ics of the matter depended entirely on Randall's point of view.
Their meetings had been contrived by no unmaidenly subterfuge on the
part of Phyllis. She knew him to be above her in social station. She
kept him off as long as she could. But que voulez-vous? Randall was a
very good-looking, brilliant, and fascinating fellow; Phyllis was a
dear little human girl. And it is the human way of such girls to fall
in love with such fascinating, brilliant fellows. I not only hold a
brief for Phyllis, but I am the judge, too, and having heard all the
evidence, I deliver a verdict overwhelmingly in her favour. Given the
circumstances as I have stated them, she was bound to fall in love with
Randall, and in doing so committed not the little tiniest speck of a
peccadillo.

My first intimation of tender relations between them came from my sight
of them in February in Wellings Park. Since then, of course, I have
much which I will tell you as best I may.

So now for Betty's story, confirmed and supplemented by what I have
learned later. But before plunging into the matter, I must say that
when Betty had ended I took up my little parable and told her of all
that Randall had told me concerning his repudiation of Gedge. And Betty
listened with a curiously stony face and said nothing.

When Betty puts on that face of granite I am quite unhappy. That is why
I have always hated the statues of Egypt. There is something beneath
their cold faces that you can't get at.

CHAPTER XI

Gedge bitterly upbraided his daughter, both for her desertion of his
business and her criminal folly in abandoning it so as to help mend the
shattered bodies of fools and knaves who, by joining the forces of
militarism, had betrayed the Sacred Cause of the International
Solidarity of Labour. His first ground for complaint was scarcely
tenable; with his dwindling business the post of clerk had dwindled
into a sinecure. To sit all day at the receipt of imaginary custom is
not a part fitted for a sane and healthy young human being. Still, from
Gedge's point of view her defection was a grievance; but that she could
throw in her lot openly with the powers of darkness was nothing less
than an outrage.

I suppose, in a kind of crabbed way, the crabbed fellow was fond of
Phyllis. She was pretty. She had dainty tricks of dress. She flitted,
an agreeable vision, about his house. He liked to hear her play the
piano, not because he had any ear for music, but becaus