“And you will marry me?”

“I suppose I’ve got to,” she replied.  And with the old pantherine twist of her body she slid from her easy-chair to the ground and buried her face on my knees.

And that is the end of my story.  We were quietly married three weeks afterwards.  Agatha, wishing to humour a maniac for whom she retained an unreasonable affection, came to the wedding and treated Lola as only a sweet lady could.  But my doings passed her understanding.  As for Jane, my other sister, she cast me from her.  People who did these things, she maintained, must bear the consequences.  I bore them bravely.  It is only now that my name is beginning to be noised abroad as that of one who speaks with some knowledge on certain social questions that Jane holds out the olive branch of fraternal peace.  After a brief honeymoon Lola insisted on joining me in Barbara’s Building.  A set of rooms next to mine was vacant, and Campion, who welcomed a new worker, had the two sets thrown into what house-agents term a commodious flat.  She is now Lady Superior of the Institution.  The title is Campion’s, and for some odd feminine reason Lola is delighted with it.

Yes, this is the end of the story which I began (it seems in a previous incarnation) at Murglebed-on-Sea.

The maiming of Lola’s beauty has been the last jest which the Arch-Jester has practised on me.  I fancy he thought that this final scurvy trick would wipe Simon de Gex for ever out of the ranks of his rivals.  But I flatter myself that, having snapped my fingers in his face, the last laugh has been on my side.  He has withdrawn discomfited from the conflict and left me master of the ground.  Love conquers all, even the Arch-Jester.

There are some who still point to me as one who has deliberately ruined a brilliant career, who pity me as one who has gone under, who speak with shrugged shoulders and uplifted eyebrows at my unfortunate marriage and my obscure and cranky occupation.  The world, they say, was at my feet.  So it was.  But what the pitying critics lack the grace to understand is that better than to have it under one’s feet is to have it, or that of it which matters, at one’s heart.

I sit in this tiny hotel by the sea and reflect that it is over three years since I awoke from death and assumed a new avatar.  And since my marriage, what have been the happenings?

Dale has just been elected for the Fensham Division of Westmoreland, and he has already begun the line of sturdy young Kynnersleys, of which I had eumoirous dreams long ago.  Quast and the cats have passed into alien hands.  Anastasius Papadopoulos is dead.  He died three months ago of angina pectoris, and Lola was with him at the end.  Eleanor Faversham has married a Colonial bishop.  Campion, too, has married—­and married the last woman in the world to whom one would have thought of mating him—­a frivolous butterfly of a creature who drags him to dinner-parties and Ascot and suppers