“Nothing.  What a surly brute you’re getting.  Got a cigarette?”

Jimmy threw his case over.

“By the way,” he said with overdone carelessness, “I’ve got some news for you.  It’ll be in all the papers to-morrow, so I thought I might as well tell you first.”  There was a little pause.

“Well?” said Sangster shortly.

Jimmy struck a match on the sole of his shoe.

“I’m engaged,” he said, “to Christine.”

It seemed a long, long time before Sangster moved or spoke.  After a moment Jimmy Challoner swung round irritably.

“Well, why don’t you say something?” he demanded.  “It’s a nice friendly way to receive news.  Why the devil don’t you say something?” he asked again angrily.

Sangster said something then; something which Jimmy had never expected.

“You ought to be shot!”

And then the silence fell once more.

Jimmy kicked at the blazing coals furiously; he had got very red.

“You ought to be shot!” said Sangster again.  He rose to his feet; he threw his unsmoked cigarette into the grate and walked towards the door.

Jimmy turned.

“Here—­come back!  Where are you going?  Of all the bad-tempered beggars——­” His face was abashed; there was a sort of wavering in his voice.  He moved a step forward to overtake his friend.

Sangster looked back at him with biting contempt in his honest eyes.

“I’m fed up with you,” he said.  “Sick to death of you and your abominable selfishness.  I—­oh, what’s the good of talking——?” He was gone with a slam of the door.

Jimmy dragged a chair forward and flung himself into it.  His face was a study; now and then he gave a little choked exclamation of rage.

What the deuce did Sangster mean by taking such an attitude?  It was like his infernal cheek.  It was no business of his if he chose to get engaged to Christine and half a dozen other girls at the same time.  Anyone would think he had done a shabby trick by asking her to marry him; anyone would think that there had been something disgraceful in having done so; anyone would think——­

“Damn it all!” said Jimmy Challoner.

He took a cigarette and lit it; but it went out almost immediately, and he flung it into the fire and lit another.

In a minute or two he had thrown that away also; he lay back in his chair and closed his eyes.

He was an engaged man—­it was no novelty.  He had been engaged before to a woman whom he adored.  Now he was engaged to Christine, the girl who had been his boyhood’s sweetheart; a girl whom he had not seen for years.

He wondered if she believed that he loved her.  He sat up, frowning.  He did love her—­of course he did; or, at least, he would when they were married and settled down.  Men always loved their wives—­decent men, that is.

He tried to believe that.  He tried to forget the heaps and heaps of unhappy marriages which had been brought before his notice; friends of his own—­all jolly decent chaps, too.