lub, and sent a despatch to
Blix--the third since morning:

"Can I come up right away? It's urgent. Send answer by this messenger."

He got his answer within three-quarters of an hour, and left the club
as Hendricks and George Hands arrived by the elevator entrance.

Sitting in the bay window of the dining-room, he told Blix why he had
come.

"Oh, you were right!" she told him. "Always, ALWAYS come, when--when
you feel you must."

"It gets so bad sometimes, Blix," he confessed with abject
self-contempt, "that when I can't get some one to play against I'll sit
down and deal dummy hands, and bet on them. Just the touch of the
cards--just the FEEL of the chips. Faugh! it's shameful."

The day following, Sunday, Condy came to tea as usual; and after the
meal, as soon as the family and Victorine had left the pair alone in
the dining-room, they set about preparing for their morrow's excursion.
Blix put up their lunch--sandwiches of what Condy called "devilish"
ham, hard-boiled eggs, stuffed olives, and a bottle of claret.

Condy took off his coat and made a great show of stringing the tackle:
winding the lines from the spools on to the reels, and attaching the
sinkers and flies to the leaders, smoking the while, and scowling
fiercely. He got the lines fearfully and wonderfully snarled, he
caught the hooks in the table-cloth, he lost the almost invisible gut
leaders on the floor and looped the sinkers on the lines when they
should have gone on the leaders. In the end Blix had to help him out,
disentangling the lines foot by foot with a patience that seemed to
Condy little short of superhuman.

At nine o'clock she said decisively:

"Do you know what time we must get up in the morning if we are to have
breakfast and get the seven-forty train? Quarter of six by the latest,
and YOU must get up earlier than that, because you're at the hotel and
have further to go. Come here for breakfast, and--listen--be here by
half-past six--are you LISTENING, Condy?--and we'll go down to the
depot from here. Don't forget to bring the rods."

"I'll wear my bicycle suit," he said, "and one of those golf scarfs
that wrap around your neck."

"No," she declared, "I won't have it. Wear the oldest clothes you've
got, but look fairly respectable, because we're to go to Luna's when we
get back, remember. And now go home; you need all the sleep you can
get if you are to get up at six o'clock."

Instead of being late, as Blix h