not perceive this. If he had but been the eldest son he might really have done very well. He was a fresh, courteous boy; he would always be presentable, though not always graceful.... And he was coming back from town this evening....

An old retriever plodded stiffly across the gravel, took up a position on the grass immediately in front of the front door, sat down, closed his eyes reverently, and began to emit solemn barks, listening, as it were, to the echo of each through eternity. It seemed very significant and ceremonial. Mary smiled at him, left off twitching the curtain, and went to the door.

The retriever did very well as an opening for conversation five minutes later as she sat between Theo and Harold; and she had learned presently, with an air of intelligent interest, his age, name, and the principal incidents of his career, all from Harold's eager lips. Algy had shot him once, it seemed, not seriously, in the hind quarters, thinking him to be a hare in the undergrowth.

" Jolly funny sort of hare," said the boy vindictively; and then, without indicating a change of subject, " He's coming down again to-day, Miss Maple. Don't tell him I told you. He's only been up about some law business."

" The Brasteds are coming by the same train," put in Theo, reaching across for the toast, " and Jack Hamilton. You know them well, don't you? "

Mary assented.

" She's a Catholic, isn't she? " asked Harold, with large eyes.

Again Mary assented.

" She became one about five years ago," she said.

As she went across to get some cold partridge the sense of despair came on her again. It was all so hopelessly the same. Here was this large and comfortable dining-room, Turkey-carpeted and hung with portraits of solid Victorian and Georgian Banisters. There was a black marble mantelpiece; silver dishes on the sideboard loaded with excellently cooked food; an immense hot-water urn blotting out her hostess's face. All the people, too, were exactly like everybody else. Old Mr. Banister seemed what he was, a Justice of the Peace, an admirable sportsman, a competent head of a household and estates. At first sight he looked as if he were in a perpetual passion.

Mrs. Banister seconded him perfectly, performed her functions well, and had about three other ideas in the world. Theo was a good third, who would make a first some day; and Harold was also what he looked, a boy of nineteen, fresh-faced, ardent and confidential. There was also another man and his wife of no importance who were leaving that morning, and Sybil Markhani, a sort of cousin of the house, a really charming girl of eighteen, looking exactly like a Gainsborough, with whom Harold was obviously in love. Then this evening there would be the Brasteds — a faint consolation — Jack Hamilton, and Algy.

Yet Mary knew perfectly well that she could not be happy unless the wheels ran smoothly. Life was tolerable in the midst of pleasant opulence — or, at any rate, it would be intolerable elsewhere. She could not imagine without horror an existence in which food was not perfectly cooked, or where other people's windows looked on to her own garden. She had had experience of it for the first fifteen years of her life, till her aunt had adopted her; she did not wish to have it again. Yet undoubtedly she would some day, when her aunt died, unless she succeeded in establishing a right of her own. Theo seemed her last chance — and Theo, in brightly coloured heather-stockings, was helping himself to ham....

She went out after breakfast to see the sportsmen off, an hour later. The unimportant man and his wife had spun off on the motor ten minutes before; the beaters were assembling on the gravel at the corner; and Mr. Banister was conferring with the keeper.

Harold came out in his homespun and gaiters and stood beside her.

" We're going over there first — just through the roots," he said, pointing out to the left. " Are you coming out to lunch? "

" I believe so," said Mary sedately, knowing perfectly well why he had asked. " At any rate, Sybil and I are coming."

Harold snicked open his gun punctiliously, and looked down the barrels with a critical eye.

" I wish those other chaps would come in time," he said. " They're ten minutes late already."

Theo came out almost immediately afterwards, a similar figure, with a large flat cap set above his ruddy face, and made the same remark; and Mary stood by him, leaning against the Corinthian pillar of the porch, presenting really a charming picture there. Out here in the dull light she did not look her age; her heavy masses of brown hair shone pleasantly with underlights of gold; her face had a warm morning flush, and her eyes seemed bright and interested. Her brown-clad figure showed to great advantage against the round white column.

cc I wish I was a man sometimes," she said suddenly. " How nice it must be to be dressed like that! "

This was well on Theo's intellectual level; and he made an obvious answer. It was like touching a spring.

" At any rate, I'm coming out to lunch," she said; " and I shall borrow somebody's gun for a shot or two afterwards."

She still stood watching as the group moved away at last across the grass, with the two late- comers still slightly apologetic. It was all so pleasantly picturesque; the long slope of grass crowned by pines against the sky a quarter of a mile away; the russetcoloured figures moving across; the band of beaters vanishing with their white flags far off to the left to take their places for the drive — all so picturesque and so suggestive. And it all so nearly belonged to her, and just did not.

Sybil came over just before they disappeared. "Oh! I'm late," she said. " I didn't know-Then the two stood watching.

(n)

After the train left East Croydon for the comparative darkness of unsuburban country, Algy laid aside the " Westminster," crossed his right leg over his left, propped his cheek on his hand and his hand against the glass, and settled himself down to luxurious meditation.

He was very much in love, and was delighted that he was alone in this first-class carriage; for it seemed to him almost impossible that his secret should not escape from him in a kind of luminous emanation. This past week had been intolerable to him. His Love had come to stay for a fortnight in his own home; he had seen her for two days; then he had been obliged to go up to town to his uncle's house about some business connected with his future entrance into Law; and now there remained six days, Sunday to Friday inclusive, in which he would see her, and live in her company.

It had begun in the previous summer at a ball. He had seen her before that; but she had not risen upon him, so to speak, before that fateful night. He had positively danced with her, he had been conscious of various details which he had meditated upon ever since — the warm colour of her complexion, the gold lights in her hair, the shape of her hand, and the extraordinary thrill of her eyes. She had been delightful to him; she had even said that she enjoyed talking to somebody who understood what she meant. He had taken her to supper, and to her carriage in the early dawn. He had gone home, not yet fully understanding what had happened to him; he had laid the gloves in which he had danced at the very back of his drawer, that they might not be worn again. He had fallen asleep to the phantom music of a band; he had awakened the next morning, conscious instantly of her existence.

It was this form, then, that love took in Algy — a form of idealism that had very little to do with facts. He had passed through Eton singularly unscathed; and he still retained the capacity for clean adoration that often disappears with childhood. Nothing entered his head but this idealism. Mary was to him an almost wholly spiritual figure — an intangible light radiating through a beautiful lantern. (I regret having to express it in this rather bombastic language, but I am unaware of any other. Perhaps it would be simpler at once to say that Algy's chief characteristic was an extreme purity.)

Other new things had followed that beginning, exactly as they always do. The world was the same, yet he, in company with all other youthful lovers, had looked upon it now from a new angle, and it reflected marvellous shades and tints of light. Things that had appeared dull, which he had taken for granted, took upon themselves a new kind of reality. It was as when one places an uninteresting photograph in a diorama; details and principles become rounded and objective — they fall into fresh and vivid relations one with another. He began to understand now why it was right and proper that summer woods should be beautiful, and sunsets should glow with entrancing colour; why the dead stillness of a country night under a sky full of stars should have a voice; what it is that sets two dogs racing and biting on dewy grass. For the first time in his life he had begun to understand that the painting of pictures, and the composing of music, and the writing of poetry were not mere methods of passing the time or making money, but that there was an impulse beneath them that must materialise or die. Most significant of all, perhaps, and certainly rather unusual in such cases, was the fact that he had begun to say his prayers again, and found in that practice a strange and bewildering joy. For, after all, the material world was not a series of coloured objects, nor the moral a series of human actions, nor time a progression, nor space an extension; but all was one spirit expressing itself under these things, itself transcendent of them; and it culminated, obviously, in a vast Parental Heart from which all took its origin, and in Whose embrace all lay poised.

It seemed to Algy very remarkable that he had not been aware of all this before — even though he did not so formulate his emotions. His life, up to that June night, appeared totally bloodless and uninteresting; yet she had been in the world all that time (and, in fact, exactly eight years previously too). But all had been but as a drop-scene to a child — sufficiently interesting, and yet not adequate to his desires. The painted castle and the sunset and the bulrushes — well, they were pretty tolerable, and when the lights were turned up, even charming; but the hour had struck, and the canvas had rolled up, showing by that action its own insubstantiality; and fairyland lay revealed in three dimensions instead of two — far more real even than common life because so far beyond ideals; and in the very centre of the stage a radiant Queen....

Here, then, sat poor Algy in a first-class carriage on the London, Brighton, and South Coast Railway.

He first drew a number of mental pictures of the hall at home, where she would probably be sitting before the open fireplace as he came in five minutes before the dressing-bell rang. She might be in a tea-gown, or she might not; but, at any rate, her hands and hair and face would be a fixed quantity. He would stand and warm his back, he thought, for a little while, and talk to her, looking down on her upturned face. The dressing-bell would ring; but he would not go upstairs at once; he could wait till twenty minutes to the hour. And so would she.

Then there would be dinner; he would probably be able to sit next her, and would tell her about his week in town, and hear the news of Crowston. He would drink enough wine to get over his shyness, of which he was perfectly aware, and which he loathed and despised. When they met again in the drawing-room he would not go to her at once; it would be good to deny himself a little — not much, for, after all, he would be in the same room with her. Then he must give her her candle, himself. There must be no mistake about that.

To-morrow morning? Yes; he would certainly go to the early celebration; he had begun that again. It was even conceivable, though perhaps not probable, that she would come too. How extraordinarily sweet it would be if she did! They would walk across the park in the dewy light, hearing the hush of Sunday; enter the little dark Norman church; kneel within a yard or two of one another, for surely no other member of the household would be there. Together they would pass up towards the warm light of the sanctuary.... And if she were not there, at least he would go; he could not have too much of love....

Algy did not get much beyond the immediate future. Of course he foresaw himself occasionally in his own house with her, and a child or two, all moving in golden light; but the steps necessary to this consummation— ways and means and income — he did not consider. Practically, too, he did not ask himself whether she loved him. She was kind to him; and that was all that was necessary just now. It was really impossible to him to doubt but that some day she would love him. His own emotion was so positive that the answer must certainly be there. So too must all the other necessary elements be there — a pleasant house in the country, a carriage or two, a large shady garden, and nothing particular to do. These things were as surely demanded as food and sleep, and therefore must be forthcoming. Otherwise, where is the argument from human instinct?

So there he sat and contemplated, idealising with all his might.

He was feeling a little drowsy, for, after all, he had walked for nearly five hours at the beginning of the day, driven from his bed into the dark streets by the insistent goad of romance — and he was slightly bewildered as he stepped out on to the platform of Crowston. It was very dark, a fine rain was falling, his luggage was in an unexpected van; and it was not till he positively ran into Lord Brasted at the entrance of the station that he remembered that guests were coming down by the same train.

His first emotion was one of disappointment. It would complicate matters to have these people crowding about the house. There might even be a dinner party, which would be fatal to his schemes.

But he behaved well, and stood about in courteous attention upon Lady Brasted, letting the other two men do all the running about, and sincerely apologetic so soon as the last piece of luggage had been wheeled out in charge of the man and maid. Then he climbed last into the motor, and sat down on the end of the seat nearest the door, fitting his knees in between those of Jack Hamilton, who sat opposite.

There was not much talking done on the way to the house. Algy had no conversational powers, and was, besides, too full of expectation to exert himself. So the four sat in the darkness, and were whirled sideways in that slightly ignominious fashion that seems inseparable from a waggonette; once they all rose solemnly together as if to adjourn a meeting, and sat suddenly down again as the car rushed over a ridge in the country road. Through the glass window on his right Algy could see the flat cap of the chauffeur and the high collar of his coat against the white glare of the acetylene, and, within, the pale profile of Lady Brasted under her hat. Jack made a remark or two of no importance, and Lord Brasted volunteered a conjecture as to the horse - power of the motor. Algy was able neither to confirm nor deny his statement.

So the lodge gate was passed, and the deep dip among the rhododendrons, and the pond where a pale swan lay poised as above an unfathomable gulf of darkness; then came the rush out from the trees, and the sight of a couple of rabbits sitting up scared in the white light across the grass; then trees again, and the first view of the lighted house beneath them in the valley; and at that sight Algy's anticipation rose keener yet, and he pressed his knees together tightly with his hands between them.

Getting out was a somewhat clumsy affair. Algy still had a good many corners left on him; he trod once upon Jack Hamilton's toes, and slipped upon the step; and when he was finally out stood alone rather helplessly while the rest descended into the pleasant light from the open hall door. Then he followed them, with a strange tightening at his throat; but the hall was empty.

He hung about while the rest went through into the inner hall, dawdling over his coat, and hesitating whether or not to ask where the others were.

" Mr. Theo anywhere about? " he said at last diplomatically as the man hung up his hat.

"Mr. Theo's in the billiard-room, I think, sir."

He still hesitated, standing on the rug, and spreading his hands mechanically to the blaze. Then he stepped briskly away, passed through the swing door, and went down the passage towards the billiard-room.

There was a click and a whirr and a loud exclamation as he opened the door.

" Fourteen, three," said Mary's voice.

But there was no kind of sensation as he made his appearance. Mary was that moment addressing herself to a stroke, and made no movement beyond a slight raising and dropping of her eyes. Theo was standing on the hearthrug chalking his cue viciously, and nodded very curtly to his brother. A pair of knees and the back of a volume of " Punch " denoted that Harold was lying on his back on the leather seat by the fire. Then Mary played, cannoned, and still without a look passed round the table, looking earnestly at the balls. She played again, missed her stroke, and came towards him.

" So you are back? " she said. "... No, I missed that."

A face looked over the " Punch."

" Is Jack come? "

" Yes; and the Brasteds," said Algy, taking up his position on the middle of the hearthrug with an odd kind of disappointment at his heart. This was not at all in accordance with his rehearsal.

"Out of the light, Algy," said Theo genially.

Miss Maple wants to mark."

It was a very depressing few minutes that followed. Harold was gone; and Theo and Mary seemed all-sufficient to themselves, entirely engrossed in their game, and paying no more attention to Algy than occasionally to ask him to mark this or that. The dressing-bell rang, but he desperately hung on, watching now his brother in his Norfolk jacket and dress trousers, now making a dreary remark or two; and studiously keeping his eyes oft the girl in the tea-gown except when he was quite certain that nobody was looking at him. Once Theo asked him whether he had settled everything all right in town; and once, by extreme dexterity, he was able to supply Mary with the chalk; but this was his sole reward. It was almost impossible to pretend that he was wanted.

" I advise you to look sharp, old chap," said Theo at last; " it's after ten to."

" Yes; I'd better go and dress," said Algy drearily.

(m)

Harold was a successful individualist. He pursued his own way, had personal relations with keepers and men-servants, saw that his errands were done, made love to Sybil, retired from the company, got the warm corners within and without doors which he wanted — he did all this and yet he was not unsociable. He had a way with him when he joined himself to his fellows that compensated for his previous self-sufficiency. He was so pleasant that his profound egotism did not matter.

Theo was his precise complement. He, on the other hand, had no intelligent existence apart from other people. He was stupendously bored when he was alone; he read no books, had no private affairs, and lived only in company. It was not a brilliant life, though it was sufficiently harmless. It comprised dressing suitably, understanding about horses and guns, behaving respectably, assenting passively to the beliefs and motives of his own people. He knew the proper moment to offer whisky, the best tailors and bootmakers, the names of distinguished actresses, and the pedigree of sporting dogs. He never speculated on what did not concern him; he thought poetry to be nonsense, though he managed not to say so very often; he was bored by the supernatural, yet considered the Establishment a necessary department of human life. He told coarse stories to the proper people; three years ago he had, morally speaking, mildly run amuck in London; but he had now left these things behind him with conspicuous success. "Good form" was for him the whole duty of man — a deposit of solidity was beginning to be precipitated upon him, body and mind.

Both these brothers, therefore, were exactly suitable to the life they lived — Harold was supposed to be coaching for Oxford; Theo was supposed to be learning the management of the estate, and every autumn accompanied his father on horseback to mark trees.

Now Algy was not so happy in his vocation. He was individualistic without being self-sufficient like Harold; he was sociable without the inglorious success of Theo. He depended too much on other people to develop his lines in loneliness; he possessed too much character to fit smoothly into wholly conventional surroundings.

This evening the smoking-room presented a kind of section of all this to the observant student of human nature.

On the right of the fire sat old Mr. Banister, with his sunset complexion well set off by his white shirt-front and his velvet coat. He handled his cigar as an artist his paint-brush — delicately, reverently, and capably — administering smoke to himself, and observing the progress of his ash as interestedly as a painter his picture, or a gardener an aspiring orchid. It was part of his evening's work to smoke one cigar as well as possible, to make the most of it, to appreciate every development. About four minutes after the stump had been laid aside was the proper moment for whisky, which he dispensed to experienced friends with a kind of sacerdotal seriousness.

On the chair opposite sat Lord Brasted, another veteran of the smoking-room who knew when to say what, how far praise should go, when silence was eloquent, and how far the young men should be deferred to. The two were as Knights of a Round

Table w able who understood one another perfectly. Each deferred to each on certain subjects. Lord Brasted was the specialist on motor-cars; his host on the management of a country estate. Each, too, had his squire this evening. Jack Hamilton sat by his cousin, in a quilted smoking-coat, his hands in his pockets, me long leg, ending in a neat sock and shoe, cocked towards the blaze, well-bred, silent, and intelligent;

iis hair was perhaps the most characteristic thing about him; it was black, glossy, and perfectly smooth; it resembled a neat wig; it was impossible to conceive of it as ruffled. Theo sat behind his father, obviously the son of the house, ready to light the candles at the

roper moment, full of shrewd comment on the somerhat limited subjects before the house, with the juliar glazed complexion of a sanguine young man lives out of doors. Harold was almost invisible jhind the guests' chairs, his elbows on his knees, deep in " Badminton " on climbing — a sport of which he had had no experience. Thoughts of Sybil Markham moved pleasingly before him as he studied the almost incredible pictures of persons in knickerbockers ascending rocky aretes. He had not spoken a word for twenty minutes.

And poor Algy sat in the middle, in a chair without arms, pulling hard at cigarettes, attempting to join in the conversation, longing to go to bed, recognising with a kind of fury at himself that he was not in the least at his ease. They were talking about guns just now. Lord

Brasted had asked an intelligent question, implying his own inexperience, and Theo, corroborated by his father's pontifical nods from time to time, was delivering a little discourse, helped out by anecdotes and statistics. It was all appallingly serious. The gravity was as of priests over casuistry, of doctors over a new treatment of an old disease, of artists over a new school. Some one, it seemed, had issued a treatise on the degrees of left-barrel " choke " best adapted to a variety of circumstances, illustrated by diagrams, and a controversy was in full blast in certain pink papers. Something or other, Algy gathered, was going to be revolutionised; and one part of him understood that he ought to be acquainted with such a subject. After all, he reflected, all this was a principal element in his life, and engaged the absorbed attention of his elders. Yet there was another part of him that protested; and he was almost astonished at the energy of the protest.

" You see," said Theo seriously, " it's all a question of the average distance of the bird. Of course, that will vary with different people."

Lord Brasted nodded two or three times.

;' You can rule out the question of walking up, nowadays," said Theo, " and that simplifies it. It's not like the old days, when the second barrel always meant from ten to fifteen yards increase of distance."

" I understand that," said the guest solemnly.

Algy sighed, rather too loudly; and his father looked at him.

But he paid very little attention, for the revolutionary spirit was uppermost just now. It seemed to him, with his newly awakened perceptions, really extraordinary that such a subject should be treated at such length. Here were four grown men — for even Jack Hamilton had made a remark or two — entirely absorbed in the question. They had been talking on it fo"r nearly twenty minutes, previously to which they had discoursed chemical manures for forty more. And this was a typical evening. As he looked back over the five years during which he had been an inmate of Olympus, he could never remember any other sort of conversation; but this was the first time that interior protest had become articulate within him.

he conduct of the meeting ran on its regular lines, father always sat in that leather chair, the principal uest opposite. The consumption of a cigar occupied as nearly as possible three-quarters of an hour, then came the pause, then the whisky; then, after a rumitive interval, the Ite Missa est was pronounced in an unvarying formula; and all the while these subjects were discussed in a rotatory form of argument. No particular conclusion was ever arrived at; it made o difference to anybody, ever; and yet this, it med, was the recognised and approved method of spending the last hour of the day. Of course, there were variations — entries, as it were, between the solid courses — anecdotes occasionally of a certain character, the discussion of certain kinds of people, and the rest — but the main features were the same. D 33

Algy sighed again.

" You're sleepy, my boy," said his father genially. " How about turning in? "

" Oh! I'm all right," said Algy hastily; and he recrossed his legs.

Theo was off again now, retracing his argument; but Algy, in a kind of revolt, deliberately withdrew his attention.

He had had a disappointing evening. Mary had been far from him at dinner; there was even a fern between them. He had sat next Sybil, with Harold beyond her, and the clergyman's wife on his right. It had been astonishingly dreary. The drawing-room had not been much better; he had even been reduced to examining books upon the round table, for Mary and Lord Brasted had entertained one another agreeably at the further end of the room. It was not in the least what he had rehearsed in the train; and in his very soreness he had been driven inwards. In a kind of despair he had wandered back at last into the ante-room, where obviously he was even less wanted than anywhere else, for he had run straight into the middle of a confidential interview between Harold and^Sybil;£and relations between him and his brother were slightly embittered in consequence. Harold had told a genial story against him publicly during the ceremony of candle lighting. And now the heavy air of the smoking-room completed his discomfort. jWhat, after all, he asked himself now, as he sat waiting for the break-up, was the object of all this elaborate existence? Roughly speaking, sixteen hours each day were consumed in laboriously doing othing of any importance, and the remaining eight recuperating energy to spend sixteen more in the e way. Six hours of the sixteen were employed painstaking efforts to kill something in as complited a way as possible; about four more in con-ming food, and the rest in various processes by hich all these other things might be done in as perfect way as possible — dressing and undressing, smoking, ving orders, making preparations, talking and stand-about — that was really the day. And the remarkable thing was that this was normal,.ot exceptional: it was the life towards which, appantly, education was directed. It was lived by all rsons who could afford to do so. A man who so lived from the age of twenty-three to that of ninety was held by the world to have lived well. His father so lived; Theo was beginning so to live. Younger sons lived other lives because they were younger sons and were compelled to do so.

"... And so," ended Theo at last, " it seems to me that we shall have to make a change. Archie Maxwell was saying so one day last week. It'll have • come."

Mr. Banister shook his head dolorously, pushed his jmpty tumbler aside, and stood up.

" Well," he said, using the formula, " how about turning in? "

Harold shut his book briskly and came forward.

" I think it's all rot," he said cheerfully. " Don't you agree, Algy? "

This was plainly derisive; and Algy too. stood up uncomfortably, affecting not to hear.

" You're so jolly interesting," went on his annoying brother. " A positive babbler."

" There, there," said Mr. Banister pacifically.