s. Crofton, with whom he had spent a good deal of
his time since his arrival in London three weeks ago, had left town. She
had not gone far, only to the Surrey village where he himself was going
on Friday.
When pretty Mrs. Crofton had told Radmore that she had taken a house at
Beechfield, he had been very much surprised and taken aback. It had
seemed to him an amazing coincidence that the one place in the wide world
which to him was home should have been chosen by her. But at once she had
reminded him, in her pretty little positive way, that it was he himself
who, soon after they had become first acquainted in Egypt, had drawn such
an attractive picture of the Surrey village. That, in fact, was why, in
July--it was now late September--when she, Enid Crofton, had had to think
of making a new home, Beechfield had seemed to her the ideal place. If
only she could hear of a house to let there! And by rare good chance
there had been such a house--The Trellis House! A friend had lent her
a motor, and she had gone down to look at it one August afternoon, and
there and then had decided to take it. It was so exactly what she
wanted--a delightful, old, cottagy place, yet with all modern
conveniences, lacking, alas! only electric light.
All this had happened, so she had explained, after her last letter to
him, for she and Radmore had kept up a desultory correspondence.
And now, with Janet Tosswill's voice still sounding in his ears, Godfrey
Radmore was not altogether sorry to feel a touch of loneliness, for at
times his good fortune frightened him.
Not only had he escaped through the awful ordeal of war with only one bad
wound, while many of his friends and comrades--the best and bravest, the
most happily young, had fallen round him--but he had come back to find
himself transformed from a penniless adventurer into a very rich man. An
old Brisbane millionaire, into whose office he had drifted in the January
of 1914, and with whom he had, after a fashion, made friends, had re-made
his will in the memorable autumn of that year, and had left Radmore half
his vast fortune. Doubtless many such wills were made under the stress of
war emotion, but--and it was here that Radmore's strange luck had come
in--the maker of this particular will had died within a month of making
it. And, as so often happens to a man who had begun by losing what little
he had owing to folly and extravagance, Godfrey Radmore, though
exceptionally generous and
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