began (it seems in a previous
incarnation) at Murglebed-on-Sea.

The maiming of Lola's beauty has been the last jest which the
Arch-Jester has practised on me. I fancy he thought that this final
scurvy trick would wipe Simon de Gex for ever out of the ranks of his
rivals. But I flatter myself that, having snapped my fingers in his
face, the last laugh has been on my side. He has withdrawn discomfited
from the conflict and left me master of the ground. Love conquers all,
even the Arch-Jester.

There are some who still point to me as one who has deliberately ruined
a brilliant career, who pity me as one who has gone under, who speak
with shrugged shoulders and uplifted eyebrows at my unfortunate marriage
and my obscure and cranky occupation. The world, they say, was at
my feet. So it was. But what the pitying critics lack the grace to
understand is that better than to have it under one's feet is to have
it, or that of it which matters, at one's heart.

I sit in this tiny hotel by the sea and reflect that it is over three
years since I awoke from death and assumed a new avatar. And since my
marriage, what have been the happenings?

Dale has just been elected for the Fensham Division of Westmoreland, and
he has already begun the line of sturdy young Kynnersleys, of which I
had eumoirous dreams long ago. Quast and the cats have passed into alien
hands. Anastasius Papadopoulos is dead. He died three months ago of
angina pectoris, and Lola was with him at the end. Eleanor Faversham has
married a Colonial bishop. Campion, too, has married--and married the
last woman in the world to whom one would have thought of mating him--a
frivolous butterfly of a creature who drags him to dinner-parties and
Ascot and suppers at the Savoy, and holds Barbara's Building and all
it connotes in vixenish detestation. He roars out the agony of his
philanthropic spirit to Lola and myself, who administer consolation and
the cold mutton that he loves. The story of his marriage is a little
lunatic drama all to itself and I will tell it some day. But now I
can only rough-sketch the facts. He works when he can at the beloved
creation of his life and fortune; but the brain that would be inadequate
to the self-protecting needs of a ferret controls the action of this
masterful enthusiast, and his one awful despair in life is to touch a
heart that might beat in the bosom of a vicious and calculating haddock.
I only mention this to explain how it has co