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THEY were playing hide-and-seek with bicycle lamps after tea. Dan had hung his lamp on the apple tree at the end of the hellebore bed in the walled garden, and was crouched by the gooseberry bushes ready to dash off when Una should spy him. He saw her lamp come into the garden and disappear as she hid it under her cloak. While he listened for her footsteps, somebody (they both thought it was Phillips the gardener) coughed in the corner of the herb-beds. ‘All right,’ Una shouted across the asparagus; ‘we aren’t hurting your old beds, Phippsey!’

She flashed her lantern towards the spot, and in its circle of light they saw a Guy Fawkes-looking man in a black cloak and a steeple-crowned hat, walking down the path beside Puck. They ran to meet him, and the man said something to them about rooms in their head. After a time they understood he was warning them not to catch colds.

‘You’ve a bit of a cold yourself, haven’t you?’ said Una, for he ended all his sentences with a consequential cough. Puck laughed.

‘Child,’ the man answered, ‘if it hath pleased Heaven to afflict me with an infirmity—’

‘Nay, nay,’ Puck struck In, ‘the maid spoke out of kindness. I know that half your cough is but a catch to trick the vulgar; and that’s a pity. There’s honesty enough in you, Nick, without rasping and hawking.’

‘Good people’—the man shrugged his lean shoulders—‘the vulgar crowd love not truth unadorned. Wherefore we philosophers must needs dress her to catch their eye or—ahem! —their ear.’

‘And what d’you think of that?’ said Puck solemnly to Dan.

‘I don’t know,’ he answered. ‘It sounds like lessons.’

‘Ah—well! There have been worse men than Nick Culpeper to take lessons from. Now, where can we sit that’s not indoors?’

‘In the hay-mow, next to old Middenboro,’ Dan suggested. ‘He doesn’t mind.’

‘Eh?’ Mr Culpeper was stooping over the pale hellebore blooms by the light of Una’s lamp. ‘Does Master Middenboro need my poor services, then?’

‘Save him, no!’ said Puck. ‘He is but a horse—next door to an ass, as you’ll see presently. Come!’

Their shadows jumped and slid on the fruit-tree walls. They filed out of the garden by the snoring pig-pound and the crooning hen-house, to the shed where Middenboro the old lawn-mower pony lives. His friendly eyes showed green in the light as they set their lamps down on the chickens’ drinking-trough outside, and pushed past to the hay-mow. Mr Culpeper stooped at the door.

‘Mind where you lie,’ said Dan. ‘This hay’s full of hedge-brishings.

‘In! in!’ said Puck. ‘You’ve lain in fouler places than this, Nick. Ah! Let us keep touch with the stars!’ He kicked open the top of the half-door, and pointed to the clear sky. ‘There be the planets you conjure with! What does your wisdom make of that wandering and variable star behind those apple boughs?’

The children smiled. A bicycle that they knew well was being walked down the steep lane. ‘Where?’ Mr Culpeper leaned forward quickly. ‘That? Some countryman’s lantern.’

‘Wrong, Nick,’ said Puck. ‘’Tis a singular bright star in Virgo, declining towards the house of Aquarius the water-carrier, who hath lately been afflicted by Gemini. Aren’t I right, Una?’ Mr Culpeper snorted contemptuously.

‘No. It’s the village nurse going down to the Mill about some fresh twins that came there last week. Nurse,’ Una called, as the light stopped on the flat, ‘when can I see the Morris twins? And how are they?’

‘Next Sunday, perhaps. Doing beautifully,’ the Nurse called back, and with a ping-ping-ping of the bell brushed round the corner.

‘Her uncle’s a vetinary surgeon near Banbury,’ Una explained, and if you ring her bell at night, it rings right beside her bed—not downstairs at all. Then she ’umps up—she always keeps a pair of dry boots in the fender, you know—and goes anywhere she’s wanted. We help her bicycle through gaps sometimes. Most of her babies do beautifully. She told us so herself.’

‘I doubt not, then, that she reads in my books,’ said Mr Culpeper quietly. ‘Twins at the Mill!’ he muttered half aloud. “And again He sayeth, Return, ye children of men.” ‘

‘Are you a doctor or a rector?’ Una asked, and Puck with a shout turned head over heels in the hay. But Mr Culpeper was quite serious. He told them that he was a physician-astrologer—a doctor who knew all about the stars as well as all about herbs for medicine. He said that the sun, the moon, and five Planets, called Jupiter, Mars, Mercury, Saturn, and Venus, governed everybody and everything in the world. They all lived in Houses—he mapped out some of them against the dark with a busy forefinger—and they moved from House to House like pieces at draughts; and they went loving and hating each other all over the skies. If you knew their likes and dislikes, he said, you could make them cure your patient and hurt your enemy, and find out the secret causes of things. He talked of these five Planets as though they belonged to him, or as though he were playing long games against them. The children burrowed in the hay up to their chins, and looked out over the half-door at the solemn, star-powdered sky till they seemed to be falling upside down into it, while Mr Culpeper talked about ‘trines’ and ‘oppositions’ and ‘conjunctions’ and ‘sympathies’ and ‘antipathies’ in a tone that just matched things.

A rat ran between Middenboro’s feet, and the old pony stamped.

‘Mid hates rats,’ said Dan, and passed him over a lock of hay. ‘I wonder why.’

‘Divine Astrology tells us,’ said Mr Culpeper. ‘The horse, being a martial beast that beareth man to battle, belongs naturally to the red planet Mars—the Lord of War. I would show you him, but he’s too near his setting. Rats and mice, doing their businesses by night, come under the dominion of our Lady the Moon. Now between Mars and Luna, the one red, t’other white, the one hot t’other cold and so forth, stands, as I have told you, a natural antipathy, or, as you say, hatred. Which antipathy their creatures do inherit. Whence, good people, you may both see and hear your cattle stamp in their stalls for the self-same causes as decree the passages of the stars across the unalterable face of Heaven! Ahem!’ Puck lay along chewing a leaf. They felt him shake with laughter, and Mr Culpeper sat up stiffly.

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‘I myself” said he, ‘have saved men’s lives, and not a few neither, by observing at the proper time—there is a time, mark you, for all things under the sun—by observing, I say, so small a beast as a rat in conjunction with so great a matter as this dread arch above us.’ He swept his hand across the sky. ‘Yet there are those,’ he went on sourly, ‘who have years without knowledge.’

‘Right,’ said Puck. ‘No fool like an old fool.’

Mr Culpeper wrapped his cloak round him and sat still while the children stared at the Great Bear on the hilltop.

‘Give him time,’ Puck whispered behind his hand. ‘He turns like a timber-tug—all of a piece.’

‘Ahem!’ Mr Culpeper said suddenly. ‘I’ll prove it to you. When I was physician to Saye’s Horse, and fought the King—or rather the man Charles Stuart—in Oxfordshire (I had my learning at Cambridge), the plague was very hot all around us. I saw it at close hands. He who says I am ignorant of the plague, for example, is altogether beside the bridge.’

‘We grant it,’ said Puck solemnly. ‘But why talk of the plague this rare night?’

‘To prove my argument. This Oxfordshire plague, good people, being generated among rivers and ditches, was of a werish, watery nature. Therefore it was curable by drenching the patient in cold water, and laying him in wet cloths; or at least, so I cured some of them. Mark this. It bears on what shall come after.’

‘Mark also, Nick,’ said Puck, ‘that we are not your College of Physicians, but only a lad and a lass and a poor lubberkin. Therefore be plain, old Hyssop on the Wall!’

‘To be plain and in order with you, I was shot in the chest while gathering of betony from a brookside near Thame, and was took by the King’s men before their Colonel, one Blagg or Bragge, whom I warned honestly that I had spent the week past among our plague-stricken. He flung me off into a cowshed, much like this here, to die, as I supposed; but one of their priests crept in by night and dressed my wound. He was a Sussex man like myself.’

‘Who was that?’ said Puck suddenly. ‘Zack Tutshom?’

‘No, Jack Marget,’ said Mr Culpeper.

‘Jack Marget of New College? The little merry man that stammered so? Why a plague was stuttering Jack at Oxford then?’ said Puck.

‘He had come out of Sussex in hope of being made a Bishop when the King should have conquered the rebels, as he styled us Parliament men. His College had lent the King some monies too, which they never got again, no more than simple Jack got his bishopric. When we met he had had a bitter bellyful of King’s promises, and wished to return to his wife and babes. This came about beyond expectation, for, so soon as I could stand of my wound, the man Blagge made excuse that I had been among the plague, and Jack had been tending me, to thrust us both out from their camp. The King had done with Jack now that Jack’s College had lent the money, and Blagge’s physician could not abide me because I would not sit silent and see him butcher the sick. (He was a College of Physicians man!) So Blagge, I say, thrust us both out, with many vile words, for a pair of pestilent, prating, pragmatical rascals.’

‘Ha! Called you pragmatical, Nick?’ Puck started up. ‘High time Oliver came to purge the land! How did you and honest Jack fare next?’

‘We were in some sort constrained to each other’s company. I was for going to my house in Spitalfields, he would go to his parish in Sussex; but the plague was broke out and spreading through Wiltshire, Berkshire, and Hampshire, and he was so mad distracted to think that it might even then be among his folk at home that I bore him company. He had comforted me in my distress. I could not have done less; and I remembered that I had a cousin at Great Wigsell, near by Jack’s parish. Thus we footed it from Oxford, cassock and buff coat together, resolute to leave wars on the left side henceforth; and either through our mean appearances, or the plague making men less cruel, we were not hindered. To be sure, they put us in the stocks one half-day for rogues and vagabonds at a village under St Leonard’s forest, where, as I have heard, nightingales never sing; but the constable very honestly gave me back my Astrological Almanac, which I carry with me.’ Mr Culpeper tapped his thin chest. ‘I dressed a whitlow on his thumb. So we went forward.

‘Not to trouble you with impertinences, we fetched over against Jack Marget’s parish in a storm of rain about the day’s end. Here our roads divided, for I would have gone on to my cousin at Great Wigsell, but while Jack was pointing me out his steeple, we saw a man lying drunk, as he conceived, athwart the road. He said it would be one Hebden, a parishioner, and till then a man of good life; and he accused himself bitterly for an unfaithful shepherd, that had left his flock to follow princes. But I saw it was the plague, and not the beginnings of it neither. They had set out the plague-stone, and the man’s head lay on it.’

‘What’s a plague-stone?’ Dan whispered.

‘When the plague is so hot in a village that the neighbours shut the roads against ’em, people set a hollowed stone, pot, or pan, where such as would purchase victual from outside may lay money and the paper of their wants, and depart. Those that would sell come later—what will a man not do for gain? —snatch the money forth, and leave in exchange such goods as their conscience reckons fair value. I saw a silver groat in the water, and the man’s list of what he would buy was rain-pulped in his wet hand.

‘“My wife! Oh, my wife and babes!” says Jack of a sudden, and makes uphill—I with him.

‘A woman peers out from behind a barn, crying out that the village is stricken with the plague, and that for our lives’ sake we must avoid it.

‘“Sweetheart!” says Jack. “Must I avoid thee?” and she leaps at him and says the babes are safe. She was his wife.

‘When he had thanked God, even to tears, he tells me this was not the welcome he had intended, and presses me to flee the place while I was clean.

‘“Nay! The Lord do so to me and more also if I desert thee now,” I said. “These affairs are, under God’s leave, in some fashion my strength.”

‘“Oh, sir,” she says, “are you a physician? We have none.”

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‘“Then, good people,” said I, “I must e’en justify myself to you by my works.”

‘“Look—look ye,” stammers Jack, “I took you all this time for a crazy Roundhead preacher.” He laughs, and she, and then I—all three together in the rain are overtook by an unreasonable gust or clap of laughter, which none the less eased us. We call it in medicine the Hysterical Passion. So I went home with ’em.’

‘Why did you not go on to your cousin at Great Wigsell, Nick?’ Puck suggested. ‘’tis barely seven mile up the road.’

‘But the plague was here,’ Mr Culpeper answered, and pointed up the hill. ‘What else could I have done?’

‘What were the parson’s children called?’ said Una.

‘Elizabeth, Alison, Stephen, and Charles—a babe. I scarce saw them at first, for I separated to live with their father in a cart-lodge. The mother we put—forced—into the house with her babes. She had done enough.

‘And now, good people, give me leave to be particular in this case. The plague was worst on the north side of the street, for lack, as I showed ’em, of sunshine; which, proceeding from the Prime Mobile, or source of life (I speak astrologically), is cleansing and purifying in the highest degree. The plague was hot too by the corn-chandler’s, where they sell forage to the carters, extreme hot in both Mills, along the river, and scatteringly in other places, except, mark you, at the smithy. Mark here, that all forges and smith shops belong to Mars, even as corn and meat and wine shops acknowledge Venus for their mistress. There was no plague in the smithy at Munday’s Lane—’

‘Munday’s Lane? You mean our village? I thought so when you talked about the two Mills,’ cried Dan. ‘Where did we put the plague-stone? I’d like to have seen it.’

‘Then look at it now,’ said Puck, and pointed to the chickens’ drinking-trough where they had set their bicycle lamps. It was a rough, oblong stone pan, rather like a small kitchen sink, which Phillips, who never wastes anything, had found in a ditch and had used for his precious hens.

‘That?’ said Dan and Una, and stared, and stared, and stared. Mr Culpeper made impatient noises in his throat and went on.

‘I am at these pains to be particular, good people, because I would have you follow, so far as you may, the operations of my mind. That plague which I told you I had handled outside Wallingford in Oxfordshire was of a watery nature, conformable to the brookish riverine country it bred in, and curable, as I have said, by drenching in water. This plague of ours here, for all that it flourished along watercourses—every soul at both Mills died of it,—could not be so handled. Which brought me to a stand. Ahem!’

‘And your sick people in the meantime?’ Puck demanded.

‘We persuaded them on the north side of the street to lie out in Hitheram’s field. Where the plague had taken one, or at most two, in a house, folk would not shift for fear of thieves in their absence. They cast away their lives to die among their goods.’

‘Human nature,’ said Puck. ‘I’ve seen it time and again. How did your sick do in the fields?’

‘They died not near so thick as those that kept within doors, and even then they died more out of distraction and melancholy than plague. But I confess, good people, I could not in any sort master the sickness, or come at a glimmer of its nature or governance. To be brief, I was flat bewildered at the brute malignity of the disease, and so—did what I should have done before—dismissed all conjectures and apprehensions that had grown up within me, chose a good hour by my Almanac, clapped my vinegar-cloth to my face, and entered some empty houses, resigned to wait upon the stars for guidance.’

‘At night? Were you not horribly frightened?’ said Puck.

‘I dared to hope that the God who hath made man so nobly curious to search out His mysteries might not destroy a devout seeker. In due time—there’s a time, as I have said, for everything under the sun—I spied a whitish rat, very puffed and scabby, which sat beneath the dormer of an attic through which shined our Lady the Moon. Whilst I looked on him—and her—she was moving towards old cold Saturn, her ancient ally—the rat creeped languishingly into her light, and there, before my eyes, died. Presently his mate or companion came out, laid him down beside there, and in like fashion died too. Later—an hour or less to midnight—a third rat did e’en the same; always choosing the moonlight to die in. This threw me into an amaze, since, as we know, the moonlight is favourable, not hurtful, to the creatures of the Moon; and Saturn, being friends with her, as you would say, was hourly strengthening her evil influence. Yet these three rats had been stricken dead in very moonlight. I leaned out of the window to see which of Heaven’s host might be on our side, and there beheld I good trusty Mars, very red and heated, bustling about his setting. I straddled the roof to see better.

‘Jack Marget came up street going to comfort our sick in Hitheram’s field. A tile slipped under my foot.

Says he, heavily enough, “Watchman, what of the night?”

‘“Heart up, Jack,” says I. “Methinks there’s one fighting for us that, like a fool, I’ve forgot all this summer.” My meaning was naturally the planet Mars.

‘“Pray to Him then,” says he. “I forgot Him too this summer.”

‘He meant God, whom he always bitterly accused himself of having forgotten up in Oxfordshire, among the King’s men. I called down that he had made amends enough for his sin by his work among the sick, but he said he would not believe so till the plague was lifted from ’em. He was at his strength’s end—more from melancholy than any just cause. I have seen this before among priests and overcheerful men. I drenched him then and there with a half-cup of waters, which I do not say cure the plague, but are excellent against heaviness of the spirits.’

‘What were they?’ said Dan.

‘White brandy rectified, camphor, cardamoms, ginger, two sorts of pepper, and aniseed.’

‘Whew!’ said Puck. ‘Waters you call ’em!’

‘Jack coughed on it valiantly, and went downhill with me. I was for the Lower Mill in the valley, to note the aspect of the Heavens. My mind had already shadowed forth the reason, if not the remedy, for our troubles, but I would not impart it to the vulgar till I was satisfied. That practice may be perfect, judgment ought to be sound, and to make judgment sound is required an exquisite knowledge. Ahem! I left Jack and his lantern among the sick in Hitheram’s field. He still maintained the prayers of the so-called Church, which were rightly forbidden by Cromwell.’

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‘You should have told your cousin at Wigsell,’ said Puck, ’and Jack would have been fined for it, and you’d have had half the money. How did you come so to fail in your duty, Nick?’

Mr Culpeper laughed—his only laugh that evening—and the children jumped at the loud neigh of it.

‘We were not fearful of men’s judgment in those days,’ he answered. ‘Now mark me closely, good people, for what follows will be to you, though not to me, remarkable. When I reached the empty Mill, old Saturn, low down in the House of the Fishes, threatened the Sun’s rising-place. Our Lady the Moon was moving towards the help of him (understand, I speak astrologically). I looked abroad upon the high Heavens, and I prayed the Maker of ’em for guidance. Now Mars sparkingly withdrew himself below the sky. On the instant of his departure, which I noted, a bright star or vapour leaped forth above his head (as though he had heaved up his sword), and broke all about in fire. The cocks crowed midnight through the valley, and I sat me down by the mill-wheel, chewing spearmint (though that’s an herb of Venus), and calling myself all the asses’ heads in the world! ’Twas plain enough now!’

‘What was plain?’ said Una.

‘The true cause and cure of the plague. Mars, good fellow, had fought for us to the uttermost. Faint though he had been in the Heavens, and this had made me overlook him in my computations, he more than any of the other planets had kept the Heavens—which is to say, had been visible some part of each night wellnigh throughout the year. Therefore his fierce and cleansing influence, warring against the Moon, had stretched out to kill those three rats under my nose, and under the nose of their natural mistress, the Moon. I had known Mars lean half across Heaven to deal our Lady the Moon some shrewd blow from under his shield, but I had never before seen his strength displayed so effectual.’

‘I don’t understand a bit. Do you mean Mars killed the rats because he hated the Moon?’ said Una.

‘That is as plain as the pikestaff with which Blagge’s men pushed me forth,’ Mr Culpeper answered. ‘I’ll prove it. Why had the plague not broken out at the blacksmith’s shop in Munday’s Lane? Because, as I’ve shown you, forges and smithies belong naturally to Mars, and, for his honour’s sake, Mars ’ud keep ’em clean from the creatures of the Moon. But was it like, think you, that he’d come down and rat-catch in general for lazy, ungrateful mankind? That were working a willing horse to death. So, then, you can see that the meaning of the blazing star above him when he set was simply this: “Destroy and burn the creatures of the moon, for they are the root of your trouble. And thus, having shown you a taste of my power, good people, adieu.”’

‘Did Mars really say all that?’ Una whispered.

‘Yes, and twice so much as that to any one who had ears to hear. Briefly, he enlightened me that the plague was spread by the creatures of the Moon. The Moon, our Lady of ill-aspect, was the offender. My own poor wits showed me that I, Nick Culpeper, had the people in my charge, God’s good providence aiding me, and no time to lose neither.

‘I posted up the hill, and broke into Hitheram’s field amongst ’em all at prayers.

‘“Eureka, good people!” I cried, and cast down a dead mill-rat which I’d found. “Here’s your true enemy, revealed at last by the stars.”

‘“Nay, but I’m praying,” says Jack. His face was as white as washed silver.

‘“There’s a time for everything under the sun,” says I. “If you would stay the plague, take and kill your rats.”

‘“Oh, mad, stark mad!” says he, and wrings his hands.

‘A fellow lay in the ditch beside him, who bellows that he’d as soon die mad hunting rats as be preached to death on a cold fallow. They laughed round him at this, but Jack Marget falls on his knees, and very presumptuously petitions that he may be appointed to die to save the rest of his people. This was enough to thrust ’em back into their melancholy.

‘“You are an unfaithful shepherd, jack,” I says. “Take a bat” (which we call a stick in Sussex) “and kill a rat if you die before sunrise. ’Twill save your people.”

‘“Aye, aye. Take a bat and kill a rat,” he says ten times over, like a child, which moved ’em to ungovernable motions of that hysterical passion before mentioned, so that they laughed all, and at least warmed their chill bloods at that very hour—one o’clock or a little after—when the fires of life burn lowest. Truly there is a time for everything; and the physician must work with it—ahem!—or miss his cure. To be brief with you, I persuaded ’em, sick or sound, to have at the whole generation of rats throughout the village. And there’s a reason for all things too, though the wise physician need not blab ’em all. Imprimis, or firstly, the mere sport of it, which lasted ten days, drew ’em most markedly out of their melancholy. I’d defy sorrowful job himself to lament or scratch while he’s routing rats from a rick. Secundo, or secondly, the vehement act and operation of this chase or war opened their skins to generous transpiration—more vulgarly, sweated ’em handsomely; and this further drew off their black bile—the mother of sickness. Thirdly, when we came to burn the bodies of the rats, I sprinkled sulphur on the faggots, whereby the onlookers were as handsomely suffumigated. This I could not have compassed if I had made it a mere physician’s business; they’d have thought it some conjuration. Yet more, we cleansed, limed, and burned out a hundred foul poke-holes, sinks, slews, and corners of unvisited filth in and about the houses in the village, and by good fortune (mark here that Mars was in opposition to Venus) burned the corn-handler’s shop to the ground. Mars loves not Venus. Will Noakes the saddler dropped his lantern on a truss of straw while he was rat-hunting there.’

‘Had ye given Will any of that gentle cordial of yours, Nick, by any chance?’ said Puck.

‘A glass—or two glasses—not more. But as I would say, in fine, when we had killed the rats, I took ash, slag, and charcoal from the smithy, and burnt earth from the brickyard (I reason that a brickyard belongs to Mars), and rammed it with iron crowbars into the rat-runs and buries, and beneath all the house floors. The Creatures of the Moon hate all that Mars hath used for his own clean ends. For example—rats bite not iron.’

‘And how did poor stuttering Jack endure it?’ said Puck.

‘He sweated out his melancholy through his skin, and catched a loose cough, which I cured with electuaries, according to art. It is noteworthy, were I speaking among my equals, that the venom of the plague translated, or turned itself into, and evaporated, or went away as, a very heavy hoarseness and thickness of the head, throat, and chest. (Observe from my books which planets govern these portions of man’s body, and your darkness, good people, shall be illuminated—ahem!) None the less, the plague, qua plague, ceased and took off (for we only lost three more, and two of ’em had it already on ’em) from the morning of the day that Mars enlightened me by the Lower Mill.’ He coughed—almost trumpeted—triumphantly.

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‘It is proved,’ he jerked out. ‘I say I have proved my contention, which is, that by Divine Astrology and humble search into the veritable causes of things—at the proper time—the sons of wisdom may combat even the plague.’

‘H’m!’ Puck replied. ‘For my own part I hold that a simple soul —’

‘Mine? Simple, forsooth?’ said Mr Culpeper.

‘A very simple soul, a high courage tempered with sound and stubborn conceit, is stronger than all the stars in their courses. So I confess truly that you saved the village, Nick.’

‘I stubborn? I stiff-necked? I ascribed all my poor success, under God’s good providence, to Divine Astrology. Not to me the glory! You talk as that dear weeping ass Jack Marget preached before I went back to my work in Red Lion House, Spitalfields.’

‘Oh! Stammering Jack preached, did he? They say he loses his stammer in the pulpit.’

‘And his wits with it. He delivered a most idolatrous discourse when the plague was stayed. He took for his text: “The wise man that delivered the city.” I could have given him a better, such as: “There is a time for—” ‘

‘But what made you go to church to hear him?’ Puck interrupted. ‘Wail Attersole was your lawfully appointed preacher, and a dull dog he was!’

Mr Culpeper wriggled uneasily.

‘The vulgar,’ said he, ‘the old crones and—ahem! —the children, Alison and the others, they dragged me to the House of Rimmon by the hand. I was in two minds to inform on Jack for maintaining the mummeries of the falsely-called Church, which, I’ll prove to you, are founded merely on ancient fables—’

‘Stick to your herbs and planets,’ said Puck, laughing. ‘You should have told the magistrates, Nick, and had Jack fined. Again, why did you neglect your plain duty?’

‘Because—because I was kneeling, and praying, and weeping with the rest of ’em at the Altar-rails. In medicine this is called the Hysterical Passion. It may be—it may be.’

‘That’s as may be,’ said Puck. They heard him turn the hay. ‘Why, your hay is half hedge-brishings,’ he said. ‘You don’t expect a horse to thrive on oak and ash and thorn leaves, do you?’

Ping-ping-ping went the bicycle bell round the corner. Nurse was coming back from the mill.

‘Is it all right?’ Una called.

‘All quite right,’ Nurse called back. ‘They’re to be christened next Sunday.’

‘What? What?’ They both leaned forward across the half-door. it could not have been properly fastened, for it opened, and tilted them out with hay and leaves sticking all over them.

‘Come on! We must get those two twins’ names,’ said Una, and they charged uphill shouting over the hedge, till Nurse slowed up and told them. When they returned, old Middenboro had got out of his stall, and they spent a lively ten minutes chasing him in again by starlight.

[a short tale]

THE Doctor of the Gaol and his wife had gone to tennis in the Gardens, leaving their six-year-old son, William, in nominal care of his ayah, but actually to One Three Two and old Mahmud Ali, his mother’s dharzi, or sewing-man, who had made frocks for her mother since the day when skirts were skirts.One Three Two was a ‘lifer,’ who had unluckily shot a kinsman a little the wrong side of the British frontier. The killing was a matter he could no more have shirked than a decent Englishman his Club dues. The error in geography came from a head-wound picked up at Festubert, which had affected his co-ordinations. But the judge who tried the case made no allowance, and One Three Two only escaped the gallows on an appeal engineered and financed by the Colonel and officers of his old regiment, which he had left after twenty years of spotless service with a pension and—as was pointed out at the trial—urgent private affairs to settle.

His prison duties—he had been a noncommissioned officer—were to oversee the convicts working in the Doctor’s garden, where, bit by bit, he took it upon his battered and dishonoured head to be William’s bodyguard or, as he called it, ‘sacrifice.’ Few people are more faithful to such trusts than the man of one fair killing, and William made him chief of all his court, with honorary title of Busi-bandah, which means much the same as ‘Goosey-gander.’

So, when William came out with his scooter into the afternoon smell of newly watered paths, which attracts little snakes, One Three Two, with a long-handled hoe, kept within striking distance of him at every turn, till the child wearied of the play.

‘Put away, Busi-bandah,’ he commanded, and climbed up the veranda steps to old Mahmud, cross-legged on the carpet, surrounded by beautiful coloured stuffs. It was a dinner dress, and Mahmud held a seam of it between his toes.

‘Drink tobacco,’ said William spaciously. ‘They will not return till dark.’

‘But this stuff will tell,’ said Mahmud above the frock, ‘for the smell of hukah tobacco clings.’

‘Take of my father’s cigarettes.’ William pointed indoors with his chin.

One Three Two went into the drawing-room and came back with a couple of cigarettes from the store beside the wireless cabinet.

‘What word of the Padishah’s sickness?’ he asked.

William swelled importantly. It was one of his prerogatives to announce what the Man in the Box said about the sick Padishah.

‘He slept little last night, because of the fever. He does not desire to eat. None the less his strength holds. Five doctors have taken oath to this. There will be no more talk out of the Bokkus till after I am asleep.’

‘What does thy father say?’ Mahmud asked.

‘My father says that it is in the balance—thus!’ William picked up Mahmud’s embroidery-scissors and tried to make them ride on his forefinger.

‘Have a care! They may cut. Give me.’ Mahmud took them back again.

‘But my mother says that, now all people everywhere are praying for the Padishah’s health, their prayers will turn the balance, and he will be well.’

‘If Allah please,’ said Mahmud, who in private life was Imam or leader of the little mud mosque of the village by the Gaol gates, where he preached on Fridays.

‘I also pray every night,’ William confided cheerily. ‘After “Make me a good boy,” I stand to ’tenshin, and I say: “God save the King.” Is that good namaz (prayer)?’

‘There is neither hem nor border nor fringe to the Mercy of Allah,’ Mahmud quoted.

‘Well spoken, tailor-man.’ One Three Two laughed. He was a hard-bitten Afridi from the Khaiber hills, who, except among infidels, rode his faith with a light hand.

‘Good talk,’ William echoed. ‘For when I had the fever last year, and my father said it was tach-an-go—that is, in the balance—my mother prayed for me, and I became well. Oh, here is my blue buttony-bokkus! ‘ He reached out for Mahmud’s lovely, old, lacquered Kashmiri pencase, where oddments were kept, and busied himself with the beads and sequins. One Three Two rolled a deep-set eye towards Mahmud.

‘That news of the Padishah is bad,’ said he. ‘Hast thou inquired of the Names, Imam, since his sickness came?’

The Koran discourages magic, but it is lawful to consult the Names of Allah according to a system called the Abjad, in which each letter of the Arabic alphabet carries one of the Nine-and-ninety Names of God beginning with that letter. Each Name has its arbitrary Number, Quality, Element, Zodiacal sign, Planet, and so forth. These tables are often written out and used as amulets. Even William, who thought he knew everything, did not know that Mahmud had sewn an Abjad into the collar of his cold-weather dressing-gown.

‘All the world has questioned,’ Mahmud began.

‘Doubtless. But I do not know much of the world from here. How came it with thee?’

‘I took the age of the Padishah, which is sixty-and-three. Now the Number Sixty carries for its attribute the Hearer. This may be good or bad, for Allah hears all things. Its star is Saturn, the outermost of the Seven. That is good and commanding. But its sign is the Archer, which is also the sign of the month (November) in which his sickness first struck the Padishah. Twice, then, must the Archer afflict the Padishah.’

One Three Two nodded. That seemed reasonable enough.

‘As for the Number Three, its attribute is the Assembler, which again may be good or bad. For who knows to what judgment Allah calls men together? Its sign is the Crab, which, being female, is in friendship with the Archer. It may be, then, that if the Archer spare the Padishah both now and later—for he will surely smite twice—the Padishah will be clear of his malady in the month of the Crab (late June or early July).’

‘And what is the Planet of the Number Three?’ said the other.

‘Mars assuredly. He is King. The Abjad does not lie. Hast thou used it?’

‘There was a priest of ours cast it for me, when I would learn how my affairs would go. The dog said, truly enough, that I should punish my cousin, but he said nothing of my punishment here.’

‘Did he reckon by thy name-letters or by thy age?’

‘By my name, I think. I am no great scholar.’

“Be merciful!’ said Mahmud. ‘No wonder thou art afflicted, O Zuhan Khan. Thy letter is Zad, which carries for its Name the Punisher. Its attribute is Terrible, and its quality Hate.’

‘All true,’ One Three Two returned. ‘Am I not here till I die? I submit myself to the fixed decree. And, certainly, were I free’—he chuckled impiously—‘my kin on the hills would kill me. But I live. Why? Because a man may draw back-pay, as it were, for his good deeds. I dug my Captain, who is now Colonel, out of some ground that fell upon him in Frangistan (France). It was part of our work. He said nothing—nor I. But seven years after—when I was condemned for that affair of my burnt cousin—he spent money like water on lawyers and lying witnesses for my sake. Otherwise——’ One Three Two jerked his beard towards a little black shed on a roof outside the high garden wall. No one had ever told William what it was for.

‘It may be thy good deed in saving that Captain’s life was permitted to count in thy balance,’ Mahmud volunteered.

‘And I am no more than a convict. . . . What is the order, Baba? I am here.’

William had suddenly shut the pencase. ‘Enough,’ he said. ‘Bring again my eskootah, Busi-bandah. I will be a horseman. I will play polo.’

Now little snakes, who have a habit of coming out on damp garden-paths, cast no warning shadow when a low sun is blinded by thick mango-trees.

‘It is brought,’ said One Three Two; but in place of getting it he said to Mahmud: ‘While he rides, I will tell thee a tale of the Padishah which my Colonel told me.’

‘No! Let be my eskootah. I will listen to that tale. Make me my place!’ said William.

It was not five steps to the man’s side, but by the time William had taken them, an inviting lap awaited him, into which he dropped, his left cheek on the right shoulder in its prison blanket, his right hand twined in the beard, and the rest of him relaxed along the curve of the right arm.

‘Begin, Busi-bandah,’ he commanded from off his throne.

‘By thy permission,’ One Three Two began. ‘Early in the year when thou wast born, which was the year I came to be with thee, Baba, my Colonel told me this tale to comfort my heart. It was when I—when I——’

‘Was to be hanged for thy bad cousin,’ said William, screwing up his eyes as he pointed with his left third finger to the hut on the roof. ‘I know.’

‘“Keep a thing from women and children, and sieves will hold water,”’ Mahmud chuckled in his big, silver-black beard.

‘Yes, Baba, that was the time,’ said One Three Two, recovering himself. ‘My Colonel told me that after the war in Frangistan was ended, the Padishah commanded that every man who had died in his service—and there were multitudes upon multitudes—should be buried according to his faith.’

William nodded. When he went out, he always met funeral processions on their way to the Moslem cemetery near the race-course; and, being a child below the age of personality, there were few details of wedding or burial that he had not known since he could ask questions.

‘This was done as commanded, and to each man was his tomb, with his name, rank, and service cut in white stone, all one pattern, whether he had been General or Sweeper—Sahib—Mussulman—Yahudi—Hubashi—or heathen. My Colonel told me that the burial-places resembled walled towns, divided by paths, and planted with trees and flowers, where all the world might come and walk.’

‘On Fridays,’ murmured William. Friday is the day when Muhammedan families visit their dead. He had often begged afternoons off for the servants to go there.

‘And every day. And when all was done, and the People of the Graves were laid at ease and in honour, it pleased the Padishah to cross the little water between Belait and Frangistan, and look upon them. He give order for his going in this way. He said: “Let there be neither music nor elephants nor princes about my way, nor at my stirrup. For it is a pilgrimage. I go to salute the People of the Graves.” Then he went over. And where he saw his dead laid in their multitudes, there he drew rein; there he saluted; there he laid flowers upon great stones after the custom of his people: And for that matter,’ One Three Two addressed Mahmud, ‘so do our women on Fridays. Yes, and the old women and the little staring children of Frangistan pressed him close, as he halted among the bricks and the ashes and the broken wood of the towns which had been killed in the War.’

‘Killed in the War,’ William answered vaguely.

‘But the People of the Graves waited behind their white walls, among the grass and flowers—orderly in their lines—as it were an inspection with all gear set out on the cots.’

One Three Two gathered the child closer as he grew heavier.

‘My Colonel told me this. And my Colonel said—and Allah be my witness I know!—it was killing cold weather. Frangistan is colder than all my own hills in winter—cold that cuts off a man’s toes. Yes! That is why I lack two toes, Baba. And bitter it was when the Padishah came in spring. The sun shone, but the winds cut. And, at the last, and the last, was a narrow cemetery, walled with high walls, entered by one door in a corner. Yes—like this Gaol-Khana. It was filled with our own people for the most part—Mussulmans who had served. It lay outside a city, among fields where the winds blew. Now, in the order of the Padishah’s pilgrimage, it was commanded that wheresoever he chose to draw rein, there should wait on him some General-sahib, who had fought near that place in the long War. Not princes, priests, nor elephants, but a General of his service. And so to this narrow, high-walled burial-place of the one gate came a General-sahib, sworded and spurred, with many medals, to wait the Padishah’s coming. And while he waited he clothed himself—for he had been sick—in his big coat, his Baritish warrum.’

‘I know,’ said William, rousing himself. ‘Mahmud made me a little one out of the old one of my father, when he came back. But Mahmud would not sew me any crowns or stars on the shoulder.’

Mahmud drew a quick breath (he had been putting away his hand sewing-machine) and went softly into the house. The sun was setting, and there was a change in the air.

‘Yes, all the world knows Baritish warrum. So the General waited, sheltering himself from the wind that blew through that gate till the feet of the Padishah were heard walking across the waste ground without.’

One Three Two reached up his left hand, took the cold-weather dressing-gown that Mahmud fetched from the nursery, and laid it lightly over William.

His voice went on in a soothing purr. ‘And when the feet of the Padishah were heard without the gate, that General stripped off his heavy coat and stood forth in his medalled uniform, as the order is. Then the Padishah entered. The General saluted, but the Padishah did not heed. He signed with his open hand thus, from right to left—my Colonel showed me—and he cried out “By Allah, O man, I conjure thee put on that coat on one breath! This is no season to catch sickness.” And he named the very sickness that was to fall upon himself five years after. So the General cast himself into that big coat again with speed, and in one breath the Padishah became in all respects again the Padishah. His equerries rehearsed the General’s name and honours, and the General saluted and put forward his sword-hilt to be touched, and he did the Padishah duty and attendance in that place through the appointed hour. And on the out-going the Padishah said to him: “ Take heed that never again, O man, do I find thee at such seasons without thy thick coat upon thee. For the good are scarce.” And he went down to the sea, and they cast off in the silence of ten thousand bare-headed. (He had forbidden music because it was a haj [pilgrimage].) And thus it was accomplished; and this, my Colonel told me, was his last act in his haj to the People of the Graves. . . . Wait thy prayer awhile, Mahmud. The child sleeps. When the Padishah was gone the General said to my Colonel, who was on leave in Frangistan, “By Allah, to the Padishah do I owe my life, for an hour coatless in that chill would have slain me!”’

‘The Padishah forenamed the sickness that fell upon himself?’ Mahmud asked.

William breathed evenly.

‘That very sickness—five full years before it fell.’

‘It may be a sign,’ Mahmud conceded, ‘even though it is a little one.’

‘A man’s life is not a little thing. See what a tamasha (circus) that fat Hindu pig of a judge made over the one I spilled.’

‘A little thing beside the great things which the Padishah does daily, in his power.’

‘What do we know of them? He is Padishah. The more part of his rule is worked by his headmen—as, but for my Colonel, my hanging would have been. Nay! Nay! We say, in the Regiment: “How does a man bear himself off parade?” And we say in our Hills, of those cursed crooked Kabul-made rifles: A gun does not throw true unless it has been bored true.” But thou art no soldier.’

‘True! And yet in my trade we say: “As the silk, so the least shred of it. As the heart, so the hand.”’

‘And it is truth! This deed that the Padishah did among the People of the Graves declared the quality and nature of the Padishah himself. It was a fair blood-debt between a man and a man. The life of that General is owing to the Padishah. I hold it will be paid to him, and that the Padishah will live.’

‘If God please,’ said Mahmud, and laid out his mat. The sun had set, and it was time for the fourth prayer of the day. Mahmud, as Imam of a mosque, was strict in ritual, but One Three Two only prayed at dawn and full dark. So he sat till he heard the Doctor’s car challenged at the Gaol gate before he carried William in to the nursery.

‘What did the Man in the Bokkus tell about the King?’ William asked his mother when she kissed him good-night in his cot. He was all but asleep.

‘Only the same as this morning. Shall I hear your prayers, little man?’

‘No need! ‘ muttered William. Then he sat bolt upright, intensely awake, and speaking in chosen English: ‘Because Busi-bandah says the King will get well, anyhow. He says it is his back-pay for making the cold General put on his Baritish warrum.’

He flopped back, burrowed in his pillow, grunted, and dived far beneath the floods of sleep.

page 1 of 7

SINCE Astronomy is even less remunerative than Architecture, it was well for Harries that an uncle of his had once bought a desert in a far country, which turned out to overlie oil. The result for Harries, his only nephew, was over a million pounds invested, plus annual royalties.When the executors had arranged this, Harries, who might have been called an almost-unpaid attaché at Washe Observatory, gave a dinner to three men, whom he had tried and proved beneath glaring and hostile moons in No Man’s Land.

Vaughan, Assistant Surgeon at St. Peggotty’s, was building himself a practice near Sloane Street. Loftie, pathologist, with the beginnings of a reputation, was—for he had married the unstable daughter of one of his earlier London landladies—bacteriological advisor to a Public Department, on five-hundred-and-seventy pounds per annum, and a prospect of being graded for pension. Ackerman, also a St. Peggotty’s man, had been left a few hundreds a year just after he had qualified, and so had given up all serious work except gastronomy and the allied arts.

Vaughan and Loftie knew of Harries’ luck, which Harries explained in detail at the dinner, and stated what, at the lowest count, his income would be.

‘Now,’ said he, ‘“Tacks” can tell you.’

Ackerman made himself small in his chair, as though it had been the shell-hole whence he had once engineered their retreat.

‘We know each other fairly well,’ he began. ‘We’ve seen each other stripped to the Ultimate Atom pretty often? We needn’t camouflage? Agreed? You’re always saying what you’d do if you were independent. Have you changed your minds?’

‘Not me,’ said Vaughan, whose oft-told dream was a nursing-home of his own near Sloane Street. He had marked the very house for it.

‘Do you think I’d keep on with this sewage job if it wasn’t for the pension?’ Loftie asked. He had followed research the more keenly since, at twenty-two, he had wrecked his own happiness.

‘Be free, then,’ said Ackerman. ‘Take three thousand——’

‘Hold on,’ Harries broke in plaintively. ‘I said “up to five.”’

‘Sorry, old man! I was trying for the commission. Take up to five thousand a year from Harries for as long as you choose—for life, if you like. Then research on your own lines, Loftie, and—and—let the Bull know if you stumble on anything. That’s the idea, isn’t it?’

‘Not all.’ Harries surged a little in his seat. ‘A man’s entitled to use a telescope as well as a microscope, isn’t he? Well—I’ve got notions I want to test. They mean keeping one’s eyes open and—logging the exact times that things happen.’

‘That’s what you said when you lectured our company about Astrology—that night under Arras. D’you mean “planetary influences?”’ Loftie spoke with a scientist’s scorn.

‘This isn’t my lecture.’ Harries flushed. ‘This is my gamble. We can’t tell on what system this dam’ dynamo of our universe is wound, but we know we’re in the middle of every sort of wave, as we call ’em. They used to be “influences.”’

‘Like Venus, Cancer, and that lot?’ Vaughan inquired.

‘Yes—if you choose. Now I want Vaughan to start his clinic, and give me a chance to test my notions occasionally. No! Not faith-healing! Loftie can worry his cells and tissues with radium as much as he likes. But——’

‘We’re only on the threshold of radium,’ Loftie snapped.

‘Then get off it!’ was the blasphemous retort. ‘Radium’s a post hoc, not a propter. I want you merely to watch some of your cellgrowths all round the clock. Don’t think! Watch—and put down the times of any changes you see.

‘Or imagine?’ Loftie supplemented.

‘You’ve got it. Imagination is what we want. This rigid “thinking” game is hanging up research. You told me yourself, the other night, it was becoming all technique and no advance,’ Harries ended.

‘That’s going too far. We’re on the edge of big developments.’

‘All the better! Take the money and go ahead. Think of your lab., Lofter! Stoves, filters, sterilisers, frigidaria—everything you choose to indent for!’

‘I’ve brought along Schermoltz’s last catalogue. You might care to look at it, later.’ Ackerman passed the pamphlet into Loftie’s stretched hand.

‘Five thousand a year,’ Loftie muttered and turned the enthralling pages. ‘God! What one could afford! . . . But I’m not worth the money, Bull. Besides, it’s robbery. . . . You’ll never arrive at anything by this astrology nonsense.’

‘But you may, on your lines. What do you suppose is the good of Research?’

‘God knows,’ Loftie replied, devouring the illustrations. ‘Only—only it looks—sometimes—as if He were going to tell.’

‘That’s all we want,’ Harries coaxed. ‘Keep your eye on Him, and if He seems inclined to split about anything, put it down.’

‘I’ve had my eye on that house for the last half-year. You could build out a lift-shaft at the back.’ Vaughan looked and spoke into the future.

Here the padrone came in to say that if more drinks were needed, they should be ordered.

Ackerman ordered; Harries stared at the fire; Loftie sank deeper into the catalogue; and Vaughan into his vision of the desirable house for his clinic. The padrone came back with a loaded tray.

‘It’s too much money to take—even from you, Bull.’ Vaughan’s voice was strained. ‘If you’d lend me a few hundred for my clinic, I could . . .’

Loftie came out of the catalogue and babbled to the same effect, while he reckoned up for just how many pounds a week the horror that defiled his life and lodgings could be honourably removed from both till it drank itself dead.

Harries reared up over them like a walrus affronted.

page 2

‘Do you remember the pill-box at Zillebeeke, and the skeleton in the door? Who pinched the bombs for us then?’ he champed.

‘Me and The Lofter,’ said Vaughan, sullen as a schoolboy.

‘What for?’

‘Because we dam’ well needed ’em.’

‘We need ’em worse now! We’re up against the beggar in the pill-box. He’s called Death—if you’ve ever heard of him. This stuff of mine isn’t money, you imbeciles! It’s a service-issue—same as socks. We—we haven’t kept on saving each other’s silly lives for this! Oh, don’t let me down! Can’t you see?’ The big voice quavered.

‘Kamerad, Bull! I’ll come in,’ said Loftie. Vaughan’s hands had gone up first, and he was the first to recover himself, saying: ‘What about “Tacks?” He isn’t let off, is he?’

‘No. I’m going to make commission out of the lot of you,’ said Ackerman. ‘Meantime! Come on, me multi-millionaires! The Bald-headed Beggar in the pill-box is old, but the night is yet young.’

The effects of five thousand a year are stimulating.

A mere Cabinet Minister, dependent on elections for his place, looking in on a Committee where Loftie was giving technical evidence, asked in too loud a whisper, if that all-but-graded Civil Servant were ‘one of my smell-and-tell temporaries.’ Loftie’s resignation was in that evening. Vaughan, assisted by an aunt, started a little nursing-home near Sloane Street, where his new household napery lift and drying-cupboards almost led to his capture by ‘just the kind of girl, my dear, to make an ideal wife for a professional man.’

Harries continued to observe the heavens, and commissioned Ackerman to find a common meeting-place. This—Simson House was its name—had been a small boys’ school in a suburb without too many trams. Ackerman put in floods of water, light and power, an almost inspired kitchen-range, a house-man and his cook-wife, and an ex-Navy petty rating as valet-plumber, steward-engineer, and butler-electrician; set four cots in four little bedrooms, and turned the classroom in the back garden into a cement-floored hall of great possibilities, which Harries was the first to recognise. He cut off a cubicle at one end of it, where he stored books, clocks, and apparatus. Next, Loftie clamoured for a laboratory and got it, dust and air-tight, with lots of the Schermoltz toys laid out among taps and sinks and glass shelves. Hither he brought various numbered odds-and-ends which Vaughan and other specialists had sent him in the past, and on which, after examination, he had pronounced verdicts of importance to unknown men and women. Some of the samples—mere webs of cancerous tissue—he had, by arts of his own, kept alive in broths and salts after sentence had been executed on their sources of origin.

There were two specimens—Numbers 127 and 128—from a rarish sort of affliction in exactly the same stage of development and precisely the same position, in two women of the same age and physique, who had come up to Vaughan on the same afternoon, just after Vaughan had been appointed Assistant Surgeon at St. Peggotty’s. And when the absurdly identical operations were over, a man, whose praise was worth having, but whose presence had made Vaughan sweat into his palms, had complimented him. So far as St. Peggotty’s knew, both cases were doing well several months after. Harries found these samples specially interesting, and would pore over them long times on end, for he had always used the microscope very neatly.

‘Suppose you watch what these do for a while,’ he suggested to Loftie one day.

‘I know what they’ll do well enough,’ the other returned. He was hunting a line of his own in respect to brain-cells.

‘Then couldn’t you put Frost on to watch ’em with a low-power lens?’ Harries went on. ‘He’s a trained observer in his own line. What? Of course he’s at your disposition, old man. You could make anything of him. Oh, by the way, do you happen to remember what time of day you operated on One-twenty-Seven and Eight?’

‘Afternoon, of course—at St. Peggotty’s—between three and five. It’s down somewhere.’

‘It don’t matter. I only wanted to get an idea. Then you’ll turn on Frost to watch ’em? Thanks awfully.’

Frost, the valet-plumber, etc., was ex-captain of a turret, with the hard blue eye of the born gunlayer—a middle-aged, uncomely man, no mean mechanic, and used to instruments of precision. He liked sitting in a warm room, looking through a microscope at what he called ‘muckings,’ with instructions to ‘watch ’em all round the clock and log all changes.’ But no sooner did he begin than Loftie, jealous as two women, and knowing what beginner’s luck may do, stood watch and watch with him. Loftie was in hard work on his brain-cells, and the monotony of this sentry-go made him fear that his mind might build theories on self-created evidence. So he told Frost, after a while, that the whole thing was absurd, as well as bad for the eyes. ‘Isn’t it?’ he added.

‘I don’t know how it is with you, sir,’ Frost replied. ‘It sometimes makes me feel as if I were seeing a sort of ripple strike up along the edges of ’em. Like broken water, with the sun tipping it. Like Portland Race in open-and-shut weather.’

‘That’s eye-strain. But when does it come on—with you?’

‘Sometimes through the middle watch—from twelve to four a.m. Then, again, it will come on through the first and second dog-watches—four to eight p.m., sir.’

‘No matter which—what sample—you are looking at?’ Loftie asked keenly.

‘I’d say it depended on the sample. Now, One-twenty-Eight—’seems to me—plays up in the middle watch—from midnight on—and One-twenty-Seven in the afternoon. I’ve logged it all.’

Three months later, at Simson House, Loftie told the others that, while not in the least departing from his own theories, there was a phenomenon, which for the sake of brevity he would call ‘tide,’ in Samples 127 and 128. It occurred at certain hours, which had all been noted and passed on to Harries—‘for what that may be worth.’

Harries smiled, and hired an expensive expert to photo the two samples and film them; which took several weeks and cost some hundreds of pounds. They all checked the magnified ‘tides’ by some curious tables which Harries had worked out—‘for what that’s worth,’ as Loftie said.

Harries said it was worth the expense, and took to spending a good deal of his leisure at Simson House. Vaughan, too, reeking of ether, would put in for shelter there, as the hunt after him (which his aunt whipped) quickened with his successes. Loftie had been almost a fixture in his lab. from the first; and poor ‘Tacks,’ who could no more have made a dishonest penny than he could have saved an honest one, catered for them so lavishly that even the cook shied at the weekly bills, which Harries flatly refused to audit.

page 3

Three months after their first film’s ‘release,’ Loftie read them a typed paper before dinner, asserting there was ‘tide ‘ in the normal cells of all tissues which he and his helper, Frost, had observed; but he could see no sign of ‘tide’ in the malignant areas. He detailed tests and observations till they yawned. Then Frost ran the latest film for them—in slow and quick time—and they sat round the fire.

‘I’m not committing myself to anything,’ said Loftie, speaking like a badly-shaken human being, ‘but every dam’ tissue up till now seems to have its own time for its own tides. Samples from the same source have the same tides in strength and time. But, as I showed you just now, there are minute constant variations—reactions to something or other—in each tide, as individual as finger-prints. I wouldn’t stake my reputation on it except to you. But I know it’s so.’

‘What do you suppose it means?’ Vaughan half-whispered.

‘As I read it,’ Harries spoke quietly, ‘the minor differences in those “tides” in the tissues are due to interferences with the main or external influence—whichever it may be—which sets up, or which is, the main tide in all matter. They both come from without. Not within.’

‘How far out?’ Vaughan asked.

‘’Can’t tell—yet—to a few light-years. I’ve been trying to disentangle the minor interferences or influences—which may be due to the nearer—er—influences—from the main tide. In my opinion——’

‘Stop!’ Loftie cried shrilly. ‘You swore us all not to theorise before a year.’

‘Hear me out! I’ve verified some of my calculations at my end of the game, and they justify me in saying that . . . we are all justified in getting tight to-night.’

So, then, they did: being drunk with the ferment of their own speculations before they went to table. Loftie, whom Ackerman confined to strong beer as best for tired brain-cells, rose up above the savoury, and said that he was ‘the Servant of the Infil-tresimally Minute, but not of that fat tape-worm, Tacks.’ Harries described to them the vasts of the Ultimate Heavens fizzing in spirals ‘with—or rather like—champagne,’ but all one generating station of one Power drawn from the Absolute, and of one essence and substance with all things. Then he slept soundly. Vaughan—the professional man—merely wanted to telephone for a taxi that he might drive to discredit a hated West End rival by calling him to his bedroom window and there discussing ‘dichotomy’—a hard word at 3 A.M.

Then they packed Loftie off for a month’s holiday, with a cubic metre of seven-and-sixpenny detective novels, plus Vaughan’s aunt to see that he ate and dressed properly. On his return, he began certain experiments with mice, which Frost took charge of in the boiler-room, because he remembered when their ancestors served in the earliest submarines. It seemed that ‘tides’ worked in their tissues also; but slipped a little round the clock according to the season of each litter’s birth.

And there were born to them mice among mice with prodigious ‘tides.’ Some of these, inoculated at the flood, threw off the trouble, and were promoted by Frost to the rating of pets. Treated on their lowest ebbs, they perished less quickly than the average. Harries kept careful count of their times in all things and ways, and had Frost sling some of their cages on various compass-bearings or set them out in moonlight or thunderstorms.

This last was too much for Loftie, who returned once more to the legitimate drama of cultures and radium emanations, and the mysteries of malignant cells which never acknowledge any ‘tide.’ At the end of three weeks, he, and Frost, broke off the campaign.

He said to Harries one evening after watching their usual film: ‘What do you suppose germs think of?’

‘If you’ve got as far as that,’ was the answer, ‘you’ll develop an imagination one day.’

Then Vaughan came in full of trouble. His matron had been immobilised by sciatica, and his household staff had taken base advantages. He needed at once, some table-napkins, some bathtowels, two jacketed water jugs and a metal—not china—bedroom breakfast-set. Ackerman said he would speak to Frost and see what could be spared from the ship.

While they were laughing at Vaughan, St. Peggotty’s rang him up. He replied: ‘Well, well! If it was coming, it was to be expected now. . . . One of my beds empty? . . . You can have it. . . . Send her over to me. . . . You must! . . I’ll warn my people to expect her? . . . Oh? That’s all right. . . . I’ll send the car. . . . Yes, and all other expenses. . . . Because I operated on her originally, of course. We’ll expect her at nine, then. . Righto! . . . Not in the least. Thank you, old man.’

He then telephoned his home to prepare for a patient, and returned to the still circle by the fire.

‘It’s one of those twin cases of mine,’ he explained. ‘One of ’em’s back again. Recurrence—in the scar—after eighteen months.’

‘That means?’ said Harries.

‘With that particular kind of trouble—three—five months’ reprieve—perhaps. Then final recurrence. The other one’s all right, so far, they say.’

‘She would be. This one is One-twenty-Eight,’ said Loftie.

‘How do you make that out?’

Frost had entered and was going through Vaughan’s indent with Ackerman.

‘Frost, what is One-twenty-Eight’s timing?’ Loftie interposed.

‘One-two-Eight, sir? Flood from midnight till four a.m.—ebb from four to eight p.m. . . Yes, sir, I can make the table-linen all right, and the jugs. But we’re short on bath-towels just now.’

‘Would it prove anything if she lasted out nine months?’ Harries picked up the thread of talk with Vaughan.

‘No. There are rallies and reserves.’

‘A full year?’

‘I should accept that. But I know who wouldn’t.’ Vaughan gave a great name.

‘Thanks for reminding me,’ said Ackerman over his shoulder. ‘Frost, the bathroom hotwater pipe has got arterial sclerosis, too. Operate on it.’

page 4

‘When shall you operate, Taffy?’ Harries held on.

‘To-morrow at a quarter to ten. I always feel fittest then.’

‘Think of the patient for a change. Suppose you stand-to at a few minutes to midnight tomorrow? I’ll telephone you zero from here.’

Vaughan seemed a shade taken aback. ‘Midnight? Oh, certainly,’ he said. ‘But I’ll have to warn my anaesthetist.’

‘And Ferrers ’ll swear you’ve taken to drink or drugs,’ said Ackerman. ‘Besides, think of your poor matron and the nurse who’s got to have her evening off? Much better let the woman conk out in Trades Union hours, Taffy.’

‘Dry up, padrone,’ said Loftie. ‘No need to bring in Ferrers. I’ll take his place—if you think I’m safe.’

Since this was as if Raeburn had volunteered to prime a canvas for Benjamin West, Vaughan accepted, and they sat down to eat.

When he and Loftie had refreshed their memories of One-two-Eight’s construction and arrangements, they asked Harries why he had chosen that time for the operation. Harries said that by his reckonings it should fall nearer the woman’s birthday. His guess at its actual date he wrote down and was passing it to Vaughan, when Vaughan’s Nursing Home reported the arrival of the patient, not unduly fatigued and most anxious to thank ‘Doctor’ Vaughan for the amazing kindness which had rescued her from the open ward.

The table listened to Vaughan’s reply, soothing and sustaining, and, by tone, assuming the happiest issue out of this annoying little set-back. When he hung up, he said: ‘She—wants it the day after to-morrow, because that’s her birthday. She thinks it ’ll be lucky.’

‘Make it midnight, then, of the day after tomorrow, and look at the date I wrote down. . . . No! The Devil has nothing to do with it. By the way—if it won’t cramp your style—could you set the table on——’ Harries gave a compass bearing.

‘Don’t be shy,’ said Ackerman. ‘He’d stand her on her head to operate now, if the Bull told him. Are you off, Taffy? Frost ’ll put all your towels and pots in a taxi. ’Sorry if I’ve hurt your feelings.’

Loftie’s account of the operation did not interest Frost so much as the samples he brought back. It took both of them three or four days to plant them out properly. In return, Frost told Loftie that ‘our end of the show,’ with Major Harries at the sidereal clock, waiting ‘till the sights came on,’ and Captain Ackerman at the telephone, waiting to pass the range to Captain Vaughan in Sloane Street, was ‘just like Jutland.’

‘Now, this lady of ours,’ he said after a busy silence. ‘How would she lie in her bed?’

Loftie gave a bearing which he had heard Harries give Vaughan.

‘I expect Major Harries knows, if anyone,’ was Frost’s placid comment. ‘It’s the same as ships’ compasses varying according as their heads lay when they were building.’

‘It’s crazy mad. That’s all!’

‘Which was what the Admiralty said at first about steam in the Navy,’ Frost grinned.

He put away a set of sealed cover-glasses and reverently returned some lenses to their velvet shrines.

‘Not to talk of that lady of ours—’ he straightened up as he spoke—‘some of my mice aren’t behaving as I could wish.’

‘Which?’ said Loftie. There were several types of experiments under way.

‘One or two of some that recovered after inoculation—since discharged and promoted to pets. But it looks as if they’d had a relapse. They’re highly restless—always trying to escape out—as if they were wild, not white. I don’t like it.’

‘Clean up, then,’ Loftie answered, ‘and we’ll go down to the boiler-room.’

In one of the cages there, a doe with a plum-coloured saddle was squeaking, as she strove desperately to work through the wires with semitransparent hand-like forefeet. Frost set the cage on a table under an electric and handed her dossier to Loftie. This gave her birth, age, date and nature of inoculation, date also when her system seemed to have cleared itself of the dose; and, of course, the times and strengths of her ‘tides.’ It showed dead-ebb for her at that hour.

‘What does she think she’s doing?’ Loftie whispered. ‘It isn’t her natural squeak, either.’

They watched. She laboured increasingly at the barrier; sat up as though most intently listening; leaped forward and tore into her task beneath the glare of the basement-bulb.

‘Turn it out,’ said Loftie. ‘It’s distressing her.’

Frost obeyed. In a few seconds the little noises changed to a flutter and ceased.

‘I thought so! Now we’ll look again,’ said Loftie. ‘Oh! Oh! God!’

‘Too late,’ Frost cried. ‘She’s broke her neck! Fair broken her pretty little neck between the wires! How did she do it?’

‘In convulsion,’ Loftie stammered. ‘Convulsion at the last. She pushed and pushed with her head in the wires and that acted as a wedge . . . and . . . what do you think?’

‘I expect I’m thinking pretty much the same as you are, sir.’ Frost replaced the cage under the leads and fuses which he had painted man-o’war fashion. ‘It looks like two tides meeting,’ he added. ‘That always sets up a race, and a race is worst at ebb. She must have been caught on her ebb—an’ knocked over! Pity! There ought to be some way of pulling ’em through it.’

‘Let’s see if there isn’t,’ said Loftie, and lifted out the tiny warm body with a needed droplet of blood on the end of the nose.

page 5

One-two-Eight (Mrs. Berners) made a good recovery, and since she seemed alone in the world, Vaughan said that, as payment, she must stay on in his home and complete it to his satisfaction. She was touchingly grateful. After a few months (her strength returning) she asked to do something for her benefactors. No one seemed to look after the linen at Mr. Vaughan’s. Might she repair, count, store, and, even, give it out—for she had had experience in that line as a housekeeper. Her prayer was granted, and the work of getting at the things Vaughan had started the Home with; had bought, but had never entered; had raided from Ackerman, and thought—or worse, was quite sure—that he had sent back; or had lost by laundries and through servants, did her good. It also brought her over to Simson House to return things to Frost, where Harries and Ackerman complimented her on her appearance, and Loftie asked her to administer his chance-bought body-linen. She was delighted. She told them that, when she had nothing to do, she mostly felt in people’s way, and as if she ought to go on elsewhere. Loftie asked her why. She answered that, when her troubles were on her, they kept her busy, if it was only at trying not to cry. But now that they had been removed and by such kind gentlemen—the busiest day was none too full for her. She had a trick of tossing her head sideways and upwards, sometimes in the midst of her overseeing, and would say: ‘Well, well! I can’t keep at this all the time. I must be off elsewhere where I’m wanted’—Loftie’s Home or Simson House as the case might be.

They discussed her at long and at large, one evening, throughout a film which—Vaughan and Loftie collaborating—was based on her more recent productions.

Vaughan was well satisfied. ‘You see! Nothing has struck back. I know that her strength—notice how the tides have steadied—and our new blankets weigh a bit, too—is above normal. She has covered seven months and twenty-three days, and—I tell you—her scar is simply beautiful.’

‘We’ll take your word,’ said Harries. ‘Now bring on your mouse-film, Loftie.’

And Loftie, while Frost slowed, speeded, or went back at command, spoke of mice that had recovered apparently from certain infections, but had fallen later into a characteristic unease, followed by nervous crises—as shown—culminating in what seemed to be attempts at suicide.

In every case where an attempt had succeeded, the vacuoles—the empty centres—which do not take stain—of the brain-cells over a minute area seemed to have blown out, apparently as(‘This’ll interest you, I know. I hired it from the Dominion Weather Bureau last week.’) asa house explodes through its own windows under the vacuum set up by a tornado. They then beheld a three-storey, clapboarded hotel vomiting itself outwards, while the black hook of a tornado’s tip writhed and fished above it.

Sometimes, Loftie went on, an affected mouse would recover, after nervous upheavals very like those of tetanus—as they had seen—followed by collapse and amazingly sub-normal temperatures, and then a swift resumption of normal life. They could draw their own conclusions.

Ackerman broke their stillness. ‘Frost, go back, please, to that bit showing the movement of their heads when the attacks are coming on.’ Frost began again.

‘Who’s that like?’ Ackerman called out suddenly. ‘Am I wrong?’

‘No, sir,’ Frost groaned out of the dark. Then they all saw.

‘“Well, I can’t stay here! I’ve got to move on elsewhere where I’m wanted,”’ Ackerman quoted half-aloud. ‘And her hands working! The forefeet—I mean her hands! Look! It’s her!’

‘That’s exactly her listening attitude, too,’ said Harries. ‘I never noticed it before.’

‘Why would you—with nothing to check it by?’ said Loftie. ‘What does it mean?’

‘It means she’s as likely as not to chuck herself under a lorry some day, between here and Sloane Street,’ Frost interrupted, as though he had full knowledge and right.

‘How do you know?’ Vaughan began. ‘She’s absolutely normal.’

The flexes of the camera had not been disconnected, so they were still darkling.

‘She’s not! She’s all astray. God knows where she’s straying; but she’s not here, more’n the dead.’ Frost repacked the camera and went out. They gathered round Harries.

‘As I read it,’ he laid down, after some preliminaries, ‘she has been carried yes, tided—over the time that her trouble ought to have finished her. That is two or three months now, isn’t it, Taffy? But, she wasn’t saved by the knife. She was saved by the knife at the proper time of tide.’

‘She has lasted seven months and twenty-three days. Most unusual, I grant, with that type of growth; but not conclusive,’ was Vaughan’s retort.

‘Hear me out. Qua Death, as created. or evolved, on this planet (He needn’t exist elsewhere, you know), and especially qua the instrument of decay that was to kill her, she’s some odd weeks owing to the grave. But, qua the influence—tide, if you like—external to this swab of culture which we call our world, she has been started on a new tide of life. The gamble is that, after crises, something like those we’ve seen in the mice, that tide may carry her beyond the—er—the demand of the grave. It’s beginning to be pull-devil, pull-baker between ’em now, I should imagine.’

‘I see your line, Bull,’ said Loftie. ‘When ought her crises to be due? Because—it’s all as insane as the rest—but there may be an off-chance of——’

‘The suicidal tendency comes first,’ said Ackerman. ‘Why not have her watched when she goes out? Taffy’s nurses can keep an eye on her indoors.’

‘You’ve been reading my sleuth-tales,’ Loftie smiled.

‘Make it so, then. Any decent inquiry-agency would undertake it, I suppose,’ said Harries.

‘I’ll leave the choice to Frost. I’ll only take the commission. We’re in for a wildish time. She’s a woman—not a white mouse!’ Ackerman said, and added thoughtfully: ‘But the champion ass, as distinguished from mere professional fool, of us all, is Taffy!’

Vaughan had ordered her never to go afoot between Simson House and the Nursing Home, and, also, to take taxis to and from her little ‘exercise walks’ in the parks, where she so often picked up the nice elderly lady’s-maid with the pom, the sales-lady from the Stores, and other well-spoken lady strangers near her own class (at ever so many shillings an hour). Of Mr. Frost she saw but little that summer, owing to the pressure of his duties and some return, they told her, of rheumatism contracted in the defence of his country. The worst that came to her was a slight attack of stiff neck, caught from sitting in a draught. As to her health, she admitted that sometimes she felt a bit flustered in the head, but otherwise could not be better.

page 6

She was recounting her mercies, a little fulsomely as usual, to Loftie one afternoon in the common-room of Simson House, where she had brought him some new shirts marked. Frost had taken them upstairs, and Loftie had hinted that he must get back to his work. She flicked her head sideways and said that she was busy, too. In the same breath, but in a whisper, she ran on ‘I don’t want to die, Mr. Loftie. But I’ve got to. I’ve reelly got to get out of this. I’m wanted elsewhere, but’—she shivered—‘I don’t like going.’

Then she raced, with lowered head, straight towards the wall. Loftie snatched at her dress, turned her, so that she struck the wall with her shoulder and fell—and Frost came down to find him grappling with her, not inexpertly.

She broke away and skimmed across the room. Frost ran and tripped her, and brought her down. She would have beaten her head on the floor, but he jerked it up, his palm beneath her chin, and dragged her to her feet. Then he closed.

She was silent, absorbed in this one business of driving to the nearest wall through whatever stood between. Small and fragile though she was, she flung the twelve-stone Frost clear of her again and again; and a side-pushing stroke of her open palm spun Loftie half across the hall. The struggle lasted without a break, but her breath had not quickened, when like a string she relaxed, repeating that she did not want to die. As she cried to Loftie to hold her, she slipped away between them, and they had to chase her round the furniture.

They backed her down on the couch at last, Loftie clinging to her knees, while Frost’s full strength and weight forced the thin arms over her head. Again the body gave, and the low, casual whisper began: ‘After what you said outside Barker’s in the wet, you don’t think I reelly want to die. Mr. Frost? I don’t—not a mite. But I’ve got to. I’ve got to go where I’m wanted.’

Frost had to kneel on her right arm then, holding her left down with both hands. Loftie, braced against the sofa, mastered her feet, till the outbreak passed in shudders that shook all three. Her eyes were shut. Frost raised an eyelid with his thumb and peered closely.

‘Lor’!’ said she, and flushed to the temples. The two shocked men leapt clear at once. She lifted a hand to her disordered hair. ‘Who’s done this?’ she said. ‘Why’ve I come all over like this? I ought to be busy dying.’ Loftie was ready to throw himself on her again, but Frost held up a hand.

‘You can suit yourself about that, Mrs. Berners,’ he said. ‘What I’ve been at you all this time to find out is, what you’ve done with our plated toast-rack, towels, etcetera.’

He shook her by the shoulders, and the rest of her pale hair descended.

‘One plated toast-rack and two egg-cups, which went over to Mr. Vaughan’s on indent last April twenty-eighth, together with four table-napkins and six sheets. I ask because I’m responsible for ’em at this end.’

‘But I’ve got to die.’

‘So we’ve all, Mrs. Berners. But before you do, I want to know what you did with. . . .’ He repeated the list and the date. ‘You know the routine between the houses as well as I do. I sent ’em by Mr. Ackerman’s orders, on Mr. Vaughan’s indent. When do you check your linen? Monthly or quarterly?’

‘Quarterly. But I’m wanted elsewhere.’

‘If you aren’t a little more to the point, Mrs. Berners, I’ll tell you where you will be wanted before long, and what for. I’m not going to lose my character on account of your carelessness—if no worse. An’ here’s Mr. Loftie. . . .’

‘Don’t drag me in,’ Loftie whispered, with male horror.

‘Leave us alone! I know me class, sir. . . . Mr. Loftie who has done everything for you.’

‘It was Mr. Vaughan. He wouldn’t let me die.’ She tried to stand, fell back, and sat up on the couch.

‘You won’t get out of it that way. Cast back in your memory and see if you can clear yourself!’ Frost began anew, scientifically as a female inquisitor; mingling details, inferences, dates, and innuendoes with reminders of housekeeping ritual: never overwhelming her, save when she tried to ride off on her one piteous side-issue, but never accepting an answer. Painfully, she drew out of her obsession, protesting, explaining, striving to pull her riven wits into service; but always hunted from one rambling defence to the next, till, with eyes like those of a stricken doe, she moaned: ‘Oh, Fred! Fred! The only thing I’ve ever took—you said so outside Barker’s—was your own ’ard ’eart.’

Frost’s face worked, but his voice was the petty-officer’s with the defaulter.

‘No such names between us, Mrs. Berners, till this is settled.’

He crumpled his wet eyes, as though judging an immense range. Then observed deliberately

‘’Ask me—I’d say you’re a common thief.’

She stared at him for as long as a shell might take to travel to an horizon. Then came the explosion of natural human wrath—she would not stoop to denial, she said—till, choking on words of abuse, she hit him weakly over the mouth, and dropped between his feet.

‘She’s come back!’ said Frost, his face transfigured. ‘What next?’

‘My room. Tell Cook to put her to bed. Fill every hot-water bottle we’ve got, and warm the blankets. I’ll telephone the Home. Then we’ll risk the injections.’

Frost slung her, limp as a towel, over his shoulder, and, turning, asked: ‘This—all these symptoms don’t need to be logged, sir—do they? We—we know something like ’em?’

Loftie nodded assent.

She came up shuddering out of the seven days’ chill of the cheated grave, and Vaughan’s nurses told her what a dreadful thing was this ‘suppressed influenza’ which had knocked her out, but that she might report for duty in a few weeks. Ackerman, who loved Vaughan more than the others put together, testified on their next film-night that Taffy was almost worthy to be called a medical man for his handling of the case.

‘Tacks,’ said Vaughan kindly, ‘you are as big a dam’ fool about my job as I was about Frost. I injected what the Lofter gave me, at the times that Harries told me. The rest was old wives’ practice.’

page 7

‘She always looked like a wet hen,’ said Harries. ‘Now she goes about like a smiling sheep. I wish I’d seen her crises. Did you or Frost time ’em, Lofter?’

‘It wasn’t worth it,’ was the light answer. ‘Just hysteria. But she’s covered her full year now. D’you suppose we’ve held her?’

‘I should say yes. I don’t know how you feel, but’—Vaughan beamed—‘the more I see of her scar, the more pleased I am. Ah! That was a lovely bit of work, even if I am only a carpenter, Tacks!’

‘But, speaking with some relation to ordinary life, what does all this lunacy of ours prove?’ Ackerman demanded.

‘Not a dam’ thing, except that it may give us some data and inferences which may serve as some sort of basis for some detail of someone else’s work in the future,’ Harries pronounced. ‘The main point, as I read it, is that it makes one—not so much think—Research is gummed up with thinking—as imagine a bit.’

‘That’ll be possible, too—by the time Frost and I have finished with this film,’ said Loftie.

It included a sequence of cultures, from mice who had overcome their suicidal fits, attenuated through a human being who, very obligingly, in the intervals of running the camera, described the effects of certain injections on his own rugged system. The earlier ones, he admitted, had ‘fair slung him round the deck.’

‘It was chuck it and chance it,’ Loftie apologised. ‘You see, we couldn’t tell, all this summer, when Mrs. Berners might play up for the grave. So I rather rushed the injections through Frost. I haven’t worked out my notes yet. You’ll get ’em later.’

He stayed to help Frost put back some of the more delicate gear, while the others went to change.

‘Not to talk about that lady of ours,’ Frost said presently. ‘My first—though, of course, her mother never warned me—drank a bit. She disgraced me all round Fratton pretty much the whole of one commission. And she died in Lock ’Ospital. So, I’ve had my knock.’

‘Some of us seem to catch it. I’ve had mine, too,’ Loftie answered.

‘I never heard that. But’—the voice changed—‘I knew it—surer than if I’d been told.’

‘Yes. God help us!’ said Loftie, and shook his hand. Frost, not letting go of it, continued ‘One thing more, sir. I didn’t properly take it in at the time—not being then concerned—but—that first operation on that lady of mine, was it of a nature that’ll preclude—so to say—expectations of—of offspring?’

‘Absolutely, old man,’ Loftie’s free hand dropped on Frost’s shoulder.

‘Pity! There ought to be some way of pulling ’em through it—somehow—oughtn’t there?’

I