their comfortable home for one of his own on a
necessarily much smaller scale. Miss Hemming, the future Mrs. Guy, was
by no means deficient in peculiarity from his people's point of view.
She affected flowing fabrics of peculiar shades, and she had still more
peculiar ideas of furnishing. On Saturday afternoons she would drag poor
Guy into all the second-hand furniture shops in the neighbourhood--not
even to save money, as Mrs. Berridge complained to her more intimate
friends--but just to be peculiar. It seemed like a judgment when Guy
fell so ill with influenza, obviously contracted in one of those highly
peculiar shops, that he had to mortgage his summer holiday by going away
for a complete change early in the New Year.

He went to country cousins of the suburban Hemmings; his own Miss
Hemming went with him, and it was on their return that a difference was
first noticed in the young couple. They no longer looked radiant
together, much less when apart. The good young accountant would pass my
window with a quite tragic face. And one morning, when we met outside,
he told me that he had not slept a wink.

That evening I went to smoke a pipe with Uvo Delavoye, who happened to
have brought me into these people's ken. And we were actually talking
about Guy Berridge and his affairs when the maid showed him up into
Uvo's room.

I never saw a man look quite so wretched. The mild face seemed to cower
behind the truculent moustache; the eyes, bright and bloodshot, winced
when one met them. I got up to go, feeling instinctively that he had
come to confide in Uvo. But Berridge read me as quickly as I read him.

"Don't you go on my account," said he gloomily. "I've nothing to tell
Delavoye that I can't tell you, especially after giving myself away to
you once already to-day. I daresay three heads will be better than two,
and I know I can trust you both."

"Is anything wrong?" asked Uvo, when preliminary solicitations had
reminded me that his visitor neither smoked nor drank.

"Everything!" was the reply.

"Not with your engagement, I hope?"

"That's it," said Berridge, with his eyes on the carpet.

"It isn't--off?"

"Not yet."

"I don't want to ask more than I ought," said Uvo, after a pause, "but I
always imagine that, between people who're engaged, the least little
thing----"

"It isn't a little thing."

And the accountant shook his downcast head.

"I only meant, my dear chap, if you'd had some disagreement----"