And then, as the last gleam of Lilian’s white dress vanished down the garden path, I laid my head down on the table among the coffee-cups, and cried like a beaten child.

I got leave as soon as I could, and went abroad.  The morning after my return I noticed, while shaving, that there was a small square marble tablet placed against the wall of the colonel’s garden.  I got my opera-glass and read—­and pleasant reading it was—­the following inscription: 

IN AFFECTIONATE MEMORY

OF

B I N G O,

SECRETLY AND CRUELLY PUT TO DEATH,

IN COLD BLOOD,

BY A

NEIGHBOUR AND FRIEND.

JUNE, 1881.

If this explanation of mine ever reaches my neighbours’ eyes, I humbly hope they will have the humanity either to take away or tone down that tablet.  They cannot conceive what I suffer when curious visitors insist, as they do every day, on spelling out the words from our windows, and asking me countless questions about them!

Sometimes I meet the Curries about the village, and as they pass me with averted heads I feel myself growing crimson.  Travers is almost always with Lilian now.  He has given her a dog,—­a fox-terrier,—­and they take ostentatiously elaborate precautions to keep it out of my garden.

I should like to assure them here that they need not be under any alarm. 
I have shot one dog.

THAT BRUTE SIMMONS, By Arthur Morrison

Simmons’s infamous behaviour toward his wife is still matter for profound wonderment among the neighbours.  The other women had all along regarded him as a model husband, and certainly Mrs. Simmons was a most conscientious wife.  She toiled and slaved for that man, as any woman in the whole street would have maintained, far more than any husband had a right to expect.  And now this was what she got for it.  Perhaps he had suddenly gone mad.

Before she married Simmons, Mrs. Simmons had been the widowed Mrs. Ford.  Ford had got a berth as donkeyman on a tramp steamer, and that steamer had gone down with all hands off the Cape:  a judgment, the widow woman feared, for long years of contumacy, which had culminated in the wickedness of taking to the sea, and taking to it as a donkeyman—­an immeasurable fall for a capable engine-fitter.  Twelve years as Mrs. Ford had left her still childless, and childless she remained as Mrs. Simmons.

As for Simmons, he, it was held, was fortunate in that capable wife.  He was a moderately good carpenter and joiner, but no man of the world, and he wanted one.  Nobody could tell what might not have happened to Tommy Simmons if there had been no Mrs. Simmons to take care of him.  He was a meek and quiet man, with a boyish face and sparse, limp whiskers.  He had no vices (even his pipe departed him after