ent," he said, smiling down at her
through the darkness. "Thank you for letting me come. Good night."

"Good night."

There was again that barely noticeable lingering of her hand in his. The
repetition rather disappointed him. "It's just her way of shaking
hands," was the explanation he gave of it.

When he had passed out of the gate he pretended to take his way down
Algonquin Avenue, but he only crossed the Street to the shelter of a
friendly elm. There he could watch her tall, white figure as it went
slowly up the driveway. Except for a dim light in the fan-shaped window
over the front door the house was dark. The white figure moved with an
air of dragging itself along.

"It isn't the most important thing in the world for her," he whispered
to himself, "to marry--_the man she cares for_."

There was a renewal of his blind fury against Ashley, while at the same
time he found himself groaning, inwardly: "I wish to God the man she
cares for wasn't such a--such a--trump!"

XVIII

When the colonel of the Sussex Rangers woke on the following morning the
Umfraville element in him, fatigued doubtless with the demands of the
previous day, still slept on. That strain in him which had made his
maternal ancestors gentlemen-adventurers in Tudor times, and cavaliers
in the days of Charles the First, and Jacobites with James the Second,
and roysterers with George the Fourth--loyal, swashbuckling, and
impractical, daring, dashing, lovable, absurd, bound to come to grief
one day or another, as they had come--that strain lying dormant, Ashley
was free to wake in the spirit of the manufacturer of brushes. In other
words he woke in alarm. It was very real alarm. It was alarm not unlike
that of the gambler who realizes in the cold stare of morning that for a
night's excitement he has thrown away a fortune.

The feeling was so dreadful that, as he lay for a few minutes with his
eyes closed, he could say without exaggeration that he had never felt
anything so sickening in his life. It was worse than the blue funk that
attended the reveille for his first battle--worse than the bluer remorse
that had come with the dawn after some of his more youthful sprees. The
only parallel to it he could find was in the desolation of poor
creatures he had seen, chiefly in India, reduced suddenly by fire,
flood, or earthquake to the skin they stood in and a lodging on the
ground. His swaggering promises of yesterday had brought him as near