at and
top-hat and his porterages, and if forgiveness entailed any more of
these nightmare sacraments of friendliness, he felt that he would be
unable to endure the fatiguing accessories of the regenerate state. He
hung up his top-hat and wiped his wet and throbbing head; he kicked off
his shoes and shed his frock-coat, and furiously qui-hied for a whisky
and soda and lunch.

His physical restoration was accompanied by a quickening of dismay at
the general prospect. What (to put it succinctly) was life worth, even
when unharassed by allusions to duels, without the solace of golf,
quarrels and diaries in the companionship of Puffin? He hated Puffin--no
one more so--but he could not possibly get on without him, and it was
entirely due to Puffin that he had spent so outrageous a morning, for
Puffin, seeking to silence Miss Mapp by his intoxicated bargain, had
been the prime cause of all this misery. He could not even, for fear of
that all-seeing eye in Miss Mapp's garden-room, go across to the house
of the unforgiven sea-captain, and by a judicious recital of his woes
induce him to beg Miss Mapp's forgiveness instantly. He would have to
wait till the kindly darkness fell.... "Mere slavery!" he exclaimed with
passion.

A tap at his sitting-room door interrupted the chain of these melancholy
reflections, and his permission to enter was responded to by Puffin
himself. The Major bounced from his seat.

"You mustn't stop here," he said in a low voice, as if afraid that he
might be overheard. "Miss Mapp may have seen you come in."

Puffin laughed shrilly.

"Why, of course she did," he gaily assented. "She was at her window all
right. Ancient lights, I shall call her. What's this all about now?"

"You must go back," said Major Flint agitatedly. "She must see you go
back. I can't explain now. But I'll come across after dinner when it's
dark. Go; don't wait."

He positively hustled the mystified Puffin out of the house, and Miss
Mapp's face, which had grown sharp and pointed with doubts and
suspicions when she observed him enter Major Benjy's house, dimpled, as
she saw him return, into her sunniest smiles. "Dear Major Benjy," she
said, "he has refused to see him," and she cut the string of the large
cardboard box which had just arrived from the dyer's with the most
pleasurable anticipations....

Well, it was certainly very magnificent, and Miss Greele was quite
right, for there was not the faintest tinge to show that it h