shall
have it laid out again on rather more elaborate lines."

"That," she said to the Baroness afterwards "is what I call having an
emergency brain."

THE SHEEP

The enemy had declared "no trumps." Rupert played out his ace and king
of clubs and cleared the adversary of that suit; then the Sheep, whom the
Fates had inflicted on him for a partner, took the third round with the
queen of clubs, and, having no other club to lead back, opened another
suit. The enemy won the remainder of the tricks--and the rubber.

"I had four more clubs to play; we only wanted the odd trick to win the
rubber," said Rupert.

"But I hadn't another club to lead you," exclaimed the Sheep, with his
ready, defensive smile.

"It didn't occur to you to throw your queen away on my king and leave me
with the command of the suit," said Rupert, with polite bitterness.

"I suppose I ought to have--I wasn't certain what to do. I'm awfully
sorry," said the Sheep.

Being awfully and uselessly sorry formed a large part of his occupation
in life. If a similar situation had arisen in a subsequent hand he would
have blundered just as certainly, and he would have been just as
irritatingly apologetic.

Rupert stared gloomily across at him as he sat smiling and fumbling with
his cards. Many men who have good brains for business do not possess the
rudiments of a card-brain, and Rupert would not have judged and condemned
his prospective brother-in-law on the evidence of his bridge play alone.
The tragic part of it was that he smiled and fumbled through life just as
fatuously and apologetically as he did at the card-table. And behind the
defensive smile and the well-worn expressions of regret there shone a
scarcely believable but quite obvious self-satisfaction. Every sheep of
the pasture probably imagines that in an emergency it could become
terrible as an army with banners--one has only to watch how they stamp
their feet and stiffen their necks when a minor object of suspicion comes
into view and behaves meekly. And probably the majority of human sheep
see themselves in imagination taking great parts in the world's more
impressive dramas, forming swift, unerring decisions in moments of
crisis, cowing mutinies, allaying panics, brave, strong, simple, but, in
spite of their natural modesty, always slightly spectacular.

"Why in the name of all that is unnecessary and perverse should Kathleen
choose this man for her future husband?" was t