Harry was sitting cross-legged on the hearth rug after dinner, poking the fire in an idiotic manner with the tongs. Gun cotton would have smouldered out under so illiterate a stroke. He was also talking with about equal vivacity and vacuity to Lady Oxted and Evie, but while his conversation was not more than difficult to bear, his poking of the fire was quite intolerable. Lady Oxted got swiftly and silently up from her chair, and, in the manner of a stooping hawk, took the instrument from him.

"We can attend better, dear Harry," she said, "to your most interesting conversation if you do not distract our minds by making a bayonet of improper fire irons. You can do that after we have gone to bed."

"They are improper," said Harry, "but my sense of delicacy forbade my telling you so. How a respectable woman like you could tolerate their presence in the house has been more than I was able to imagine. But now the ice is broken— Oh, I never told you about the ice house! \'More I did."

Lord Oxted looked up from the evening paper[Pg 358] which he was reading distractedly but diligently, and made a bee line for the door. His exit, though made without protest, was somewhat marked. He had no manners, as his wife often told him.

"The ice house," said Harry, as if he were giving out a text to a diminishing congregation, and a spicy emphasis was required to retain the rest, "and the gun, and the sluice."

The shadow of Lord Oxted lingered a moment in the doorway at this alluring selection, but immediately disappeared on the next words: "I\'ll make your blood run cold!"

"Has the Luck been singing its nursery rhymes?" asked Lady Oxted, uncertain what to do with that white elephant, the tongs.

"Singing!" cried Harry, digging the shovel into the fire. "Singing quo\' she! My good woman, I can and will a tale unfold which, if you have tears, prepare to shed them now," said he, with a felicitous air.

Lady Oxted annexed the shovel also. Thus there were two white elephants.

"I am not the washerwoman, Harry," she remarked with reason.

"No, dear aunt," said he, growing suddenly grave. "And if I hadn\'t been so absurdly happy to-night, I shouldn\'t have made a joke of it, for, indeed, it was no joke. Anyhow, the doctor congratulated me on my admirable nerves."

"Some people when they prepare to tell a story," said Lady Oxted, "begin at the beginning.[Pg 359] Others—this is without prejudice—begin at the end and work laboriously and slowly backward. Let me at least ask you, Harry, not to be slow. Tell us about the doctor, as we are to go backward. Did his name begin with an A?"

"Quite right," said Harry, "and it went on with an R."

Lady Oxted dropped her white elephants on the carpet and sat down by Evie.

"Armytage?" she asked, and the fooling was gone from her voice.

"Right again. You had much better tell the whole story for yourself, hadn\'t you?"

"No; when other people begin to talk about the Luck, I take no part in the conversation," said she, "except, at least, when Geoffrey is here, and then I talk of bears and bulls."

The Harry who had played bayonet with the tongs had by this time vanished; vanished also were the flying skirts of farce, and in absolute silence on the part of his audience, and in gravity on his own, he told them the three adventures, narrating only the salient facts, and alluding neither directly nor otherwise to Geoffrey or his uncle. But while his tale was yet young, Evie crossed from the sofa where she had been sitting with Lady Oxted and joined Harry on the hearth rug. One hand held her fan, the other was on her lap. Of the latter Harry easily possessed himself, and the tale of the gun was told with it in his. But as he spoke of the raking gash that riddled the cornice and ceiling of the gun[Pg 360] room, it was suddenly withdrawn and laid on his shoulder.

"O Harry, Harry!" she murmured.

He turned and stopped, spontaneously responsive.

"My darling," he said, "I ought never to have told you. Only I could not help telling you some time, and why not now? Was it not better to tell you like this, making no confidence of it?"

If ever a word ought to have carried the weight of a hint, the word was here. But Lady Oxted showed not the slightest sign of following her husband, or saying she must write two notes.

"Go on, Harry," she said. "We are waiting. So the gun went off?"

But Harry turned to the girl.

"It is with you," he said. "Will you have the third adventure or not? Simply as you wish. Here am I, anyhow."

"Yes, tell us," she said.

At the end Lady Oxted rose crisply.

"I never heard of such impotent magic in all my life," she said. "Really, Harry, if you must tell us supernatural experiences in the evening, we have a right to expect to be pleasantly frightened. But I have never been less frightened. You whistled your way into an ice house; you took up a gun carelessly; you stood on a piece of unsafe stonework.—If I were you, Evie, I should buy him a nice leading-rein."

These brutalities were effective, and banished the subject, and, without pausing to comment or[Pg 361] let others comment, Lady Oxted sent for her husband, and they sat down to a table of bridge.

"The only thing I insist on," he said, "is that my wife shall be my partner. Her curious processes of thought, when she is engaged in this kind of brain work, are a shade less disconcerting and obscure to me than they would be to others. Aimer c\'est tout comprendre. And if I do not quite understand them all," he added, as he cut for deal, "I understand more than anybody else.—Eh, dear Violet?"

Lady Oxted\'s brow was always clouded when she played bridge, and to-night the blackness of the thunderstorm that sat there was not appreciably denser than usual. She played with a curious and unfortunate mixture of timorousness when the declaration was with her, and a lively confidence in the unparalleled strength of her partner\'s hand when the declaration was passed to her. Thus at the end of two hours, as these methods to-night were more marked than usual, the house of Oxted was sensibly impoverished. But with the rising from the card table her disquieted looks showed no betterment, and her husband offered consolation.

"We can easily sell the Grosvenor Square house," he said, "if it is that which is bothering you, Violet; and if that is not enough we can give up coffee after dinner, and have no parties. The world is too much with us."

"And with the proceeds we can buy a handbook on bridge," said she with spirit. "I will[Pg 362] give it you for a present at Christmas, Bob. Let us go to bed."

Lady Oxted employed, in the almost daily conduct of her life, methods which she characterized as diplomatic. A less indulgent critic than herself might have labelled them with a shorter and directer word, yet not have felt that he was harsh, for the diplomatic methods did not exclude what we may elegantly term evasions of the truth. To-night, for instance, she talked with Evie for a few minutes only in her bedroom, and exacted a promise that she would go to bed at once, for she looked very tired. For herself she would have it known that her head was splitting, that if she got influenza again she would turn atheist. With these immoderate statements she secured herself from interruption, and went, not to bed, but to the smoking room, where she found Harry alone. The rustling of her dress made him look up quickly, and the most undiplomatic disappointment was evident on his face.

"No, I am not Evie," remarked this clear-sighted lady. "She is tired and has gone to bed, so I came for a chat with you. Dear Harry, it is so nice to see you again! But what terrible adventures you have been through! I want to hear of them more particularly, but I thought it would frighten Evie to talk of them longer. That is why I was abrupt to you."

"And so she is tired! Diplomacy?" said Harry.

"Yes, just a touch of diplomacy," assented[Pg 363] Lady Oxted, "for she looked scared and frightened. Now were you alone when all these things happened, or was Dr. Armytage there? And how did Dr. Armytage come to be at Vail at all?"

"He came to Vail," said Harry, "on the evening of the third affair, the breaking of the sluice. I telegraphed for him because I was frightened about my uncle. He is liable, you know, to cardiac attacks, and I was afraid of one coming on."

"He was naturally agitated at your series of escapes," said Lady Oxted.

"Naturally," said Harry.

Lady Oxted rose with some impatience, and threw diplomacy aside.

"Your efforts at dissimulation are pitiable, Harry," said she. "If you won\'t tell me what happened, say so: I am going to fish no more."

Harry did not immediately reply, and Lady Oxted continued.

"Seriously speaking," she said, "I think I ought to know. If there is nothing more, if your conscience allows you to say that there is nothing to tell, I am content. If you can not say that, I think you ought to tell me."

"Do you not think that you are putting an unfair pressure on me?" asked Harry.

"No, for you are no longer only your own master. You must consider not only yourself, but Evie. In her mother\'s absence I have a certain duty toward her. I do not ask you from curiosity, but because of the relations in which both you and I stand to her. You have within[Pg 364] the last few weeks been in three positions of extreme personal danger. Can you, however vaguely, account for this? Have there been no suspicious circumstances of any kind which might lead any one to think that these were not entirely accidents? You say that Geoffrey was in the house on all these occasions. Did he take it all as lightly as you seem to?"

"I would rather not bring Geoffrey into it," said Harry.

"Have you quarrelled?"

"Yes, I suppose you may say that we have quarrelled," he replied.

"Harry, why will you not tell me, and save my asking you all these questions? I intend to go on asking them. Was your quarrel with Geoffrey connected in any way with these accidents?"

"Oh, give me a minute!" cried Harry. "I want to make up my mind whether I am going to tell you or not. I suppose, if I did not, you would go to Geoff."

"Certainly I should," said Lady Oxted promptly, although this had not occurred to her.

"Well, it is better that I should tell you than he," said Harry, and without more words he told her all that he had purposely left unsaid, from the mistaken direction which had sent him to the ice house instead of the summerhouse, down to the scene in the smoking room when he had parted with Geoffrey. She heard him in silence without question or interruption, and when he had finished, still she said nothing. Apt and ready as[Pg 365] she was for the ordinary social emergency, she could frame nothing for this. She could not say what she thought, outspokenly like Geoffrey, for Harry\'s sake; she would not say what she did not think, in spite of her diplomatic tendencies, for her own.

At last the silence became portentous, and Harry broke it.

"Have I then lost another friend in addition to Geoffrey?" he said, in a voice that was not very steady. He could not have given her a better lead.

"Ah! do not say things like that, Harry," she said. "You do not think it possible, in the first place, and even if you did it would be no part of wisdom to say it. But I tell you frankly that, though Geoffrey seems to me to have spoken most hastily and unwisely, yet I can understand what he felt. There are, I don\'t deny that I see it, many curious circumstances about all these adventures, which lend reasonableness—pardon me—to his suspicions."

"I know—I know all that," said Harry, "but I find it a sheer impossibility to believe them in any degree at all. Geoffrey\'s suspicions are out of the question. That being so, I can not away with what he has done, with the speaking to my uncle like that; I can not away with that condition of mind to which, however plausible the idea, the idea was possible."

Lady Oxted was a quick thinker; she knew, moreover, that to decide wrong was better than[Pg 366] not to decide at all; and before Harry had finished speaking, she was determined on her line of action. Geoffrey, she rightly guessed, had at least as much influence with Harry as herself, yet even Geoffrey, in all the heat and horror of these adventures, had been powerless to move him. Her chance, then, speaking at this cooler distance, had scarcely the slightest prospect of success, and secret coalition with Geoffrey was evidently preferable to open collision with Harry.

"I see—I quite see," she said; "but, ............