“And so the clock stopped!” observed Simon Loggerheads.

“Yes,” said Mary.  “If it hadn’t been for the sheer accident of that clock stopping, we shouldn’t be sitting here on this sofa now, and Dick would be in that chair, and you would just be beginning to tell him that we are engaged.”  She sighed.  “Poor Dick!  What on earth will he do?”

“Strange how things happen!” Simon reflected in a low voice.  “But I’m really surprised at that clock stopping like that.  It’s a clock that you ought to be able to depend on, that clock is.”

He got up to inspect the timepiece.  He knew all about the clock, because he had been chairman of the presentation committee which had gone to Manchester to buy it.

“Why!” he murmured, after he had toyed a little with the pendulum, “it goes all right.  Its tick is as right as rain.”

“How odd!” responded Mary.

Simon Loggerheads set the clock by his own impeccable watch, and then sat down again.  And he drew something from his waistcoat pocket and slid it on to Mary’s finger.

Mary regarded her finger in silent ecstasy, and then breathed “How lovely!”—­not meaning her finger.

“Shall I stay till he comes back?” asked Simon.

“If I were you I shouldn’t do that,” said Mary.  “But you can safely stay till eleven-thirty.  Then I shall go to bed.  He’ll be tired and short [curt] when he gets back.  I’ll tell him myself to-morrow morning at breakfast.  And you might come to-morrow afternoon early, for tea.”

Simon did stay till half-past eleven.  He left precisely when the clock, now convalescent, struck the half-hour.  At the door Mary said to him: 

“I won’t have any secrets from you, Simon.  It was I who stopped that clock.  I stopped it while they were bending down looking for music.  I wanted to be as sure as I could of a good excuse for me suggesting that he ought to take her home.  I just wanted to get him out of the house.”

“But why?” asked Simon.

“I must leave that to you to guess,” said Mary, with a hint of tartness, but smiling.

Loggerheads and Richard Morfe met in Trafalgar Road.

“Good-night, Morfe.”

“’night, Loggerheads!”

And each passed on, without having stopped.

You can picture for yourself the breakfast of the brother and sister.

HOT POTATOES

I

It was considered by certain people to be a dramatic moment in the history of musical enterprise in the Five Towns when Mrs Swann opened the front door of her house at Bleakridge, in the early darkness of a November evening, and let forth her son Gilbert.  Gilbert’s age was nineteen, and he was wearing evening dress, a form of raiment that had not hitherto happened to him.  Over the elegant suit was his winter overcoat, making him bulky, and round what