a fight between the two.  Bidlake funked it and never turned up.  My advice to Fairfax was, whenever he met Bidlake, to give him the soundest thrashing he could.  That night at Soto’s I caught sight of Fairfax some time before dinner.  He was talking to the woman who had been his wife, and he had evidently been drinking.  He drew me on one side.  ‘To-night,’ he told me, ’I am going to settle accounts with Bidlake.’  ‘Where?’ I asked.  ‘Here,’ he answered.  He went out to the theatre, I upstairs to dine.  That was the extent of the knowledge I possessed which enabled me to predict some unwonted happening that night.  Fairfax was a bedrugged and bedrunken decadent who had not the courage afterwards to face what he had done.  That is all.”

The hand slipped from Francis’ shoulder.  Francis, with a smile, held out his own.  They stood there for a moment with clasped hands—­a queer, detached moment, as it seemed to Francis, in a life which during the last few months had been full of vivid sensations.  From outside came the lazy sounds of the drowsy summer morning—­the distant humming of a mowing machine, the drone of a reaper in the field beyond, the twittering of birds in the trees, even the soft lapping of the stream against the stone steps.  The man whose hand he was holding seemed to Francis to have become somehow transformed.  It was as though he had dropped a mask and were showing a more human, a more kindly self.  Francis wondered no longer at the halting gallop of the horses in the field.

“You’ll be good to Margaret?” Sir Timothy begged.  “She’s had a wretched time.”

Francis smiled confidently.

“I’m going to make up for it, sir,” he promised.  “And this South American trip,” he continued, as they turned towards the French windows, “you’ll call that off?”

Sir Timothy hesitated.

“I am not quite sure.”

When they reached the garden, Lady Cynthia was alone.  She scarcely glanced at Francis.  Her eyes were anxiously fixed upon his companion.

“Margaret has gone in to make the cocktails herself,” she explained.  “We have both sworn off absinthe for the rest of our lives, and we know Hedges can’t be trusted to make one without.”

“I’ll go and help her,” Francis declared.

Lady Cynthia passed her arm through Sir Timothy’s.

“I want to know about South America,” she begged.  “The sight of those trunks worries me.”

Sir Timothy’s casual reply was obviously a subterfuge.  They crossed the lawn and the rustic bridge, almost in silence, passing underneath the pergola of roses to the sheltered garden at the further end.  Then Lady Cynthia paused.

“You are not going to South America,” she pleaded, “alone?”

Sir Timothy took her hands.