in the arbour. Jim removed his pipe, and looked at
her.

"Do I know--who--did--what?" he asked slowly.

"Do you know the name of the man who made the mistake which killed Lord
Ingleby?"

Jim returned his pipe to his mouth.

"Yes, dear, I do," he said, quietly. "But how came you to know of the
blunder? I thought the whole thing was hushed up, at home."

"It was," said Myra; "but Lady Ingleby was told, and I heard it then.
Jim, if she asked you the name, should you tell her?"

"Certainly I should," replied Jim Airth. "I was strongly opposed, from
the first, to any mystery being made about it. I hate a hushing-up
policy. But there was the fellow's future to consider. The world never
lets a thing of that sort drop. He would always have been pointed out as
'The chap who killed Ingleby'--just as if he had done it on purpose; and
every man of us knew that would be a millstone round the neck of any
career. And then the whole business had been somewhat irregular; and 'the
powers that be' have a way of taking all the kudos, if experiments are
successful; and making a what-on-earth-were-you-dreaming-of row, if they
chance to be a failure. Hence the fact that we are all such
stick-in-the-muds, in the service. Nobody dares be original. The risks
are too great, and too astonishingly unequal. If you succeed, you get a
D.S.O. from a grateful government, and a laurel crown from an admiring
nation. If you fail, an indignant populace derides your name, and a
pained and astonished government claps you into jail. That's not the way
to encourage progress, or make fellows prompt to take the initiative. The
right or the wrong of an action should not be determined by its success
or failure."

Lady Ingleby's mind had paused at the beginning of Jim's tirade.

"They could not have taken Michael's kudos," she said. "It must have been
patented. He was always most careful to patent all his inventions."

"Eh, what?" said Jim Airth. "Oh, I see. 'Kudos,' my dear girl, means
'glory'; not a new kind of explosive. And why do you call Lord Ingleby
'Michael'?"

"I knew him intimately," said Lady Ingleby.

"I see. Well, as I was saying, I protested about the hushing up, but was
talked over; and the few who knew the facts pledged their word of honour
to keep silence. Only, the name was to be given to Lady Ingleby, if she
desired to know it; and some of us thought you might as well put it in
_The Times_ at once, as tell a woman. Then we heard she