in intensity it could scarcely grow.) Urquhart was saying something about bad luck and shoulders; it was decent of Urquhart to say that.  In fact, things were going really well till Hilary, after saying, “Good-bye, glad to have met you,” added to it the afterthought, “You must come and stay at my uncle’s place in Sussex some time.  Mustn’t he, Peter?” At the same time—­fitting accompaniment to the over-bold words—­Peter saw a half-crown, a round, solid, terrible half-crown, pressed into Urquhart’s unsuspecting hand.  Oh, horror!  Which was the worse, the invitation or the half-crown?  Peter could never determine.  Which was the more flagrant indecency—­that he, young Margerison of the lower fourth, should, without any encouragement whatever, have asked Urquhart of the sixth, captain of the fifteen, head of his house, to come and stay with him; or that his near relative should have pressed half-a-crown into the great Urquhart’s hand as if he expected him to go forthwith to the tuck-shop at the corner and buy tarts?  Peter wriggled, scarlet from his collar to his hair.

Urquhart was a polite person.  He took the half-crown.  He murmured something about being very glad.  He even smiled his pleasant smile.  And Peter, entirely unexpectedly to himself, did what he always did in the crises of his singularly disastrous life—­he exploded into a giggle.  So, some years later, he laughed helplessly and suddenly, standing among the broken fragments of his social reputation and his professional career.  He could not help it.  When the worst had happened, there was nothing else one could do.  One laughed from a sheer sense of the completeness of the disaster.  Peter had a funny, extremely amused laugh; hardly the laugh of a prosperous person; rather that of the unhorsed knight who acknowledges the utterness of his defeat and finds humour in the very fact.  It was as if misfortune—­and this misfortune of the half-crown and the invitation is not to be under-estimated—­sharpened all the faculties, never blunt, by which he apprehended humour.  So he looked from Hilary to Urquhart, and, mentally, from both to his cowering self, and exploded.

Urquhart had passed on.  Hilary said, “What’s the matter with you?” and Peter recovered himself and said “Nothing.”  He might have cried, with Miss Evelina Anvill, “Oh, my dear sir, I am shocked to death!” He did not.  He did not even say, “Why did you stamp us like that?” He would not for the world have hurt Hilary’s feelings, and vaguely he knew that this splendid, unusual half-brother of his was in some ways a sensitive person.

Hilary said, “The Urquharts ought to invite you to stay.  The connection is really close.  I believe your mother was devoted to that boy as a baby.  You’d like to go and stay there, wouldn’t you?”