‘How big is the lake?’ I asked.

‘How long is it, Ol?’ he demanded of Colclough.  ’A couple of miles?’

‘Not it!  About a mile.  Adagio!’

They proceeded with Brahms.

‘He ran with you all the way to the station, didn’t he?’ Mrs Brindley suggested to Mrs Colclough.

‘I should just say he did!’ Mrs Colclough concurred.  ’He wanted to get warm, and then he was awfully afraid lest we should miss it.’

‘I thought you were on the lake practically all night!’ I exclaimed.

’All night!  Well, I don’t know what you call all night.  But I was back in Bursley before eleven o’clock, I’m sure.’

I then contrived to discover the Gazette in an unsearched pocket, and I gave it to Mrs Colclough to read.  Mrs Brindley looked over her shoulder.

There was no slightest movement of depreciation on Mrs Colclough’s part.  She amiably smiled as she perused the Gazette’s version of Fuge’s version of the lake episode.  Here was the attitude of the woman whose soul is like crystal.  It seems to me that most women would have blushed, or dissented, or simulated anger, or failed to conceal vanity.  But Mrs Coclough might have been reading a fairy tale, for any emotion she displayed.

‘Yes,’ she said blandly; ’from the things Annie used to tell me about him sometimes, I should say that was just how he would talk.  They seem to have thought quite a lot of him in London, then?’

‘Oh, rather!’ I said.  ’I suppose your sister knew him pretty well?’

‘Annie?  I don’t know.  She knew him.’

I distinctly observed a certain self-consciousness in Mrs Colclough as she made this reply.  Mrs Brindley had risen and with wifely attentiveness was turning over the music page for her husband.

VIII

Soon afterwards, for me, the night began to grow fantastic; it took on the colour of a gigantic adventure.  I do not suppose that either Mr Brindley or Mr Colclough, or the other person who presently arrived, regarded it as anything but a pleasant conviviality, but to a man of my constitution and habits it was an almost incredible occurrence.  The other person was the book-collecting doctor.  He arrived with a discreet tap on the window at midnight, to spend the evening.  Mrs Brindley had gone home and Mrs Colclough had gone to bed.  The book-collecting doctor refused champagne; he was, in fact, very rude to champagne in general.  He had whisky.  And those astonishing individuals, Messieurs Brindley and Colclough, secretly convinced of the justice of the attack on champagne, had whisky too.  And that still most astonishing individual, Loring of the B.M., joined them.  It was the hour of limericks.  Limericks were demanded for the diversion of the doctor, and I furnished them.  We then listened to the tale of the doctor’s experiences that day amid the sturdy, natural-minded