“You know everybody, John.  Who’s the fellow?” George asked.

“Oh, a very able man indeed, one of the best speakers we have.  I should like to see a fight between him and Lewie:  they would not get on with each other.  This Stocks is a sort of living embodiment of the irritable Radical conscience, a very good thing in its way, but not quite in Lewie’s style.”

The fifth cutting mentioned the presence of Mr. Haystoun at three garden-parties, and hinted the possibility of a mistress soon to be at Etterick.

George lay back in his chair gasping.  “I never thought it would come to this.  I always thought Lewie the least impressionable of men.  I wonder what sort of woman he has fallen in love with.  But it may not be true.”

“We’ll pray that it isn’t true.  But I was never quite sure of him.  You know there was always an odd romantic strain in the man.  The ordinary smart, pretty girl, who adorns the end of a dinner-table and makes an admirable mistress of a house, he would never think twice about.  But for all his sanity Lewie has many cranks, and a woman might get him on that side.”

“Don’t talk of it.  I can picture the horrid reality.  He will marry some thin-lipped creature who will back him in all his madness, and his friends will have to bid him a reluctant farewell.  Or, worse still, there are scores of gushing, sentimental girls who might capture him.  I wish old Wratislaw were here to ask him what he thinks, for he knows Lewie better than any of us.  Is he a member here?”

“Oh yes, he is a member, but I don’t think he comes much.  You people are too frivolous for him.”

“Well, that is all the good done by subscribing to a news-cutting agency for news of one’s friends.  I feel as low as ditch water.  There is that idiot who goes off to the ends of the earth for three years, and when he comes back his friends get no good of him for the confounded women.”  George echoed the ancient complaint which is doubtless old as David and Jonathan.

Then these two desolated young men, in view of their friend’s defection, were full of sad memories, much as relations after a funeral hymn the acts of the deceased.

George lit a cigar and smoked it savagely.  “So that is the end of Lewis!  And to think I knew the fool at school and college and couldn’t make a better job of him than this!  Do you remember, John, how we used to call him ‘Vaulting Ambition,’ because he won the high jump and was a cocky beggar in general?”

“And do you remember when he got his First, and they wanted him to stand for a fellowship, but he was keen to get out of England and travel?  Do you remember that last night at Heston, when he told us all he was going to do, and took a bet with Wratislaw about it?”

It is probable that this sad elegy would have continued for hours, had not a servant approached with letters, which he distributed, two to Arthur Mordaunt and one to Mr. Winterham.  A close observer might have seen that two of the envelopes were identical.  Arthur slipped one into his pocket, but tore open the other and read.