heels and cursing him in our hearts for having
interrupted our game. He had decided to adopt one of us, kind Cousin
Mark. Heaven knows why he chose me. Philip was eleven; two years longer
to wait. Perhaps that was why.

"Well, Mark educated me. I went to a public school and to Cambridge,
and I became his secretary. Well, much more than his secretary as your
friend Beverley perhaps has told you: his land agent, his financial
adviser, his courier, his--but this most of all--his audience. Mark
could never live alone. There must always be somebody to listen to him.
I think in his heart he hoped I should be his Boswell. He told me one
day that he had made me his literary executor--poor devil. And he used
to write me the absurdest long letters when I was away from him, letters
which I read once and then tore up. The futility of the man!

"It was three years ago that Philip got into trouble. He had been
hurried through a cheap grammar school and into a London office, and
discovered there that there was not much fun to be got in this world on
two pounds a week. I had a frantic letter from him one day, saying that
he must have a hundred at once, or he would be ruined, and I went to
Mark for the money. Only to borrow it, you understand; he gave me a good
salary and I could have paid it back in three months. But no. He saw
nothing for himself in it, I suppose; no applause, no admiration.
Philip's gratitude would be to me, not to him. I begged, I threatened,
we argued; and while we were arguing, Philip was arrested. It killed
my mother--he was always her favourite--but Mark, as usual, got his
satisfaction out of it. He preened himself on his judgment of character
in having chosen me and not Philip twelve years before!

"Later on I apologized to Mark for the reckless things I had said
to him, and he played the part of a magnanimous gentleman with his
accustomed skill, but, though outwardly we were as before to each other,
from that day forward, though his vanity would never let him see it, I
was his bitterest enemy. If that had been all, I wonder if I should have
killed him? To live on terms of intimate friendship with a man whom you
hate is dangerous work for your friend. Because of his belief in me
as his admiring and grateful protege and his belief in himself as my
benefactor, he was now utterly in my power. I could take my time and
choose my opportunity. Perhaps I should not have killed him, but I had
sworn to have my revenge