“‘It’s Mr. Simpson, the curate,’ he said.

“It seemed rude to be too surprised, so I just rattled off some of the usual congratulations.  Gerard didn’t say a word.  He simply looked and looked, and there was something beautiful to me in his shame and backwardness and hesitation.

“‘It’s very unexpected,’ he blurted out at last.  ’I thought I was going to take care of her always.  It is going to make a great difference in my life.’

“‘I know how you always devoted yourself to her,’ I said.

“‘I had made up my mind never to marry,’ he went on.  ’How could I marry?—­for it would have been like turning her out of doors.  She was too ill and helpless and despondent to live by herself, and had I brought a third person into the family it would have been misery all round.’

“Still I said nothing.

“‘Jess,’ he said suddenly, ’don’t you understand?  Can’t you understand?’

“In fact, I did understand very well.  It explained a heap of things—­why he had always acted so strangely—­sometimes so devoted to me, sometimes so distant; crazy to hold my hand one day and avoiding me the next.  It was no wonder he had made me utterly desperate and piqued me into accepting the captain.  Then he said:  ‘Jess, Jess!’ like that; and ’for God’s sake, was it too late?’

“I couldn’t trust myself to speak and I could feel my lips trembling.  I didn’t sob or anything, but the tears just rolled down my cheeks.  Wasn’t it a dead giveaway?  It’s awful to care for a man as much as that.  I thought it was splendid of him that he didn’t try to kiss me.  He simply took my hand and pulled off the captain’s ring and said I had to give it back to him at once.  Then I broke down altogether and began to cry like a baby, while Gerard got out and emptied the kerosene from the oil lamps into the exhaust valves.  You see, pieces of scale from the inside of the cylinders had wedged against the exhaust-valve seats so that they wouldn’t close tight, but leaked and leaked.  Gerard said that new Mantons always feed too rich a mixture at first and that he knew what was the matter the moment he stuck his fingers in.

“We went home on the second speed so that Gerard could steer with one hand.

“Oh, the captain?  He acted kind of miserable at first, and was awfully sarcastic about being a gentleman and not a gas-engineer.  But I said the modern idea was to be both.  He got himself transferred home and I really think it was the making of him—­for what do you think happened last week?  He won the nonstop London to Glasgow race on an eighteen horsepower Renault.  I felt quite proud of him.

“He has asked Gerard and me and the Manton to spend a month with him in England when we go abroad.  He said I’d probably be pleased to hear that he had made a lovely garage out of his ancestral Norman chapel.  But I suppose that was just his English humor, you know.  Anyway, we are the best of friends, and if I ever see him again I’ll give him a double toot on my French horn.”