course I'm a man of fifty. I suppose you thought the idea very
ridiculous."

"I don't think Stella is old enough to marry," said Michael.

"But don't you think it's better for girls to marry when they're young?"
asked Prescott, and as he leaned forward, Michael saw his eyes were very
bright and his actions feverish. "I've noticed that tendencies recur in
families. Time after time. I don't like this Viennese business, yet if
Stella had married me I shouldn't have interfered with her," he added,
with a wistfulness that was out of keeping with his severely
conventional appearance. "Still, I should have always been in the
background."

"Yes, I expect that was what she felt," said Michael.

He did not mean to be brutal, but he saw at once how deeply he had
wounded Prescott, and suddenly in a panic of inability to listen any
longer, he rose and said he must go.

As he was driving to Waterloo Station on the following afternoon to go
down to Basingstead, he saw vaguely on the posters of the starved August
journals "Suicide of a Man About Town." At Cobble Place newspapers were
read as an afterthought, and it was not until late on the day after that
above a short paragraph the headline "Tragedy in the Albany" led him on
to learn that actually Prescott was the man about town who had killed
himself.

Michael's first emotion was a feeling of self-interest in being linked
so closely with an event deemed sufficiently important to occupy the
posters of an evening paper. For the moment the fact that he had dined
with Prescott a few hours beforehand seemed a very remarkable
coincidence. It was only after he had had to return to London and
attend the inquest, to listen to the coroner's summing up of the
evidence of depression and the perspiring jury's delivery of their
verdict of temporary insanity he began to realize that in the crisis of
a man's life his own words or behavior might easily have altered the
result. He was driving to Waterloo Station again in order to take up the
thread of his broken visit. On the posters of the starved August
journals he read now with a sharp interest "Cat Saves Household in
Whitechapel Fire." This cat stood for him as the symbol of imaginative
action. He bought the evening papers at Waterloo, and during the journey
down to Hampshire read about this cat who had saved a family from an
inquest's futile epitaph, and who even if unsuccessful would have been
awarded the commendatory platitudes of the