to have taken
place on my launch have been just as much mock tragedies as last
night's, only I have not previously chosen to take the audiences into
my confidence. The greatest pugilists in the world have fought in my
gymnasium, often, if you will, under illegal conditions, but there has
never been a fight that was not fair."

"I believe that," Francis said.

"And there is another matter for which I take some blame," Sir Timothy
went on, "the matter of Fairfax and Victor Bidlake. They were neither
of them young men for whose loss the world is any the worse. Fairfax
to some extent imposed upon me. He was brought to The Walled House by a
friend who should have known better. He sought my confidence. The story
he told was exactly that of the mock drama upon the launch. Bidlake had
taken his wife. He had no wish to appeal to the Courts. He wished to
fight, a point of view with which I entirely sympathised. I arranged a
fight between the two. Bidlake funked it and never turned up. My advice
to Fairfax was, whenever he met Bidlake, to give him the soundest
thrashing he could. That night at Soto's I caught sight of Fairfax some
time before dinner. He was talking to the woman who had been his wife,
and he had evidently been drinking. He drew me on one side. 'To-night,'
he told me, 'I am going to settle accounts with Bidlake.' 'Where?' I
asked. 'Here,' he answered. He went out to the theatre, I upstairs to
dine. That was the extent of the knowledge I possessed which enabled me
to predict some unwonted happening that night. Fairfax was a bedrugged
and bedrunken decadent who had not the courage afterwards to face what
he had done. That is all."

The hand slipped from Francis' shoulder. Francis, with a smile, held
out his own. They stood there for a moment with clasped hands--a queer,
detached moment, as it seemed to Francis, in a life which during the
last few months had been full of vivid sensations. From outside came
the lazy sounds of the drowsy summer morning--the distant humming of
a mowing machine, the drone of a reaper in the field beyond, the
twittering of birds in the trees, even the soft lapping of the stream
against the stone steps. The man whose hand he was holding seemed to
Francis to have become somehow transformed. It was as though he had
dropped a mask and were showing a more human, a more kindly self.
Francis wondered no longer at the halting gallop of the horses in the
field.

"You'll be good to Margaret?" Si