TALKING-OUT OF TARRINGTON

"Heavens!" exclaimed the aunt of Clovis, "here's some one I know
bearing down on us. I can't remember his name, but he lunched with us
once in Town. Tarrington--yes, that's it. He's heard of the picnic
I'm giving for the Princess, and he'll cling to me like a lifebelt till
I give him an invitation; then he'll ask if he may bring all his wives
and mothers and sisters with him. That's the worst of these small
watering-places; one can't escape from anybody."

"I'll fight a rearguard action for you if you like to do a bolt now,"
volunteered Clovis; "you've a clear ten yards start if you don't lose
time."

The aunt of Clovis responded gamely to the suggestion, and churned away
like a Nile steamer, with a long brown ripple of Pekingese spaniel
trailing in her wake.

"Pretend you don't know him," was her parting advice, tinged with the
reckless courage of the non-combatant.

The next moment the overtures of an affably disposed gentleman were
being received by Clovis with a "silent-upon-a-peak-in-Darien" stare
which denoted an absence of all previous acquaintance with the object
scrutinized.

"I expect you don't know me with my moustache," said the new-comer;
"I've only grown it during the last two months."

"On the contrary," said Clovis, "the moustache is the only thing about
you that seemed familiar to me. I felt certain that I had met it
somewhere before."

"My name is Tarrington," resumed the candidate for recognition.

"A very useful kind of name," said Clovis; "with a name of that sort no
one would blame you if you did nothing in particular heroic or
remarkable, would they? And yet if you were to raise a troop of light
horse in a moment of national emergency, 'Tarrington's Light Horse'
would sound quite appropriate and pulse-quickening; whereas if you were
called Spoopin, for instance, the thing would be out of the question.
No one, even in a moment of national emergency, could possibly belong
to Spoopin's Horse."

The new-comer smiled weakly, as one who is not to be put off by mere
flippancy, and began again with patient persistence:

"I think you ought to remember my name--"

"I shall," said Clovis, with an air of immense sincerity. "My aunt was
asking me only this morning to suggest names for four young owls she's
just had sent her as pets. I shall call them all Tarrington; then if
one or two of them die or fly away, or leave us in any of the ways that
pet owls are