lso laughed a great deal too much around the logs
at the bungalow fire, and then drank a deal more than too much at the
clubhouse before turning in. Maybe it was cowardly to sneak back to
town a couple of days later, "on business," of course--a shabby excuse
for a chap that doesn't dabble in business more than I do. But I
honestly needed to go to get back my equilibrium. I got it, though,
and I've kept it pretty continuously. And this much is enough for
that. Natica Melsford is the only interesting bit about this story,
and let's get back to her.

That winter she married Jack Drayton. The afternoon we rehearsed for
the wedding I looked at her, before we pranced down the aisle and
endured the endless silly giggles of the bridesmaids, and the usher
louts who would fall out of step, and grew more peevish by the minute.
I looked her over then, and I said to myself: "You feeble paranoiac,
imagine that girl tying up with _you_." Well, I couldn't very well
imagine it, although I tried. But I was extremely noisy, and I heard
two or three of the bridesmaids, to say nothing of the maid of honor
and the bridegroom's mamma, tapping their gentle hammers, at my
expense, at the breakfast. It was a year afterward that I began to fag
regularly for the Drayton establishment.

Jack Drayton, by rights, ought to have been poisoned. He'd be the
first to acknowledge it now. Perhaps if he'd married a girl who
insisted on having things out the moment they began, the things
wouldn't have happened. But Natica Melsford wasn't that sort. She was
the kind that simply looked scorn into and clear through you, when she
thought you were acting low down. This, with a man strung like Jack
was, simply put the fat into the fire. It would have been different
with me. I'd--well--I'd have made an abject crawl, to be sure. You
see, her knowing this was the thing that must have always queered me
with her. A woman prefers a man she can get furious at and who'll
stick it out a bit, to one who caves in at the first sign of a frown.
But Jack carried things too far.

No, he didn't mind my frequenting the house. He liked me and I liked
him. But, all the same, I knew he didn't regard me as a foeman worthy
of his steel. And, although the knowledge made me raw now and then,
when he's come in with his easy, careless way, still I swallowed the
mean feeling because it gave me a chance to see her. And don't imagine
I went around hunting for trouble. It was at the club one