“Is this yours?” she asked.

Now whose could it have been but mine?  The ridiculous question worried me, off and on, all the evening.

CHAPTER VII

The murder is out.  A paragraph has appeared in the newspapers to the effect that the marriage arranged between Mr. Simon de Gex and Miss Eleanor Faversham will not take place.  It has also become common knowledge that I am resigning my seat in Parliament on account of ill-health.  That is the reason rightly assigned by my acquaintances for the rupture of my engagement.  I am being rapidly killed by the doleful kindness of my friends.  They are so dismally sympathetic.  Everywhere I go there are long faces and solemn hand-shakes.  In order to cheer myself I gave a little dinner-party at the club, and the function might have been a depressed wake with my corpse in a coffin on the table.  My sisters, dear, kind souls, follow me with anxious eyes as if I were one of their children sickening for chicken-pox.  They upbraid me for leaving them in ignorance, and in hushed voices inquire as to my symptoms.  They both came this morning to the Albany to see what they could do for me.  I don’t see what they can do, save help Rogers put studs in my shirts.  They expressed such affectionate concern that at last I cried out: 

“My dear girls, if you don’t smile, I’ll sit upon the hearthrug and howl like a dog.”

Then they exchanged glances and broke into hectic gaiety, dear things, under the impression that they were brightening me up.  I am being deluged with letters.  I had no idea I was such a popular person.  They come from high placed and lowly, from constituents whom my base and servile flattery have turned into friends, from Members of Parliament, from warm-hearted dowagers and from little girls who have inveigled me out to lunch for the purpose of confiding to me their love affairs.  I could set up as a general practitioner of medicine on the advice that is given me.  I am recommended cod-liver oil, lung tonic, electric massage, abdominal belts, warm water, mud baths, Sandow’s treatment, and every patent medicament save rat poison.  I am urged to go to health resorts ranging geographically from the top of the Jungfrau to Central Africa.  All kinds of worthy persons have offered to nurse me.  Old General Wynans writes me a four-page letter to assure me that I have only to go to his friend Dr. Eustace Adams, of Wimpole Street, to be cured like a shot.  I happen to know that Eustace Adams is an eminent gynecologist.

And the worst of it all is that these effusions written in the milk of human kindness have to be answered.  Dale is not here.  I have to sit down at my desk and toil like a galley slave.  I am being worn to a shadow.