And when Sabre expressed his gratification, "Enough, I have decided."

In 1912 Sabre felt that he had now brought the publishing into line with the established departments. He had emphasized the firm's reputation in this activity by the considerable success that attended two textbooks bearing (one in collaboration) his own name. "Sabre and Owen's Elementary Mathematics" had been notably taken up by the schools. "Sabre's Modern History", shunned by the public schools in accordance with their principle of ignoring all history mellowed by fewer than three thousand years, had been received enthusiastically by the lesser schools wherein was then dawning the daring idea of presenting to the rising generation some glimmering conception of the constitutional and sociological facts into which it was arising.

The tributes with which this slim primer of one hundred and fifty pages for eighteen pence had been greeted inspired Sabre towards a much bolder work, on which the early summer of 1912 saw him beginning and into which he found himself able to pour in surprising volume thoughts and feelings which he had scarcely known to be his until the pen and the paper began to attract them. The title he had conceived alone stirred them in his mind and drew them from it as a magnet stirs and draws iron filings. "England." Just "England." He could see it printed and published and renowned as "Sabre's England." Kings were to enter this history but incidentally, as kings have in fact ever been but incidental to England's history. It was to be just "England"; the England of the English people and how and why. And the first sentence said so.

"This England" (it said) "is yours. It belongs to you. Many enemies have desired to take it because it is the most glorious and splendid country in the world. But they have never taken it, because it is yours and has been kept for you. This book is to tell you how it has come to be yours and how it has been kept for you,—not by kings or by statesmen, or by great men alone, but by the English people. Down the long years they have handed it on to you, as a torch is sent from hand to hand, and you in your turn will hand it on down the long years before you. They made the flame of England bright and ever brighter for you; and you, stepping into all that they have made for you, will make it bright and brighter yet. They passed and are gone; and you will pass and go. But England will continue. Your England. Yours."



CHAPTER VII

I

Mabel called Sabre's school textbooks "those lesson books." After she had thus referred to them two or three times he gave up trying to interest her in them. The expression hurt him, but when he thought upon it he reasoned with himself that he had no cause to be hurt. He thought, "Dash it, that's what they are, lesson books. What on earth have I got to grouse about?" But they meant to him a good deal more than what was implied in the tone and the expression "those lesson books."

However, "England" was going to be something very different. No one would call "England" a lesson book. Even Mabel would see that; and in his enthusiasm he spoke of it to her a good deal, until the day when it came up—of all unlikely connections in the world—in a discussion with her on the National Insurance Act, then first outraging the country.

One day when English society was first shaken to its depths by the disgusting indignity of what Mabel, in common with all nice people, called "licking stamps for that Lloyd George", she mentioned to Sabre that, "Well, thank goodness some of us know better than to steal the money out of the poor creatures' wages."

She knew that this would please her husband because he was always doing what she called "sticking up for the servants and all that class."

That it did not please him was precisely an example of his "absolutely un-understandable" ways of looking at things that so desperately annoyed her.

Sabre asked, "How do you mean—knowing better than to steal the money out of their wages?"

"Why, making them pay their thruppence for those wretched stamps. I believe Mrs. Castor does. How she's got the face to I can't imagine."

"Why, aren't you going to make them pay, Mabel?"

Mabel was quite indignant. "Is it likely? I should hope not!"

"Really? Haven't you been making High and Low pay their share of the stamps all this time?"

"Of course I've not."

"You've been paying their contribution?"

"Of course I have."

"Well, but Mabel, that's wrong, awfully wrong."

She simply stared at him. "You really are beyond me, Mark. What do you mean 'wrong'?"

"Well, it's not fair—not fair on the girls—"

"Not fair to pay them more than their wages!"

"No, of course it's not. Don't you see half the idea of the Act is to help these people to learn thrift and forethought—to learn the wisdom of putting by for a rainy day. And to encourage their independence. When you go and pay what they ought to pay, you're simply taking away their independence."

She gave her sudden burst of laughter. "You're the first person I've ever heard say that the lower classes want their independence encouraged. It's just what's wrong with them—independence."

He began to talk with animation. This was one of the things that much interested him. He seemed to have quite forgotten the origin of the conversation. "No, it isn't, Mabel—it isn't. That's jolly interesting, that point. It's their dependence that's wrong with them. They're nearly all of them absolutely dependent on an employer, and that's bad, fatal, for anybody. It's the root of the whole trouble with the less-educated classes, if people would only see it. What they want is pride in themselves. They just slop along taking what they can get, and getting so much for nothing—votes and free this, that and the other—that they don't value it in the least. They're dependent all the time. What you want to help them to is independence, pride in themselves and confidence in themselves—that sort of independence. You know, all this talk that they put up, or that's put up for them, about their right to this and their right to that—of course you can't have a right to anything without earning it. That's what they want to be shown, see? And that's what they want to be given—the chance to earn the right to things, see? Well, this Insurance Act business—"

She laughed again. "I was beginning to wonder if you were ever coming back to that."

He noticed nothing deprecatory in her remark. "Yes, rather. Well, this Insurance Act business—that's really a jolly good example of the way to do things. You see, it's not giving them the right to free treatment when they're ill; it's giving them the chance to earn the right. That's what you want to explain to High and Low. See—you want to say to them, 'This is your show. Your very own. Fine. You're building this up, I'm helping. You're helping all sorts of poor devils and you're helping yourself at the same time. You're stacking up a great chunk of the State and it belongs to you. England's yours and you want to pile it up all you know'—"

He was quite flushed.

"That's the sort of thing I'm putting into that book of mine. 'England's yours', you know. Precious beyond price; and therefore grand to be making more precious and more your own. I wish you'd like to see how the book's getting on; would you?"

"What book?"

"Why 'England.' I told you, you know. That history."

"Oh, that lesson book! I wish you'd write a novel."

He looked at her. "Oh, well!" he said.

II

After that he never mentioned "England" again to her. But he most desperately wanted to talk about it to some one. There was no one in Penny Green from whom he could expect helpful suggestions; but it was not helpful suggestions he wanted. He wanted merely to talk about it to a sympathetic listener. And not only about the book,—about all sorts of things that interested him. And indirectly they all helped the book. To talk with one who responded sympathetically was in some curious way a source of enormous inspiration to him. Not always precisely inspiration,—comfort. All sorts of warming feelings stirred pleasurably within him when he could, in some sympathetic company, open out his mind.

He was not actively aware of it, but what, in those years, he came to crave for as a starved child craves for food was sympathy of mind.

He found it, in Penny Green, with what Mabel called "the most extraordinary people." "What you can find in that Mr. Fargus and that young Perch and his everlasting mother," she used to say, "I simply cannot imagine."

He found a great deal.

III

Mr. Fargus, who lived next door down the Green, and outside whose gate the bicycle had made its celebrated shortage record, was a grey little man with grey whiskers and always in a grey suit. He had a large and very red wife and six thin and rather yellowish daughters. Once a day, at four in summer and at two in winter, the complete regiment of Farguses moved out in an immense mass and proceeded in a dense crowd for a walk. The female Farguses, having very long legs, walked very fast, and the solitary male Fargus, having very short legs, walked very slowly, and was usually, therefore, trotting to keep up with the pack. He had, moreover, not only to keep pace but also to keep place. He was forever getting squeezed out from between two tall Farguses and trotting agitatedly around the heels of the battalion to recover a position in it. He always reminded Sabre of a grey old Scotch terrier toddling along behind and around the flanks of a company of gaunt, striding mastiffs. He returned from those walks panting slightly and a little perspiring, and at the door gave the appearance of being dismissed, and trotted away rather like a little grey old Scotch terrier toddling off to the stables. The lady Farguses called this daily walk "exercise"; and it certainly was exercise for Mr. Fargus.

The eldest Miss Fargus was a grim thirty-nine and the youngest Miss Fargus a determined twenty-eight. They called their father "Papa" and used the name a good deal. When Sabre occasionally had tea at the Farguses' on a Sunday afternoon Mr. Fargus always appeared to be sitting at the end of an immense line of female Farguses. Mrs. Fargus would pour out a cup and hand it to the Miss Fargus at her end of the line with the loud word "Papa!" and it would whiz down the chain from daughter to daughter to the clamorous direction, each to each, "Papa!—Papa!—Papa!—Papa!" The cup would reach Mr. Fargus at the speed of a thunderbolt; and Mr. Fargus, waiting for it with agitated hands as a nervous fielder awaits a rushing cricket ball, would stop it convulsively and usually drop and catch at and miss the spoon, whereupon the entire chain of Farguses would give together a very loud "Tchk!" and immediately shoot at their parent a plate of buns with "Buns—Buns—Buns—Buns" all down the line. Similarly when Mr. Fargus's grey little face would sometimes appear above the dividing wall to Sabre in the garden there would come a loud cry of "Papa, the plums!" and from several quarters of the garden this would he echoed "Papa, the plums!" "Papa, the plums!" and the grey little head, in the middle of a sentence, would disappear with great swiftness.

The Farguses kept but one servant, a diminutive and startled child with one hand permanently up her back in search of an apron shoulder string, and permanently occupied in frantically pursuing loud cracks, like pistol shots, of "Kate!—Kate!—Kate!" Each Miss Fargus "did" something in the house. One "did" the lamps, another "did" the silver, another "did" the fowls. And whatever it was they "did" they were always doing it. Each Miss Fargus, in addition, "did" her own room, and unitedly they all "did" the garden. Every doing was done by the clock; and at any hour of the day any one Miss Fargus could tell a visitor precisely what, and at what point of what, every other Miss Fargus was doing.

In this well-ordered scheme of things what Mr. Fargus principally "did" was to keep out of the way of his wife and daughters, and this duty took him all his time and ingenuity. From the back windows of Sabre's house the grey little figure was frequently to be seen fleeting up and down the garden paths in wary evasion of daughters "doing" the garden, and there was every reason to suppose that, within the house, the grey figure similarly fleeted up and down the stairs and passages. "Where is Papa?" was a constant cry from mouth to mouth of the female Farguses; and fatigue parties were constantly being detached from their duties to skirmish in pursuit of him.

In his leisure from these flights Mr. Fargus was intensely absorbed in chess, in the game of Patience, and in the solution of acrostics. Sabre was also fond of chess and attracted by acrostics; and regular evenings of every week were spent by the two in unriddling the problems set in the chess and acrostic columns of journals taken in for the purpose. They would sit for hours solemnly staring at one another, puffing at pipes, in quest of a hidden word beginning with one letter and ending with another, or in search of the two master moves that alone would produce Mate. (It was a point of honour not to work out chess problems on a board but to do them in your head.) Likewise for hours the two in games of chess and in competitive Patience, one against the other, to see who would come out first. And to all these mental exercises—chess, acrostics and Patience—an added interest was given by Mr. Fargus's presentation of them as illustrative of his theory of life.

Mr. Fargus's theory of life was that everybody was placed in life to fulfil a divine purpose and invested with the power to fulfil it. "No, no, it's not fatalism," Mr. Fargus used to say. "Not predestination. It's just exactly like a chess problem or an acrostic. The Creator sets it. He knows the solution, the answer. You've got to work it out. It's all keyed for you just as the final move in chess or the final discovery in an acrostic is keyed up to right from the start." And on this argument Mr. Fargus introduced Sabre to the great entertainment in "working back" when a game of Patience failed to come out or after a defeat in chess. You worked back to the immense satisfaction of finding the precise point at which you went wrong. Up to that point you had followed the keyed path; precisely there you missed it.

"Tremendous, eh?" Mr. Fargus used to say. "Terrific. If you hadn't done that you'd have got it. That one move, all that way back, was calamity. Calamity! What a word!"

And they would stare bemused eyes upon one another.

"You put that into life," Mr. Fargus used to say. "Imagine if every life, at death, was worked back, and where it went wrong, where it made its calamity, and the date, put on the tombstone. Eh? What a record! Who'd dare walk through a churchyard?"

Sabre's objection was, "Of course no one would ever know. Suppose your idea's correct, who's to say what a man's purpose in life was, let alone whether he'd fulfilled it? How can you work towards a purpose if you don't know what it is?"

Then little old Mr. Fargus would grow intense. "Why, Sabre, that's just where you are with an acrostic or in chess. How can you work out the solution when you don't know what the solution is?"

"Yes, but you know there is a solution."

Mr. Fargus's eyes would shine. "Well, there you are! And you know that in life there is a purpose."

And what attracted and interested Sabre was that the little man, living here his hunted life among the terrific "doings" of the seven female Farguses, firmly believed that he was working out and working towards his designed purpose. He had "worked back" his every event in life, he said, and it had brought him so inevitably to Penny Green and to skipping about among the seven that he was assured it was the keyed path to his purpose. He amazed Sabre by telling him, without trace of self-consciousness and equally without trace of religious mania, that he was waiting, daily, for God to call upon him to fulfil the purpose for which he was placed there. He expected it as one expects a letter by the post. When he talked about it to Sabre he positively trembled and shone with eagerness as a child trembling and shining with excitement before an unopened parcel.

One day Sabre protested. "But look here, Fargus. Look here, how are you going to know when it comes? It might be anything. You don't know what it is and—well, you won't know, will you?"

The little man said, "I believe I shall, Sabre. I've 'worked back' for years, as far as ever my memory will carry, and everything has been so exactly keyed that I'm convinced I'm in the way of my purpose. I believe you can feel it if you've waited for it like that. I believe you're asked 'Ready?' and I want to say, whatever it is, 'Aye, Ready!'"

Mysterious and awful suggestion, Sabre thought. To believe yourself at any moment to be touched as by a finger and asked "Ready?" "Aye, Ready!"

Mysterious and awful intimacy with God!

IV

And then there were the Perches—"Young Perch and that everlasting old mother of his", as Mabel called them.

Sabre always spoke of them as "Young Rod, Pole or Perch" and "Old Mrs. Rod, Pole or Perth." This was out of what Mabel called his childish and incomprehensible habit of giving nicknames,—High Jinks and Low Jinks the outstanding and never-forgiven example of it. "Whatever's the joke of it?" she demanded, when one day she found Sabre speaking of Major Millet, another neighbour and a great friend of hers, as "Old Hopscotch Millet."

"Whatever's the joke of it? He doesn't play hopscotch."

"No, but he bounds about," Sabre explained. "You know the way he bounds about, Mabel. He's about ninety—"

"I'm sure he isn't, nor fifty."

"Well, anyway, he's past his first youth, but he's always bounding about to show how agile he is. He's always calling out 'Ri—te O!' and jumping to do a thing when there's no need to jump. Hopscotch. What can you call him but Hopscotch?"

"But why call him anything?" Mabel said. "His name's Millet."

Her annoyance caused her voice to squeak. "Why call him anything?"

Sabre laughed. "Well, you know how a ridiculous thing like that comes into your head and you can't get rid of it. You know the way."

Mabel declared she was sure she did not know the way. "They don't come into my head. Look at the Perches—not that I care what name you call them. Rod, Pole or Perch! What's the sense of it? What does it mean?"

Sabre said it didn't mean anything. "You just get some one called Perch and then you can't help thinking of that absurd thing rod, pole or perch. It just comes."

"I call it childish and rude," Mabel said.

V

Mrs. Perch was a fragile little body whose life should have been and could have been divided between her bed and a bath chair. She was, however, as she said, "always on her legs." And she was always on her legs and always doing what she had not the strength to do, because, as she said, she "had always done it." She conducted her existence in the narrow space between the adamant wall of the things she had always done, always eaten, and always worn, and the adamant wall of the things she had never done, never eaten, and never worn. There was not much room between the two.

She was intensely weak-sighted, but she never could find her glasses; and she kept locked everything that would lock, but she never could find her keys. She held off all acquaintances by the rigid handle of "that" before their names, but she was very fond of "that Mr. Sabre", and Sabre returned a great affection for her. With his trick of seeing things with his mental vision he always saw old Mrs. Perch toddling with moving lips and fumbling fingers between the iron walls of her prejudices, and this was a pathetic picture to him, for ease or pleasure were not discernible between the walls. Nevertheless Mrs. Perch found pleasures therein, and the way in which her face then lit up added, to Sabre, an indescribable poignancy to the pathos of the picture. She never could pass a baby without stopping to adore it, and an astounding tide of rejuvenation would then flood up from mysterious mains, welling upon her silvered cheeks and through her dim eyes, stilling the movement of her lips and the fumbling motions of her fingers.

Also amazing tides of glory when she was watching for her son, and saw him.

Young Perch was a tall and slight young man with a happy laugh and an air which suggested to Sabre, after puzzlement, that his spirit was only alighted in his body as a bird alights and swings upon a twig, not engrossed in his body. He did not look very strong. His mother said he had a weak heart. He said he had a particularly strong heart and used to protest, "Oh, Mother, I do wish you wouldn't talk that bosh about me." To which Mrs. Perch would say, "It's no good saying you haven't got a weak heart because you have got a weak heart and you've always had a weak heart. Surely I ought to know."

Young Perch would reply, "You ought to know, but you don't know. You get an idea in your head and nothing will ever get it out. Some day you'll probably get the idea that I've got two hearts and if Sir Frederick Treves swore before the Lord Chief Justice that I only had one heart you'd just say, 'The man's a perfect fool.' You're awful, you know, Mother."

He used to reprove his mother like that.

Mrs. Perch would give a grim little laugh, relishing her strength, and then Young Perch would give an involuntary little laugh, accepting his weakness.

That was how they lived.

Young Perch always carried about in one pocket a private pair of spectacles for his mother and in another a private set of keys for her most used receptacles. When the search for her spectacles had exhausted even her own energy, Young Perch would say, "Well, you'd better use these, Mother." It was of no use to offer them till she was weakening in the search, and she would take them grudgingly with, "They don't suit me." Similarly with the keys, accepted only after prolonged and maddening search. "Well, you'd better try these, Mother."—"They injure the lock."

Sabre often witnessed and took part in these devastating searches. Young Perch would always say, "Now just sit down, Mother, instead of rushing about, and try to think quite calmly when you last used them."

Mrs. Perch, intensely fatigued, intensely worried:

"How very silly you are, Freddie! I don't know when I last used them. If I knew when I used them, I should know where they are now."

"Well, you'd better use these now, Mother."

"They don't suit me. They ruin my eyes."

Yet Mrs. Rod, Pole or Perch, who confided much in Sabre, and who had no confidences of any kind apart from her son, would often say to Sabre: "Freddie always finds my keys for me, you know. He finds everything for me, Mr. Sabre."

And the tide of glory would flood amazingly upon her face, transfiguring it, and Sabre would feel an immensely poignant clutch at the heart.

VI

The Perchs' house was called Puncher's—Puncher's Farm, a few hundred yards along the lane leading to the great highroad—and it was the largest and by far the most untidy house in Penny Green. Successive Punchers of old time, when it had been the most considerable farm in all the country between Chovensbury and Tidborough, had added to it in stubborn defiance of all laws of comfort and principles of domestic architecture, and now, shorn alike of its Punchers and of its pastures, the homestead that might easily have housed twenty, was mysteriously filled to overflowing by two. Mrs. Perch was fond of saying she had lived in nineteen houses "in her time", and Sabre had the belief that the previous eighteen had all been separately furnished and the entire accumulation, together with every newspaper taken in during their occupation, brought to Puncher's. Half the rooms of Puncher's were so filled with furniture that no more furniture, and scarcely a living person, could be got in; and half the rooms were so filled with boxes, packages, bundles, trunks, crates, and stacks of newspapers that no furniture at all could be got in. Every room was known to Mrs. Perch and to Young Perch by the name of some article it contained and Mrs. Perch was forever "going to sort the room with your Uncle Henry's couch in it", or "the room with the big blue box with the funny top in it", or some other room similarly described.

Mrs. Perch was always "going to", but as the task was always contingent upon either "when I have got a servant into the house", or "when I have turned the servant out of the house"—these two states representing Mrs. Perch's occupation with the servant problem—the couch of Uncle Henry, the big blue box with the funny top, and all the other denizens of the choked rooms remained, like threatened men, precariously but securely.

But not unvisited!

Sabre once spent a week in the house, terminating a summer holiday a little earlier than Mabel, and he had formed the opinion that mother and son never went to bed at night and never got up in the morning. In remote hours and in remote quarters of the house mysterious sounds disturbed his sleep. Eerily peering over the banisters, he discerned the pair moving, like lost souls, about the passages, Mrs. Perch with the skirts of a red dressing-gown in one hand and a candle in the other, Young Perch disconsolately in her wake, yawning, with another candle. Young Perch called this "Prowling about the infernal house all night"; and one office of the prowl appeared to Sabre to be the attendance of pans of milk warming in a row on oil stoves and suggesting, with the glimmer of the stoves and the steam of the pans, mysterious oblations to midnight gods.

VII

Mrs. Perch believed her son could do anything and, in the matter of his capabilities, had the strange conviction that he had only to write and ask anybody, from Mr. Asquith downwards, for employment in the highest offices in order to obtain it. Young Perch—who used to protest, "Well, but I've got my work, Mother"—was in fact a horticulturist of very fair reputation. He specialised in sweet peas and roses; and Sabre, in the early days of his intimacy with the Rod, Pole or Perch household, was surprised at the livelihood that could apparently be made by the disposal of seeds, blooms and cuttings.

"Fred's getting quite famous with his sweet peas," Sabre once said to Mrs. Perch. "I've been reading an illustrated interview with him in The Country House."

Tides of glory into Mrs. Perch's face. "Ah, if only he hadn't worn that dreadful floppy hat of his, Mr. Sabre. It couldn't have happened on a more unfortunate day. I fully intended to see how he looked before the photographs were taken and of course it so happened I was turning a servant out of the house and couldn't attend to it. That dreadful floppy hat doesn't suit him. It never did suit him. But he will wear it. It's no good my saying anything to him."

This was an opinion that old Mrs. Perch was constantly reiterating. Young Perch was equally given to declaring, "I can't do anything with my Mother, you know." And yet it was Sabre's observation that each life was entirely guided and administered by the other. Young Perch once told Sabre he had never slept a night away from his mother since he was seventeen, and he was never absent from her half a day but she was at the window watching for his return.

Sabre was extraordinarily attracted by the devotion between the pair. Their interests, their habits, their thoughts were as widely sundered as their years, yet each was wholly and completely bound up in the other. When Sabre sat and talked with Young Perch of an evening, old Mrs. Perch would sit with them, next her son, in an armchair asleep. At intervals she would start awake and say querulously, "Now I suppose I must be driven off to bed."

Young Perch, not pausing in what he might be saying, would stretch a hand and lay it on his mother's. Mrs. Perch, as though Freddie's hand touched away enormous weariness and care, would sigh restfully and sleep again. It gave Sabre extraordinary sensations.

* * * * *

If he had been asked to name his particular friends these were the friends he would have named. He saw them constantly. Infrequently he saw another. Quite suddenly she came back into his life.

Nona returned into his life.



PART TWO

NONA



CHAPTER I

I

Sabre, ambling his bicycle along the pleasant lanes towards Tidborough one fine morning in the early summer of 1912, was met in his thoughts by observation, as he topped a rise, of the galloping progress of the light railway that was to link up the Penny Green Garden Home with Tidborough and Chovensbury. In the two years since Lord Tybar had, as he had said, beneficially exercised his ancestors in their graves by selling the land on which the Garden Home Development was to develop, Penny Green Garden Home had sprung into being at an astonishing pace.

The great thing now was the railway.

And the railway's unsightly indications strewn across the countryside—ballast heaps, excavations, noisy stationary engines, hand-propelled barrows bumping along toy lines, gangs of men at labour with pick and shovel—met Sabre's thoughts on this June morning because he was thinking of the Penny Green Garden Home and of Mabel, and of Mabel and of himself in connection with the Penny Green Garden Home. Puzzling thoughts.

Here was a subject, this ambitiously projected and astonishingly popular Garden Home springing up at their very doors, that interested him and that intensely interested Mabel, and yet it could never be mentioned between them without.... Only that very morning at breakfast.... And June—he always remembered it—was the anniversary month of their wedding.... Eight years ago.... Eight years....

II

What interested Sabre in the Garden Home was not the settlement itself—he rather hated the idea of Penny Green being neighboured and overrun by crowds of all sorts of people—but the causes that gave rise to the modern movement of which it was a shining example. The causes had their place in one of the sections he had planned for "England" and it encouraged his ideas for that section to see the results here at his doors. Overcrowding in the towns; the desire of men to get away from their place of business; the increasing pressure of business and the increasing recreational variety of life that, deepening and widening through the years, actuated the desire; the extension of traffic facilities that permitted the desire; all the modern tendencies that made work less of a pleasure and more of a toil,—and out of that the whole absorbing question of the decay of joy in craftsmanship, and why.—Jolly interesting!

These were the pictures and the stories that Sabre saw in the roads and avenues and residences and public buildings leaping from mud and chaos into order and activity in the Garden Home; these were the reasons the thing interested him and why he rather enjoyed seeing it springing up about him. But these, he thought as he rode along, were not the reasons the thing interested Mabel. And when he mentioned them to her.... And when she, for her part, spoke of it to him—and she was always speaking of it—the reasons for her enthusiasm retired him at once into a shell. Funny state of affairs!

Mabel was convinced he loathed and detested the Penny Green Garden Home Development; and actually he rather liked the Penny Green Garden Home Development; and yet he couldn't tell her so; and she did not understand in the least when he tried to tell her so. Funny—eight years ago this month....

His thoughts went on. And, come to think of it, the relations between them were precisely similar in regard to nearly everything they ever discussed. And yet they would be called, and were, a perfectly happy couple. Perfectly? Was every happy married couple just what they were? Was married happiness, then, merely the negation of violent unhappiness? Merely not beating your wife, and your wife not drinking or running up debts? He thought: "No, no, there's something more in it than that." And then his forehead wrinkled up in his characteristic habit and he thought: "Of course, it's my fault. It isn't only this dashed Garden Home. It's everything. It isn't only once. It's always. It can't possibly be her fault always. It's mine. I can see that.

"Take this morning at breakfast. Perfectly good temper both of us. Then she said, 'Those houses in King's Close are going to be eighty pounds a year; and, what do you think, Mrs. Toller is going to take one!' Immediately I was riled. Why should I get riled because she says that Mrs. Toller is going to take a house for eighty pounds a year? I just rustled the newspaper. Why on earth couldn't I say, 'Good lord, is she?' or something like that? Why on earth couldn't I even not rustle the newspaper? She knows what it means when I rustle the paper. I meant her to know. Why should I? It's the easiest thing on earth for me to respond to what she says. I know perfectly well what she's getting at. I could easily have said that Mrs. Toller would have old Toller in the workhouse one of these days if he didn't watch it. I could have said, 'She'll be keeping three servants next, and she can't keep one as it is.' Mabel would have loved that. She'd have laughed."

He thought, "Why should she love that sort of tripe—gossip?"

He thought, "Damn it, why shouldn't she? Why should I mind? Why should I rustle the newspaper? She can't enter into things that interest me; but I can, I could enter into things that interest her. Why don't I? Of course I can see perfectly clearly how she looks at things. It's just as rotten for her that I can't talk with her about her ideas as it is rotten for me that she doesn't see my ideas. And it isn't rotten for me. I don't mind it. I don't expect it. I don't expect it...."

And at that precise moment of his thoughts, the garrulous Hapgood, seeing his face, could have said to another, as he said before, "There! See what I mean? Looks as though he'd lost something and was wondering where it was. Ha!"

III

A genial shouting and the clatter of agitated hoofs jerked Sabre from his thoughts.

"Hullo! Hi! Help! Out collision-mats! Stop the cab! Look out, Sabre! Sabre!"

He suddenly became aware—and he jammed on his brakes and dismounted by straddling a leg to the ground—that in the narrow lane he was between two plunging horses. Their riders had divided to make way for his bemused approach. They had violently sundered, expecting him to stop, until he was almost on top of them, and one of the pair was now engaged in placating his horse, which resented this sudden snatching at bit and prick of spur, and persuading it to return to the level road.

On one side the lane was banked steeply up in a cutting. The horse of the rider on this side stood on its hind legs and appeared to be performing a series of postman's double knocks on the bank with its forelegs. Lord Tybar, who bestrode it, and who did not seem to be at all concerned by his horse copying a postman, looked over his shoulder at Sabre, showing an amused grin, and said, "Thanks, Sabre. This is jolly. I like this. Come on, old girl. This way down. Keep passing on, please."

The old girl, an extraordinarily big and handsome chestnut mare, dropped her forelegs to the level of the road, where she exchanged the postman's knocking for a complicated and exceedingly nimble dance, largely on two legs.

Lord Tybar, against her evident intentions, skilfully directed the steps of this dance into a turning movement so that she and her rider now faced Sabre; and while she bounded through the concluding movements of the pas seul he continued in the same whimsical tone and with the same engaging smile, "Thanks still more, Sabre. This is extraordinarily good for the liver. Devilish graceful, aren't I? See, I'm only holding on with one hand! Marvellous. No charge for this." And as the mare came to rest and quivered at Sabre with her beautiful nostrils, "Ah, the music's stopped. Delicious. How well your step suits mine!"

"Ass!" laughed a voice above them; and Sabre, who had almost forgotten there was another horse when he had abruptly wakened and dismounted, looked up at it.

The other horse was standing with complete and entirely unconcerned statuesqueness on the low bank which bounded the lane on his other side. Lady Tybar had taken it—or it had taken Lady Tybar—out of danger in a sideways bound, and horse and rider remained precisely where the sideways bound had taken them as if it were exactly where they had intended to go all that morning, and as if they were now settled there for all time as a living equestrian statue,—a singularly striking and beautiful statue.

"We are up here," said Lady Tybar. Her voice had a very clear, fine note. "We are rather beautiful up here, don't you think? Rather darlings? No one takes the faintest notice of us; we might be off the earth. But we don't mind a bit. Hullo, Derry and Toms, Marko is actually taking off his hat to us. Bow, Derry."

Her horse, as if he perfectly understood, tossed his head, and she drew attention to it with a deprecatory little gesture of her hand and then said, "Shall we come down now? Is your dance quite finished, Tony? Are you content, Marko? All right. We'll descend. This is us descending. Lady Tybar, who is a superb horsewoman, descending a precipice on her beautiful half-bred Derry and Toms, a winner at several shows."

Derry and Toms stepped down off the bank with complete assurance and superb dignity. With equal precision, moving his feet as though there were marked for them certain exact spots which he covered with infinite lightness and exactitude, he turned about and stood beside his partner in exquisite and immobile pose.

IV

Thus the two riders faced Sabre, smiling upon him. He stood holding his bicycle immediately in front of them. The mare continued to quiver her beautiful nostrils at him; every now and then she blew a little agitated puff through them, causing them to expand and reveal yet more exquisitely their glorious softness and delicacy.

Sabre thought that the riders, with their horses, made the most striking, and somehow affecting picture of virile and graceful beauty he could ever have imagined.

Lord Tybar, who was thirty-two, was debonair and attractive of countenance to a degree. His eyes, which were grey, were extraordinarily mirthful, mischievous. A supremely airy and careless and bold spirit looked through those eyes and shone through their flashes and glints and sparkles of diamond light. His face was thin and of tanned olive. His face seemed to say to the world, challengingly, "I am here! I have arrived! Bring out your best and watch me!" There were people—women—who said he had a cruel mouth. They said this, not with censure or regret, but with a deliciously fearful rapture as though the cruel mouth (if it were cruel) were not the least part of his attraction.

Lord Tybar's lady, who was twenty-eight, carried in her countenance and in her hair the pleasing complement of her lord's tan and olive hue and of his cropped black poll. She was extraordinarily fair. Her skin was of the hue and of the sheen of creamy silk, and glowed beneath its hue. It presented amazing delicacy and yet an exquisite firmness. Children, playing with her, and she delighted in playing with children (but she was childless), often asked to stroke her face. They would stare at her face in that immensely absorbed way in which children stare, and then ask to touch her face and just stroke it; their baby fingers were not more softly silken. Of her hair Lady Tybar had said frequently, from her girlhood upwards, that it was "a most sickening nuisance." She bound it tightly as if to punish and be firm with the sickening nuisance that it was to her. And these close, gleaming plaits and coils children also liked to touch with their soft fingers.

Her name was Nona.

Out of a hundred people who passed her by quite a considerable number would have denied that she was beautiful. Her face was round and saucy rather than oval and classical. Incontestable the striking attraction of her complexion and of her hair; but not beautiful,—quite a number would have said, and did say. Oh, no; pretty, perhaps, in a way, but that's all.

But her face was much more than beautiful to Sabre.

V

Until this moment, standing there with his bicycle, she on her beautiful horse, he had not seen her, nor Lord Tybar, for two years. They had been travelling. Now seeing her, thus unexpectedly and thus gallantly environed, his mind, with that astonishing precision of detail and capriciousness of selection with which the mind retains pictures, reproduced certain masculine discussion of her looks at a time when, as Nona Holiday of Chovensbury Court, daughter of Sir Hadden Holiday, M.P. for Tidborough, she had contributed to local gossip by becoming engaged to Lord Tybar.

"Pretty girl, you know," masculine discussion had said; and Sabre had thought, "Fools!"

"Oh, hardly pretty," others had maintained; and again "Fools!" he had thought. "Pretty—pretty! Hardly pretty—hardly—!" Furious, he had flung away from them.

The time and the place of the discussion had been when the news of her engagement had just been brought into the clubhouse of the Penny Green Golf Club. He had flung out into the rain which had caused the pavilion to be crowded. Fools! Was she pretty! Did they mean to say they couldn't see in her face what he saw in her face? And then he thought, "But of course they haven't loved her. It's nothing to them what they've only just heard, but what she told me herself this morning.... And she knew what it meant to me when she told me.... Although we said nothing. Of course I see her differently."

He saw her "differently" now after two years of not seeing her, and ten years since that day of gossip at the golf club. Pretty!... Strange how he could always remember that smell of the rain as he had come out of the clubhouse ... and a strange fragrance in the air as now he looked upon her.

Upon the warm and trembling air, as he stood with his bicycle before the horses, were borne to him savour of hay newly turned in the fields about, and of high spring-tide blowing in the hedgerows; and with them delicious essence from the warm, gleaming bodies of the horses, and pungent flavour of the saddlery, and the mare's sweet breath puffed close to his face in little gusty agitations.

The shining, tingling picture of strength and beauty superbly modelled that the riders and their horses made, seemed, as it were, to arise out of and be suspended shimmering in the heart of the warm incense that he savoured. So when a sorcerer casts spiced herbs upon the flame, and scented vapour uprises, and in the vapour images appear.

Exquisite picture of strength and beauty superbly modelled: the horses' glossy coats glinting all a polished chestnut's hues; the perfect artistry and symmetry of slender limbs, and glorious, arching necks, and noble heads, and velvet muzzles; the dazzling bits and chains and buckles; the glinting bridles, reins and saddles; Lord Tybar's exquisitely poised figure, so perfectly maintaining and carrying up the symmetry of his horse as to suggest the horse would be disfigured, truncated, were he to dismount; his taking swagger, his gay, fine face; and she....

An incantation: jingle of bits mouthed in those velvet muzzles; a hoof pawed sharply on the road; swish of long, restless tails; creaking of saddlery; and sudden bursts of all the instruments in unison when heads were tossed and shaken. Remotely the whirr of a reaping machine. And somewhere birds....

Pretty!

VI

Greetings had been exchanged; his apologies for his blundering descent upon them laughed at. Lord Tybar was saying, "Well, it's a tiger of a place, this Garden Home of yours, Sabre—"

"It's not mine," said Sabre. "God forbid."

"Ah, you've not got the same beautiful local patriotism that I have. It's one of my most elegant qualities, my passionate devotion to my countryside. That was what that corker of a vicar of yours, Boom Bagshaw, told me I was when I wept with joy while he was showing me round. Yes, and now I'm a patron of the Garden Home Trust or a governor or a vice-priest or something. I am really. What is it I am, Nona?"

"You're a bloated aristocrat and a bloodsucker," Nona told him in her clear, fine voice. "And you're living on estates which your brutal ancestors ravaged from the people. That's what you are, Tony. I showed it you in the Searchlight yesterday. And, I say, don't use 'elegant'; that's mine."

"Oh, by gad, yes, so I am," said Lord Tybar. "Bloodsucker! Good lord, fancy being a bloodsucker!"

He looked so genuinely rueful and abashed that Sabre laughed; and then said to Nona, "Why is elegant 'yours', Lady Tybar?"

She made a little pouting motion at him with her lips. "Marko, I wish to goodness you wouldn't call me Lady Tybar. Dash it, we've called one another Nona and Marko for about a thousand years, long before I ever knew Tony. And just because I'm married—"

"And to a mere loathsome bloodsucker, too," Lord Tybar interposed.

"Yes, especially to a bloodsucker. Just remember to say Nona, will you, otherwise there'll be a cruel scene between us. I told you about it before I went away. You don't suppose Tony minds, do you?"

"And Sabre," said Lord Tybar, "what the devil does it matter what a bloated robber minds, anyway? That's the way to look at me, Sabre. Trample me underfoot, my boy. I'm a pestilent survivor of the feudal system, aren't I, Nona?"

"Absolutely. So, Marko, don't be a completer noodle than you already are."

"Ah, you're getting it now." Lord Tybar murmured. "I'm a noodle, too, the Searchlight says."

He somehow gave Sabre the impression of taking an even deeper enjoyment in the incident between his wife and Sabre than the enjoyment he clearly had in his own facetiousness. He was slightly turned in his saddle so as to look directly at Nona, and he listened and interposed, and turned his eyes from her face to Sabre's, and from Sabre's back to hers, with his handsome head slightly cocked to one side and with much gleaming in his eyes; rather as if he had on some private mock.

Fantastical notion! What mock could he have?

"Well, about my word 'elegant'," Nona was going on, "and why it is mine—weren't you asking?"

Sabre said he had. "Yes, why yours?"

"Why, you see, Derry and Toms is a case of it." She tickled her horse's ears with her riding switch, and he stamped a hoof on the ground and arched his neck as though he knew he was a case of it and was proud of being a case of it. "I wanted an elegant name for him and I always think two names are so elegant for a firm—"

"Bloodsucker and Noodle are mine," said Lord Tybar in a very gloomy voice; and they laughed.

"—So I called him Derry and Toms."

Sabre pointed out that this still left her own possession of the word unexplained.

"Oh, Marko, you're dreadfully matter-of-fact. You always were. Why, Tony and I get fond of a word and then we have it for our own, whichever of us it is, and use it for everything. And elegant's mine just now. I'm dreadfully fond of it. It's so—well, elegant: there you are, you see!"

Lord Tybar announced that he had just become attached to a new word and desired to possess it. He was going to have blood. "You see, if I live by sucking blood—"

"Tony, you're disgusting!"

"I know. I'm the most frightful things. I'm just beginning to realise it. Yes, blood's mine, Nona. Copyright. All rights reserved. Blood."

"Well, so long as you stick to the noun and don't use the adjective," she said; and they all laughed again.

Lord Tybar gathered up his reins and stroked his left hand along them. "Well, kindness to animals!" he said. "That's another of my beautiful qualities. The perfect understanding between me and my horses tells me the mare has seen enough of you, Sabre. She tells me all her thoughts in her flanks and they Marconi up my nervous and receptive legs. I must write and tell the Searchlight that. Perhaps they'll think better of me."—The mare, feeling his hand, began to dance coquettishly. "You'll come up and see us often, now you know we're back, won't you? Nona likes seeing you, don't you, Nona?" And again he looked from Nona to Sabre and back at Nona again with that look of mocking drollery.

"Oh, you're all right, Marko," Nona agreed, "when you're not too matter-of-fact. Yes, do come up. There's always a harsh word and a blow for you at Northrepps."

The mare steadied again. She stretched out her neck towards Sabre and quivered her nostrils at him, sensing him. He put up a hand to stroke her beautiful muzzle and she threw up her head violently and swerved sharply around.

Not in the least discomposed, Lord Tybar, his body in perfect rhythm with her curvettings, laughed at Sabre over his shoulder. "She thinks you're up to something, Sabre. She thinks you've got designs on us. Marvellous how I know! Whisper and I shall hear, loved one. You'll hurt yourself in a minute."

The light in his smiling eyes was surely a mocking light. "Thinks you're up to something! Thinks you've got designs on us!"

The mare was wheedled round again to her former position; against her will, but somehow as the natural result of her dancing. Marvellous how he directed her caprices into his own intentions and against her own. But Lord Tybar was now looking away behind him to where the adjoining meadow sloped far away and steeply to a copse. In the hollow only the tops of the trees could be seen. His eyes were screwed up in distant vision. He said, "Dash it, there's that old blighter Sooper. He's been avoiding me. Now I've got him. Nona, you won't mind getting back alone? I must speak to Sooper. I'm going to have his blood over that fodder business. Blood! My word! Good!"

He twisted the mare in a wonderfully quick and dexterous movement. "Good-by, Sabre. You don't mind, Nona?" And he flashed back a glance. He lifted the mare over the low bank with a superbly easy motion. He turned to wave his hand as she landed nimbly in the meadow, and he cantered away, image of grace, poetry of movement. Fortune's favourite!

The two left watched him. At the brow of the meadow he turned again in his saddle and waved again jauntily. They waved reply. He was over the brow. Out of sight.

VII

The features of the level valley beyond the brow where only he could have seen the individual he sought, were, at that distance, of Noah's Ark dimensions. "How he could have recognised any one!" said Nona, her gaze towards the valley. "I can't even see any one. He's got eyes like about four hawks!"

Sabre said, "And rides like a—what do they call those things?—like a centaur."

She turned her head towards him. "He does everything better than any one else," she said. "That's Tony's characteristic. Everything. He's perfectly wonderful."

These were enthusiastic words; but she spoke them without enthusiasm; she merely pronounced them. "Well, I'm off too," she said. "And what about you, Marko? You're going to work, aren't you? I don't think you ought to be able to stop and gossip like this. You're not getting an idler, are you? You used to be such a devoted hard-worker. My word!" and she laughed as though at some amused memory of his devotion to work.

He laughed too. They certainly had many recollections in common, though not all laughable. "I don't think I'm quite so—so earnest as I used to be," he smiled.

"Ah, but I like you earnest, Marko."

There was the tiniest silence between them. Yet it seemed to Sabre a very long silence.

She was again the one to speak, and her tone was rather abrupt and high-pitched as if she, too, were conscious of a long silence and broke it deliberately, as one breaks, with an effort, constraint.

"And how's Mabel?"

"She's all right. She's ever so keen on this Garden Home business."

"She would be," said Nona.

"And so am I!" said Sabre. Something in her tone made him say it defiantly.

She laughed. "I'm sure you are, Marko. Well, good-by"; and as Derry and Toms began to turn with his customary sedateness of motion she made the remark, "I'm so glad you don't wear trouser clips, Marko. I do loathe trouser clips."

He told her that he rode "one of those chainless bikes."

He said it rather mumblingly. Exactly in that tone she used to say things like, "I do like you in that brown suit, Marko."

VIII

He resumed his ride. A mile farther on he overtook, on a slight rise, an immense tree trunk slung between three pairs of wheels and dragged by two tremendous horses, harnessed tandemwise. As he passed them came the smell of warm horseflesh and his thought was "Pretty!"

He shot ahead and a line came into his mind:

"Was this the face that launched a thousand ships?"

Well, he had had certain aspirations, dreams, visions....

He was upon the crest whence the road ran down into Tidborough. Beneath him the spires of the Cathedral lifted exquisitely above the surrounding city.

"Those houses in King's Close are going to be eighty pounds a year, and what do you think, Mrs. Toller is going to take one!"...



CHAPTER II

I

Sabre found but little business awaiting him when he got to his office. When he had disposed of it he sat some little time staring absent-mindedly at the cases whereon were ranged the books of his publication. Then he took out the manuscript of "England" and turned over the pages. He wondered what Nona would think of it. He would like to tell her about it.

Twyning came in.

Twyning rarely entered Sabre's room. Sabre did not enter Twyning's twice in a year. Their work ran on separate lines and there was something, unexpressed, the reverse of much sympathy between them. Twyning was an older man than Sabre. He was only two years older in computation by age but he was very much more in appearance, in manner and in business experience. He had been in the firm as a boy checker when Sabre was entering Tidborough School. He had attracted Mr. Fortune's special attention by disclosing a serious scamping of finish in a set of desks and he had risen to head clerk when Sabre was at Oxford. On the day that Sabre entered the firm he had been put "on probation" in the position he now held, and on the day that Sabre's father retired he had been confirmed in the position. He regarded Sabre as an amateur and he was privately disturbed by the fact that a man who "did not know the ropes" and had not "been through the mill" should come to a position equal in standing to his own. Nevertheless he accepted the fact, showing not the smallest animosity. He was always very ready to be cordial towards Sabre; but his cordiality took a form in which Sabre had never seen eye to eye with him. The attitude he extended to Sabre was that he and Sabre were two young fellows under a rather pig-headed old employer and that they could have many jokes and grievances and go-ahead schemes in companionship together. Sabre did not accept this view. He gave Twyning, from the first, the impression of considering himself as working alongside Mr. Fortune instead of beneath him; and he was cold to and refused to participate in the truant schoolboy air which Twyning adopted when they were together. Twyning called this "sidey." He was anxious to show Sabre, when Sabre first came to the firm, the best places to lunch in Tidborough, but Sabre was frequently lunching with one of the School housemasters or at the Masters' common room. Twyning thought this stand-offish.

II

Twyning was of middle height, very thin, black-haired. His clean-shaven face was deeply furrowed in rigid-looking furrows which looked as though shaving would be an intricate operation. He held himself very stiffly and spoke stiffly as though the cords of his larynx were also rigidly inclined. When not speaking he had a habit of breathing rather noisily through his nose as if he were doing deep breathing exercises. He was married and had a son of whom he was immensely proud, aged eighteen and doing well in a lawyer's office.

He came in and closed the door. He had a sheet of paper in his hand.

Sabre, engrossed, glanced up. "Hullo, Twyning." He wrote a word and then put down his pen. "Anything you want me about?" He lay back in his chair and stared, frowning, at the manuscript before him.

"Nothing particular, if you're busy," Twyning said. "I just looked in." He advanced the paper in his hand and looked at it as if about to add something else. But he said nothing and stood by Sabre's chair, also looking at the manuscript. "That that book?"

"M'm." Sabre was trying to retain his thoughts. He felt them slipping away before Twyning's presence. He could hear Twyning breathing through his nose and felt incensed that Twyning should come and breathe through his nose by his chair when he wanted to write.

But Twyning continued to stand by the chair and to breathe through his nose. He was reading over Sabre's shoulder.

The few pages of "England" already written lay in front of Sabre's pad, the first page uppermost. Twyning read and interjected a snort into his nasal rhythm.

"Well, that book's not written for me, anyway," he remarked.

Sabre agreed shortly. "It isn't. But why not?"

Twyning read aloud the first words. "'This England you live in is yours.' Well, I take my oath it isn't mine. Not a blooming inch of it. D'you know what's happening to me? I'm being turned out of my house. The lease is out and the whole damned house and everything I've put on to it goes to one of these lordlings—this Lord Tybar—just because one of his ancestors, who'd never even dreamt of the house, pinched the land it stands on from the public common and started to pocket ground rent. Now I'm being pitched into the street to let Lord Tybar have a house that's no more his than the man in the moon's. D'you call that right?"

"No, I don't," said Sabre, but with a tinge of impatience. "I call it rotten."

Twyning seemed surprised. "Do you, though? Well, how about that book? I mean to say—"

"I shall say so in the book. Or as good as say so."

Twyning pondered. "Shall you, by Jove? Well, but I say, that's liberalism, radicalism, you know. That's not the sort of pap for kids."

"Well, the book isn't going to be pap for kids."

Twyning snorted a note of laughter through his nose. "Sorry, old man. Don't get shirty. But I say though, seriously, we can't put out that sort of stuff, you know. Radicalism. Not with our connection. I mean to say—"

Sabre gathered up the papers and dropped them into a drawer. "Look here, Twyning, suppose you wait till the book's written before you criticise it. How about that for an idea?"

"All right, all right, old man. I'm not criticising. What's it going to be called?"

"England."

Silence.

Sabre, appreciating, with the author's intense suspicion for his child, something in the silence, looked up at Twyning. "Anything wrong about that? 'England.' You read the first sentence?"

Twyning said slowly, "Yes, I know I did. I thought of it then."

"Thought of what?"

"Well—'England'—'this England.' I mean to say—What about Scotland?"

"Well, what about Scotland?"

Twyning seemed really concerned. The puckers on his face had visibly deepened. He used a stubborn tone. "Well, you know what people are. You know how damned touchy those Scotchmen are. I mean to say, if we put out a book like that, the Scotch—"

Sabre smote the desk. This kind of thing from Twyning made him furious, and he particularly was not in the mood for it this morning. He struck his hand down on the desk: "Well, damn the Scotch. What's it got to do with the Scotch? This book isn't about Scotland. It's about England. England. I'll tell you another thing. You say if 'we' put out a book like that. It isn't 'we.' Excuse me saying so, but it certainly isn't you. It's I." He stopped, and then laughed. "Sorry, Twyning."

III

Twyning's face had gone very dark. His jaw had set. "Oh, all right." He turned away, but immediately returned again, his face relaxed. "That's all right. Only my chipping, you know. I say though," and he laughed nervously. "That 'not we.' You've said it! I'd come in to tell you. It's going to be 'we.'" He advanced the paper he had been holding in his hand, his thumb indicating the top left-hand corner. "What do you think of me above the line, my boy?"

The paper was a sheet of the firm's notepaper. In the upper left-hand corner was printed in small type, "The Rev. Sebastian Fortune." Beneath the name was a short line and beneath the line, "Mr. Shearman Twyning. Mr. Mark Sabre":

The Rev. Sebastian Fortune. ————— Mr. Shearman Twyning. Mr. Mark Sabre.

Sabre said slowly, "What do you mean—you 'above the line'?"

Twyning indicated the short line with a forefinger. "That line, my boy. Jonah's going to take me into partnership. Just told me."

He had released the paper into Sabre's hand. Sabre handed it back with a single word, "Good."

Twyning's face darkened again and darkened worse. He crumpled the paper violently in his hand and spoke also but a single word, "Thanks!" He turned sharply on his heel and went to the door.

"I say, Twyning!" Sabre jumped to his feet and went to Twyning with outstretched hand. "I didn't mean to take it like that. Don't think I'm not—I congratulate you. Jolly good. Splendid. I tell you what—I don't mind telling you—it was a bit of a smack in the eye for me for a moment. You know, I've rather sweated over this business,"—his glance indicated the stacked bookshelves, the firm's publications, his publications.... "See what I mean?"

A certain movement in his throat and about his mouth indicated, more than his words, what he meant. A slight.

Twyning took the hand and gripped it with a firmness characteristic of his handshake.

"Thanks, old man. Thanks awfully. Of course I know what you mean. But after all, look at the thing, eh? I mean to say, you've been here—what—ten or twelve years. Well, I've been over twenty-five. Natural, eh? And you're doing splendidly. Every one knows that. It's only a question of time. Thanks awfully." He reached for Sabre's hand again and again gripped it hard.

Sabre went back and sat against his desk. "What rather got me, you know, coming all of a sudden like that, was that Fortune promised me partnership, twice, quite a bit ago."

Twyning, who had been speaking with an emotion in consonance with the grip of his hand, said a little blankly, "Did he? That so?"

"Yes, twice. And this looked like, when you told me—well, like dissatisfaction since, see? Eh?"

Twyning did not take up the point. "I say, you never told me."

"I'm telling you now," Sabre said. And he laughed ruefully. "It comes to much the same thing—as it turns out."

"Yes, but still.... I wish we worked in a bit more together, Sabre. I'm always ready to, you know. Let's, shall we?"

Sabre made no reply. Twyning repeated "Let's" and nodded and left the room. Immediately he opened the door again and reappeared. "I say, you won't say anything to Jonah, of course?"

Sabre smiled grimly. "I'm going to."

Again the darkening. "Dash it, that's not quite playing the game, is it?"

"Rot, Twyning. Fortune's made me a promise, and I'm going to ask if he has any reason for withdrawing it, that's all. It's nothing to do with your show."

"You're bound to tell him I've told you."

"Well, man alive, I'm bound to know, aren't I?"

"Yes—in a way. Oh, well, all right. Remember about working in more together." He withdrew and closed the door.

Outside the door he clenched his hands. He thought, "Smack in the eye for you, was it? You'll get a damn sight worse smack in the eye one of these days. Dirty dog!"

IV

Immediately the door was closed Sabre went what he would have called "plug in" to Mr. Fortune; that is to say, without hesitation and without reflection. He went in by the communicating door, first giving a single tap but without waiting for a reply to the tap. Mr. Fortune, presenting a whale-like flank, was at his table going through invoices and making notes in a small black book which he carried always in a tail pocket of his jacket.

"Can I speak to you a minute, Mr. Fortune?"

Mr. Fortune entered a note in the small black book: "Twenty-eight, sixteen, four." He placed a broad elastic band round the book and with the dexterity of practice passed the book round his bulk and into the tail pocket. He flicked his hands away and extended them for an instant, palms upward, much as a conjurer might to show there was nothing in them. "Certainly you may speak to me, Sabre." He performed his neat revolving trick. "As a matter of fact, I rather wanted to speak to you." He pointed across the whale-like front to the massive leathern armchair beside his desk.

The seat of the armchair marked in a vast hollow the cumulative ponderosity of the pillars of Church and School who were wont to sit in it. Sabre seated himself on the arm. "Was it about this partnership business?"

Mr. Fortune had already frowned to see Sabre upon the arm of the chair, a position for which the arm was not intended. His frown deepened. "What partnership business?"

"Well, you recollect promising me—being good enough to promise me—twice—that I was going to come into partnership—"

Mr. Fortune folded his hands upon the whale-like front. "I certainly do not recollect that, Sabre." He raised a hand responsive to a gesture. "Allow me. I recollect no promise. Either twice or any other number of times, greater or fewer. I do recollect mentioning to you the possibility of my making you such a proposal in my good time. Is that what you refer to as 'this partnership business'?"

"Yes—partly. Well, look here, sir, it's been a pretty good time, hasn't it? I mean since you spoke of it."

Mr. Fortune tugged strongly at his watch by its gold chain and looked at the watch rather as though he expected to see the extent of the good time there recorded. He forced it back with both hands rather as though it had failed of this duty and was being crammed away in disgrace. "I am expecting Canon Toomuch." He hit the watch, cowering (as one might suppose) in his pocket. "You know, my dear Sabre, I do think this is a little odd. A little unusual. You cannot bounce into a partnership, Sabre. I know your manner. I know your manner well. Oblige me by not fiddling with that paper knife. Thank you. And I make allowances for your manner. But believe me a partnership is not to be bounced into. You give me the impression—I do not say you mean it, I say you give it—of suddenly and without due cause or just im—just opportunity, trying to bounce me into taking you into partnership. I most emphatically am not to be bounced, Sabre. I never have been bounced and you may quite safely take it from me that I never propose or intend to be bounced."

Sabre thought, "Well, it would take a steam crane to bounce you, anyway." He said. "I hadn't the faintest intention of doing any such thing. If I made you think so, I'm sorry. I simply wanted to ask if you have changed your mind, and if so why. I mean, whether I have given you any cause for dissatisfaction since you prom—since you first mentioned it to me."

Mr. Fortune's whale-like front had laboured with some agitation during his repudiation of liability to being bounced. It now resumed its normal dignity. "You certainly have not, Sabre. No cause for dissatisfaction. On the contrary. You know quite well that there are certain characteristics of yours of which, constituted as I am, I do not approve. I really must beg of you not to fiddle with those scissors. Thank you. But they are, happily, quite apart from your work. I do not permit them to influence my opinion of you by one jot or tittle. You may entirely reassure yourself. May I inquire why you should have supposed I had changed my mind?"

"Because I've just heard that you've told Twyning you're going to take him into partnership."

The whale-like front gave a sudden leap and quiver precisely as if it had been struck by a cricket ball. Mr. Fortune's voice hardened very remarkably. "As to that, I will permit myself two remarks. In the first place, I consider it highly reprehensible of Twyning to have communicated this to you—"

Sabre broke in. "Well, he didn't. I'd like you to be quite clear on that point, if you don't mind. Twyning didn't tell me. It came out quite indirectly in the course of something I was saying to him. I doubt if he knows that I know even. I inferred it. It seems I inferred correctly."

There flashed through Mr. Fortune's mind a poignant regret that, this being the case, he had not denied it. He said, "I am exceedingly glad to hear it. I might have known Twyning would not be capable of such a breach of discretion. Resuming what I had to say—and, Sabre, I shall indeed be most intensely obliged if you will refrain from fiddling with the things on my table—resuming what I had to say, I will observe in the second and last place that I entirely deprecate, I will go further, I most strongly resent any questioning by any one member of my staff based on any intentions of mine relative to another member of my staff. This business is my business. I think you are sometimes a little prone to forget that. If it seems good to me to strengthen your hand in your department that has nothing whatever to do with Twyning. And if it seems good to me to strengthen Twyning's hand in Twyning's department that has nothing whatever to do with you."

Sabre, despite his private feelings in the matter, characteristically followed this reasoning completely, and said so. "Yes, that's your way of looking at it, sir, and I don't say it isn't perfectly sound—from your point of view—"

Mr. Fortune inclined his head solemnly: "I am obliged to you."

"—Only other people look at things on the face of them, just as they appear. You know—it's difficult to express it—I've put my heart into those books." He made a gesture towards his room. "I can't quite explain it, but I felt that the slight, or what looks like a slight, is on them, not on me." He put his hand to the back of his head, a habit characteristic when he was embarrassed or perplexed. "I'm afraid I can't quite express it, but it's the books. Not myself. I'm—fond of them. They're not just paper and print to me. I feel that they feel it. You won't quite understand, I'm afraid—"

"No, I confess that is a little beyond me," said Mr. Fortune, smoothing his front; and they remained looking at one another.

A sudden and unearthly moan sounded through the room. Mr. Fortune spun himself with relief to his desk and applied his lips to a flexible speaking tube. "Yes?" He dodged the tube to his ear, then to his lips again.

"Beg Canon Toomuch to step up to my room." He laid down the tube.

Sabre roused himself and stood up abruptly. "Ah, well! All right, sir." He moved towards his door.

"Sabre," inquired Mr. Fortune, "you get on well with Twyning, I trust?"

"Get on? Oh yes. We don't have much to do with each other."

"Do you dislike Twyning?"

"I don't dislike him. I'm indifferent to him."

"I regret to hear that," said Mr. Fortune.

From the door Sabre put a question in his turn: "When are you going to make this change with Twyning?"

"Not to-day."

"Am I still to remember that you held out partnership to me?"

"Certainly you may."

"When is it likely to be?"

"Not to-day."

Maddening expression!

Sabre, in his room, went towards his chair. He was about to drop into it when he recollected something. He went out into the corridor and along the corridor, past Mr. Fortune's door (Canon Toomuch coming heavily up the stairs) to Twyning's room. He put in his head. "Oh, I say, Twyning, if Fortune should ever ask you if you told me about that business, you can tell him you didn't."

"Oh—oh, right-o," said Twyning; and to himself when the door closed, "Funked speaking to him!"

V

Arrived again in his room, Sabre dropped into his chair. In his eyes was the look that had been in them when he had tried to explain to Mr. Fortune about the books, what Mr. Fortune had confessed he found a little beyond him. He thought: "The books.... Of course Fortune hasn't imagined them ... seen them grow helped them to grow.... But it hurts. Like hell it hurts.... And I can't explain to him how I feel about them.... I can't explain to any one."

His thoughts moved on: "I've been twelve years with him. Twelve years we've been daily together, and when I said that about the books I sat there and he sat there—and just looked. Stared at each other like masks. Masks! Nothing but a mask to be seen for either of us. I sit behind my mask and he sits behind his and that's all we see. Twelve mortal years! And there're thousands of people in thousands of offices ... thousands of homes ... just the same. All behind masks. Mysterious business. Extraordinary. How do we keep behind? Why do we keep behind? We're all going through the same life. Come the same way. Go the same way. You look at insects, ants, scurrying about, and not two of them seem to have a thing in common, not two of them seem to know one another; and you think it's odd, you think it's because they don't know they're all in the same boat. But we're just the same. They might think it of us. And we do know. And yet you get two lives and put them together twelve years in an office ... in a house.... Mabel and I ... practically we just sit and look at each other. Her mask. My mask...."

He thought: "One knows what it is, what it looks like, with ants. They're all plugging about like mad like that, not knowing one another, nor caring, because they all seem to be looking for something. I wonder.... I wonder—are we? Is that the trouble? All looking for something.... You can see it in half the faces you see. Some wanting, and knowing they are wanting something. Others wanting something but just putting up with it, just content to be discontented. You can see it. Yes, you can. Looking for what? Love? But lots have love. Happiness? But aren't lots happy? But are they?"

He knitted his brows: "It goes deeper than that. It's some universal thing that's wanting. Is it something that religion ought to give, but doesn't? Light? Some new light to give every one certainty in religion, in belief. Light?"

His thoughts went to Mabel. "Those houses in King's Close are going to be eighty pounds a year, and what do you think, Mrs. Toller is going to take one." And he had not answered her but had rustled the newspaper and had intended her to know why he had rustled the paper: to show he couldn't stick it! Unkind. His heart smote him for Mabel. Such a pathetically simple thing for Mabel to find enjoyment in! Why, he might just as reasonably rustle the newspaper at a baby because it had enjoyment in a rattle. A rattle would not amuse him, and Mrs. Toller taking a house beyond her means did not amuse him; but why on earth should he—?

He put the thing to himself in his reasoning way, his brow wrinkled up: She was his wife. She had left her home for his home. She had a right to his interest in her ideas. He had a duty towards her ideas. Unkind. Rotten.

Upon a sudden impulse he looked at his watch. Only just after twelve. He could get back in time for lunch. Lonely for her, day after day, and left as he had left her that morning. They could have a jolly afternoon together. He could make it a jolly afternoon. Nona kept coming into his thoughts—and more so after this Twyning business. He would have Mabel in his thoughts.

He went in and told Mr. Fortune he rather thought of taking the afternoon off if he was not wanted. He mounted his bicycle and rode purposefully back to Mabel.



CHAPTER III

I

The free-wheel run down into Perry Green landed him a little short of his gate,—not bad! Pirrip, the postman, whom he had passed in the bicycle's penultimate struggles, overtook him in its death throes and watched with interest the miracles of balancing with which, despite his preoccupation of mind, habit made him prolong them to the uttermost inch.

He dismounted. "Anything for me, Pirrip?"

"One for you, Mr. Sabre."

Sabre took the letter and glanced at the handwriting.

It was from Nona.

Her small, neat, masculine script had once been as familiar to him as his own. It was curiously like his own. She had the same trick of not linking all the letters in a word. Her longer words, like his own, looked as if they were two or three short words close together. To this day, when he did not get a letter from her once in a year—or in five years—his address on an envelope in her handwriting was a thing he could bring, and sometimes did bring with perfect clearness before his mental vision.

He glanced at it, regarded it for slightly longer than a glance, and with a little pucker of brows and lips, then made the action of putting it, unopened, in his pocket. Then he rested the bicycle against his hip and opened her letter.

"Northrepps. Tuesday." She never dated her letters. He used to be always telling her about that. Tuesday was yesterday.

Dear Marko—We're back. We've been from China to Peru—almost. Come up one day and be bored about it. How are you?

Nona.

He thought: "Funny she didn't mention she'd written just now. Perhaps she thought it was funny I didn't say I'd had it. I must tell her."

He returned her letter to its envelope and put the envelope in his pocket. Then wheeled his bicycle into his gate. He smiled. "Mabel will be surprised at me back like this."

Mabel was descending the stairs as he entered the hall. In the white dress she wore she made a pleasant picture against the broad, shallow stairway and the dark panelling. But she did not appear particularly pleased to see him. But he thought, "Why should she be? That's just it. That's why I've come back."

"Hullo?" she greeted him. "Have you forgotten something?"

He smiled invitingly. "No, I've just come back. I suddenly thought we'd have a holiday."

She showed puzzlement. "A holiday? What, the office? All of you?"

She had paused three steps from the foot of the stairs, her right hand on the banisters.

His wife!...

He slid his hand up the rail and rested it on hers. "Good lord, no. Not the office. No, I suddenly thought we'd have a holiday. You and I."

He half hoped she would respond to the touch of his hand by turning the palm of her own to it. But he thought, "Why should she?" and she did not. She said, "But how extraordinary! Whatever for?"

"Well, why not?"

"But what did you say at the office? What reason did you give?"

"Didn't give any. I just said I thought I wouldn't be back."

"But whatever will Mr. Fortune think?"

"Oh, what does it matter what he thinks? He won't think anything about it."

"But he'll think it's funny."

He thought, "Dash these buts!" This was what he called "niggling." It was on the tip of his tongue to say, "Why niggle about the thing?" but he recollected his purpose; that was him all over and that was just it! He said brightly, "Let him. Do him good. The idea suddenly came to me as a bit of a lark to have an unexpected holiday with you, and I just cleared off and came!"

She had descended and he moved along the hall with her towards the morning room.

"It's rather extraordinary," she said.

She certainly was not enthusiastic over it. She asked, "Well, what are you going to do?"

He wished he had thought of some plan as he came along. "What time's lunch? Half-past one? What about getting your bike and going for a bit of a run first?"

She was at a drawer of her table where she kept, with beautiful neatness, implements for various household duties. A pair of long scissors came out. "I can't possibly. I've things to do. Besides some one's coming to lunch."

He began to feel he had been a fool. The feeling nettled him and he thought, "Why 'some one'? Dash it, I might be a stranger in the house. Why doesn't she say who?" And then he thought, "Why should she? This is just it. I'd have heard all about it at breakfast if I'd been decently communicative."

He said, "Good. Who?"

She took a shallow basket from the shelf. He knew this and the long scissors for her flower-cutting implements. "Mr. Bagshaw."

And before he could stop himself he had groaned, "Oh, lord!"

She "flew up" and he rushed in tumultuously to make amends for his blunder and prevent her flying up.

"Mark, I do wish—"

"I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I really am most awfully sorry, Mabel. 'Oh, lord''s not really profanity. You know it's not. It's just my way—"

"I know that."

But he persevered. "As a matter of fact, it's clear connection of thought in this case. Bagshaw's a clergyman, and my mind flew instantly to celestial things."

She did not respond to this. "In any case, I really cannot see why you should object to Mr. Boom Bagshaw."

"I don't. I don't in the least."

"I've heard you say—often—that he's far and away the best preacher you've ever heard."

"He is. Absolutely."

"Well, then?"

"It's just his coming to lunch. He's such a terrific talker and you know I can't stick talkers."

"Yes, that's just why I invite them when you're not here."

He laughed and came across the room towards her impulsively. He was going to carry this through. "You've got me there. Properly." He took the basket from her hand. "Come on, we'll cut the flowers. I'll be absolutely chatty with old Bagshaw."

She smiled and her smile encouraged him tremendously. This was the way to do it! They went through the glass doors into the garden and he continued, "Really chatty. I'm going to turn over a new leaf. As a matter of fact, that's why I came back. I got out of bed the wrong side this morning, didn't I?"

He felt as he always remembered once feeling as a boy when, after going to bed, he had come downstairs in his nightshirt and said to his father, "I say, father, I didn't tell the truth this morning. I had been smoking." He had never forgotten the enormous relief of that confession, nor the bliss of his father's, "That's all right, old man. That's fine. Don't cry, old chap." And he felt precisely that same enormous relief now.

She said, "Was that the reason? How awfully funny of you!" and she gave one of her sudden bursts of laughter.

He had a swift feeling that this was not quite the same as the reception of his confession by his father in that long-ago; but he thought immediately, "The thing's quite different." Anyway, he had confessed. She knew why he had come back so suddenly. He felt immensely happy. And when she said, "I think we'll have some of the roses," he gaily replied, "Yes, rather. These roses!"

Fine! How easy to be on jolly terms!

And immediately it proved not so easy. He had got over the rocks of "niggling"; he found himself in the shoals of exasperation.

II

She cut the first rose and held it to her lips, smelling it. "Lovely. Who was your letter from, Mark?"

He thought, "How on earth did she know?" He had forgotten it himself. "How ever did you know? From Lady Tybar. They're back."

"I saw you from the window with the postman. Lady Tybar! Whatever was she writing to you about?"

He somehow did not like this. Why "whatever"? And being watched was rather beastly; he remembered he had fiddled about with the letter,—half put it in his pocket and then taken it out again. And why not? What did it matter? But he had a prevision that it was going to matter. Mabel did not particularly like Nona. He said, "Just to say they're back. She wants us to go up there."

"An invitation? Whyever didn't she write to me?"

"Whyever" again!—"May I see it?"

He took the letter from his pocket and handed it to her. "It's not exactly an invitation—not formal."

She did what he called "flicked" the letter out of its envelope. He watched her reading it and in his mind he could see as perfectly as she with her eyes, the odd, neat script; in his mind he read it with her, word by word.

Dear Marko—We're back. We've been from China to Peru almost. Come up one day and be bored about it. How are you?

Nona.

His thought was, "Damn the letter!"

Mabel handed it back, without returning it to its envelope. She said, "No, it's not formal."

She snipped three roses with astonishing swiftness,—snip, snip, snip!

Sabre sought about in his mind for something to say. There was nothing in his mind to say. He had an absurd vision of his two hands feeling about in the polished interior of a skull, as one might fumble for something in a large jar.

At the end of an enormous cavity of time he found some slight remark about blight on the rose trees—the absence of it this year—and ventured it. He had again an absurd vision of dropping it into an enormous cavern, as a pea into an immense bowl, and it seemed to tinkle feebly and forlornly, as a pea would. "No blight this year, eh?"

"No; is there?" agreed Mabel,—snip!

Nevertheless conversation arose from the forlorn pea and was maintained. They moved about the garden from flower bed to flower bed. In half an hour the shallow basket was beautified with fragrant blooms and Mabel thought she had enough.

"Well, that's that," said Sabre as they reentered the morning room.

III

Low Jinks, her matchless training at the level of mysteriously performed duties pat to the moment and without command, appeared with a tray of vases. Each vase was filled to precisely half its capacity with water. There were also a folded newspaper, a pair of small gilt scissors and a saucer. Low Jinks spread the newspaper at one end of the table, arranged the vases in a semicircle upon it, and placed the gilt scissors precisely in alignment with the right-hand vase of the semicircle, and the saucer (for the stalk ends) precisely in alignment with the left-hand vase. She then withdrew, closing the door with exquisite softness. Sabre had never seen this rite before. The perfection of its performance was impressive. He thought, "Mabel is marvellous." He said, "Shall I take them out of the basket?"

"No, leave them. I take them up just as I want them."

She took up a creamy rose and snipped off a fragment of stalk over the saucer. "Why does she call you 'Marko'?"

He was utterly taken aback. If the question had come from any one but Mabel, he would have quite failed to connect it with the letter. But there had distinctly been an "incident" over the letter, though so far closed, as he had imagined, that he was completely surprised.

He said "Who? Nona?"

"Yes, Nona, if you like. Lady Tybar."

"Why, she always has. You know that."

Mabel put the rose into a specimen vase with immense care and touched a speck off its petals with her fingers. "I really didn't."

"Mabel, you know you do. You must have heard her."

"Well, I may have. But long ago. I certainly didn't know she used it in letters."

He felt he was growing angry.

"What on earth's the difference?"

"It seems to me there's a great deal of difference. I didn't know she wrote you letters."

He was angry. "Damn it, she doesn't write me letters."

She shrugged her shoulders. "You seem to get them anyway."

Maddening!

And then he thought, "I'm not going to let it be maddening. This is just what happens." He said, "Well, this is silly. I've known her—we've known one another—for years, since we were children, pretty well. She's called me by my Christian name since I can remember. You must have heard her. We don't see much of her—perhaps you haven't. I thought you had. Anyway, dash the thing. What does it matter?"

"It doesn't matter"—she launched a flower into a vase—"a bit. I only think it's funny, that's all."

"Well, it's just her way."

Mabel gave a little sniff. He thought it was over. But it wasn't over. "If you ask me, I call it a funny letter. You say your Christian name, but it isn't your Christian name—Marko! And then saying, 'How are you?' like that—"

"Like what? She just said it, didn't she?"

"Yes I know. And then 'Nona.' Don't you call that funny?"

"Well, I always used to call her 'Nona.' She'd have thought it funny, as you call it, to put anything else. I tell you it's just her way."

"Well, I think it's a very funny way and I think anybody else would think so. I don't like her. I never did like her."

There seemed no more to say.

IV

He walked up to his room. He closed the door behind him and sat on a straight-backed chair, his legs outthrust. Failure? He had come back home thus suddenly with immensely good intentions. Failure? On the whole, no. There was a great deal more he could have said downstairs, and a great deal more he had felt uncommonly inclined to say. But he had left the morning room without saying it, and that was good; that redeemed his sudden return from absolute failure.

Why had he returned? He "worked back" through the morning on the Fargus principle. Not because of his thoughts after the Twyning business; not because of the disturbance of the Twyning business. No. He had returned because he had seen Nona. Thoughts—feelings—had been stirred within him by meeting her. And it had suddenly been rather hateful to have those thoughts and to feel that—that Mabel had no place in them.

Well, why had he come up here? What was he doing up here? Well, it hadn't been altogether successful. Mabel hadn't been particularly excited to see him. No, but that didn't count. Why should she be? He had gone off after breakfast, glum as a bear. Well, then there was that niggling business over why he had returned. Always like that. Never plump out over a thing he put up. Niggling. And then this infernal business about the letter. That word "funny." She must have used it a hundred times. Still.... The niggling had been carried off, they had gone into the garden together; and this infernal letter business—at least he had come away without boiling over about it. Much better to have come away as he did.... Still....

V

A gong boomed enormously through the house. It had been one of her father's wedding presents to Mabel and it always reminded Sabre of the Dean's, her father's voice. The Dean's voice boomed, swelling into a loud boom when he was in mid-speech and reverberating into a distant boom as his periods terminated. This was the warning gong for lunch. In ten minutes, in this perfectly ordered house, a different gong, a set of chimes, would announce that lunch was ready. The reverberations had scarcely ceased when Low Jinks, although she had caused the reverberations, appeared in his room with a brass can of hot water.

"Mr. Boom Bagshaw has not arrived yet, sir," said Low Jinks; "but the mistress thought we wouldn't wait any longer."