pot picnics or crimson sunflowers
than she had in the chemicals of Inglewood or the sardonic speeches
of Moon. Courtesy, on the other hand, is a thing that anybody
can understand, and Smith's manners were as courteous as they
were unconventional. She said he was "a real gentleman," by which she
simply meant a kind-hearted man, which is a very different thing.
She would sit at the head of the table with fat, folded hands and a fat,
folded smile for hours and hours, while every one else was talking at once.
At least, the only other exception was Rosamund's companion,
Mary Gray, whose silence was of a much more eager sort. Though she
never spoke she always looked as if she might speak any minute.
Perhaps this is the very definition of a companion. Innocent Smith
seemed to throw himself, as into other adventures, into the adventure
of making her talk. He never succeeded, yet he was never snubbed;
if he achieved anything, it was only to draw attention to this quiet figure,
and to turn her, by ever so little, from a modesty to a mystery.
But if she was a riddle, every one recognized that she was a fresh
and unspoilt riddle, like the riddle of the sky and the woods in spring.
Indeed, though she was rather older than the other two girls,
she had an early morning ardour, a fresh earnestness of youth,
which Rosamund seemed to have lost in the mere spending of money,
and Diana in the mere guarding of it. Smith looked at her again and again.
Her eyes and mouth were set in her face the wrong way--which was really
the right way. She had the knack of saying everything with her face:
her silence was a sort of steady applause.

But among the hilarious experiments of that holiday
(which seemed more like a week's holiday than a day's)
one experiment towers supreme, not because it was any sillier
or more successful than the others, but because out of this
particular folly flowed all of the odd events that were to follow.
All the other practical jokes exploded of themselves, and left vacancy;
all the other fictions returned upon themselves, and were finished
like a song. But the string of solid and startling events--
which were to include a hansom cab, a detective, a pistol,
and a marriage licence--were all made primarily possible
by the joke about the High Court of Beacon.

It had originated, not with Innocent Smith, but with Michael Moon. He was
in a strange glow and pressure of spirits, and talked incessantly;
yet he had neve