as in every sense, thoroughly instructed, furnished with
details that fitted out and rounded off all that was vague and
incomplete in his vision of the thing, he was still unprepared for the
question with which his mother met him.

"Have you told Mr. and Mrs. Usher?"

He hadn't.

He had forgotten Mr. and Mrs. Usher, forgotten that this prolongation of
his ordeal would be necessary.

"Well, you'll have to."

"Of course I'll have to."

"Will you go and see him?"

"No. I--can't. I'll write."

He wrote in the afternoon of the next day at Woolridge's, in the
luncheon hour when he had the ledger clerks' pen to himself. He was very
brief.

He received his father-in-law's reply by return. Mr. Usher made no
comment beyond an almost perfunctory expression of regret. But he said
that he must see Randall. And, as the journey between Elstree and
Wandsworth was somewhat long to be undertaken after office hours, he
proposed the "Bald-Faced Stag," Edgware, as a convenient halfway house
for them to meet at, and Wednesday, at seven or thereabouts, as the day
and hour. Thus he allowed time for Randall to receive his letter and, if
necessary, to answer it. No telegraphing for Mr. Usher, except in case
of death, actual or imminent.

Ransome supposed that he would have to see him and get it over. Soon
after seven on Wednesday, then, Mr. Usher having ridden over on his mare
Polly and Ransome on his bicycle, they met in the parlor of the
"Bald-Faced Stag," Edgware. Mr. Usher's friend the landlord had
undertaken that they should not be disturbed.

It was impossible for Ransome not to notice something queer about his
father-in-law, something utterly unlike the bluff and genial presence he
had known. Mr. Usher seemed to have shrunk somehow and withered, so that
you might have said the catastrophe had hit him hard, if that, his mere
bodily shrinkage, had been all. What struck Ransome as specially queer
about Mr. Usher was his manner and the expression of his face. You could
almost have called it crafty. Guilty it was, too, consciously guilty,
the furtive face of a man on the defensive, armed with all his little
cunning against a possible attack, having entrenched himself in the
parlor of the "Bald-Faced Stag" as on neutral territory.

"What say to a bit of supper, my boy, before we begin business?"

It was a false and feeble imitation of his old heartiness.

Over a supper of cold ham and cheese and beer they discussed Ransome's