THESE LYNNEKERS 
 J. D. BERESFORD 
 
BY J. D. BERESFORD 
 
 THESE LYNNEKERS 
 
 THE EARLY HISTORY OP JACOB STAHL 
 
 A CANDIDATE FOR TRUTH 
 
 THE INVISIBLE EVENT 
 
 THE HOUSE IN DEMETRIUS ROAD 
 
 GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY 
 NEW YORK 
 
THESE 
 LYNNEKERS 
 
 BY 
 
 J. D. BERESFORD 
 
 AUTHOR OF "THE EARLY HISTORY OF JACOB STAHL/ 
 "A CANDIDATE FOR TRUTH," ETC., ETC. 
 
 NEW YORK 
 GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY 
 
Copyright, 1916, 
 BY GEORGE H. DOBAN COMPANY 
 
 PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 
 

 TO MY SON 
 
 1 fling away ambition; 
 
 By that sin fell the angels " 
 
 HENRY VIII 
 
 393R37 
 
CONTENTS 
 BOOK ONE 
 
 CHAPTEB 
 
 I THE EQUATION n 
 
 II OAKSTONE 22 
 
 III LAISSEZ FAIRE 42 
 
 IV THE LYNNEKER METHOD 63 
 
 V MEDBOROUGH 78 
 
 VI THE BEGINNING OF REASON 91 
 
 VII EDWARD 106 
 
 VIII MRS. LYNNEKER 119 
 
 IX GEORGE SMITH 146 
 
 X THE GOD OUT OF MAYFAIR 174 
 
 XI ADELA 219 
 
 XII BRIAN LESSING 257 
 
 BOOK TWO 
 
 XIII JULY, 1903 301 
 
 XIV THE NEW OAKSTONE 333 
 
 XV SIBYL 354 
 
 XVI THE HERMIT 394 
 
 XVII THE MISSING INDUCTION 411 
 
 XVIII THE Two SACRAMENTS 437 
 
 XIX THE LYNNEKER FAMILY 449 
 
BOOK ONE 
 
THESE LYNNEKERS 
 
 I 
 
 THE EQUATION 
 
 YOU might tell young Dickie I want him," Latimer 
 said. "He's in the stable, making a rabbit-hutch." 
 
 "I'm going the other way." Adela's errand was too im- 
 portant to be postponed by carrying messages between her 
 younger brothers; and the stables were at least fifty yards 
 in the wrong direction. "I'm taking this soup to old Mrs. 
 Oliver," she explained. "I shall be going out by the top 
 gate." 
 
 Latimer grudgingly conceded the importance of the can 
 his sister exhibited. "I'm swatting up these beastly maths 
 for my scholarship," he said, dropping from the urgency 
 of his first command. 
 
 Adela at seventeen had developed a difficult independence. 
 As her skirts grew longer and her hair crept up by slow 
 stages so that now the tail of it hung scarcely lower than 
 the collar of her braided jacket, she had come to exhibit an 
 incomprehensible contrariety. Even Edward, two years 
 her senior, dignified by the fact that he had left school last 
 term and was going up to Cambridge in October, found 
 that diplomacy had had to take the place of command. 
 Adela was, according to Edward, evolving a temperament. 
 She was learning to play the organ and had already pub- 
 licly performed "Hill's March" as a voluntary after evening 
 service. 
 
 11 
 
12 THESE LYNNEKERS 
 
 "Awful swat," Latimer continued, tactfully working upon 
 his sister's sympathies. "I'm no earthly good at maths, but 
 I have to get up enough just to pass in 'em. And I wanted 
 young Dickie to explain something. He's good at this 
 rotten stuff," he added, with a hint of contempt to cover 
 the indignity of appealing for help to a kid of fourteen in 
 the junior school. 
 
 "No good looking at me, I can't explain them/' Adela re- 
 plied, with the superiority of the recently acclaimed artist. 
 
 Latimer leant back in his chair and yawned, and then 
 hastily sat forward again. "This chair's awfully rocky," 
 he remarked. "The whole affair'll come to pieces one of 
 these days." He got up and roughly pulled the back up 
 to its normal angle again. "I suppose I'd better go and 
 get young Dickie," he said. "He might do something to 
 this bally chair, too." 
 
 "I'll tell him if you like," Adela conceded. 
 
 "Oh! don't bother," protested Latimer. 
 
 "It's all right," Adela said. 
 
 She left her soup can on the dining-room taole. 
 
 Latimer investigated the contents with faint disgust; 
 strolled over to the window, and then returned to a con- 
 templation of his algebra. 
 
 ii 
 
 "Good Lord, you are in a muck," was his greeting to 
 the obedient Dickie. 
 
 Dickie frowned impatiently. He had been called away 
 from the construction of what promised to be an unusually 
 respectable rabbit-hutch, at that most interesting stage 
 when the thing begins to take shape, and all the hard work 
 of the patient young carpenter is rewarded by the delight 
 of fitting and fastening his creation into the ideally con- 
 ceived form. 
 
 "Am I ?" he asked, and picked a shaving from a crease in 
 his waistcoat. "What did you want me for?" 
 
THE EQUATION 13 
 
 "Your hair's full of chips," commented Latimer fastidi- 
 ously. 
 
 Dickie's hair was a reproach to the whole Lynneker 
 family. It was quite too exuberant; and all the gibes of 
 Edward, Adela and Latimer were insufficient to keep it 
 cropped closely enough to hide a tendency to wave. 
 Dickie's hair had never curled, but when it was permitted 
 to grow it fell into the conventional tumultuous masses of 
 sculpture. 
 
 "Oh! I can't help it," protested Dickie. "Does it mat- 
 ter? I'm going back directly. What did you want me 
 for?" 
 
 "Look here, you're getting most confoundedly cheeky, 
 you young beggar," Latimer advised him; and Dickie, well 
 drilled as became the youngest of a family of five, set his 
 mouth firmly and attempted no reply. 
 
 "Apologise!" commanded Latimer. 
 
 "I'm sorry," Dickie said, so perfunctorily that his 
 brother might have demanded fuller satisfaction had he 
 not had a favour to ask. In the circumstances, he thought 
 it wiser to appear mollified. 
 
 "Look here," he began, "I wish you'd have a squint at 
 this filthy quadratic. I can't see what's wrong with it. 
 Number 23," he went on, pushing the book and his own 
 paper of figures towards his brother. "I'll swear I've 
 stated it all right." 
 
 Dickie was in a hurry and wasted no time. He read the 
 example aloud in an undertone, and then fixed his eyes 
 vacantly on the mantelpiece opposite. 
 
 "You must make 'x' equal the single file," he said ; "then 
 *x 2 ' will equal the company; and . . ." 
 
 Latimer interrupted him. "I have," he said caustically. 
 "Don't you think you might look at my working?" 
 
 Dickie submissively picked up his brother's calculations 
 and went through them. "It's all right," he announced. 
 "The answer's 16. What's the matter with it?" 
 
 "There's a mistake somewhere," Latimer said resolutely. 
 He had authority in store, but he preferred to reserve it 
 
14 THESE LYNNEKERS 
 
 for a time. Young Dickie was so cocksure about his mathe- 
 matics; it would be a distinct score to let him thoroughly 
 commit himself before producing the crushing evidence. 
 
 Dickie impatiently ran through his brother's calculations 
 a second time. "It's perfectly all right," he said. 
 
 "Well, I tell you it isn't," Latimer returned. "If you 
 want to know, the answer's '19.' " 
 
 Dickie shook his head. "It's *i6/ " he affirmed. "It must 
 be. You can prove it." 
 
 'Trove away, you young ass," sneered Latimer. "Only 
 perhaps you might take the trouble to look it up in the 
 answers to examples." 
 
 Dickie obediently turned to the end of the book and 
 made a careful comparison of the characteristic figures of 
 the example and the key. 
 
 Latimer had the tip of his tongue between his teeth. His 
 eyes gloated on the prospect of his brother's humiliation. 
 
 "It must be a misprint," Dickie said. 
 
 For a moment Latimer was speechless with amazement. 
 This, indeed, was the climax of Dickie's infatuation. 
 
 "Good Lord, you little fool," he gasped, struggling to 
 find some adequate expression for the immensity of his con- 
 tempt; "you don't mean to say you know better than the 
 book?" 
 
 Dickie was slightly abashed, but still persistent. "Well, 
 the answer must be '16,' " he submitted. 
 
 "But it isn't, you cuckoo, it's '*$,' " Latimer shouted 
 vehemently. 
 
 Dickie pushed his fingers through his hair, came across 
 a chip which he put in his mouth, and then dropped to a 
 dogged statement of the fact that the figure "19" did not 
 satisfy the equation. 
 
 "You're too infernally cocky," was Latimer's counter- 
 blast. He was righteously indignant. If Dickie were going 
 to question the sacred pronouncements of Todhunter, the 
 whole system of authority would be threatened. Moreover, 
 Latimer had greater faith in the printed figure than in 
 Dickie's powers of discretion. Algebra examples and ex- 
 
 
THE EQUATION 15 
 
 amination papers were like other incomprehensible erudi- 
 tions, they had some esoteric quality; they asked ques- 
 tions or made assertions that were beyond the understand- 
 ing. And if they were questioned on common grounds the 
 enquirer found himself held up to scorn as an ignorant 
 fool who could not read the subtle, and incidentally un- 
 impeachable mysteries that underlay the surface statement. 
 
 Dickie's expression pathetically asked when he might be 
 allowed to return to his rabbit-hutch. He had done his best. 
 If his brother foolishly persisted in accepting an impossible 
 figure in face of certain evidence, no one could help him. 
 
 "Can I go, Latimer?" he asked. 
 
 Latimer scowled. "Not till you say you're wrong," he 
 said. 
 
 "But I'm not wrong," Dickie rather quaveringly asserted ; 
 and the wrangle began again. 
 
 "Can't you see, you young ass, that the answer's '19'?" 
 
 "But it won't work." 
 
 "It would if you understood the question, only you don't. 
 You're so confoundedly cocksure." And then rising to the 
 pitch of querulous indignation, the note of one who would 
 passionately defend authority and has no argument, Latimer 
 went on : "Why, great Scott, if you're calmly going to say 
 that every answer in the key's wrong when it doesn't agree 
 with your own, what on earth's the good of of anything? 
 I mean what's the good of having algebra at all, you idiot?" 
 
 "It's only one answer." 
 
 "How do you know ? Have you tried them all ?" 
 
 "I say, Latimer, can't I go, now?" 
 
 "Is the answer '19' or '16'?" 
 
 Dickie weighed the chances of a surely permissible ex- 
 pediency before he decided that he could not deny the va- 
 lidity of his own intellectual processes. 
 ' '19' won't work," he said. 
 
 Latimer jumped to his feet and caught him by the wrist. 
 
 "Oh ! shut up, Latimer," protested Dickie, as his right arm 
 was twisted behind his back. 
 
 "Admit you're wrong, then." 
 
16 THESE LYNNEKERS 
 
 "But '19' . . . oh ! Latimer, shut up, you're hurting most 
 frightfully." 
 "Admit you're wrong!" 
 
 in 
 
 Those two years in Latimer's favour had given him 
 the right to bully. Dickie's occasional resentments in mo- 
 ments of passion, his weak physical oppositions, had al- 
 ways resulted in more drastic lickings, a deeper ignominy. 
 The convention had been established in the nursery: Lati- 
 mer was older and taller than Dickie, Latimer was, there- 
 fore, stronger and had autocratic powers when the two 
 brothers were alone. And until last holidays the conven- 
 tion had worked agreeably enough. The two boys had had 
 common ground in defending themselves against Edward; 
 and although they had never formed an offensive alliance 
 against him, nor even developed their defensive tactics to 
 the point of rescuing one another from an occasional lick- 
 ing, they had been united by their sense of playing on the 
 same side. 
 
 But a recognisable breach had begun to open between 
 Latimer and Dickie during the Easter holidays. Latimer 
 was becoming suddenly adult, and had gone over to the 
 enemy; and he and Edward had developed what Dickie 
 considered to be the nasty habit of continually sharing some 
 joke from which he was always excluded. 
 
 That new alliance had thrown Dickie upon his own re- 
 sources. He played cricket or tennis with the other two, 
 but he was being relegated to the position of a junior whose 
 duty it was to fag ; a duty that he consciously resented. In 
 the old days he and Latimer had had a remedy ; under great 
 provocation from Edward they could declare a strike, 
 could down tools, and go off to an improvised game of their 
 own. And, in effect, Dickie had adopted the same compro- 
 mise, and more particularly during this summer holiday, by 
 finding a resource in the pleasures of carpentry. It is true 
 
THE EQUATION 17 
 
 that he was not safe, that the use of the tools might be for- 
 bidden, since they belonged according to tradition to his 
 elder brothers ; but he had exhibited a skill and diligence in 
 the mending and making of rabbit-hutches that had en- 
 listed his mother's unsolicited support. And when Lati- 
 mer interfered with Dickie's peaceful occupation on the 
 ground that he was spoiling the tools, he could plead that 
 he was making something for mother, and if the thing was 
 not completed Mrs. Lynneker would inevitably intervene to 
 plead in her gentle nervous way for her own rights, if not 
 for Dickie's. 
 
 On occasion Latimer or Edward had sought to circum- 
 vent this diplomacy by finishing the job themselves, but 
 they were both as clumsy with their hands as Dickie was 
 skilful ; while it was unbearable to work under a little 
 brother's silent criticism of their incompetence. So, in the 
 course of five weeks, Dickie had established a right to the 
 use of the stable-building that was used as a workshop 
 a right that he had earned by craftsmanship and the 
 breach between him and Latimer had widened and friction 
 had increased. 
 
 Latimer's reaction to the new relationships had shown 
 itself in an access of spitefulness. He resented his brother's 
 proficiencies in handicraft, in mathematics and in such 
 games as chess and draughts, and sought to establish a 
 balance by bullying him. Latimer had the autocrat's natu- 
 ral fear of a possible rival, and had been driven back to 
 force in order to maintain his dignities. 
 
 And, now, on this eventful morning, he was to learn 
 that he could rely no longer even on seniority to uphold his 
 rule. He was three inches taller than his brother, but he 
 was slightly built, while Dickie was broad-shouldered and 
 sturdy and altogether in better physical condition. 
 
 "Admit you're wrong!" Latimer insisted and pressed his 
 authority to the breaking point. 
 
 Dickie began his revolution by strategy. He yelped 
 alarmingly, and risking further agony, gave way suddenly 
 at the knees. Latimer was startled into releasing his over- 
 
18 THESE LYNNEKERS 
 
 whelming advantage, and let go his hold of the tortured, 
 twisted arm. 
 
 For a few seconds Dickie squatted on the floor rubbing 
 his elbow and shoulder, and then, shuffling a little away 
 from his tyrant, regained his feet. 
 
 "Admit you're wrong," Latimer began once again threat- 
 eningly, but Dickie set his mouth and glared defiance. 
 
 "I'm right," he said resolutely. "It's a misprint. Any 
 one can see that '19' won't work it hasn't got a square 
 root to begin with." 
 
 Latimer wisely avoided the controversial point. "Come 
 here!" he commanded brutally. 
 
 "I shan't," replied Dickie. 
 
 "Do you want the worst licking youVe ever had in all 
 your life?" 
 
 "No, I don't, and you're not going to give it me, either." 
 
 Latimer realised that he must lose his temper. He was 
 afraid. It is so difficult to begin an attack on a passive an- 
 tagonist, and Latimer was too civilised to risk a straight 
 blow at Dickie's undefended face. Refined tortures like 
 the twisting of an arm could be carried by controllable 
 degrees to almost any length, but the contrast between that 
 method and the deliberate frontal attack marks the differ- 
 ence between nervous civilisation and irresponsible savagery. 
 
 "Infernal cheek!" Latimer shouted. 
 
 Dickie stared in resolute silence, his mouth set, his hands 
 loosely clenched. 
 
 Latimer came one step nearer and made a snatch at 
 Dickie's wrist. Dickie backed a little and that movement 
 made a beginning possible. 
 
 "Come here!" snouted Latimer, and achieved the loss 
 of temper that could alone carry him over the difficult 
 sticking point. 
 
 He made a rush, Dickie ducked, and then the two boys 
 clenched, and the fight resolved itself into a wrestling match, 
 Latimer hitting wildly and ineffectively whenever he could 
 get a hand free, an error in tactics that was partly respon- 
 sible for his downfall. 
 
THE EQUATION 19 
 
 He came down on his back and his head bumped re- 
 soundingly on a floor quite inefficiently padded by a string 
 carpet. It occurred to him that it might be good policy to 
 lie still. He had come startlingly to a realisation of the fact 
 that "that young beggar Dickie was most beastly strong," 
 and thought he might be decently relieved from further 
 assertions of his superiority at that moment by the pre- 
 tence of being slightly stunned. 
 
 He kept his eyes shut and awaited some cowardly prose- 
 cution of the initiative, but when the interval of silence 
 had been unendurably prolonged, a furtive return to con- 
 sciousness discovered that Dickie was sitting on the edge of 
 the table and staring imperturbably out of the window. 
 
 Latimer was gravely disconcerted. No really promising 
 plan of action suggested itself. He shirked the effort en- 
 tailed by an elaborate assumption of a recovery from un- 
 consciousness ; and could think of no sound argument to 
 demonstrate the unquestionable fact that he had been most 
 unfairly handled. 
 
 "Rotten little cad," he said at last. He made the state- 
 ment judicially, as one who is above contradiction. He 
 remained on the floor, with his hands now under his head, 
 which he was sure must have been badly bruised although 
 it had not begun to hurt as yet. 
 
 Dickie continued to stare, a little moodily, out of the 
 window. 
 
 "That's all rot," he said calmly. He was trying to un- 
 derstand all that this victory of his might connote. During 
 that decisive encounter he had realised for the first time 
 that he was a strong and capable fighter. And that know- 
 ledge set him free. He was no longer a fag. He did not 
 wish to take any undue advantage of the fact, but he felt 
 that it must be clearly ratified. 
 
 "Rotten little cad," Latimer repeated steadily. It was 
 quite evident that he had found his line, and meant to con- 
 tinue his assertion indefinitely without regard to any possi- 
 ble argument. 
 
 "Oh! all right," Dickie said. "I'm a cad if you like. 
 
20 THESE LYNNEKERS 
 
 You bumped my head against the stable wall last holidays, 
 but I suppose that doesn't count. Anyway you're licked, 
 and I can lick you again when I want to, and I'm not going 
 to fag for you any more or do any other jolly thing for 
 you if I don't want to. And the answer to that equation is 
 '16,' I don't care what the key says ; and I'm going back to 
 finish my hutch." 
 
 He did not wait to receive a reply to this bold claim 
 for independence. He got out of the room as quickly as he 
 could, blundering a little as was his habit, and left his an- 
 nouncement to sink in. 
 
 IV 
 
 He came back to his work with a sense of elation. He 
 was aware that he had conquered something stronger than 
 his brother's physical or mental opposition. He had scored 
 in some way, he thought, by carrying his victory to a definite 
 conclusion. He had been tempted to be magnanimous when 
 he had thrown Latimer, to be what both his brothers would 
 have called "decent" about it; and instead of giving way 
 to the impulse he had sat on the table and had argued the 
 point out with himself. Nevertheless he had funked again 
 when it came to asserting his right to the fruits of victory. 
 All his home-training, all the example of his family, with 
 the possible exception of Adela had urged him to take 
 the easier course, to relinquish his advantage for the sake 
 of re-establishing friendly relations. And he was glad, now, 
 that he had resisted the temptation. He felt strong and 
 assertive, ready to go out again and begin the battle afresh. 
 He did not know that he had conquered the Lynneker weak- 
 ness, but he was definitely aware of a sense of victory. . . . 
 
 He looked up from his work half an hour later to see 
 Latimer thoughtfully kicking a stone round and round the 
 stable yard. Presently he dribbled the stone to the door of 
 the outhouse. 
 
 Dickie looked at him boldly, but Latimer's eyes were ap- 
 
THE EQUATION 21 
 
 parently concerned with anything but his brother's face. 
 
 "Nearly finished?" he asked. 
 
 "Nearly," Dickie replied. 
 
 "I expect dinner's about ready. Hadn't you better 
 wash ?" 
 
 "Oh! hang! I suppose I had. I shan't be half a tick." 
 
 "The mater's in." 
 
 "All right. I'm coming." 
 
 Dickie laid his chisel carefully on the old table that served 
 as a bench and began to dab at the sawdust on his waist- 
 coat. 
 
 "I say, look here," began Latimer. 
 
 "What?" asked Dickie with a touch of defiance. 
 
 "You're not going to tell Edward we had a row?" 
 
 "Well, rather not. Why should I?" 
 
 "I don't know." Latimer had picked up a bradawl and 
 was absently stabbing at a loose board. 
 
 Dickie suffered another qualm before he said, "Oh ! look 
 out, I'm going to use that wood, and you'll smash the brad- 
 awl if you're not careful." He felt that he was taking an 
 unfair advantage of Latimer 's magnanimity in overlooking 
 recent insults. 
 
 Latimer put down the bradawl and went over to the 
 door. He stood on the threshold with his hands in his 
 pockets, kicked the door-post undecidedly, and then said : 
 
 "You aren't going to be a young ass, are you?" 
 
 "No, I don't think so," replied Dickie, after a moment's 
 hesitation. "But I'm not a bit sorry I licked you this morn- 
 ing. I'm sick of being kicked about all over the shop, and 
 I meant what I said about jolly well not fagging any more." 
 
 Latimer began to whistle. "As long as you don't put on 
 side," he remarked ; and Dickie knew that he had won that 
 bout, and that he might, if he cared, do anything with a 
 family whose chief concern was the desire for friendly 
 relations. 
 
 All the fret and bother of open quarrels required so much 
 effort. 
 
 Neither Dickie nor Latimer mentioned the equation again. 
 
II 
 
 OAKSTONE 
 
 ACCORDING to the diagnosis of his form-master, 
 Dickie "went stale" at the age of fifteen. The lower 
 fifth was the recognised dead end at Oakstone; "boys of a 
 certain type," as Wickford classified them, reached the 
 privileges of the lower fifth by a splendid effort and stayed 
 there till they left. But Dickie astonishingly stuck in the 
 form below, known in those days as "the Remove" ; and all 
 Mr. Wickford's exertions failed to push him on into the 
 upper school. A phrase had to be found to explain this 
 almost unprecedented failure. 
 
 Joyce, another permanent resident in the Remove, was 
 easily accounted for. His proper place, if learning were 
 the test of position, was in some shameful depth of igno- 
 rance among children of ten and eleven. He was put in 
 the Remove, mainly for aesthetic reasons. A young man of 
 five foot ten with explorable hair on his upper lip, destroyed 
 the symmetry and offended the decency of the lower se- 
 cond. Joyce's limitations had been fully comprehended be- 
 fore he had been at Oakstone for three terms a less gen- 
 eralised psychology would have explained them in a week, 
 and might possibly have found an outlet for him and he 
 was perfectly comfortable in his accredited seat at the bot- 
 tom of the form; an old resident of years' standing, who, 
 despite his many obvious stupidities, was quite able to enter 
 into the spirit of the witticism when Wickford sought to 
 enliven a dull ten minutes by casually asking him a ques- 
 tion. Joyce had become a stock joke to be endlessly elabo- 
 
 22 
 
OAKSTONE 23 
 
 rated, and he smiled complacently at his own undignified 
 uses. Every one knew that he had a bad negro strain in 
 him. The majority of the boys were quite ignorant of his 
 surname, and an innocent new master had once entered 
 him as "Nigger, H. L." on the class list. 
 
 Lynneker II was in another category. 
 
 Mr. James had passed him up from "the fourth" with 
 his usual summary of potentialities. "A hopeless duffer 
 at classics," James wrote, "and has no memory for Eng- 
 lish subjects such as history and geography, but promises 
 to be a fair mathematician. He has not the intelligence of 
 either of his two elder brothers, nor has he their general 
 characteristic teachableness ; but he is on the whole a nice, 
 well-behaved boy, although ferociously obstinate in some 
 respects." ("Ferocious" was James's pet adjective; he had 
 been known to describe a boy as "ferociously placid.") 
 
 Wickford was not discouraged by this report. He had 
 had worse cases that had not destroyed his reputation for 
 being able to whip any boy into the lower fifth in three 
 terms at the outside. But when Dickie had hung, sus- 
 pended in mid-class, for nearly two years, a phrase had 
 to be found to account for the unusual phenomenon of a 
 reasonably intelligent boy staying in the Remove. 
 
 "He seems to have gone stale," Wickford humbly con- 
 fessed to the head, and after a short discussion the Head 
 decided to write to Lynneker's father. 
 
 The drastic remedy suggested in that letter brought con- 
 sternation to the Lynneker family. Dr. Barnard, with a 
 thoughtless brevity, had proposed to put Dickie on the 
 "Modern Side." As a prescription, it would probably have 
 failed to stimulate Dickie in that fallow period of his early 
 puberty. The subjects taught on the Modern Side at Oak- 
 stone under Barnard, differed mainly by the substitution of 
 French and German for Latin and Greek. Science was 
 distantly acknowledged by a few perfunctory classes in in- 
 organic chemistry, and mathematics were extended to in- 
 clude dynamics, statics and trigonometry. But the classic 
 tradition had affected the whole principle of the teaching; 
 
24 THESE LYNNEKERS 
 
 and Dickie's one developed gift would not have carried him 
 through the quagmire of ill-expounded "English subjects" 
 that were still necessary to raise him from form to 
 form. , 
 
 II 
 
 Dickie's father never read his letters at the breakfast 
 table; and when he called his wife into the sacred pre- 
 cincts of his study at eleven o'clock, and asked her to sit 
 down, she knew that some serious trouble was in the air. 
 So apprehensive was she, indeed, that she failed to grasp 
 the infamy implied by Dr. Barnard's suggestion. 
 
 "Does that mean some kind of disgrace?" she asked 
 anxiously. 
 
 "Impossible for him to think of a scholarship," her 
 husband replied, avoiding explanations and conveying his 
 sense of some impassable gulf between their ways of 
 thought in this regard. 
 
 He never had explained certain things to her, not be- 
 cause there was a fundamental lack of sympathy between 
 them, but because he was inarticulate where his reserves 
 were concerned. He could not explain, now, why the 
 thought of any son of his being educated on the "Modern 
 Side" was distasteful to him. He had been a fellow of 
 Emmanuel (resigning his Fellowship under the old Univer- 
 sity laws on his marriage) , and his two elder boys had both 
 won classical scholarships at Cambridge. That was the 
 honoured tradition that Dickie was about to break in an 
 untraditional way. There were other ways of breaking it, 
 more shameful; but, inexplicably, less perturbing. They 
 were, it is true, cause for distress but of another kind. Mr. 
 Lynneker's elder brother who held the family living at 
 Culver had four sons, only two of whom had gone to the 
 University, but the other two could be accounted for as 
 precociously sowing their wild oats. Dickie's failure was 
 more plebeian. In Mr. Lynneker's thought the idea of the 
 
OAKSTONE 25 
 
 "Modern Side" was associated with trade ; and Dickie's ma- 
 ternal grandfather had been a tea-merchant. 
 
 He shirked that issue and went on: "It's quite out of 
 the question to send him to Cambridge unless he gets a 
 scholarship. I don't know where the money's coming 
 from for Barnard's fees next term." 
 
 Mrs. Lynneker's face slipped automatically into the par- 
 ticular expression of distress that it always wore when 
 this perpetual, heart-breaking question of money was un- 
 der discussion. Her eyebrows drew together and her mouth 
 tightened. For fifteen years she had met her husband's 
 complaints about expenditure with a pained silence and 
 that expression of helpless distress. 
 
 "I'm overdrawn nearly three hundred pounds at the 
 Bank, now," Mr. Lynneker continued almost by force of 
 habit, "and I suppose I must sell more shares. I don't 
 know how much longer this sort of thing can go on. Ed- 
 ward's costing me more than a hundred a year at Em- 
 manuel, and if he stays on at home while I give him a title 
 for orders. . . ." He fidgeted with his neat grey beard 
 and then added : "And Latimer will be going up to Downing 
 in October. His scholarship is only 35, and he will be on 
 my hands for at least three years." 
 
 Neither husband nor wife had looked at one another 
 since the topic of money had been opened. There had been 
 a steady misunderstanding between them on that question 
 ever since the expenses of their family had begun to over- 
 take their income. His unexpressed complaint was that 
 she "could not understand the value of money"; hers that 
 he exaggerated his difficulties. And neither of them had 
 ever put their grievance into words in each other's pres- 
 ence. The children knew both sides, and Eleanor, the 
 eldest of the family, was furtively trying to reduce expenses, 
 while Edward was inclined to agree with his mother. He 
 had good reason to hope that she was right in her estimate, 
 for he had bills at Cambridge that he could never hope to 
 pay out of his allowance. The other three, and more par- 
 ticularly Adela, took the line that it was "bound to be all 
 
26 THESE LYNNEKERS 
 
 right." Mrs. Lynneker, after a decent interval of pained 
 forbearance, gently slipped away from the awful topic by 
 saying, 
 
 "I don't quite understand what it is that Dickie has 
 done ... ?" She halted on the last word and gave it the 
 value of an interrogation. 
 
 Her husband frowned. "He hasn't done anything," he 
 said with evident annoyance. "The truth of the matter is 
 that he will have to go into the Bank. I must speak to 
 Bell about it when I go in to Medborough." 
 
 "Will he like that?" asked Mrs. Lynneker, thinking not of 
 the bank-manager, but of Dickie. 
 
 "Entirely his own fault," Mr. Lynneker said. He spoke 
 impatiently to cover any hint of a threatened injustice. He 
 was not consciously aware that he was making the most 
 of his son's failure in order to find an excuse for avoiding 
 expense, but he was fretted by a conflict of motives. He 
 disliked that sense of conflict, and he wanted immediately 
 to be relieved from it. "Entirely his own fault," he re- 
 peated. "He has had every opportunity. If he had done 
 as well as Edward and Latimer, I should have sold another 
 of the bank shares to send him to Cambridge. But if Bar- 
 nard suggests putting him on the Modern Side at sixteen, 
 it's a hopeless case." 
 
 "Poor Dickie," sighed Mrs. Lynneker. 
 
 "I shall keep him at Oakstone for another year," Mr. 
 Lynneker concluded ; a splendid compromise that gave him 
 ease from the harry of that sub-conscious conflict. "He 
 shall have another year," he elaborated, "and he must make 
 the best of his opportunities. If he doesn't do better . . ." 
 
 "Shall you tell him?" Mrs. Lynneker asked. 
 
 "I think we might warn him that it will be inevitable 
 for him to go into the Bank unless he can get a scholarship. 
 I shall write to Barnard. In any case it will be quite use- 
 less to put him on the Modern Side." 
 
 Even if Dickie was doomed to work in a Bank at Med- 
 borough, he should have the opportunities afforded by a 
 sound classical education. 
 
OAKSTONE 27 
 
 in 
 
 Dr. Barnard took a humorous view of Dickie's case. 
 His doctor's degree was in Letters, not in Divinity, and if 
 he had not found it advisable for the sake of his family 
 to accept the headmastership of Oakstone, he would prob- 
 ably have developed into a slightly whimsical historian. 
 
 To him, the school was an amusing experience ; he had 
 never thought of trying to understand the boys; and his 
 treatment of Dickie in the present instance was amiably 
 characteristic. 
 
 He asked him to breakfast, and afterwards gave him a 
 quarter of an hour before first school. 
 
 "I've had a letter from your father, Lynneker," he began. 
 
 "Does he want me to go on the Modern Side, sir ?" Dickie 
 asked anxiously. To him, also, the suggestion had conveyed 
 a hint of disgrace; unless you were cramming for Wool- 
 wich or Sandhurst, you were curiously out of it on the 
 Modern Side; you became associated with the thirty or 
 forty day-boys from the town, who definitely ranked as 
 members of a lower social grade. 
 
 Dr. Barnard made one of his amusing grimaces. He 
 was clean-shaved, and had a mobile, expressive mouth. 
 
 "No, for some esoteric reason, that he hasn't made quite 
 clear to me, he doesn't," Barnard said. "But I gather that 
 he is prepared to give you another chance. Another year, 
 he says, but presumably that means four terms from now." 
 
 Dickie was thinking that with two more summer terms 
 before him, he ought certainly to get his first eleven cap 
 before he left. If he could do that, he wouldn't mind so 
 much. 
 
 "Oh! good, sir," he mumbled. 
 
 "Is it so good?" asked Barnard caustically. "If you are 
 going to stick in the middle of the Remove, Lynneker, we 
 really haven't much use for you, here, you know. If you're 
 going into training for the business of a mollusc, better go 
 and practise by yourself on some lonely rock." 
 
28 THESE LYNNEKERS 
 
 Dickie looked miserable. "I do try, sir," he said. 
 
 "To be a limpet?" 
 
 "No, sir, to get out of the Remove." 
 
 "You will have to try harder," returned Barnard with 
 a whimsical smile; "and go on trying. Now, cut along, or 
 you'll be late for call-over." 
 
 He felt that he had done all that was possible for Lyn- 
 neker II, but by way of taking special precautions, Dickie 
 was in his own house and represented a capitation fee 
 he said a few words to Latimer after the Lower Sixth was 
 dismissed that morning. 
 
 "You might see if you can't help your young brother 
 with his classical work, Lynneker," was the form in which 
 this further display of interest was manifested. "Have 
 him up to your study sometimes during preparation. Your 
 father seems anxious about him." 
 
 Latimer was not sorry to have opportunity for rubbing 
 in his authority. As a prefect he was able to enforce due 
 respect from Dickie during term; but in the holidays the 
 effort to maintain his dignity had been altogether too irk- 
 some since that declaration of independence in the Rec- 
 tory dining-room. 
 
 "Here, you're to come up to my study for prep.," he 
 announced to Dickie that evening after tea. "Barnard says 
 you're a rotten little shirker, and I've got to keep an eye 
 on you." 
 
 Dickie looked sulky. He had no faith in Latimer's abil- 
 ity to elucidate the structural difficulties of the Latin tongue. 
 Wickford was more patient than Latimer, and Wickford 
 was very difficult to follow ; he took so much for granted. 
 
 Dickie had taught himself mathematics. He had discov- 
 ered at the age of nine that the "proof" of subtraction by 
 adding subtrahend and difference explained the mysterious 
 business of "borrowing." He found that discovery im- 
 mensely satisfying; and when he was tired of it began to 
 seek other arithmetical satisfactions. He found so many 
 and took so much delight in them that when he came to 
 algebra, it presented few difficulties. Here, again, the 
 
OAKSTONE 29 
 
 "laws" that were dogmatically laid down with no reason 
 given, were open to investigation ; and repaid the enquirer 
 by demonstrating that they were not to be counted among 
 the didactic inventions of some prehistoric governess, but 
 were natural and inevitable consequences of certain primary 
 and highly credible assumptions. Algebra, in fact, worked ; 
 and was as fascinating as any other puzzle that could be 
 engagingly and neatly solved. 
 
 Latin had offered no such key to his understanding. 
 He never thought of it as having once been the spoken 
 language of a people. He had learnt it by rote ; case, tense 
 and syntax ; and no one had ever suggested a single etymo- 
 logical analogy that might have related Latin to his own 
 English speech. Also, he had made no enquiry into the 
 historical authenticity of Gaius Julius Caesar's account of 
 his Gallic campaigns. Dickie, and the overwhelming ma- 
 jority of his schoolfellows, considered "Caesar," in so far 
 as they had considered the thing at all, as a schoolbook 
 written by some long-forgotten pedagogue who had com- 
 posed it as an exercise in composition, and introduced all 
 the tricks and catches of the characteristic examination 
 paper. 
 
 At Oakstone in the year 1891, no master thought it 
 necessary to enter into a reasonable account of Caesar's 
 strenuous life at home and abroad. No humanising paral- 
 lels were suggested, such as that between the crossing of 
 the Rhine in 58 B. C. and the march by Besangon and 
 Belfort to Alsace ; and the invasion of the same country by 
 another Caesar only five years before Dickie was born. 
 Besangon remained steadily as Vesentio, some stupidly ro- 
 mantic place that had no position in the map of modern 
 Europe ; just as the Helvetii had but the vaguest connexion 
 in Dickie's mind with the inhabitants of Switzerland. When 
 modern names occurred, such as the Alps or the Rhone, 
 they were dismissed as having been inserted by the long- 
 forgotten pedagogue, for the sake of verisimilitude. Roman 
 history was not taught at Oakstone with any reference to 
 geography, much less with reference to its influence on the 
 
30 THESE LYNNEKERS 
 
 present condition of the stultified boys who wrestled with 
 Caesar as with an exponent of syntax, learning Latin gram- 
 mar from history, and entirely ignorant of the fact that 
 they might have learnt more history from a study of their 
 own tongue. But "English subjects" had, also, been for- 
 malised into a meaningless dogma at Oakstone; a school 
 that was fully representative of its class at that period of 
 educational development. 
 
 And Latimer, true exponent that he was of the method 
 that had produced him, was quite unable to provide any 
 stimulus that should set his younger brother to the inves- 
 tigation of new and fascinating puzzles, puzzles that had 
 a solution no less than those of algebra. Poor Dickie, bun- 
 gling subject and object under the disguises of nominative 
 and accusative ; and trying to render every phrase by some 
 absolute English equivalent, as if Caesar had been first trans- 
 lated into Latin and it was essential to rediscover the pre- 
 cise terms of the English original ; poor obfuscated Dickie 
 was forced to submit with the patience of a circus horse 
 to Latimer's dogmatic and arbitrary expoundings of his 
 author. 
 
 "Great Scott, haven't you learnt yet that 'do' governs 
 the dative?" was Latimer's method of instruction copied 
 from the methods of his own preceptors; and he never 
 paused, himself, to consider the meaning of the case-name, 
 nor condescended to expound by an English analogy that 
 you give something to somebody. When forced to a fur- 
 ther elaboration by a failure of expletive, his pedantic 
 explanation had reference to "the remoter object"; which 
 to Dickie's thoroughly confused mind only conveyed the 
 idea of a person standing rather further away. All those 
 arbitrary grammatical terms had to be learnt by heart as 
 one might learn any other jargon, merely for the sake of 
 getting out of the Remove, and being saved in the process 
 from the social indignity of going on the "Modern Side." 
 
 Considerable pertinacity and an efficient memory, even 
 for meaningless formulae, saved Dickie from immediate 
 disgrace. He learnt the rules by sheer force of application, 
 
OAKSTONE 31 
 
 a system that left him liable to make the most childish 
 blunders. And that liability further retarded him, for 
 Elliott, who took the lower fifth, was highly irascible, and 
 fear of his flaming denunciations filled Dickie with a sullen 
 opposition that had the effect of making him forget the 
 farrago he had so patiently acquired. 
 
 The only really bright spot that compensated him for 
 all the harassments of that summer term, was the fact 
 that he somewhat precociously got his first-eleven colours 
 five days before the holidays by going in seventh wicket and 
 making 53 not out, against a particularly strong team, in 
 the "Old Boys" match. 
 
 IV 
 
 It was Elliott who by a lucky fluke found for Dickie's ob- 
 stinate stupidity, a more satisfying explanation than Wick- 
 ford's "gone stale," a phrase that dealt only with effects. 
 
 Elliott had been in a highly inflammable condition all 
 the morning, and Livy edited for the use of schools, with 
 notes had finally been flung at Dickie's head. The book 
 had been thrown violently in a spurt of furious temper, but 
 had immediately opened to display a tremendous flutter of 
 white wings, had soared upwards in an unexpected curve 
 and dropped accurately but tamely at Dickie's feet. 
 
 He picked the book up and politely returned it. The 
 rest of the form stiffened and watched eagerly. They 
 had seen a boy knocked down for less. 
 
 But either Elliott's passion had been expended by its 
 physical expression, or he had realised that a further dis- 
 play might make him appear ridiculously anxious to re- 
 trieve his failure. He accepted the Livy quietly; leaned 
 forward in his chair, and stared over his desk at the ap- 
 parently submissive Dickie. 
 
 "Quite Daedalian, eh, Lynneker?" he said quietly. 
 
 "Yes, sir," returned Dickie. 
 
 "The allusion is no doubt perfectly clear to you?" 
 
32 THESE LYNNEKERS 
 
 Dickie considered a moment, his thought confused by 
 some association with Pygmalion they pronounced their 
 Latin at Oakstone, in those days, as if it were an English 
 dialect, with endless misunderstandings about the "length" 
 of the vowels. 
 
 "You've heard of Daedalus, I presume?" Elliott con- 
 tinued with an increasingly ironic inflexion. 
 
 Dickie knew that he was done, now. A black screen 
 had come between him and all his tediously memorised 
 knowledge. It had been temporarily obliterated and no 
 fierce concentration of effort, mental or physical he did, 
 indeed, resort at times to the drastic measure of beating 
 his head with his fists would raise the horrid curtain that 
 was interposed between him and his little docket of facts. 
 Presently, perhaps when he had his head down in the 
 "scrum," a wonderful illumination would come to him. 
 The screen would fade and he would be able to recall 
 rules of syntax, irregular verbs, classical allusions, and 
 even fragments of the text of Livy or Cicero, with a de- 
 lightful ease and clearness. 
 
 "Yes, sir, I've heard of him; lots of times, I suppose," 
 he said valiantly, and he lifted his head and looked at his 
 form-master with an expression of tired patience. "But 
 when I'm asked suddenly, my mind simply goes blank. I 
 expect I'm some kind of idiot, sir, really." 
 
 "Oh! you're several kinds of idiot, Lynneker," Elliott 
 returned, "and unhappily the most obvious kind is particu- 
 larly exasperating. Come, now, doesn't the name of Daeda- 
 lus convey any sort of suggestion to your mind? Taken 
 in conjunction with the recent flight of Livy?" 
 
 Dickie was patently trying hard; so patently that Elliott 
 was interested. 
 
 "I suppose you've never taken any interest in these fa- 
 bles?" he asked. 
 
 "I'm afraid I haven't, sir." 
 
 "Don't you want to know them?" 
 
 "I'm afraid I don't, sir." 
 
 "Why not, Lynneker?" 
 
OAKSTONE 33 
 
 "It all seems rather useless sort of tosh, sii !" Dickie 
 said. 
 
 Elliott, in an uncharacteristic mood of placidity, found 
 himself facing, a question that was too difficult for him; 
 and to give himself a little time turned to the brilliant Hud- 
 son, who was at the head of the lower fifth, that Christmas 
 term. 
 
 "Can you tell us anything about Daedalus, Hudson?" he 
 asked. 
 
 Hudson was facile. When he had briefly detailed the 
 story of the flight into Sicily and the death of Icarus, he 
 was prepared to enter into what was evidently to him the 
 more interesting question of Daedalus's claim to fame as 
 an architect and sculptor, more particularly with reference 
 to a mention of him in the Iliad. 
 
 Elliott interrupted him. "Thank you, Hudson," he said. 
 "We'll have your lecture some other time. But I should 
 just like to ask you, now, whether all this seems rather 
 useless sort of tosh to you?" 
 
 "No, sir." Hudson smiled the superior smile of the well- 
 informed. 
 
 "And how would you define your use for it ?" Elliott con- 
 tinued. 
 
 "Well, it's knowledge, sir," replied Hudson. 
 
 "And your use for knowledge is what?" 
 
 Hudson began to suspect a trap. "Isn't it what we come 
 here to learn, sir?" he returned, guardedly. 
 
 Elliott realised that that enquiry could not expediently 
 be prosecuted further. He turned back to Dickie. 
 
 "Haven't you any desire to shine as shines the brilliant 
 Hudson, Lynneker?" he asked. 
 
 Dickie looked over his shoulder at the paragon, sitting 
 self-consciously elate at his desk. 
 
 "Not particularly, sir," he said ; and a pleased titter from 
 the rest of the form marked the fact that the precocious 
 Hudson was too clever to be popular. 
 
 That titter, however, closed the episode. Elliott was re- 
 minded that his plunge into boy-psychology was become 
 
34 THESE LYNNEKERS 
 
 a pleasant excuse for wasting time, and that Livy was 
 still untranslated. 
 
 "Perhaps it may encourage your taste for classical knowl- 
 edge, Lynneker," he said, "if you were to read up all you 
 can find about Daedalus and write me an essay on him of, 
 say, five hundred words. Try it ; and bring me what you've 
 done on Saturday morning, will you? Now, Atcherley, 
 when you've done smiling, will you go on; page 7, line 
 22. . . ." 
 
 But when he was talking to Wickford that evening, El- 
 liott found his explanation. 
 
 "The attitude of that fellow Lynneker, you know, rather 
 intrigues me," he said. "He isn't interested in classics sim- 
 ply because he doesn't get anything out of them. And he 
 doesn't seem to care a damn for knowledge for its own 
 sake. It's no satisfaction to Lynneker just to know. Now 
 that little prig, Hudson, preens himself all over with the 
 mere pride of being an authority." 
 
 "Hudson ought to do something for the school," Wick- 
 ford replied, effectually quenching Elliott's enthusiasm. 
 "Get a senior scholarship, or something. Barnard was 
 saying, the other day . . ." 
 
 And unfortunately for Dickie, Elliott made no further 
 application of his one bright discovery. 
 
 The essay on Daedalus was delivered punctually on Sat- 
 urday morning. When it was a matter of mere applica- 
 tion, Dickie was never at fault. 
 
 And despite his marked tendency to blunder and all his 
 apparent stupidities, he had succeeded in crawling up to 
 the third place in his form order by the end of his next 
 summer term. The examinations helped him wonderfully. 
 Sitting at a desk, with boys from the lower school on 
 either side of him an arrangement that effectually antici- 
 pated any chance of copying and with a printed set of 
 
OAKSTONE 35 
 
 questions to answer, Dickie was at his best. That horri- 
 ble screen never fell on those occasions. The Cambridge 
 examiner reported that his Latin and Greek prose and verse 
 were uninspired by any feeling for the language, but that 
 he was sound, very sound ; and followed that opinion by 
 one of surprise that a boy of Lynneker's age (he was seven- 
 teen then) and capacity should be still in so low a form; 
 the lowest form, indeed, that the Cambridge don had to 
 examine. 
 
 Elliott curled his handsome moustache and scowled a 
 little when that report was handed on to him. He was in- 
 clined to believe, now, that Lynneker had in some inexplica- 
 ble way been shirking for the past two years. If he could 
 do so well in examinations, he could have done better in 
 class, was Elliott's argument; and Dickie was arbitrarily 
 included thereafter in the category of boys who "wouldn't 
 try." 
 
 Nevertheless, Dickie was the success of Speech Day 
 that year. He had only won the despised mathematical 
 prize, and when Lord Bingley (very weary and bored, but 
 his wife was in bed with "Russian" influenza) automatically 
 handed over the solid, leather-bound, gold-stamped edition 
 of "The Wealth of Nations," with his appropriate, but 
 quite inaudible mumble, some of the visitors were quite 
 unable to account for the unprecedented howl of ovation 
 that greeted the stumbling Dickie. 
 
 It was the etiquette at Oakstone for the school to make 
 no sound during the announcement of the prize-winners' 
 names, nor during the candidate's trying ascent of the plat- 
 form steps. Until the orthodox mumble (Lady Bingley 
 whispered) was done and the prize actually delivered, the 
 school remained patiently silent, and after the first two 
 or three occasions, ignorant visitors learnt to restrain their 
 nervous, perfunctory clapping until the right moment. 
 
 And it was just that class of visitors who were startled 
 into asking what that square-looking boy with the hand- 
 some hair had done, when, as Dickie received his Adam 
 Smith, a sudden roar shook the big school-room and sent 
 
36 THESE LYNNEKERS 
 
 the hands of mothers, aunts and sisters to their shocked 
 ears; while their faces were contorted by the deprecating 
 smiles that marked "their compromise between physical 
 agony and a sense of the occasion. That class of visitors 
 had not heard that Dickie had made 117 not out in the 
 first innings of the "Old Boys' " Match yesterday afternoon ; 
 and many of them would have failed to appreciate the 
 achievement as an excuse for so outrageous a clamour. . . . 
 
 Mr. Lynneker, sitting with his stick between his knees 
 and his black wide-awake hung on the ivory handle, banged 
 away furiously and made no attempt to conceal the tears 
 in his eyes. He was momentarily oblivious of the five mem- 
 bers of his family clustered about him. His one black 
 sheep was miraculously changed into an ewe lamb, the 
 youngest and just then, as it seemed, the most precious 
 of his flock. But he concealed his emotion as an Univer- 
 sity man should in the presence of his grown sons, when 
 Dickie came and modestly plumped his heavy brown book 
 into his mother's lap. 
 
 Mr. Lynneker 's "dear boy" was a sotto-voce comment, 
 only heard by his wife who, with Adela, was examining 
 the prize itself, as if the real glory lay in this substantial 
 recognition; with its engraved plate of the school-arms, 
 inside the cover, slightly disfigured by Dr. Barnard's too 
 scholarly handwriting. 
 
 Edward in his all-round collar, and wearing the air of 
 a most aristocratic and elegant deacon, smoothed his neat 
 dark moustache, and preserved his dignity by a smile of 
 approving condescension. But Latimer, not quite above 
 the suspicion of failure as an undergraduate of the slightly 
 contemptible Downing, came out with a "good for you, 
 young Dickie," and then fearing that he had, if anything, 
 overdone it, went on : "We all prayed that you wouldn't 
 stumble up the steps, and lump down on old Bingley." 
 
 Every one of the six was more self-conscious than the 
 recipient of honour himself. H?s blushing had been done 
 before he reached this eddy of family life. 
 
 "The shouting wasn't for this bally thing," he explained. 
 
OAKSTONE 37 
 
 "It was for my century yesterday. There's young Hudson 
 going 1 up again ; supposed to be the most brilliant chap the 
 school's ever turned out. He's only sixteen, now, and 
 head of the upper fifth this term. Well, all I mean is that 
 they don't shout for him much, although he's supposed to be 
 a credit to the place. You remember him, of course, Lati- 
 mer?" 
 
 "Rather," agreed Latimer, glad to engage in any topic 
 other than Dickie's success. "Bright little kid in Wick- 
 ford's house." 
 
 "I believe he came the term after I left," put in Ed- 
 ward, leaning forward. 
 
 "He's come on tremendously the last year," explained 
 Dickie. "But he's a bit too cocky to be popular. Puts on 
 a lot of smug side, you know, as if he knew everything 
 and the answer to it. He's pretty good, though. Old 
 Barnyard's fearfully keen on him. They're trying to coach 
 him for a senior school at Trinity." 
 
 VI 
 
 The contemplation of young Hudson's brilliant abilities 
 was not permitted to damp Mr. Lynneker's emotional pleas- 
 ure in his son's success. The sunlight that streamed in 
 solid prisms of golden dust through the high, narrow win- 
 dow of the big school-room, was shining that day for the 
 honour and glory of the new generation of Lynneker. And 
 when Dickie's head, and particularly the strong curves of 
 his unmanageable hair, was thrown into massive relief by 
 the moving slant of that all too palpable beam, his father 
 had a wonderful sense that it was this youngest child of 
 his who was to reveal the ultimate meaning of a life that 
 must in some ways be counted a failure. Since he had 
 married and left the Cathedral to accept the living of Hal- 
 ton with 800 a year, then, but now depreciated to a 
 doubtful 650 Mr. Lynneker had dropped out of the list 
 of those marked for possible preferment. 
 
38 THESE LYNNEKERS 
 
 But this was one of the high emotional days when his 
 own relative failure was forgotten in his ambitions for 
 his children. Edward and Latimer had both been good 
 boys, but they had always been stamped with the character- 
 istic family mediocrity. A Canon's stall was the probable 
 limit of their ascension among church dignitaries. One of 
 them would almost certainly get the family living of Cul- 
 ver. Without doubt both Edward and Latimer would be a 
 credit to the family. . . . 
 
 The vision of Dickie that had come at that emotional 
 moment had been of quite other achievement and Mr. Lyn- 
 neker could not define it even in his own thought. This 
 ugly duckling of his had justified himself so unexpectedly ; 
 had been so suddenly presented in the light of hero. Neither 
 of his more scholarly brothers had ever evoked so spon- 
 taneous a burst of cheering. . . . 
 
 And on the field that afternoon, Mr. Lynneker left the 
 women of his family under the protection of Mrs. Bar- 
 nard, and wandered off to a quiet bench which was pre- 
 cipitately abandoned by three small boys at the threat of 
 his approach. He sat there, a little black thoughtful figure 
 watching the game with keen interest; a slightly old-fash- 
 ioned, aristocratic little man in a clerical frock-coat, with 
 small, neat shoes and a collar and tidy black bow that 
 did not too definitely mark him as a parson. He rested 
 his hands on the ivory handle of his stick, and kept his 
 attention on the game while some remote orchestration of 
 his thoughts charmed his imagination to pleasant rhapso- 
 dies. . . . 
 
 Dickie was to be the pride of the Lynnekers ... a great 
 statesman, perhaps, who would stand for all that was solid 
 and enduring in the life of England ... a greater premier 
 than Salisbury; a man who would set right all that had 
 been destroyed by that arch-villain Gladstone. . . . 
 
 That was, indeed, a wonderful afternoon; for when the 
 Old Boys' innings was finished, Dickie in his pads and 
 carrying his bat, came over, as if drawn by some sympathy 
 of thought, to that lonely bench and sat down by his father's 
 
OAKSTONE 39 
 
 side. Neither Edward nor Latimer would have done that. 
 They were so much at their ease among the crowd. They 
 had that Lynneker fascination of manner, and loved to 
 please and be gracious to acquaintances, rather than waste 
 their charm on their own people. 
 
 "We ought to beat them, eh ?" Mr. Lynneker asked, turn- 
 ing a trifle desperately to the subject of the match. 
 
 "We've beaten 'em on the first innings, you know," Dickie 
 explained. "There won't be time to play another innings 
 apiece. The rest'll be footle, chiefly. I expect I shall 
 get another smack, if Dido and Bing don't get set. We 
 draw at half-past five." 
 
 "I wish we'd been here yesterday to see our boy batting," 
 Mr. Lynneker commented. 
 
 "Rather! Yes, I wish you had. It wasn't a bad in- 
 nings," returned Dickie and added, "I say, pater, why are 
 you sitting out here all alone?" 
 
 "To watch the match," his father said. "The Barnards 
 distracted one's attention." And then he rested one grey- 
 gloved hand on Dickie's arm and went on. "I think we 
 shall have to stay on for another year, eh? and see what 
 we can do about a scholarship?" 
 
 "Oh! good!" murmured Dickie. "Will it be all right, 
 pater? I mean not too big an expense? I believe, you 
 know, it might be possible for me to get a mathematical 
 scholarship. I'd have a good try, anyway. It's at classics 
 that I'm such an awful duffer. I needn't actually go on 
 the Modern Side, you know. Just do some special coach- 
 ing with Armstrong." 
 
 "I think it might be managed," Mr. Lynneker said 
 quietly; and then Bing unexpectedly spooned a "sitter" 
 to point. 
 
 "It's awfully good of you, pater," Dickie said, getting to 
 his feet. He paused a moment and swung his bat reflec- 
 tively. "I do know I'm being a beastly expense, but I've 
 tried jolly hard." 
 
 Mr. Lynneker's eyes were brimming again. 
 
 "Dear boy, your mother and I have been so proud of 
 
40 THESE LYNNEKERS 
 
 you," he said, looking out steadily at the blurred elms on 
 the far side of the field 
 
 "It's awfully ripping of you to let me stay on," was all 
 Dickie could find to say. "I must go," he added. "I'll 
 come back here when I'm out." 
 
 But he had no further opportunity for expressing all 
 that he knew he had failed to convey, for he stayed in till 
 stumps were drawn, and only time prevented him from 
 making a school-record by doing the "double century 
 trick." The bowlers were sympathetically "tossing them up" 
 for the last quarter of an hour in order to give him the 
 opportunity ; and they would have played on for another ten 
 minutes if the arbitrary arrangements of the railway com- 
 pany had not enforced the absence of half the field. 
 
 VII 
 
 Mr. Lynneker's day ended rather drearily after all that 
 emotion. 
 
 He made his announcement concerning his changed plans 
 for Dickie in the train going home. He had been so wrapt 
 in his dreams that he had forgotten his family might not 
 have been equally affected. 
 
 "Oh! father! can you afford it?" Eleanor asked. "It 
 will be a great expense with Edward at home and Lati- 
 mer at Cambridge." 
 
 "I expect I could get a curacy, now," put in Edward, 
 generously, from his corner. "One of the curates at St. 
 Peter's is only in deacon's orders." 
 
 "Quite unnecessary," Mr. Lynneker said, and looking at 
 his wife, he understood that he had confirmed her yet again 
 in her unspoken opinion that he exaggerated his money dif- 
 ficulties. 
 
 And that brought a chill which effectually froze his 
 dreams. He was face to face once more with that ter- 
 rible problem of ways and means. He had been too gen- 
 erous that afternoon, and his wife's look of slightly 
 
OAKSTONE 41 
 
 stubborn resignation was a reminder that he had been un- 
 diplomatic in the statement of his intentions. 
 
 It was a saddening reflection that this perpetual mis- 
 understanding with regard to money should have interfered 
 with the joy they should have shared in their boy's success. 
 
 But the days when they could share any emotion what- 
 ever seemed hopelessly past. 
 
 "I'm very glad for Dickie's sake/' Mrs. Lynneker said. 
 
 "If you really think you can afford it," repeated Eleanor 
 anxiously. 
 
 "Didn't the little boy look a duck?" was Adela's only 
 contribution to the conversation. 
 
Ill 
 
 LAISSEZ FAIRE 
 
 THE village of Halton lies among the agricultural pla- 
 cidities of the Nene Valley. The church, splendidly 
 dominant, stands on the upper slope of the hill that mounts 
 gently through the unenclosed lands to the north and dies 
 into the level of the Common. Up there the earth is open 
 to broad horizons, and the Common is only separated 
 from the edge of the Fens by a deep belt of wood known 
 as the Hanglands. 
 
 The village turns its back upon those open spaces, and 
 the last of the sporadic cottages that dares the bleak winds 
 on that side, is half a mile from the crest of the slope. 
 The site of Halton was chosen by Romans who knew their 
 business, and the marks of their occupation remain to this 
 day. On the hill massive chunks of masonry, built of flat 
 stone laid in "herring-bone" courses and set in cement that 
 is hard as the stone itself, appear as uneven masses of rock 
 in the high retaining wall of the Rectory garden. Accord- 
 ing to Mr. Lynneker those relics marked the ruins of the 
 Praetor's house; for Halton had been an administrative 
 centre in the second century. 
 
 And doubtless there had been good material for founda- 
 tions in what was later the church-yard (every grave dug 
 in a certain area yielded coins or fragments of tessellated 
 pavement), such material as had decided the converted 
 daughter of one of the Mercian Kings to plant her con- 
 vent on that commanding spot. Her building had been com- 
 paratively evanescent, and hardly a trace remained of the 
 
 42 
 
LAISSEZ FAIRE 43 
 
 Saxons who had followed her. But when the Normans 
 took up their claim to the right of supersession, they had 
 built to leave a permanent monument ; and the square tower 
 of Halton church capped three centuries later by a parapet 
 and a spire was a landmark that could be seen for miles 
 down the river valley. 
 
 That big, cruciform church, spreading broad wings of 
 nave and chancel on either side of its central tower, was 
 warden of the whole parish. The stranger who drove out 
 from Medborough got his first distant signal of the village by 
 the sight of the tower and spire rising behind the big elms 
 in the Rectory garden. He became aware, then, of a vigi- 
 lant sentry, typified, a little profanely perhaps, by the full- 
 breasted cock of the wind-vane, a bird that still seemed to 
 boast too proudly of the part it had played in the tragedy 
 of St. Peter. 
 
 But that distant view was obliterated when the stranger 
 had come down the sharp hill into the main street, and 
 could look up at the whole white mass of the guardian 
 structure, wide-armed, secure and immensely confident. It 
 had not the beauty of much of the Nene Valley architec- 
 ture, nor was it a fine example of any style (although its 
 Norman work was splendidly characteristic), but it gained 
 by its differences. It was so unlike the typical village 
 church in its broad-browed decision. No crockets fretted 
 the outline of its spire, and the pinnacles that had plainly 
 been designed for the corners of the tower had never 
 been built; the majority of the buttresses on the south 
 side had a very flat projection, and almost the only enrich- 
 ments of surface the billets, nail-heads and scales of the 
 Norman work were so shallow that they were invisible 
 from the main street. Yet it defied the aesthetic criticism 
 of the archaeologist by its plain strength. It wore the air 
 of a clean-shaven prelate, dressed in a white cassock. 
 
 The Rectory standing in its three-acre garden was only 
 a fief of that solemn, resolute church. 
 
 Dickie had grown up in its company and accepted its 
 watch over the Rectory garden as one of the commonplaces 
 
44 THESE LYNNEKERS 
 
 of life. On week-days its uses for him were to tell the 
 time and the direction of the wind; and its vane lifted 120 
 feet into the air was fairly accurate, if its clock was oc- 
 casionally liable to error, an apparent frailty that was due 
 to the eccentricities of Gann, the sexton and Rector's 
 church-warden. Indeed, the church's only interference with 
 the normal holiday life of the young Lynnekers was due 
 to the untimely ringing of the bells when the ringers un- 
 expectedly bethought themselves "to practise." There were 
 six magnificent bells hung in that solid tower, and how- 
 ever delightful the sound of them at Allerton, a mile and 
 a half away across the river, they were relentlessly over- 
 powering in their crashing attack upon such near neigh- 
 bours as the Lynnekers. 
 
 On winter evenings, with the ground floor shutters fas- 
 tened and the curtains drawn, the din was reasonably soft- 
 ened; but Mrs. Lynneker hated the bells even then. She 
 had an emotional objection to the sound of the peal; she 
 found them "saddening," and hers was a temperament that 
 never sought sadness. Her two elder sons shared her sen- 
 timental dislike to what Latimer called that "infernal prac- 
 tising for Christmas" ; and it was characteristic of the fam- 
 ily that until Adela made the point good, none of them 
 had understood that the ringers "practised" out of sheer 
 exuberance of spirit during any dark evenings. Even after 
 Adela had demonstrated her argument by abundant in- 
 stance, Mrs. Lynneker would exclaim, "Oh ! surely they're 
 not going to practise for Christmas!" when the solitary 
 tolling of the tenor bell on some still February night pro- 
 claimed the arrival of an impatient first-comer in the bel- 
 fry, calling to the attention of his fellow-ringers. 
 
 Adela followed her father in her professed liking for 
 the bells. She, too, had dreams and reserves unguessed by 
 the rest of the family. 
 
 To Dickie, they were just "bells," during his adolescence. 
 He had climbed all over the cradle staging before he was 
 ten, and had hung manfully on to the "lamb's tail" of the 
 rope and been carried off his feet in his first attempts to 
 
LAISSEZ FAIRE 45 
 
 join the ringers. He had not, however, tried to decipher 
 the old inscriptions, because they were in Latin and too 
 painfully reminiscent of Wickford and the Remove. 
 
 ii 
 
 But all the irk of that perpetual grind to memorise Latin 
 syntax, was taken from him in the summer holidays fol- 
 lowing the speech-day ovation. 
 
 Latimer guessed that something was "up" at breakfast. 
 He had been late for prayers, it is true, but that alone was 
 not enough to account for his father's irritability and his 
 mother's expression of patient suffering. Edward and 
 Adela were staying at Culver with their uncle, and lacking 
 any other confidant, Latimer suggested to Dickie that he 
 should come out into the garden as soon as their father 
 had gathered up his unopened letters and retired to the se- 
 crecy of his study. 
 
 It was a wonderful morning in early September. The 
 dew still lay on the grass like hoar frost, and the yew 
 hedge, the privet, the standard roses and every other avail- 
 able site was enriched with wheels of web that might have 
 been spun of delicate white wool. There was not a breath 
 of wind, but the air was riotous with sound, with the clam- 
 our of rooks, the twitter of innumerable small birds, the 
 clatter of a reaper in the cornfield that adjoined the garden, 
 and the distant tinkle of the blacksmith's shop down the 
 village came in now and again as a recognisable obligato 
 to the prominent symphony. 
 
 "Going to be jolly hot," remarked Dickie, sniffing the 
 sharp, cold scents of the morning. 
 
 "Rather. We ought to do something," replied Latimer. 
 He had lighted his pipe and was savouring the aroma of 
 his tobacco. "Pity to waste a day like this mucking about 
 the garden," he added. 
 
 "Might go fishing," suggested Dickie, and watched the 
 little puffs of Latimer's smoke mounting compactly in neat 
 
46 THESE LYNNEKERS 
 
 lavender clouds and wreaths. "Blow some on the rose 
 bushes," he continued. "The green fly's perfectly wicked 
 this year." 
 
 Latimer made a few experiments in fumigation and 
 then desisted on the ground that it spoilt the enjoyment 
 of his pipe, the after-breakfast pipe, the best smoke of 
 the day. "I'll come," he said, taking up the interrupted 
 conversation. "We'll go down to the backwater behind 
 Allerton lock. We might take sandwiches, or something, 
 for lunch." 
 
 "Good," was Dickie's comment. He was walking along 
 the edge of the back lawn, kicking up tiny fountains of 
 spray from the grass, and leaving the marks of his passage 
 in dark trails along the whiteness of the dew-drenched 
 grass. Latimer, in his pumps, kept sedately to the gravel 
 path. 
 
 "I say, did you notice anything funny at breakfast?" 
 he said, coming to the point that had been intriguing him. 
 
 "Yes." Dickie evidently had no doubts on the subject. 
 "I wondered if it was because you didn't come down to 
 prayers. You miss 'em about two days in every three, 
 now." 
 
 Latimer hesitated and decided not to question that 
 charge. "I don't think it was," he said. 
 
 "The pater asked whether you weren't coming, after 
 the servants were in the room." 
 
 "Did he?" Latimer's tone expressed reserrtment at hav- 
 ing been thus inferentially criticised not only before Dickie, 
 but also in the presence of the two maid-servants. He was 
 annoyed with his father for displaying so little tact; why 
 couldn't he have waited and spoken to Latimer, himself, 
 quietly. He always meant to be down to prayers, but he 
 had an unfortunate habit of going to sleep again after he 
 was called. Emma always called him too early. . . . 
 
 "I'll speak to him about it," he said by way of vindicating 
 his independence, and then went on quickly : "But it wasn't 
 that that made the mater look so worried." 
 
LAISSEZ FAIRE 47 
 
 "Do you think it's the old money trouble again?" Dickie 
 asked. 
 
 "I don't know. Yes, I do. I expect it is. There was 
 a letter from the Bank. I saw it on the table." 
 
 "Do you think it's serious?" 
 
 "How should I know?" 
 
 "They'd never put him in the Bankruptcy Court, or any- 
 thing of that sort, would they?" 
 
 Latimer, in the capacity of man of the world, with the 
 vast experiences of an undergraduate going up next month 
 to begin his second year, paused to give that question judi- 
 cial consideration. 
 
 "Who's 'they/ after all, you know," he said. "I don't 
 suppose we owe much money to tradesmen and people 
 of that kind." 
 
 "What about that overdraught at the Bank?" 
 
 "They can't come down on him for that," replied Lati- 
 mer with an air of authority. "It's their own look-out for 
 letting him overdraw." 
 
 "But it means selling more shares or something," com- 
 mented Dickie. 
 
 "Makes one feel rather rotten, doesn't it ?" remarked Lati- 
 mer. "I can't think why Edward doesn't get a proper cu- 
 racy." 
 
 "You'll have to stay on at Downing anyhow, I suppose ?" 
 
 "Well, of course, you young ass. How the dickens am 
 I going to make a living if I don't take my degree? But 
 I expect you'll have to leave Oakstone." 
 
 "Yes," replied Dickie. "I know." He paused a moment 
 and then said: "I'd better go and get some worms. Will 
 you ask the mater about something to take for lunch ? The 
 tackle's all ready. I used it a few days ago." 
 
 "All serene," replied Latimer calmly. "I'll go in a min- 
 ute or two. I expect the mater's still in the kitchen." 
 
 "She isn't ; she's here," remarked Dickie, as he turned to 
 go down the lawn. 
 
 Mrs. Lynneker in an abundant blue apron and snow 
 overshoes was coming through the wire arch that separated 
 
48 THESE LYNNEKERS 
 
 the back from the front garden on that side. She stopped 
 to grab a fine head of cow-parsley as she passed the corner 
 of the shrubbery. 
 
 "Going to feed the rabbits," Latimer commented. 
 
 "No, I think she's looking for us," Dickie said, and the 
 two boys came out from under the screen of the big elm at 
 the top of the lawn and hailed her. 
 
 She looked up quickly and made signs to them, and then 
 came towards them at a little eager trot. 
 
 "I wish she wouldn't run" murmured Latimer, frowning. 
 Dickie saved her the exertion by hurrying to meet her. 
 
 in 
 
 Mrs. Lynneker had stopped before he reached her. She 
 still looked harassed. 
 
 "I've been trying to find you/' she said. 
 
 "Me, more particularly?" asked Dickie, as Latimer saun- 
 tered up. 
 
 Mrs. Lynneker looked from one to the other of her two 
 sons with an expression of faint distress. 
 
 "Your father has been dreadfully upset this morning," 
 she said. 
 
 "Bank?" queried Latimer briefly, and his mother nodded 
 and set her lips. 
 
 "I don't know how serious it is, really," she said. She 
 had already taken the two boys into her confidence, and 
 the three of them stood intent and frowning, weighing and 
 re-considering the old problem. 
 
 "He says that he can't overdraw any more," Mrs. Lyn- 
 neker continued, "and that he'll have to sell more shares. 
 He asked me to tell you. He said that you ought to know 
 just how things are." 
 
 "What does he expect us to do?" asked Latimer impa- 
 tiently. "I suppose I could get some rotten mastership or 
 other," he added as an afterthought. 
 
 "I might emigrate," remarked Dickie, and looked at his 
 
LAISSEZ FAIRE 49 
 
 mother hopefully as though the suggestion were full of 
 promise. 
 
 "If one only knew how serious it was," she said, re- 
 turning to her old grievance. "Your father never tells me 
 anything." 
 
 "It's rot to talk about emigrating," was Latimer's com- 
 ment. 
 
 "I suppose something ought to be done," Dickie returned. 
 "I didn't suggest that you should go." 
 
 "We ought to be told the actual facts," Latimer pro- 
 tested. He paused for a moment on the thought of declar- 
 ing that he would go at once and demand full confidence 
 from his father, and then said: "One doesn't want to do 
 anything absolutely desperate, unless there's some jolly 
 good reason for it." 
 
 Mrs. Lynneker sighed helplessly, saw a fine dandelion 
 at the edge of the shrubbery and made a plunge for it. 
 When she had added that plant to the trophies already col- 
 lected in her apron, she sighed again and said, 
 
 "It's happened so often before, of course." 
 
 "But he can't go on selling shares for ever, you know, 
 mater," Dickie said. "He'll get to the end of them one 
 day." 
 
 "I've never properly understood about those shares," his 
 mother acknowledged. 
 
 Latimer was kicking a hole in the gravel. 
 
 "Look here, I'll go in and talk to him," Dickie announced. 
 
 His mother and brother shook their heads doubtfully. 
 
 "He won't tell you anything," Mrs. Lynneker said. "He's 
 he's very upset this morning." 
 
 "You'd probably be infernally cheeky or something," was 
 Latimer's criticism. 
 
 Dickie looked moody and obstinate. 
 
 "Somebody's got to do something," he said. "What's 
 the good of talking about it and never doing anything? 
 If it's really serious we ought to know, and I'm quite will- 
 ing to go to Canada or somewhere, and try to make a living. 
 I ought to be able to get a job as a carpenter." 
 
50 THESE LYNNEKERS 
 
 " 'Mr. Dick puts us all right/ " quoted Latimer ironically ; 
 "only you're pretty certain to make things twenty times 
 worse, if you do go in and see the pater," he added. "Are 
 you going to demand to see his pass-book?" 
 
 "Don't be so frightfully funny," Dickie said, pushing 
 Larimer's opposition on one side. "I think I will go and 
 see him, mater," he insisted. 
 
 She looked up at him with a gleam of hope. "What shall 
 you say to him?" she asked. 
 
 "I don't know," replied Dickie. He had a sudden sense 
 of the coming interview that made him feel as if he had 
 been disloyal in doubting his father's difficulties. He won- 
 dered why, as a family, 'they should be for ever "taking 
 sides"; why his mother was always ranged as his father's 
 antagonist ? 
 
 "Well, if you'll take my advice, you'll jolly well leave it 
 alone, young Dickie," put in Latimer. "You'll only make 
 some holy blunder ; you always do." 
 
 Dickie looked at his brother with frank interest. "I'm 
 not sure it isn't better to blunder a bit than just go on let- 
 ting things slide," he said. 
 
 Latimer had gone back to his excavations in the gravel 
 path. "Oh ! don't be a young ass," he grumbled. "Who's 
 letting things slide ? Only one has to use a certain amount 
 of tact if you happen to know what tact means." 
 
 "Perhaps it would be better if Latimer went," hazarded 
 Mrs. Lynneker. 
 
 "I suppose I ought to go if any one does," Latimer ad- 
 mitted. 
 
 "Well, go, then," Dickie urged him. 
 
 "I'm not sure that it's the right thing to do," he protested, 
 frowning. "You're in such an infernal hurry about it. 
 It seems to me that we ought to consider everything very 
 carefully before we go in and see him." 
 
 Dickie looked at his brother, who didn't return his re- 
 gard, and then at his mother, who met his eyes and framed 
 the words "You go" with her lips. She had more faith 
 
LAISSEZ FAIRE 51 
 
 in Dickie's blundering than in all Latimer's or Edward's 
 tact. 
 
 Latimer was carefully filling up and smoothing down 
 the hole he had made in the path. "I can't see that it's 
 any good rushing it, in any case," he said. "Let's go fishing 
 and talk it all over. We thought of going to Allerton," 
 he explained to his mother. "Could we take some sand- 
 wiches or something?" 
 
 "I must go and dig for worms," put in Dickie, and turned 
 to go across the lawn towards the kitchen garden, and 
 more especially towards the cucumber frames, the habitat 
 of the brandlings he sought. From behind Latimer's back 
 he nodded reassuringly to his mother. 
 
 Before he had crossed the lawn, she had returned to her 
 forage for green stuff. Latimer was thoughtfully pacing 
 the gravel walk. 
 
 IV 
 
 Dickie entered the house through the kitchen, went 
 straight to his father's study and knocked gently. No one 
 ever entered the study without knocking. 
 
 His father looked up with evident irritation when Dickie 
 answered the summons to come in. 
 
 "I say, pater, can I speak to you for a minute?" he asked. 
 
 The frown of irritation was not smoothed from Mr. Lyn- 
 neker's face by that unexpected request. He associated all 
 such tentative openings with some kind of demand for 
 money ; and he imagined, now, that his message to the boys 
 had not yet been delivered by his wife, and that Dickie's 
 presence was due to a most unfortunately timed desire 
 for extra pocket-money a few shillings, perhaps, to buy 
 a cricket-ball or fishing tackle. 
 
 "Yes, yes, what is it?" he said impatiently. 
 
 Dickie closed the door gently, and stood leaning with his 
 back against it. 
 
 "I want to help, pater, if I can," he said. Edward and 
 
52 THESE LYNNEKERS 
 
 Latimer would have looked a little sheepish and self-con- 
 scious if they had made that offer; Dickie looked straight 
 into his father's face, with a frank sympathy. 
 
 "Help?" echoed Mr. Lynneker. The irritation had gone 
 from his voice and he was fidgeting with the quill pen 
 he had been cutting when Dickie came in. 
 
 "Yes," Dickie said. "Mater's been telling me and Lati- 
 mer that things are a bit rocky all round ; and I want you 
 to let me leave Oakstone and go to Canada, or somewhere. 
 Will you?" 
 
 Mr. Lynneker dropped his pen, got up and stood by the 
 mantelpiece, turning his back on the room. He was won- 
 dering why none of his family had ever treated him like 
 this before. Even Eleanor was never perfectly frank and 
 open with him. And he had a feeling of resentment against 
 his wife. She was in their children's confidence. They 
 told her everything and she had always stood between 
 them and him. He had got into the habit of sending them 
 messages by her. . . . 
 
 "I shouldn't mind a bit, you know, except, of course, for 
 leaving you and the mater," Dickie went on as his father 
 still kept silence. 
 
 "But, my dear boy, why Canada?" Mr. Lynneker asked, 
 without turning his head. He had one foot on the fender 
 and was apparently studying the empty grate. 
 
 "I don't know," returned Dickie. "I thought it was the 
 kind of place one did go to, that was all. I thought I might 
 p'raps work as a carpenter." 
 
 "Bell might take you into my Bank ..." Mr. Lynneker 
 began and Dickie caught at the suggestion before it could 
 be elaborated. 
 
 "Ohf I say, would he, do you think? That's a good 
 idea," he exclaimed. "Couldn't we see about it at once?" 
 
 Mr v Lynneker had a momentary suspicion of his son's 
 motives, and he turned round and faced him as he said, 
 
 "Are you so anxious to leave school?" 
 
 "Well rather not," returned Dickie, suddenly quenched, 
 a little affronted. "You know I'm not, pater," he went on. 
 
LAISSEZ FAIRE 53 
 
 "I'm awfully keen on Oakstone; but the mater told us you 
 were in some kind of money trouble, and Latimer and I 
 want to help." 
 
 "Latimer, too?" 
 
 "He said something about a mastership," Dickie explained 
 and wondered whether Latimer would thank him for men- 
 tioning that impulsive offer. "Of course, he's got his schol- 
 arship," he added; "and it would be rather a pity for him 
 to chuck it." 
 
 Mr. Lynneker sat down and took up his pen again. He 
 had been moved by Dickie's offer, but he wanted before 
 all things to be perfectly just. 
 
 "Have you ever thought of taking orders, Dick?" he 
 asked. 
 
 Dickie's cheeks flushed. He had been expecting this sug- 
 gestion from one or other of his parents, and anticipated 
 the possibility of what he called "ructions" when he made 
 his inclinations known. He might, now, have avoided the 
 direct issue by protesting that the expense involved put 
 that proposal out of the question; but Dickie had none of 
 the Lynneker gift for finesse. 
 
 "I have thought about it, pater," he said, "but I don't 
 want to be a parson." 
 
 As a human being and the father of a family, Mr. Lyn- 
 neker was relieved by his boy's statement; but as a priest 
 of the English church, he had what he regarded as an un- 
 avoidable duty to perform. He frowned slightly and re- 
 adjusted his pince-nez, as he replied; and his voice had be- 
 come clearer and more formal. 
 
 "Your mother and I would have liked you to go into 
 the church," he said; "and I fancy I could still manage it 
 by hook or by crook. I am not at all anxious to see you tied 
 down to a stool in a Bank, I assure you. It isn't an occu- 
 pation I should choose for you." 
 
 He paused a moment, but as Dickie still blushed uncom- 
 fortably and made no reply, he went on, 
 
 "Why don't you want to take orders, my boy ?" 
 
 "I'm not sure exactly," Dickie said. "I just feel that 
 
54 THESE LYNNEKERS 
 
 I'd sooner not. It it seems to me such a tie, somehow." 
 
 "You could hardly wish for a better tie," his father re- 
 turned irritably, uncomfortably, conscious that he could ap- 
 preciate his son's attitude only too well. 
 
 "Oh! I know," Dickie said. "But I don't feel that I 
 could go in for it with any enthusiasm." 
 
 "That might come later," Mr. Lynneker suggested, rather 
 in the manner of a worldly mother advising her daughter 
 to marry for position. 
 
 Dickie's hand went up to his hair. This was a problem 
 that had to be solved, and he attacked it without regard 
 to secondary aspects. 
 
 "I don't feel that way about it," he said. "I wouldn't 
 go into the church unless I meant to go in for it like any- 
 thing. I'd want to be a missionary, or something des- 
 perate. . . ." 
 
 Mr. Lynneker's sense of humour was a little smothered 
 that morning. The house-bills for August had been un- 
 usually, as he thought unnecessarily, high, a fact that had 
 upset him more than the receipt of the expected notice from 
 the Bank. And now he was conscious of being thwarted, 
 and implicitly criticised, a consciousness that temporarily 
 outbalanced his realisation of his son's youthful impetuosity 
 and real desire to help. 
 
 "When you are a little older, my boy," he said impa- 
 tiently, "you'll understand that there are other and harder 
 forms of service than the heroic. We all want to do the 
 spectacular things, as Naaman did." 
 
 Dickie felt snubbed. This was another of those abso- 
 lutes that he was continually blundering against, incontro- 
 vertible statements that youth must accept with all the other 
 dogmas of the prehistoric governess. 
 
 "Yes, father," he said submissively. "I don't want to 
 be heroic." 
 
 "Have you ever had a particular leaning to any pro- 
 fession?" his father asked. "Or have you simply never 
 thought about it?" 
 
 "I think I should rather like to be an astronomer," Dickie 
 
LAISSEZ FAIRE 55 
 
 replied; and still his father did not smile. He shrugged 
 his shoulders as though to dismiss such puerile fancies, and 
 obliterated the whole of the recent conversation by saying, 
 
 "I'm sure I don't know what to do for the best." 
 
 "Why not the Bank, pater?" asked Dickie, quite willing 
 to come back to the obvious and practical. 
 
 But Mr. Lynneker had become lost, now, in a maze of 
 cross-purposes. He was sincerely anxious about his finan- 
 cial position, and he had been thwarted in his attempt to be 
 unwisely generous and send Dickie to Cambridge. He 
 would have been glad of such a valid justification for that 
 sacrifice as the training of Dickie for Holy Orders. Lack- 
 ing that, he had to confront, and refused at that moment 
 to confront, the suggestion that he was failing in his duty 
 to one of his sons. 
 
 "The whole thing wants consideration," he decided. "We 
 can't possibly settle it, just now." 
 
 Dickie understood that he was dismissed. "I'm sorry 
 I interrupted you, pater," he said; "but you know, I feel 
 that I ought to go into the Bank." 
 
 It all seemed so absurdly simple to him. There were 
 evil and remedy conveniently near together. He had not 
 come yet to a criticism of his family, nor even to a con- 
 scious apprehension of their methods. 
 
 In that household, difficulties were debated, but it was 
 rare for any one to take action. The average trouble, what- 
 ever it was, righted itself in time. Something always hap- 
 pened, sooner or later. 
 
 Edward had caught his father's phrase, and delivered 
 himself of the remark that the affair "wanted considera- 
 tion," whenever the awful alternative of taking immediate 
 action was remotely possible. "It's no earthly good to rush 
 things," was the line of his aigument; "one has to look at 
 the problem from every point of view." In any matter 
 
56 THESE LYNNEKERS 
 
 outside politics and religion, he had a great idea of hearing 
 both sides. 
 
 But, at seventeen, Dickie was only vaguely aware of 
 his family's manner of avoiding the unpleasant by a settled 
 habit of procrastination. He regarded them all, even Lati- 
 mer, with a certain respect and deference that included 
 their opinions and manner of thought. The opinions were 
 those that he had been trained to reverence, and repre- 
 sented what he supposed to be Catholic and unchanging in- 
 stitutions. The general habit of thought fell into much 
 the same category. It was a characteristic so familiar that 
 it appeared to be necessarily right. His cousins at Culver 
 followed the same habit, and no expression that he had 
 ever beard from any of the neighbouring clergy, or small 
 land-owners, had presented any possible alternative to the 
 comforting policy of laissez-faire. 
 
 Certainly, no countervailing heresy had been preached 
 at Oakstone. There, also, he had been taught the foolish- 
 ness of opposition to what he presumed to be the accepted 
 and settled tendencies of the universe. He had heard of 
 radicals ; there was Gann, the sexton ; and some foolish can- 
 didate had contested the Medborough election in the Liberal 
 interest last July ; but they were, ex hypothesi, either un- 
 educated and contemptible vulgarians, or fools. 
 
 Charles Bradlaugh came pace Mr. Lynneker, and the 
 family accepted his classification without question into 
 the second category. His vaunted "atheism" had not fright- 
 ened Halton, and had not, therefore, aroused any particular 
 fury of hate. He was pitied as a blind and arrogant mite 
 who had deplorably dared to set up his puny strength in 
 defiance of the omnipotent immutable. Mr. Lynneker, from 
 his security, spoke of him with a touch of condescension. 
 "Fool!" was the limit of his abuse for Bradlaugh. 
 
 But there was a third category, not clearly differentiated 
 by Dickie who had never troubled to examine the particu- 
 lar disqualifications of Radicals and "Atheists," a list that 
 included criminals and other varieties of antichrist. And 
 chief among these enemies of society at that moment was 
 
LAISSEZ FAIRE 57 
 
 the man who had just accepted office for the fourth time, 
 and was proposing (with a majority of 39) to destroy the 
 British constitution. "Fool" was no word to apply to Mr. 
 Gladstone at Halton. He had aroused fear and an intensity 
 of hate. He was rascal, villain, unprincipled, the man who 
 "owed his greatness to his country's ruin" ; and since 1885, 
 specifically and without mitigation, a Murderer. An en- 
 graving of Gordon hung in the drawing-room at Halton 
 Rectory, and Mr. Lynneker often looked at it and extolled 
 the martyr, with bitter reference to the consummate rascal 
 who had sacrificed him. 
 
 All these conceptions Dickie understood to be expres- 
 sions of the only right and sane attitude towards religion 
 and politics. Halton and Oakstone had striven, without 
 any conscious object, to grave these conceptions deeply into 
 his young mind. He had been taught. And his preceptors 
 had conscientiously endeavoured to mould the same image 
 that had been the model for their own training. The de- 
 tail was changed in some respects but the outline was the 
 same. 
 
 And, now, when his life was to be affected by some 
 practical application of the principles he had been taught, 
 he could make no application because he knew nothing of 
 reason in this connexion. Reasons had been explicitly de- 
 nied to him when he had sought them. The creed began 
 "I believe and you must believe also"; and creeds do not 
 open with argument. To Dickie, the Bank was merely an 
 obvious remedy; slightly distasteful like most remedies, 
 but effective. He could not see the dangers of life in a 
 town, that despite its Cathedral influence, had only returned 
 Lord William March by a majority of 273. Dickie natu- 
 rally assumed that every one in Medborough who was not a 
 vulgarian, a fool or a criminal, thought as he had been 
 taught to think. 
 
 Nor did Mr. Lynneker, himself, objectively face and 
 critically consider these dangers. His shrinking from the 
 thought of the Bank as a remedy was an inevitable re- 
 action; and was due to his sixty-five years' submission 
 
58 THESE LYNNEKERS 
 
 to a particular creed and attitude. And it increased his 
 irritation to find that his youngest son had, apparently, 
 so little realisation of what was due to the family pride. 
 
 VI 
 
 "One moment, my boy!" he said, as Dickie turned the 
 handle of the study door. "I don't think you realise what 
 you are saying. Do you understand what it will mean 
 to you if you go into my Bank as a clerk?" 
 
 Dickie tried to analyse the proposition by an inductive 
 process. 
 
 "I suppose it means adding up lots of figures," he said ; 
 "and counting money and all that sort of thing. I don't 
 think I should be bad at it after a little practice." 
 
 His father frowned impatiently. "I've no doubt what- 
 ever that you'd be equal to the work," he said. "But it 
 doesn't promise a very magnificent future." 
 
 "Oh!" exclaimed Dickie. "I see. But, pater, I don't 
 see why I need stop in the Bank for ever. I should have 
 a certain amount of time to go on working, at maths, for 
 example." 
 
 That was a way of escape for Mr. Lynneker's conscience, 
 but he hesitated to take it. He had little faith in such a 
 heroic remedy. The Lynnekers stayed where they were 
 put; and he judged human nature, and more particularly 
 his own sons, by the standard that was most familiar to 
 him. 
 
 "You probably won't have much inclination to work at 
 night after a long day in an office," he said. 
 
 "Reading maths isn't like ordinary work," explained 
 Dickie. To him "work" meant cramming uninteresting 
 facts. 
 
 "But you need a clear head," his father returned. 
 
 "Oh! I don't know," said Dickie. He had no associa- 
 tions between muddle-headedness and mathematics. 
 
 Mr. Lynneker attributed their inability to understand 
 
LAISSEZ FAIRE 59 
 
 one another to Dickie's ignorance. He was about to re- 
 peat his formula that "the whole thing wanted considera- 
 tion/' when Dickie interposed with the clarifying suggestion 
 that they might "try it for three months." 
 
 Mr. Lynneker perceptibly brightened. This was a decent 
 evasion, sanctioned by precedent. "Well, we might try it 
 and see," was another family phrase that expressed not a 
 spirit of empiricism, but of procrastination. The chief 
 anxiety in his mind at that moment was with regard to Dr. 
 Barnard, who should have had a term's notice if Dickie 
 were to leave Oakstone. Fortunately that old statement 
 of his intention to keep the boy on at school for another 
 year had never been definitely cancelled. 
 
 "Hm!" commented Mr. Lynneker and looked up at his 
 son's eager face. "If we found that it didn't answer," he 
 said, "you might cram for a scholarship with Hornby at 
 Little Milton." He was so honestly anxious not to spoil 
 Dickie's chances off-hand. 
 
 "Yes," murmured Dickie reluctantly. He knew that the 
 Vicar of Little Milton was a classical scholar. "He isn't 
 mathematical, of course," he added. 
 
 "You're quite bent on mathematics?" his father re- 
 turned with a touch of petulance. 
 
 "Well, it's the only subject I'm any good at," Dickie ex- 
 postulated. He had not grasped the principle of the de- 
 sirable average in education. 
 
 "Isn't that a reason why you should read up your Greek 
 and Latin ?" his father asked. 
 
 Dickie looked round the bookshelves that lined the study 
 as if he would find some escape from this awful persistent 
 attack of the tedious classics. Nothing but enemies con- 
 fronted him. With such possible exceptions as the co 1 
 lected works of Dickens, Thackeray, Walter Scott and 
 Charles Kingsley, there was not a book there that held the 
 least interest for him. The thought of the Medborough 
 Bank was suddenly presented as a vision of glorious freedom 
 from Sallust, Cicero, Herodotus or Euripides, and all thos$ 
 
60 THESE LYNNEKERS 
 
 other Mediterranean authors whom he was expected to 
 tackle before his education was complete. 
 
 "I don't see any use in doing that," he said. "If I ever 
 go to Cambridge I shall read for the Mathematical Tripos. 
 I know enough classics to pass, my Previous, and that's all 
 that's wanted. But we needn't bother about that now, pater, 
 need we? Couldn't we decide to try the Bank for three 
 months ?" 
 
 "Very well, as you seem bent on it," his father said, defi- 
 nitely shelving the responsibility for that time. "I am 
 going in this afternoon and I'll speak to Bell about it." 
 
 "Would you like me to come?" Dickie asked. 
 
 Mr. Lynneker thought not. He felt that he was con- 
 ferring an honour on the Medborough manager of the City 
 & County Bank by permitting Dickie to work for him ; he 
 did not mean to submit his son for Mr. Bell's approval. 
 
 "Right-oh!" agreed Dickie; and then understanding that 
 the conference was ended and that it was only necessary to 
 make some final comment before he departed to dig for 
 worms, he fell back on the family cliche. "I expect it'll be 
 all right," he said. 
 
 When he was alone Mr. Lynneker wished that he had 
 made some acknowledgment of his son's generosity in of- 
 fering himself. Dickie was obviously ignorant of the nature 
 of the sacrifice he was making, and all boys wanted to get 
 away from the discipline of school life. But he had come 
 forward with genuine sympathy, and a practical suggestion. 
 "There are great possibilities in Dickie," Mr. Lynneker 
 murmured; he had a confirmed habit of talking to himself 
 in undertones "great possibilities." He repeated the 
 phrase three or four times. He wanted to dwell on that, 
 and to put away from him the thought that, in some in- 
 explicable way, Dickie was not a Lynneker. 
 
 VII 
 
 Dickie found his mother and Latimer sitting in the din- 
 ing-room with the door open. They were evidently keeping 
 
LAISSEZ FAIRE 61 
 
 their eyes on the study and waiting to hear the upshot of 
 the momentous interview. 
 
 Latimer beckoned and closed the dining-room door with 
 the air of a conspirator when his brother had entered. 
 
 "Well?" he said. 
 
 "I'm going into the Bank," Dickie announced briefly. 
 "The pater's going to see Bell this afternoon." 
 
 Latimer whistled. "Pretty rotten for you," was his com- 
 ment. 
 
 "I don't see it," replied Dickie. "Sooner do that than 
 mug Livy any day." 
 
 "What did he say?" Latimer asked. 
 
 "Lots of things. He wasn't at all keen on my doing it. 
 I'm to try it for three months. I say, you haven't got your 
 boots on, yet. I'll go and get those worms. And, mater, 
 do you suppose there's any paste and a bit of old yellow 
 cheese, cheese-paste is rather a good bait for club." 
 
 "I'll see, dear," Mrs. Lynneker said, and then: "Your 
 father wasn't put out at all by your going in to him?" 
 
 "I don't think so," Dickie said. "He seemed all right." 
 
 "And you really don't mind?" 
 
 "Rather not; I expect it'll be rather sport. I wonder 
 what salary I shall get?" 
 
 "Probably you won't get anything to start with," Lati- 
 mer thought. 
 
 "Not much good my going if I don't," retorted Dickie. 
 "Do buck up and see about that cheese-paste and get your 
 boots on," he added. "I shan't be half a shake. . . ." 
 
 The sun was high above the elms, now; and save under 
 the shadows of the big trees, the dew had all vanished from 
 the grass. 
 
 "Ripping day," reflected Dickie, as he trowelled vigor- 
 ously in the manure that was banked up round the cucum- 
 ber frames. He was deciding which pools it would be ad- 
 visable to fish. 
 
 He was immensely disgusted when he returned, glowing, 
 to the house, to find that Latimer, in his pumps, was still 
 debating the financial situation with his mother. 
 
62 THESE LYNNEKERS 
 
 "Oh! great Scott, what's the hurry?" Latimer said, but 
 Mrs. Lynneker flushed slightly and got up quickly. 
 
 "Oh! the cheese-paste!" she said. "I'll go and see 
 about it." 
 
 "All right, mater, I can do it, now," Dickie assured her, 
 "while Latimer gets his boots on." 
 
IV 
 
 THE LYNNEKER METHOD 
 
 MR. LYNNEKER described himself as a Member 
 of the Old School, and he was partly awake to the fact 
 that that school was passing. He frequently affirmed his 
 inability to understand what the younger generation was 
 "coming to." He had been born three years before the 
 death of George IV, and his temper was not characteris- 
 tically Victorian. 
 
 His father had been a dignified old Tory pluralist who 
 had held three livings, one in London and two in the Mid- 
 lands. Culver was the chief of these holdings, ranking as 
 hardly less than a private estate, for with so many Lynne- 
 kers in the church, the tenure of the Rectory was as reason- 
 ably assured as that of any other property. 
 
 But the Lynneker pride of race found no boast in the 
 possession of Culver. That was a modern, i8th century, 
 acquisition. The departed glories of the family were ^repre- 
 sented, now, by an uninteresting ruin, the remains of Lin- 
 nerdale Hall, at Linnerdale in Staffordshire. 
 
 The last tenant of that estate had died in 1741, and with 
 him the elder branch of the Lynnekers had ceased to be 
 feudal landlords. For five hundred years, according to fair 
 documentary evidence, they had been established in the 
 Staffordshire dale to which they had given a name, but 
 little record remained now of their influence there, save 
 the shapeless mound that marked the site of the old Hall and 
 the prevalence of variants of the patronymic among the 
 
 68 
 
64 THESE LYNNEKERS 
 
 county people in such diverse shapes as Lanniger and 
 Lenners. 
 
 The Earl of Carronbridge was the descendant of a 
 younger branch. His ancestor had been a fourth son and 
 a renegade inasmuch as he had fought on the side of York 
 in the Civil Wars. The title of Baron Carronbridge had 
 been conferred on this turn-coat's heir by Edward IV and 
 the Earldom had come for some Whig advocacy in the 
 reign of George II. This Scotch offshoot, although noble 
 for so many generations, was usually spoken of with some 
 suggestion of contempt by descendants of the direct line 
 the mark of cadency was exhibited by the martlet of the 
 Carronbridge coat of arms, there had been intermarriages 
 with other Scottish families, and the Whig tradition had 
 unhappily survived ; the present Lord Carronbridge was, in 
 theory at least, a Gladstonian, although he rarely attended 
 the Upper House. This slight air of deferring to the 
 junior branch did not, however, deter the English family 
 from acknowledging the relationship. The Carronbridges, 
 apparently, never troubled to recognise or refute the claim 
 to kinship, which, indeed, was clearly set out in the pages 
 of Burke. 
 
 The elder branch had not been ennobled, although they 
 could claim kinship with many aristocratic families by inter- 
 marriage. They had sent sons to the wars, and there was 
 a tradition that thirteen Lynnekers were killed in the battle 
 of Cregy; but the only famous member of the race was 
 that Thomas Linacre (the original Norman spelling) who 
 was court physician to Henry VIII and the tutor of Eras- 
 mus, Sir Thomas More and Queen Mary ; and his connexion 
 was unhappily somewhat obscure. It was difficult to account 
 for the fact that he was probably born at Canterbury, unless 
 he were the illegitimate son of some apostate Lynneker 
 pilgrim; and even so he might have derived from the 
 Scottish branch. 
 
 Nevertheless, if the Lynneker records showed no high 
 achievement, they exhibited all the marks of honourable 
 and gentle birth, and a succession that stretched back with- 
 
THE LYNNEKER METHOD 65 
 
 out a break to the Norman invasion. (The name figures 
 among the servientes in Domesday Book.) If they had not 
 fought their way to place and honour, they had hardly 
 fallen below the honourable level of their old position. 
 Through all their incompetencies ran some streak of stabil- 
 ity, of faith in their own rank. 
 
 And the old stock was still fertile. Canon Lynneker at 
 Culver had six children, five of them boys; and the eldest 
 brother who died in '8& he had been a stipendiary magis- 
 trate had left a son and two daughters. The fourth brother 
 was the only one who had had no issue. He had married 
 a Miss Gale possibly the fault had been hers and had 
 died young, as the long-lived Lynnekers counted it. The 
 Rector of Halton referred to him as "poor Dick" ; an under- 
 stood allusion to the fact that he was only fifty-five at the 
 time of his death. He, too, had been in the church and 
 had held a living in Hampshire. Of Mr. Lynneker's two 
 sisters one was the wife of a Welsh County Court Judge 
 and had four children ; the other had never married. Thus 
 the six Lynnekers of the old generation were represented 
 by eighteen children, of whom ten were sons capable 
 of carrying on the name and the tradition. The weak period 
 in the direct line had been in the days of old Edward, the 
 pluralist, whose two brothers had died of small-pox before 
 they had reached the marriageable age, and had left him 
 alone to perpetuate the stock. 
 
 Descent from such a family was not a subject for boast; 
 there was no need for boasting. The name announced it- 
 self. Ignorance of so notable a pedigree proclaimed the 
 stranger as one who knew nothing of English traditions. 
 Particularly ill-bred was that absurd question: "Are you 
 related to the General ?" the reference being to that famous 
 brother of Lord Carronbridge's who had won his honours 
 in the Crimea. The correct answer was to admit cousin- 
 ship and. if the hearer were sufficiently interested, to men- 
 tion, not the precise degree of cousinship which was almost 
 incalculable, but the mere fact that Carronbridge was the 
 junior branch. The thing could be done without snobbery 
 
66 THESE LYNNEKERS 
 
 by any Lynneker. They had the dignified consciousness 
 of their breed. 
 
 And yet, despite the soundness of the link that had so 
 finely carried the chain on into the iQth century, the Lyn- 
 neker blood was running a little thin. The flavour of it 
 remained but it lacked body, like some amazingly old port 
 that had passed the perfect development of its maturity. 
 The strain had been so individual that intermarriage had 
 scarcely altered it, but while still maintaining its chief 
 characteristics, the strain was wearing out. Intellectually 
 the Lynnekers were dropping behind their own times. They 
 had been Tories, every man of them, since the name had 
 come into use at the end of the seventeenth century; and, 
 now, their conservatism was falling into senile decay; a 
 fact that the Rector of Halton just failed to recognise in 
 his realisation that he belonged to the Old School. 
 
 He took his own family as the standard of English cul- 
 ture, and deplored not the Lynneker loss of vitality, but 
 the growing vulgarity of the new generation. 
 
 II 
 
 The mark of his attitude was to be found in his treatment 
 of the Bank manager. Mr. Bell was, in the Rector's phrase, 
 "a very worthy fellow." He had been a Cathedral chorister 
 and his subsequent success had not spoiled him. The 
 King's School at Medborough offers a free education to all 
 choristers, and although in the mass they were regarded as 
 social pariahs by both boarders and day-boys, an excep- 
 tional individual, such as Bell had been, could win the 
 recognition of being treated almost as an equal. And 
 then Bell had been a real musician. He played the piano, 
 violin and 'cello more than passably well, and he founded 
 and led the celebrated Medborough quartette of men's voices 
 that was engaged all over the county for every concert 
 of any pretension. Finally, his manner expressed him. 
 Some becoming air of deference remained as the result 
 
THE LYNNEKER METHOD 67 
 
 of his chorister training, an air that suited his quiet habit 
 and justified the adjective "gentlemanly," that described 
 him in the Precincts. As Mrs. Hillier, the Precentor's wife, 
 put it, "One was never afraid that Mr. Bell would take 
 advantage. . . ." He was certainly a treasure to that 
 Cathedral branch of the City & County. 
 
 He would, in any case, have treated the Rector of Halton 
 with the particular respect due to one of the original share- 
 holders. In his free bachelor days and he had not mar- 
 ried until he was forty with his fellowship and his minor 
 canonry, Mr. Lynneker had saved money, and when the 
 City & County Banking Co. had been founded in 1860, he 
 had subscribed for and obtained five ;ioo shares. In thirty 
 years those shares had quadrupled their value by apprecia- 
 tion and by the issue of new stock at par to the first holders, 
 issues that until the last fifteen years Mr. Lynneker had 
 conscientiously taken up. But during the period of heavy 
 outlay on his children's education, he had been forced to sell 
 800 of his holding, and he was now paying a higher rate 
 of interest on his 300 overdraft than his shares were 
 earning. 
 
 Thus, in one sense, his wife was justified in her assump- 
 tion that their financial situation was not so perilous as 
 Mr. Lynneker led her to believe. It was true that if that 
 overdraft were made good by a further sale of stock, he 
 would still have 900 of solid capital as a stand-by in case 
 of emergency. But as he realised, and as he believed she 
 never could, that "sort of thing could not go on indefi- 
 nitely," and moreover he was perpetually scared by the 
 thought of that spectre which must haunt the incumbent 
 of any Parish with good Rectory accommodation and a 
 glebe farm of 300 acres, the fearful spectre of "ecclesiastical 
 dilapidations," as administered under the Act of 1871. 
 
 There were times when Mr. Lynneker had daunting 
 visions of a widow and two daughters left in very straight- 
 ened circumstances. . . . 
 
 He discussed the advisability of another sale of stock 
 
THESE LYNNEKERS 
 
 that afternoon before he opened the question of Dickie's 
 candidature. Indeed, he had got to his feet and was 
 drawing on his driving-gloves, and Bell was politely stand- 
 ing, with that look of intent occupation on his face, which 
 always saved him from the necessity of offering super- 
 fluous comments on the weather. 
 
 "Ah! by the way," Mr. Lynneker began, "I think I re- 
 member your saying, Bell, that you might have a vacancy 
 in the Bank for my youngest boy?" 
 
 "I have not yet filled it, Mr. Lynneker," Bell replied 
 gravely. 
 
 "And do you think er what would you advise? I feel 
 that I can't afford to send a third son to Cambridge." 
 
 "The Bank does not offer any considerable advance- 
 ment," Bell said reflectively, as if he were considering some 
 hypothetical case. "A junior clerkship begins at sixty 
 pounds a year and rises by yearly increments of ten pounds 
 to a hundred and fifty. After that there is the possibility 
 of a branch managership, but the vacancies do not occur 
 very often." 
 
 "He might perhaps try it for a few months," ventured 
 Mr. Lynneker. 
 
 "Yes?" Mr. Bell's agreement was obviously tempered 
 by a reservation that he immediately displayed. "Yes, but 
 it would hardly be advisable to put that before the Directors. 
 They leave the engagement of clerks to me, but I report, 
 of course; and I am particularly instructed to find young 
 men who are likely to remain with us. In a Bank, as you 
 will understand, Mr. Lynneker, there are many reasons 
 why a constant change of staff is inadvisable." 
 
 The Rector coughed irritably. "Do you make any kind 
 of stipulation?" he asked. 
 
 "If it were possible for there to be some understanding 
 that he would stay for five years . . ." 
 
 "He has a mathematical bias," Mr. Lynneker announced, 
 as if Bell's suggestion had not reached him. "He talks 
 of reading for some other profession in his spare time. 
 
THE LYNNEKER METHOD 69 
 
 Personally I should like to see him in the church. I believe 
 he has quite unusual abilities. We have only thought of 
 his coming here as a stop-gap." 
 
 Mr. Bell nodded sympathetically, and looked as if he 
 were employed in some immense mental calculation. He 
 could maintain an unembarrassed silence for some minutes 
 with that expression. His "I perfectly understand your 
 position" was a particular compliment to an original share- 
 holder who had once figured gloriously remote in the 
 minor Canons' stalls. 
 
 "He might consent to stay for three years," Mr. Lynne- 
 ker hazarded. "That would still make it possible for him 
 to go up to Cambridge at twenty, if opportunity offered." 
 
 "May I write to you, Mr. Lynneker?" Bell asked. 
 
 "Certainly; by all means," the Rector returned, snatch- 
 ing at the chance of postponing decision. He could talk 
 it over with his wife and Dickie, he thought. It was so 
 essential to consider such an important undertaking from 
 all sides before making a decision. 
 
 "By all means, Bell," he repeated. "I'm wasting your 
 time." 
 
 As he drove home alone in the Stanhope, he decided that 
 he had certainly done the wise thing in not pledging Dickie 
 to five years' service; and he was, also, inclined to con- 
 gratulate himself on the compromise he had effected with 
 regard to the sale of stock by giving instructions to sell 
 only one share, he had still kept intact that comfortable 
 1000 which was so much more substantial a figure than 
 900. The small overdraft might be made good by putting 
 a little pressure on the tenant of the Glebe Farm, who owed 
 arrears that would more than wipe out the balance. That 
 resource was always in reserve and had never yet been 
 called upon. 
 
 The aroma of the cigar, he always smoked as he drove 
 home from Medborough, seemed to him rather sweeter than 
 usual. 
 
70 THESE LYNNEKERS 
 
 in 
 
 The discussion of Dickie's immediate future fluttered 
 about the supper table that evening; and the comforting 
 fact that nothing could be "settled" until they received 
 Bell's decision with regard to the term of probation, came 
 continually to the surface and gave the problem the air 
 of pleasant unreality. 
 
 "But let us suppose," Adela said with great earnestness, 
 "let us suppose that Mr. Bell says he must go for five 
 years, what then?" 
 
 "What's the good of debating on an uncertain assump- 
 tion?" asked Latimer, and he and his sister nearly quar- 
 relled before it was agreed to play Adela's game for a 
 time. 
 
 "It settles it one way, in any case," she concluded. "If 
 we decide that he ought to go if it's to be for five years, 
 he would certainly go if it were only for three." 
 
 "Suppose that we decide that he shouldn't," put in 
 Latimer. He was divided between jealousy of Dickie's abil- 
 ity to relieve the family distress, and a fear that he, him- 
 self, might be called upon to throw up his scholarship 
 and be turned out without a degree to make a living as 
 an assistant master in some preparatory school. Adela's 
 opposition was merely a temporary stimulus to range him- 
 self on the dissenting side. 
 
 The weight of opinion was against Adela on her sup- 
 position. 
 
 "I shouldn't like to bind him for so long," Mr. Lynneker 
 said. 
 
 "He'd only be twenty-two then," Adela argued. 
 
 "I can't picture Dickie as being twenty-two," her mother 
 interpolated inconsequently. She had a vision of her last 
 baby sturdily trying to balance himself on his heels at 
 the age of fourteen months. He had been the best tempered 
 of all her babies and the most backward. 
 
 When that side issue had been disposed of by Adela's 
 
THE LYNNEKER METHOD 71 
 
 description of her little brother with a white beard, sign- 
 ing Bank of England notes, they returned almost unani- 
 mously to the decision that five years was too long. 
 
 Dickie, himself, took little part in the game. He seemed 
 to think his immediate duty was to eat a reasonable amount 
 of the coarse and rather muddy bream that had been the 
 one important trophy of the fishing expedition. The rest 
 of the family had preferred the alternative of cutlets. 
 
 "You seem to like it," Latimer remarked presently, lean- 
 ing forward to stare with critical disapproval across the 
 table. 
 
 "It's all right," remarked Dickie, and suddenly decided 
 that he had done all that was required of him in that 
 direction. After he had transferred his plate and the re- 
 mains of the bream to the sideboard, he started cheer- 
 fully on the two tepid cutlets that had been kept for 
 him. 
 
 "You haven't told us what you feel about it all, Dick," 
 his father said. 
 
 "Oh ! I'm going to take it on, of course," replied Dickie. 
 
 "I don't know that I should care to pledge you for five 
 years," Mr. Lynneker submitted. 
 
 "That'll be all right," mumbled Dickie. Plainly the 
 bream and the City & County were in the same category 
 as far as he was concerned. 
 
 "Of course you don't in the least realise what you're 
 going to do," Latimer said; and his mother asked her 
 youngest son if he "really thought he would like being 
 in a Bank"; a failure to understand the essential issue 
 that had the effect of silencing her husband. He cherished 
 the certainty that Bell would be reasonable and admit the 
 shorter period to be sufficient; and that Dickie would 
 wonderfully go to Cambridge eventually, as a Lynneker 
 should. 
 
 IV 
 
 But Mr. Bell was firm on this occasion. His letter came 
 the next morning, and in defiance of precedent, Adela 
 
72 THESE LYNNEKERS 
 
 begged that it might be opened at the breakfast-table. The 
 manager's argument was perfectly reasonable. He pointed 
 out that in a small local Bank, run by himself with only, 
 at present, two assistants, it was impossible so to divide 
 the work that the junior should be excluded from a general 
 knowledge of the various accounts; a reservoir of secrets 
 that was of the utmost importance in the life of a provincial 
 town. While the clerks were in the Bank's employ, they 
 were under bond, and the sense of their fiduciary capacity 
 was sufficient to keep them loyal to their agreement. But 
 if the clerks were constantly changed, some of the Bank's 
 customers might reasonably feel uneasy. In Mr. Lynne- 
 ker's case there could be no reason to doubt that the Bank's 
 secrets would be faithfully kept, but unhappily Mr. Bell 
 could not take upon himself the responsibility of creating 
 a new precedent in this connexion. If he accepted Mr. 
 Richard Lynneker, at the end of three years another of 
 the Bank's clientele might be offended by the refusal of 
 similar terms. 
 
 None of the Lynnekers had enough knowledge of the 
 usual terms of employment in Banks to be surprised at 
 Mr. Bell's stipulation. They approached such technicali- 
 ties as these without curiosity. But the truth of the matter 
 was that the manager of the City & County had recently 
 lost two accounts owing to the indiscretions of a dismissed 
 clerk. The affair had come to the Directors and Brian 
 Lessing, the chairman, had casually suggested the advisa- 
 bility of not employing a local man, except under a five 
 years' agreement. And fresh from that check to the steady 
 confirmation of his tedious achievements, Mr. Bell had 
 determined to observe that suggestion with the greatest 
 exactitude. 
 
 The Rector exhibited signs of annoyance when he had 
 read the letter aloud to his family; and more particularly 
 he was annoyed with Adela for her insistence. 
 
 "What are we going to do, now ?" she asked innocently ; 
 and her father snubbed her by replying, 
 
 "My dear child, you must leave that question to me.'' 
 
THE LYNNEKER METHOD 73 
 
 Latimer looked glum. He thought the general outlook 
 distinctly unpromising, and when, after a strained silence, 
 his father left the table, announced that it was "all up 
 with the Bank scheme." 
 
 "The pater's got his knife into Bell for sticking to the 
 five years," he explained. 
 
 Dickie looked as if he did not care one way or the other, 
 and Mrs. Lynneker sighed and remarked that she was 
 not altogether sorry. 
 
 "All jolly fine, mater," Latimer said, "but I suppose it 
 means my going down." 
 
 "Of course you don't care what Dickie has to do, as 
 long as you're not interfered with," Adela put in acidly ; not 
 because she wished especially to champion Dickie, but 
 because she was glad of an opportunity to relieve her 
 temper. She hated to be snubbed "before people." 
 
 Latimer frowned sulkily. "It isn't that at all," he 
 grumbled, trying to think of some reasonable defence. "I 
 mean it isn't as if Dickie minds going into the Bank; he's 
 jolly keen on it; aren't you, Dickie?" 
 
 "Not particularly," Dickie said quietly. 
 
 "There you are," snapped Adela as if she had scored 
 a point. 
 
 "Well, what on earth are you so set on it for, then?" 
 asked Latimer suspiciously. 
 
 "Somebody's got to do something," Dickie returned. 
 "We're always talking about things and nobody's any 
 further at the end of it." 
 
 He had no sense of being heroic and his mother em- 
 barrassed him when she said, "You are always doing things, 
 dear," and added : "We expect you to retrieve the family 
 fortunes." She gave her speech the air of a quotation from 
 popular melodrama, but it was quite clear that she recog- 
 nised in her youngest son some quality that she found in 
 neither of his elder brothers. 
 
 "Oh! Dickie's a wonderful child," commented Latimer. 
 "He'll probably blunder into something one of these days." 
 
 Dickie dug his hands into his trouser pockets and grinned. 
 
74 THESE LYNNEKERS 
 
 "Anyhow, what are you going to do, now?" asked 
 Adela. 
 
 "Go into the Bank," returned Dickie. 
 
 "For five years?" 
 
 "I suppose so." 
 
 "And if the pater won't let you?" 
 
 "He will," Dickie affirmed confidently. 
 
 "Are you going in to see him about it?" asked Latimer. 
 
 Dickie nodded. 
 
 "Well, look here, I shouldn't see him this morning, if 
 I were you," was Latimer's advice. "He's fearfully shirty 
 with Bell, and he'll probably refuse to discuss it with you 
 at all. You'd miles better wait until he's settled down a 
 bit, if you really mean to stick to the idea. Don't do it 
 to please me, though, for goodness' sake. I don't care a 
 little hang one way or the other." 
 
 "I shouldn't do it to please you," Dickie replied seriously, 
 and Adela laughed and said, "Good old Dickie." 
 
 "I know you're being splendidly heroic," snapped Latimer. 
 
 "Richard to the rescue of the family !" put in Mrs. Lynne- 
 ker gaily, trying to divert the conversation into less acri- 
 monious courses. "Richard shall go and fight the Med- 
 borough Saracens for us." 
 
 "Well, if you take my advice, you won't see the pater 
 this morning," Latimer concluded and left the room before 
 his sister could make any further assault upon him. 
 
 "Latimer's most beastly selfish," she remarked. 
 
 "Oh! he's all right," Dickie said, adding another to his 
 list of tolerations. "But I'll see the pater now," he added. 
 "I want to get this settled." 
 
 His mother and sister regarded him with open admira- 
 tion as he walked across the hall and knocked at the door 
 of his father's study. 
 
 The interview was brief and decisive. 
 
 Mr. Lynneker's petulant opposition to the scheme had 
 
THE LYNNEKER METHOD 75 
 
 run its usual course and produced moral fatigue. His 
 outbreak of annoyance at breakfast had marked a climax, 
 and now he wanted to be on easy terms again with his 
 family. He knew that all of them, with the possible excep- 
 tion of his wife, would approve sending Dickie to the 
 Bank. 
 
 He recognised the strain of selfishness that prompted 
 his children's inclination and was aware that his own 
 motives were equally biassed. And he deprecated that 
 bias and in his own futile way had fought against it. But, 
 now, he was willing to fall back on the excuse that cir- 
 cumstances had been too strong for him. He had given 
 Dick every chance of avoiding this derogatory clerk- 
 ship; if the boy insisted on taking it, he did it with his 
 eyes open. 
 
 This last evasion was the immediate palliative that pre- 
 sented itself. It offered the excuse for a perfectly reason- 
 able hesitation. Dick's eyes must be clearly opened; he 
 must never have an opportunity to say that he had been 
 driven into this slavery. 
 
 When Dickie's knock came to the study door his father 
 was already prepared and he welcomed the chance to 
 have the affair settled while he was in the mood. He meant 
 to be perfectly just, to put the case without a shadow of 
 prejudice. 
 
 "Sit down, my boy," he said, when Dickie had come in. 
 "I want you just to listen to me for a few moments." 
 
 Dickie accepted both invitations without comment. He 
 was always glad to be treated reasonably. 
 
 There were but two arguments to be explained, and 
 Mr. Lynneker found that both could be briefly stated. 
 The first was with regard to Dickie's future career. "This 
 clerkship may prejudice your chances," was the effect of 
 that statement. "You won't want to begin school again 
 at twenty-two by taking a University course, and you 
 won't be prepared for any of the professions." 
 
 Dickie nodded. "Yes, pater, go on," he said. "I won't 
 say anything until you've finished." 
 
76 THESE LYNNEKERS 
 
 "The second point, dear boy," Mr. Lynneker continued, 
 "is that I feel this clerkship is rather . . . well, a little 
 infra dig., eh? It isn't quite an occupation I should have 
 chosen for you. Very modern, no doubt; but I confess 
 that it rather goes against the grain . . ." he paused un- 
 decidedly, as if uncertain whether he had said enough 
 under that head. 
 
 "I don't see that that matters much, does it?" Dickie 
 said, as his father still hesitated. 
 
 "You wouldn't feel that you would be losing posi- 
 tion . . ." Mr. Lynneker began. 
 
 "I don't mean to stick to it after the five years, you 
 see," Dickie explained. "I don't know whether Mr. Bell 
 ought to be told that. Perhaps he ought. But I'm not a 
 slacker, you know, pater. I'm going to work in my own 
 time while I'm in the Bank ; and I expect in a year or two 
 I'll know better what sort of thing to go in for. I haven't 
 thought of anything yet, except astronomy. Really I only 
 thought of that because it seemed to give some kind of 
 chance to a chap who was any good at maths, like J. C. 
 Adams, you know. And, anyhow, I think I'd feel more 
 comfortable if I was earning something." 
 
 "It might be possible to find another opening for you," 
 Mr. Lynneker ventured. 
 
 "This one is all ready and I might begin at once," Dickie 
 returned. "I mean, wouldn't it be rather a waste of time 
 looking about for something else? I don't see that the 
 Bank's half bad. They're shortish hours, anyhow. Oh ! 
 and, pater, I've been thinking, wouldn't it be a jolly good 
 thing for me to get a bicycle, not a high wheel, mater's 
 so funky about them. I could get a "safety" at Pearson's 
 for about eight quid and it would save the price of the 
 season-ticket and any amount of time. If you could ad- 
 vance the money, I could pay you back out of my screw, 
 you know." 
 
 "We might think about it, certainly," his father agreed. 
 
 "Give me a certain amount of ekkers, too," added Dickie, 
 piling up his argument. He had picked up the abbrevia- 
 
THE LYNNEKER METHOD 77 
 
 tion of exercise from Edward, who had had a bad attack 
 of cutting his words and adding "er" to the stem during 
 his first year at Cambridge. 
 
 Mr. Lynneker agreed that the safety bicycle was un- 
 questionably an idea that must be considered. He was, 
 indeed, planning to give Dickie ten pounds to buy it 
 another salve for his conscience but that was to be a "sur- 
 prise." Meanwhile he had to write to Barnard. 
 
 VI 
 
 Dr. Barnard extorted no penalty. He was able to fill 
 the one empty place in his own house, even at that eleventh 
 hour, and when he had made certain of that, he wrote 
 a very charming letter to express his regret that so promis- 
 ing a boy as Richard Lynneker should be leaving the school 
 just when he seemed to have overcome various tempera- 
 mental disabilities and to be well on the way to a scholar- 
 ship. 
 
 Mr. Lynneker kept that letter among certain other treas- 
 ured papers. 
 
 And for many months he had moments, decreasing in 
 poignancy as time went on, in which he saw again the 
 visions of that triumphant speech-day; and wondered if 
 he might not have made some sacrifice to give his youngest 
 son a better chance. 
 
 The only confidence he gave to his wife was contained 
 in the remark that "the dear boy had been so splendid 
 about it all." 
 
 Mrs. Lynneker agreed with enthusiasm. Dickie's em- 
 ployment had made a difference of 160 a year in their 
 income, and she was permitting herself and Adela a few 
 minor extravagances. 
 
V 
 MEDBOROUGH 
 
 AMONG the outstanding influences that marked the 
 course of his life during the next two years, Dickie 
 would probably have given an important place to the pur- 
 chase of his bicycle. That machine a second-hand "Rover" 
 safety, with cushion tyres gave him independence, and 
 curiously linked the diverse experiences of Medborough and 
 Halton. . . . 
 
 Medborough took on a new aspect when he went to work 
 there. Until then, it had made other claims on his at- 
 tention. He remembered it first as a place where one had 
 tea and enticingly unfamiliar cakes at Hopkinson's, the 
 confectioner in Broad Street comparatively rare celebra- 
 tions for him, as the Stanhope would only hold four, and 
 Edward, Latimer and his two sisters were given the prece- 
 dence due to seniority. Usually he had gone in alone with 
 his mother, by train, on those occasions. 
 
 More recently Medborough had been regarded either as 
 a shopping centre that offered many attractive things, 
 tools, bicycles and guns, for example, all quite beyond 
 reach ; or as a place of diversion. He had been in to 
 hear Corney Grain at the Drill Hall, or to see a cricket- 
 match. 
 
 But in all these aspects, the town had been a rather 
 remote, perfectly distinct place, to be visited only in holi- 
 day mood ; a place of objective men and women, mainly 
 shopkeepers, who were never visualised as moving from 
 their counters or as having any other interests and man- 
 
 78 
 
MEDBOROUGH 79 
 
 ners than those they displayed to customers. The exceptions 
 were almost exclusively cathedral clergy, encountered cas- 
 ually in the street, or living in grey stone and old red 
 brick houses within the precincts; houses that opened 
 ecclesiastical, nail-studded front doors to receive his father 
 and mother, possibly Edward and his two sisters, but were 
 barred against gauche, rather untidily dressed schoolboys 
 of fifteen or so, who were left to wander about the cloisters 
 or stare in at the windows of Bailey, the ironmonger. 
 
 The first day in the Bank altered these impressions for 
 Dickie. 
 
 Alfred Bailey, himself, the owner of those amazingly at- 
 tractive tools he so carelessly displayed, came into the City 
 & County early on Monday morning, and nodded to Dickie 
 at his side desk as to an equal. Mr. Bailey was no longer 
 a servant waiting upon small Lynneker demands, with a 
 placatory smile, but a customer with a respectable account, 
 a man to be propitiated by the employee of the Bank. 
 
 The unexpectedness of the phenomenon demanded at- 
 tention. 
 
 At the moment Dickie was inclined to resent the fa- 
 miliarity of that casual nod. It had no precedent in his 
 experience. He was accustomed to the subservience of 
 all Medborough trades-people, and to some hint of respect 
 from any member of what he had been led to regard as 
 the lower classes. He had had no preparation for this 
 sudden sweeping away of social barriers. Mr. Bell had 
 been properly polite in his reception of the Bank's new 
 clerk. There had been no perceptible change in his manner 
 that morning. 
 
 Dickie returned the nod with a touch of hauteur, and 
 occupied himself with the simple copying of figures that 
 was to be his introduction to the complexities of book- 
 keeping. 
 
 But Mr. Bailey was not to be dismissed so easily. After 
 he had announced that he was going to Sheffield that after- 
 noon, and had taken ten pounds in gold to cash the cheque 
 
80 THESE LYNNEKERS 
 
 he presented, he looked across at Dickie's corner and re- 
 marked in a resonant voice, 
 
 "Got a new clerk, Bell." 
 
 "We've been understaffed for the last three months," 
 Mr. Bell replied. 
 
 "Oh !" commented Mr. Bailey, and then directly address- 
 ing Dickie, he said, "Young Mr. Lynneker, isn't it?" 
 
 Mr. Bell turned round and Dickie understood that he was 
 expected to reply. 
 
 "Yes, my name is Lynneker," he said. 
 
 "I've known your father this thirty year," stated Mr. 
 Bailey, "and I think I remember seein' you in my shop 
 a time or two." 
 
 "I've bought a few tools there," Dickie admitted. 
 
 "Fond of carpent'ring ?" asked Bailey. 
 
 "I do a little," Dickie said. 
 
 Mr. Bailey nodded and carefully stowed away his gold 
 in a flatleather purse. Then he pressed his square-crowned, 
 hard felt hat a little more firmly on his head, pulled 
 down his waistcoat, gave another nod to the office in 
 general, said, "Well, good mornin' to you, gentlemen," 
 and went out. 
 
 Mr. Bell continued his work without making any com- 
 ment. 
 
 Dickie ran his fingers through his hair, and as he pro- 
 ceeded with his mechanical copying, came to some con- 
 sideration of the difficult proposition that Alfred Bailey 
 was not a public-serving automaton, but an individual to 
 be considered and, if necessary, propitiated by a member of 
 the old and aristocratic family of Lynneker. 
 
 Mr. Bailey had come wonderfully to life. Dickie re- 
 membered, now, that he had heard the ironmonger's name 
 mentioned as a probable candidate for the mayoralty. Also, 
 he was a churchwarden of St. Peter's, the parish church 
 of Medborough. 
 
 And with Mr. Bailey's sudden development into a person 
 of consequence, Medborough itself began strangely to grow 
 and take a new form. It no longer wore the air of an 
 
MEDBOROUGH 81 
 
 amusing dependency of Halton, but had become the centre 
 of a large circle of the dim circumference of which were 
 dozens of little parishes such as that from which Dickie 
 had ridden out that morning. Halton, Thrapley, Allerton, 
 Great and Little Milton, and all the rest of those more 
 or less familiar villages, were from the Medborough trades- 
 man's point of view so many sources of custom, and 
 comparatively unimportant, even so. 
 
 ii 
 
 And there was Bradshaw. . . . 
 
 Dickie had seen him in the town a few weeks before 
 and had commented on his appearance to Latimer, who 
 had not observed the odd phenomenon, or thought it be- 
 neath his notice; had not, in any case, displayed the least 
 interest. 
 
 "That was a rum looking chap," had been Dickie's descrip- 
 tion; and Mark Bradshaw's appearance certainly deserved 
 some distinctive adjective. 
 
 Ordinary people of Bradshaw's physique would be de- 
 scribed as tall and thin; he demanded some less human 
 account such as long and narrow. His little shoulders 
 were perfectly square and he gave the effect of being 
 parallel-sided, just an unduly protracted square slip of 
 a man who could never be likened to anything so rounded 
 as a lamp-post. 
 
 And as a superfluous addition to that extended parallelo- 
 gram he had a long narrow face with a square jaw and 
 more chin than the strongest face could carry without 
 an effect of exaggeration; an expanse of chin that dis- 
 tracted the attention from the attempt at balance contrived 
 by an almost perfectly square box of forehead. 
 
 Between those rival spaces a small mouth, a short, 
 straight nose and little bright brown eyes were hope- 
 lessly tucked away and neglected. These peculiarities would 
 have been sufficient eccentricity for any one but the de- 
 
82 THESE LYNNEKERS 
 
 signer of Mark Bradshaw, but by way of completing the 
 grotesque, his hair had been arranged in three separate 
 waves, one over each ear and one down the centre of his 
 head, and these curling tufts were separated from each 
 other by neat bald pathways like very wide partings. 
 
 He had been bare-headed when Dickie had seen him 
 in the Market Place, and any one less preoccupied than 
 Latimer (he had just been buying ties) must have been 
 startled into the search for an adjective. Dickie was 
 aware that "rum-looking" was quite inadequate; but he 
 had not attempted any more detailed experiment to recall 
 the abstracted attention of his brother. Latimer was not 
 interested in the peculiarities of "common people." 
 
 It was an immense shock to Dickie to find that this queer- 
 looking fellow was to be his colleague in the Bank. The 
 fact had all the air of an astonishing coincidence, and 
 Dickie pondered it and tentatively classified it as belong- 
 ing to the same class as the vivifying of Mr. Bailey. Once 
 or twice he glanced covertly in Bradshaw's direction, 
 ashamed to look at him openly, as he might have been 
 ashamed of staring at some crippling disfigurement. 
 
 But that problem, at least, was solved for him when 
 Mr. Bell went upstairs to his dinner at a quarter past 
 twelve, leaving the senior clerk, Cartwright, in charge. 
 
 There were no depositors in the Bank at that moment, 
 and Bradshaw got up when Mr. Bell went out, walked 
 across the office and took a vacant stool next to Dickie. 
 
 "Shoo!" remarked Bradshaw, and when Dickie looked 
 up, began very solemnly to waggle his amazing chin. 
 
 "Have a good look, and get used to it," he said. "You'll 
 find that the pain relaxes after a few minutes. Some 
 people find this contortion more engaging/' he added, and 
 shot out his chin in an extraordinary grimace that entirely 
 finished Dickie. 
 
 "Oh! Good Lord," he exclaimed, and was overtaken 
 with a convulsion of laughter. 
 
 "Better, better ;" Bradshaw prompted him. "You're pass- 
 ing the crisis nicely. I've known young children scream 
 
MEDBOROUGH 83 
 
 and faint for less. Try another position!" And he pro- 
 ceeded to exhibit the further possibilities of that astonish- 
 ing face of his. 
 
 "Oh ! don't," gasped Dickie. "I shall have a fit or some- 
 thing/' 
 
 Cartwright, with his back to the counter, looked on with 
 interested amusement. 
 
 "Cartwright has reached the point of enduring, even of 
 enjoying the sight of my misfit, you notice," Bradford 
 said, when Dickie had reached a stage of weeping recovery. 
 "I've been a little brutal with you, because it saves time 
 and misunderstandings. I've found that it's no good trying 
 to talk to people until they've passed the phase of trying 
 to giggle without my seeing ''em. And I like talking to 
 people. Feeling any better ? Hm ?" 
 
 "I shall be all right if you won't do things with it, 
 you know," Dickie said, 1 still balanced on the verge of 
 hysterical laughter. 
 
 "Gross flattery," commented Bradshaw. "I know I'm a 
 freak, man. For God's sake don't be polite. I see the 
 girls in the street nudge each other when they see me 
 coming. And when I take off my hat to 'em, they're 
 finished. They have to hold each other up, or else lean 
 against a wall and give way to it. Once I sang 'Beauty's 
 Eyes' at a concert in the Drill Hall, and if Corney Grain 
 had been there he'd have chucked the funny business for 
 sheer shame; Corney Grain's recitals were like a prayer- 
 meeting alongside of the reception I had for 'Beauty's 
 Eyes.' When I got to 'I need no star in Heaven to guide 
 me,' the bobby in the Minster Yard half a mile away let 
 off as fast as he could go for the mayor to read the riot 
 act, and I've heard he rang up the fire station on the way 
 to be on the safe side." 
 
 "Oh ! for goodness' sake, shut up," gasped Dickie. 
 
 Cartwright, a fair, young man with smooth hair, listened 
 with a fixed, attentive smile. "He ought to go on the 
 stage," he remarked, when Bradshaw stopped, "as a popular 
 entertainer. I've often told him he'd make his fortune." 
 
84 THESE LYNNEKERS 
 
 Bradshaw shook his head and pressed his button mouth 
 into a thin line. Dickie fancied he saw some suggestion 
 of pathos in the bright little brown eyes, but Cartwright, 
 who had only smiled before, suddenly broke into a cackle 
 of laughter. 
 
 "Gosh, Braddie, you are a licker," he said, wiping 
 his eyes. 
 
 The creak of the outer pair of swing doors leading to 
 the street interrupted the comedy. Cartwright was in- 
 stantly at attention, suave and eager as a shop- walker; 
 while Bradshaw got to his feet and turning his back on 
 the counter, leaned over Dickie's ledger as if he were 
 deeply engaged in the Company's business. 
 
 "Cartwright goes to his lunch when Mr. Bell comes in," 
 he observed in an undertone, "and when Cartwright re- 
 turns at a quarter to two sharp, I go. I bring sandwiches 
 with me and eat 'em in the boot-cupboard, and then ex- 
 hibit myself for half an hour in order to put Medborough 
 in a good temper." Then he went on in a louder voice, 
 "Have you checked the cast on each slip? You ought to 
 and tick 'em again. Merely a matter of form, but nothing 
 counts as passed till it's been ticked twice. You can go 
 out when you like, you're merely an accessory at present; 
 and I was going to suggest that you might join my pro- 
 cession if you can bear it." 
 
 "I should like to," Dickie said. 
 
 in 
 
 That walk after lunch added another to Dickie's new 
 impressions of Medborough. 
 
 As they crossed the Market Place, Bradshaw was still 
 playing the fool for his companion's benefit. He took off 
 his hat to two young women they met, stuck out his chin 
 and made a stiff, elaborate bow; a performance that cer- 
 tainly had the effect of making the young women giggle, 
 although they looked, also, a trifle scared, and looked back 
 
MEDBOROUGH 85 
 
 once or twice with a faint apprehension after they had 
 passed. 
 
 But when they came into the Minster Yard, Bradshaw 
 looked keenly at Dickie and said : 
 
 "Struck me when I first saw you, Lynneker, that you 
 weren't one of the giggling sort." 
 
 "I don't think I 1 am," agreed Dickie. 
 
 ''May seem a paradox to you," Bradshaw went on, "but 
 I'm not altogether stuck on the funny business. It's been 
 forced on me, you see. I've got into a way of sticking 
 my chin through a collar, if you follow me, to give people 
 an excuse for laughing." 
 
 "I couldn't help it this morning," Dickie apologised. 
 
 "Naturally. I could set you off again, now, if I wanted 
 to," Bradshaw returned, exhibiting a curious pride in t!ie 
 power he had just been depreciating. "I'm not always in 
 the mood, you understand, but when I lay myself out . . ." 
 He paused as if doubtful whether he would not, now, make 
 further experiment on Dickie, and then looked up at the 
 great West Front of the Cathedral, waved his hand vaguely 
 and said : 
 
 "Mean anything to you, this sort of thing?" 
 
 "The Cathedral?" asked Dickie. 
 
 The afternoon sun cast great shadows into the depths of 
 the three immense arches of the West Front. The delicate, 
 serene mass of it towered overwhelmingly higher than 
 the buildings of the old King's School and the houses 
 on the south side of the Minster Yard. The row of great 
 elms on the north side, straining against the assault of the 
 bright October gale, were dwarfed into insignificance ; and 
 the little figures of men and women dotted about the paths 
 that cut the neat grass of the yard into sharp rhombuses 
 and triangles, were so utterly remote and small, it seemed 
 incredible that that great elevation could have been built by 
 the hands of so petty a race. 
 
 Bradshaw nodded. 
 
 "I don't know that it does/' Dickie said. "It's never 
 struck me particularly. Does it mean anything to you?" 
 
86 THESE LYNNEKERS 
 
 Bradshaw's grotesque face was absurdly solemn as he 
 replied. "Doesn't it impress you?" he asked. 
 
 "In what way?" asked the rather puzzled Dickie. 
 
 "Of course, if you don't feel it . . ." returned Brad- 
 shaw. 
 
 "Never thought about it," Dickie admitted. 
 
 "Well, even on its historical side . . ." 
 
 "What historical side?" 
 
 "As a piece of building." 
 
 "Go on," Dickie said. 
 
 "The nave's Norman, you know," Bradshaw explained, 
 "and then a hundred years or so later a fresh lot of beg- 
 gars, monks I suppose, came along and just jabbed that 
 front on to the end of it. They didn't bother particularly 
 to make it fit, or to make any sort of match with the old 
 stuff, they just barged in and built that. That's the way 
 they felt about building a cathedral. Pretty well got it, 
 too, didn't they? Dignity and solemnity and all that. 
 
 "Then, another couple of hundred years after them 
 some silly idiots built that porch into the middle arch. 
 Pity! And now the whole affair's supposed to be falling 
 forwards and they're talking of tying it in with steel girders. 
 That's history enough, isn't it? Can't you see the little 
 fellows swarming about all over it like flies on a house- 
 front, chipping and hammering, tiny little chaps they must 
 have looked up there, and yet they left that behind 'em 
 when they'd done. Terrific, I call it." 
 
 Dickie felt slightly uncomfortable. He was not ripe 
 yet for the tremendous bouleversement necessary before 
 he could cease to regard Medborough Cathedral as among 
 the classified things, such as Csesar's Gallic Wars or the 
 signing of Magna Carta, and look upon it as a magic 
 memorial of his ancestors' thought and feeling. 
 
 "I'm afraid I'm an awful duffer at architecture," he said 
 with a schoolboy sheepishness. "Are you keen on it?" 
 
 "Oh! architecture and lots of other subjects like that 
 interest me," Bradshaw returned airily. "I like to imagine 
 
MEDBOROUGH 87 
 
 the things happening. The cloisters, now. You know about 
 them, of course?" 
 
 "I don't," confessed Dickie. 
 
 Bradshaw, with one of his odd, stiff gestures, hooked 
 him by the arm. "Oh! that ought to wake you up, any- 
 how," he said. 
 
 But when he reached the cloisters, he paused before he 
 began his exposition and pointed up at the vast enclos- 
 ing solidity of the nave and South transept. 
 
 "I always feel about half a centimetre high, when I stand 
 here," he remarked. 
 
 "It is tremendous," agreed Dickie. 
 
 "The tower's new, of course," Bradshaw went on. "It 
 was all pulled down and rebuilt a few years ago and they 
 added those pepper-castors at the corners. Don't like 'em 
 much, do you?" 
 
 They stood for a few moments craning their necks to 
 stare up at the impending cliff of grey masonry the newly- 
 built tower, above, shone cream white on the rain-washed 
 sunlight of the windy October afternoon. 
 
 "Fine, don't you think?" asked Bradshaw. 
 
 "Yes, it is fine," Dickie said. "I don't seem to have no- 
 ticed it like this, before." 
 
 "Oh! you'll get to like it more and more," Bradshaw 
 said with enthusiasm. "And the cloisters, ajl smashed up 
 by Cromwell's fellows in 1643. Can't you see 'em at it? 
 Burnt the best part of this bit, of course. All that black 
 stuff's the mark of the fire. You can't get -it off with your 
 finger. It has just stained the stone, I suppose; all the 
 cindery stuff been washed off years ago, no doubt." 
 
 Dickie had always assumed that the comparatively low 
 stone wall of the quadrangle, with its niches and blackened 
 carving, had been originally built like that. No one had 
 ever enlightened him, and he had taken the cloisters for 
 granted together with the rest of the Cathedral and its 
 precincts. And, although he was too callow, as yet, to 
 suffer any great change of attitude, even on that first 
 day in Medborough he began to have some suspicion that 
 
88 THESE LYNNEKERS 
 
 many of the things he had hitherto despised as "tosh" 
 might possibly be worth knowing. 
 
 The thought passed through his mind, as Bradshaw 
 warmed to his reconstruction of the past and attempted 
 a picture of Cromwell's Ironsides ravishing the interior 
 of the Minster; passed, and left an ineradicable trace of 
 its passage. 
 
 "You can't blame 'em. in a way," Bradshaw concluded. 
 "They were up against every sort of toggery; and just 
 wild with all Roman Catholic and Cavalier notions sort 
 of different race to them lost their wool completely like 
 the people in the French Revolution. I say it's time we 
 went back, old man." 
 
 IV 
 
 Other people in Medborough came to life for Dickie on 
 that first day in the City & County. There was, for in- 
 stance, a whisper behind the Bank counter that young 
 Wetherall, who owned the big draper's business in Priest- 
 gate, could not hang on much longer. Apparently the Bank 
 knew what no one else in the town had guessed, namely, 
 that young Wetherall had been speculating foolishly in 
 mining stocks. His inner financial history was all written 
 in the City & County's ledgers and any one who was skilled 
 in the use of those mysterious volumes might read the 
 story of young. Wetherall's life. 
 
 Nothing could be hidden from the quiet eyes of Mr. 
 Bell. He knew the secret history of the town's business 
 and never suggested the profundity of his knowledge by 
 so much as a change of manner. When some unfortunate, 
 who had long been marked down as unsafe, came to beg 
 the privilege of an overdraft, he was refused with just 
 that same air of deference with which the manager wel- 
 comed an original shareholder, or my Lord, the Bishop. 
 
 For those remorseless columns of figures gave entrance 
 even to the private life of the Palace. They were full of 
 
MEDBOROUGH 89 
 
 the strangest significance, a hieroglyphic character reveal- 
 ing mysteries that no other records could show. The per- 
 mutations of those ten numerals could express the depths 
 of tragedy more surely than any language; the misery of 
 the steadily declining balance, the effort expressed by the 
 reduction in the amounts of those weekly cheques payable 
 to self; the final horror of that terrible draft for a few 
 shillings to close the account. But after that the investi- 
 gator was faced by a blank silence. The Bank knew nothing 
 of the unfortunate depositor's future; in the hieroglyphic 
 character bankruptcy was death. 
 
 Dickie did not come at once to any appreciation of the 
 occult significance of the books in his charge. As junior 
 ledger clerk, he had no means of collating his items, and 
 could strike no financial or moral balance. He did not, 
 at first, have access to that collection of dossiers, bound 
 in white parchment, where the private life of the indi- 
 vidual was recorded in the convenient ciphers that were 
 the Bank's sole means of expression, the only language 
 of which it took any account. But the astounding novelty 
 of it all impressed him with a sense of new values, and 
 the sight of his bicycle standing in the back premises of 
 the City & County, was like the vision of some forgotten 
 thing coming up out of the past. 
 
 During the past ten days, that bicycle had gathered to 
 itself a group of associations with Halton Rectory. He 
 had discussed it with Latimer, cleaned it in the stable 
 yard with Adela as an interested onlooker. The sight of 
 the crank cotter he had hammered and slightly damaged, 
 immediately recalled her enquiry as to why women should 
 not ride bicycles; and their subsequent discussion in which 
 Adela had advocated some kind of rational costume and 
 he had suggested that the frame of the safety might be 
 adapted to suit the inconvenience of skirts. 
 
 And when he had mounted and ridden down the cob- 
 bled streets of Medborough, had safely passed the two level 
 crossings of the Great Northern Railway and was able 
 to increase his pace on the excellent surface of the Thrap- 
 
90 THESE LYNNEKERS 
 
 ley road, the day's experiences began to fall into an altered 
 perspective. The recognitions of individuality in Mr. Bailey, 
 young Wetherall and the Cathedral; the odd appearance 
 and personality of Bradshaw, the smell of the calf-bound 
 ledgers, all began to take a new shape. They were falling 
 into Halton classifications. In a few minutes he would 
 cease to be a bank clerk, subject to the casual greeting 
 of ironmongers and drapers, and would return without 
 effort to his position as the youngest son of the Rector 
 the villagers would touch their hats to him as he rode 
 past. 
 
 Between those two different worlds, the bicycle flung 
 a bridge. When he saw it standing in the coach-house at 
 home it reminded him of the Bank. When he was in 
 Medborough it was full of associations with Halton. The 
 bicycle stood to him as a symbol, something that shared 
 his two lives and in some sense related them. 
 
VI 
 THE BEGINNING OF REASON 
 
 IF Dickie had been a mathematical genius such as his 
 hero, J. C. Adams, he might have walked into that 
 enceinte of particular learning which confines the out- 
 look of the specialist. At Oakstone he had been distin- 
 guished inasmuch as he was, at seventeen, unquestionably 
 the best mathematician in the school ; a distinction that had 
 tended to impress upon him a false scale of values. He 
 had dreamed vaguely of becoming senior wrangler, and of 
 discovering a ninth major planet circling behind the orbit 
 of Neptune. 
 
 He came to a recognition of his own limitations during 
 the first six months of his work at the Bank. The promise 
 to read in his spare time was scrupulously fulfilled. He 
 read for two hours every morning before breakfast, and 
 all that winter denied himself the invigoration of his half- 
 mile morning run down to the river. (In his taste for 
 cold water, at least, he was his father's son. Mr. Lynneker 
 had bathed in the river every morning summer and winter 
 until he was sixty, and still went in the warmer weather. 
 Edward and Latimer had never accompanied him during 
 the Christmas holidays; and Dickie had been too young 
 then, but he had taken up the tradition on his own account 
 when he was fifteen.) In addition to these two quiet hours 
 before breakfast, he put in another hour and a half before 
 supper, and if he took that time for cleaning his bicycle or 
 for some odd job of carpentering, he worked from half-past 
 eight until half -past ten, with an interval of a quarter of 
 
 91 
 
92 THESE LYNNEKERS 
 
 an hour for family prayers. Also, there was the Thurs- 
 day half-holiday, and he worked, surreptitiously, on Sun- 
 days. 
 
 Adela and his mother occasionally urged that he was 
 overdoing it, the latter from purely disinterested motives, 
 the former because she wanted Dickie's company. He 
 met them both with the quiet assurance that he wanted 
 to work and meant to work. Adela accused him of being 
 selfish. , 
 
 ii 
 
 The discovery of his own limitations was a slow process. 
 
 He had boldly attacked the calculus, and found many 
 reasons in succession for his failure to master the finer 
 subtleties of mathematical reasoning. He had gone on 
 too quickly, was his first deduction; but a return to the 
 calculus after a month's steady grind at less difficult work, 
 found him with no firmer grasp of the theorems than he 
 had had before. After that he leaned to the suggestion 
 that he had "gone stale," and by way of rest took up the 
 subject of "Banking," borrowing various works from the 
 collection of Mr. Bell. Then he decided that he ought to 
 have help, realised that no help was available, and suffered 
 a period of discontent and unrest, during which he went 
 back over old ground again and cursed himself as a 
 "slacker" the most opprobrious term he knew. 
 
 That period was ended for him by an apparently irrele- 
 vant incident. 
 
 Parliament was to meet in a few weeks' time, and the 
 arch-criminal was proposing to bring in his villainous bill 
 for the disruption of the Empire. The country about Med- 
 borough was immensely anxious and disturbed. Meetings 
 were being held in every possible place, and a lecturer was 
 engaged by Mr. Lynneker to expound the atrocities of Mr. 
 Gladstone in the Infant School-room at Halton. 
 
 Dickie accepted all his father's pronouncements on that 
 
THE BEGINNING OF REASON 93 
 
 subject of Radical iniquity without question; and he was 
 a little ashamed of the fact that he did not resent the 
 wickedness of Mr. Gladstone as bitterly as he undoubtedly 
 ought to resent it. Even Bradshaw had been warmed to 
 a glow of indignation, and had deplored the congenital 
 handicap which prevented his being taken seriously on 
 public occasions. 
 
 "I'd like to have a chance to let myself go about the 
 Home Rule Bill," Bradshaw had said one afternoon ; and 
 Mr. Bell and Cartwright had murmured their sympathy 
 with his aspirations. 
 
 Dickie attributed his own tepidity to ignorance, and de- 
 cided to take advantage of the opportunity afforded by 
 the meeting in the Halton school-room. Mr. Lynneker 
 warmly approved his son's interest in so urgent a matter. 
 
 The lecturer, familiarly spoken of in the town as "young 
 Charlie Evans," was a red-faced, sandy-haired, amazingly- 
 freckled young man of thirty or so, with a powerful voice 
 and a vehement manner. He was a partner in the principal 
 firm of auctioneers and estate agents in Medborough, and 
 was accounted a valuable asset by the Conservative Associa- 
 tion. He had been second speaker at important gatherings 
 through the winter, and had been complimented on more 
 than one occasion by the member, Lord William March. 
 
 The Halton meeting was held at six o'clock for the con- 
 venience of labourers who went to bed at seven in the 
 winter months. The school-room could hold a hundred and 
 fifty people and when Ford, the village policeman, had, 
 at Mr. Lynneker's request, herded in the rabble, who would 
 have preferred to remain just outside the door, the place 
 was nearly full. Many of the labourers had brought their 
 wives free entertainments were rare in Halton, for even 
 missionary meetings closed with the pressing invitation of 
 "a collection" which it was hardly decent to ignore and 
 the wives had brought the children who were too young 
 to be left at home. 
 
 Mr. Lynneker opened the proceedings with a few bitter 
 remarks about Mr. Gladstone, that failed to rouse the en- 
 
94 THESE LYNNEKERS 
 
 thusiasm of the general audience, and then Mr. Evans 
 jumped to his feet as if he had not a moment to spare and 
 plunged into his exposition of what the Home Rule Bill 
 would do for the Empire. He had brought with him an 
 immense map which had been hung on the wall at the back 
 of the platform, and he began with a tactical treatise. The 
 map displayed the whole of the British Isles, and, at the 
 bottom, the nose of France, poking out nearly as far West 
 as the Lizard. That nose was, indeed, the chief feature of 
 the earlier argument. 
 
 "Cut off Ireland from English rule," was the gist of 
 Mr. Evans's heated demonstration of possibilities under 
 this head, "and you laid England open to invasion by the 
 French." He emphasised the certainty of that disaster 
 with a walking stick as a pointer, sliding about the near 
 Atlantic, and exhibiting the straightness of the line from 
 Brest to Cork. He admitted that it might be possible to 
 guard the Channel and the East Coast, but it seemed that 
 no power on earth could stop the French from crossing 
 the Irish Sea, once they had landed at Queenstown. 
 
 In the loyalty of the Irish people, Mr. Evans had no 
 faith whatever. He hinted that the demand for a separate 
 Parliament was but the opening stage of a policy that 
 aimed at the final subjugation with French help of the 
 whole English people ; and he became so hot and angry and 
 loud that many of the audience began to have awful 
 doubts of the safety of their walk home. If this inva- 
 sion were so easy, the thing might have been already accom- 
 plished; why, after all, should the French wait for such 
 a trifle as the passing of this particular bill? 
 
 The second part of Mr. Evans's speech, however, raised 
 them from their depression. He dropped his walking stick, 
 resolutely turned his back on the map, and came to the 
 front of the platform. He expatiated on the glories of 
 the British Empire; he gave every member of the audi- 
 ence his due for the share he or she had taken in build- 
 ing up these glories; he became fearfully impassioned, 
 waved his hairy, freckled hands in thick and stubborn 
 
THE BEGINNING OF REASON 95 
 
 gestures of denunciation or appeal and came at last to a 
 peroration on the duty of every man to save his country 
 from political, financial and moral ruin. 
 
 When he sat down with a vigour that saved the least sug- 
 gestion of anti-climax, the applause, earnestly led by Mr. 
 Lynneker, was all that a speaker could desire. Mr. Evans 
 had to suspend the long-neglected duty of wiping the per- 
 spiration from his face, in order to bow his acknowledge- 
 ments. 
 
 There had been no interruptions while he was speaking; 
 it would, indeed, have taken a confident man to attempt 
 any opposition to that tremendous, unslackening power of 
 lung; but as the Rectory party passed out through the 
 porch into the school field, a group of youths, dimly seen 
 in the darkness, laughed rudely, and a jeering voice called 
 out, 'Three cheers for Billy Gladstone." 
 
 "That was young Bellamy," Mr. Lynneker said severely 
 when they were out of hearing of the mob, and explained 
 to Mr. Evans that young Bellamy was the black sheep of 
 the parish. 
 
 Mr. Evans had been invited to supper at the Rectory. 
 
 in 
 
 He was seen to less advantage on the drawing-room 
 hearth-rug or across the supper-table. His collar had suf- 
 fered by the neglect of his handkerchief while speaking, and 
 was badly buckled on the right side, a defect that he tried 
 to remedy by continually pulling at its upper edge. Also, 
 he was very conscious of no longer being nervous in clerical 
 society. On the platform his speech had been astonishingly 
 fluent, and he relied on the same gift of words to tide him 
 over the awkwardness of the social entertainment. His 
 talk was all of politics, and he was never at a loss for an 
 opinion. He appeared to have finally made up his mind 
 on every point connected with the policy of the govern- 
 ment, its effect upon every class of voter and the steps 
 
96 THESE LYNNEKERS 
 
 that must be taken to combat it. Finally, he never addressed 
 one of the company without mentioning them by name. 
 
 "A very attentive meeting," the Rector suggested when 
 he had an opportunity to turn the conversation from the 
 general to the particular. 
 
 "Yes, Mr. Lynneker," Evans agreed. "I have found all 
 my meetings recently well attended and well received. The 
 country, as a whole, is very strong against the present pro- 
 gramme. If we had a general election at the present mo- 
 ment, Mr. Lynneker, we should come home with a very 
 large majority." 
 
 "I should like to see that infamous scoundrel horse- 
 whipped out of the country," the Rector commented, and 
 there was no need to point the application of his remark. 
 
 "We shall get rid of him without that, Mr. Lynneker," 
 Evans said, and proceeded to outline the means. 
 
 Dickie listened and found himself singularly unimpressed. 
 He was too near the life of a public-school to have been 
 roused to any enthusiasm by the wordy patriotism of the 
 speech in the school-room, and certain doubts that had 
 been fermenting in his mind took the form of a question 
 in the drawing-room after supper. 
 
 "I say," he said when he found a chance, "d'you really 
 believe there's any chance of a French invasion ?" 
 
 "It's highly improbable, Mr. Lynneker," Evans replied, 
 "but it is a possibility that must be considered." 
 
 "But you made it your chief point, to-night," Dickie 
 persisted, and his father looked up at him with a nod of 
 approval. He liked to see his boys holding their own in- 
 telligently. 
 
 "For a rustic audience, Mr. Lynneker," Evans explained. 
 "We have to get hold of 'em and shake 'em. They ought 
 never to have been given the vote, but as they've got it, 
 we must teach 'em how to use it, and we have to talk to 
 'em in words they can understand." 
 
 "Then you don't believe, yourself, that this invasion 
 business is a particularly good argument against Home 
 Rule! at least not for educated people." 
 
THE BEGINNING OF REASON 97 
 
 "Well, no, Mr. Lynneker, there are better arguments ; 
 for instance . . ." 
 
 "Oh! I'm sure there are," Dickie interrupted. "I only 
 wanted to make certain that that one was bunkum. It struck 
 me it must be when I heard it." 
 
 "Come, come, Dick," put in Mr. Lynneker, on a note of 
 admonishment. "One must adapt oneself to the neces- 
 sities of one's audience, eh, Evans?" 
 
 "One certainly must, Mr. Lynneker," Evans said. "I 
 remember at a big meeting in the Drill Hall last 
 autumn ..." 
 
 But Dickie was not yet satisfied, and when the anecdote 
 had been told, returned to his attack by saying : 
 
 "It doesn't seem to you that there's anything dishonest 
 in rubbing all those yarns into these labourers?" 
 
 "Oh ! my dear boy," his father said. "You don't in the 
 least understand . . ." 
 
 Mr. Evans interrupted the reproof by submitting that 
 it was necessary to meet an opponent with his own weapons, 
 and then talked himself on to his feet, into his coat and 
 out to the dog-cart that was waiting at the front door for 
 him, bidding his host good-night amid a final volley of 
 "Mr. Lynnekers." 
 
 "Capital fellow," was the Rector's comment. "So ear- 
 nest." 
 
 "And so devoted to the name of Lynneker," put in his 
 wife. "I never heard it mentioned so often before." 
 
 The Rector smiled. "A self-made man, of course," he 
 agreed. 
 
 The family as a whole found considerable amusement 
 later in various imitations of the ebullient Evans, par- 
 ticularly Adela, who was certainly a clever mimic. 
 
 IV 
 
 But Dickie's criticism went deeper than ridicule of 
 Evans's mannerisms, although he lacked both practical ex- 
 
98 THESE LYNNEKERS 
 
 perience and theoretical knowledge, and was necessarily too 
 detached and too superficial in his examination. He iso- 
 lated this single problem that had been presented to him, 
 and tried to solve it by the primitive logical formula that 
 his mathematical bias had suggested. A digest of his en- 
 quiry which incidentally touched and immediately recoiled 
 from an application to his father's political opinions, falls 
 into the simplest statements, but he doubted the truth of his 
 conclusions. 
 
 His premises were two. The first, that the policy of Mr. 
 Gladstone must be attacked by dishonest methods; the 
 second, that, according to Mr. Evans's admission, this dis- 
 honesty was induced by the necessity to fight one's op- 
 ponents with their own weapons. He could not make a 
 right of these two wrongs. 
 
 If a clerk cheated the Bank, the Bank did not retaliate 
 by trying to cheat the clerk. The alternative in that case 
 was a resort to a general principle of integrity administered 
 by the law. In the world of politics there was, apparently, 
 no standard of rectitude to which resort could be made. 
 If the radical John Smith brought in a bill to raise labourers' 
 wages, his political opponents might use any specious false- 
 hood they could invent in order to persuade the labourer 
 that he would be a loser and not a gainer under the proposed 
 act. 
 
 That statement which so far as he could judge was incon- 
 trovertible, led him to a consideration of why any bill 
 should, ex hypothesi, be attacked by the side that was not 
 responsible for its submission to the House. Did one 
 choose a party as one might pick up sides in a cricket- 
 match, and just try for all one was worth to put the other 
 side out? 
 
 He rejected that conclusion as altogether too farcical. He 
 believed that Parliament under the King's direction gov- 
 erned the country. Then he remembered the clause in 
 the church catechism and was met by another flat contradic- 
 tion. Neither his father, nor Mr. Evans, for example, 
 honoured or respected the present Prime Minister, who 
 
THE BEGINNING OF REASON 99 
 
 certainly came within the definition of one "put in authority 
 under" Queen Victoria. 
 
 For a few days he pondered the problem of political 
 dishonesty at odd moments, usually as he was riding be- 
 tween Halton and Medborough, and was inclined to dismiss 
 the whole bother as beyond his understanding. The hand 
 of the prehistoric governess was visible again here. Cer- 
 tain incomprehensible laws had been laid down by her in 
 the forgotten past, and it was, as he had been told many 
 times, arrogant and presumptuous to doubt her proved 
 wisdom. 
 
 He might have left his problem there for a time, if it 
 had not been for Bradshaw. 
 
 Bradshaw had the conservative habit, and Dickie posed 
 him with the question of why he had "picked up" on that 
 side. 
 
 It was a wet February afternoon and they were taking 
 their mid-day constitutional by pacing up and down under 
 the deserted arches of the market hall. 
 
 "Built that way," Bradshaw explained promptly. "Al- 
 ways been keen on history, as you know." 
 
 "But why does that make you so hot against Home 
 Rule?" asked Dickie. 
 
 "It's against the traditions," Bradshaw said. "I hate 
 anything that wants to break up the traditions. I'd like 
 to go back to feudalism, with the landowner as a little 
 father to his work-people; and have guilds in the town 
 everything that makes for brotherhood Thelema and that 
 sort of thing, you know. Pity you aren't more interested 
 in history, Lynneker." 
 
 "Yes," Dickie agreed. "I must have another shot at it." 
 
 "You should," Bradshaw said. "Fine stuff." He had 
 formed a considerable liking and admiration for young 
 Lynneker in the course of the past four months. 
 
100 THESE LYNNEKERS 
 
 Dickie was already regarded by the staff of the City 
 & County as a youngster who would make his mark. Mr. 
 Bell had been astonished by his junior clerk's ability to 
 master the general principles of book-keeping and bank- 
 ing, and had advised him to read for the examinations of 
 the Institute of Chartered Accountants as a sure step to 
 ultimate promotion. "Splendid head for figures," had been 
 Mr. Bell's eulogy, made to Cartwright in Bradshaw's hear- 
 ing. Cartwright was inclined to be a little jealous; but 
 Bradshaw frankly admitted that he had no talent for 
 his work, and that he intended ultimately to strike out on 
 some original line of his own. So no rivalry interfered 
 between him and Dickie, and in some queer way each sup- 
 plied the other's deficiencies. 
 
 "Why I didn't take to history at school," Dickie said, 
 "was because it didn't seem to do anything, didn't work, 
 you know." 
 
 Bradshaw stopped in his walk and his bright little brown 
 eyes opened in a quaint expression of astonishment. A 
 stranger might have laughed as he would have laughed 
 at seeing his own face in a distorting mirror, but Dickie 
 had come to understand the man behind the mask; he was 
 no more tempted to grin than is a pantomime super talk- 
 ing to his disguised friend. 
 
 "Doesn't do anything?" Bradshaw exclaimed. "Good 
 Lord, Lynneker!" He shrugged his square, narrow shoul- 
 ders and attempted explanation with stiff, gesticulating 
 hands. "D'you mean politics, the government of the coun- 
 try doesn't do anything?" he asked. "D'you mean things 
 would run themselves if there was no authority for law 
 and order?" 
 
 "Oh! no, of course not," returned Dickie, "but where 
 does history come in?" 
 
 "Well, you don't suppose civilisation and all the rest 
 of it was made one night when folks were in bed, do 
 yon?" asked Bradshaw. "It's all a growth, man, and 
 history is the record of it. I don't say that it hasn't, in 
 my opinion, been growing a bad shape for the last hun- 
 
THE BEGINNING OF REASON 101 
 
 dred years or so," he added thoughtfully. '\Yh;it I say 
 is that the French Revolution upset things so as they've 
 never properly got over it; got a bit on the skew-whiff, you 
 know. But we'll have a reaction by and by. Machinery's 
 a curse read Butler's 'Erewhon' ? Oh ! you should ; 
 Butler's fine and all this atheism that Darwin started, 
 that's another rotten thing ; Butler doesn't believe in Natural 
 Selection ; you must read Butler. . . ." 
 
 "Here, wait a shake/' Dickie interposed, "we haven't 
 time for a public lecture, old chap. I want to ask ques- 
 tions. To begin with, what's Darwin got to do with it? I 
 thought he was a naturalist with some theory about mon- 
 keys awful rot, from all I've heard of it." 
 
 Bradshaw's explanation was not of a kind to lighten 
 appreciably the dark places of Dickie's mind. His reading 
 had been characteristically capricious and perfunctory. He 
 had dabbled happily in the shallows of history, giving his 
 imagination play with all the movement and colour of 
 the pageant. The traffic of kings, the wars that were be- 
 gotten of it, the passing ambitions of various nobles or 
 of the people to take a more authoritative hand in govern- 
 ment, all were sympathetically reviewed by him in pre- 
 cisely the same spirit. Each stage of history was to him 
 a detached incident, real as the various chapters of a 
 romantic novel. He clothed the bare story with a wealth 
 of circumstantial detail, for the most part quite inaccurate, 
 and lived in the scene as he lived in the emotions of the 
 theatre. 
 
 But if his scholarship was negligible and his plan of read- 
 ing unscientific, he did, at least, presently inspire Dickie 
 to take a more vital interest in the study of history. Dar- 
 win still remained in the obscure background of his mind, 
 labelled as "some naturalist fellow who had a rotten theory 
 about monkeys," and he failed to comprehend the satire 
 of "Erewhon," lent him by Bradshaw; but Dickie began 
 this February to widen his reading, to make the important 
 discovery that there were other subjects besides mathe- 
 matics that "did" things. 
 
102 THESE LYNNEKERS 
 
 VI 
 
 His first attack met with little encouragement. Mr. 
 Lynneker's library was not well-stocked with historical 
 literature. The chief piece was a six-volume history of 
 England "founded on Hume and Smollett," a work that 
 had been published in monthly parts some time before the 
 middle of the century, and one that if it were open to expert 
 censure, had the advantage of being richly illustrated. 
 Beyond this there was a vile edition of Gibbon, condensed 
 into one clumsy octavo ; an odd volume of Macaulay's His- 
 tory the others had been lent and never returned and 
 an edition of Hallam's "Middle Ages." 
 
 Dickie wrestled bravely with this stodgy diet and if 
 he found it little more interesting than the rules of Latin 
 syntax, admitted that the study was opening his eyes to 
 the fact that the British constitution had not, as Bradshaw 
 suggested, miraculously sprung into being while people 
 slept. 
 
 But at the back of his mind, some uncertain subconscious 
 suggestion struggled vainly now and again to find ex- 
 pression. Sometimes he would pause in his reading and 
 ruffle his hair, in the vain attempt to understand what lay 
 behind all this mass of particulars concerning the acts of 
 Kings and Queens and Parliaments. 
 
 "There's something behind it all I can't get at," he said 
 to Bradshaw. "I feel as if it doesn't quite work, yet, if you 
 know what I mean." 
 
 Bradshaw had no idea what he meant, and Dickie, him- 
 self, was not at all clear. He found Bradshaw's attempted 
 exposition of the causes of the war between Charles I and 
 his Parliament even less convincing than those advanced in 
 the work "founded on Hume and Smollett." 
 
 And then Dickie in a spirit of rash adventure went to 
 a Radical Meeting at the Drill Hall in Medborough. 
 
 It was possibly the first time that a Lynneker had ever 
 so demeaned himself, and the Rector frowned upon the 
 
THE BEGINNING OF REASON 103 
 
 idea when it was mooted. "A waste of time," was his 
 opinion. Nevertheless Dickie went, if not in defiance of 
 parental authority, certainly without parental approval. 
 
 He was not impressed by the arguments of the principal 
 speaker, who abused Salisbury and Balfour in much the 
 same spirit as that in which Evans and the Rector had 
 abused Gladstone. The arguments in favour of the Home 
 Rule Bill it had passed the Commons at that time 
 seemed to Dickie rather more sensible than those which 
 he had heard against it; but he was outraged by the sug- 
 gestion that the House, then debating and certainly intend- 
 ing to reject the controversial measure under discussion, 
 ought to be destroyed root and branch. 
 
 Dickie had been educated into a profound respect for the 
 House of Lords. His father had thanked God for its 
 existence on more than one recent occasion; and this 
 radical "spouter" who obviously was not a gentleman, was 
 necessarily judged by Lynneker standards as "a rank 
 outsider." 
 
 The Rector was still sitting up, in his dressing-gown, 
 when Dickie came in at half-past eleven. 
 
 "Well, are you satisfied?" was his half-ironical greeting. 
 
 "The chief speaker was a ghastly bounder," Dickie said. 
 
 "And you're not converted, eh?" 
 
 "Simply don't understand it all," Dickie admitted. "It 
 seems to me that the important thing is to abuse the other 
 side." 
 
 Mr. Lynneker made no answer to that. He was occu- 
 pied in locking, bolting and chaining the front door, and 
 the purport of his son's reply may have been lost upon 
 him. 
 
 But one effect remained and grew as an outcome of 
 that attendance at the Drill Hall. One of the less im- 
 portant speakers had made a reference to Thorold Rogers's 
 "Six Centuries of Life and Labour," and the title appealed 
 to Dickie. He succeeded in borrowing a copy of the work 
 from the Medborough Public Library and before he had 
 read three chapters, he found that key to his historical read- 
 
104 THESE LYNNEKERS 
 
 ing which he had not been quite clever enough to discover 
 for himself. 
 
 A month or two later he commended the book to Brad- 
 shaw who dipped fastidiously and pronounced it "muck." 
 
 VII 
 
 This introduction of the study of economics diverted 
 Dickie from pure mathematics and marked the first stage 
 of his general education. When he presently returned to 
 a consideration of the calculus, he found that his desire to 
 rival the achievement of J. C. Adams had given place to 
 a greater ambition, to the intense wish to understand some- 
 thing of the inclusive problem. A sight of the immense 
 world had been opened to him, and after a moment's amazed 
 hesitation he set himself doggedly to prepare for its ex- 
 ploration. 
 
 He took no one but Bradshaw into his confidence. He 
 had not lost faith in his father's opinion, but he anticipated 
 the advice to return first of all to a study of classic litera- 
 ture, and refused any longer to be dictated to in that matter. 
 He was still under the influence of his reaction, and did 
 not come to a recognition of the real, if subsidiary, place 
 of Greek and Latin in education for more than two years. 
 
 Bradshaw was chiefly astounded by Dickie's statement 
 that he meant to learn French and German. 
 
 "All right for a foreign correspondent's job," was Brad- 
 shaw's utilitarian criticism, and he shook his head over the 
 explanation that French and German, and more particu- 
 larly the latter, were only pathways to historical and eco- 
 nomic material. 
 
 "It's beyond me, Lynneker, old boy," he said. "I'm a 
 born what-you-call-it not electric; something like that 
 just a dabbler. You'll be Chancellor of the Exchequer one 
 day, safe as eggs. I haven't got enough gum in my consti- 
 tution; can't stick to anything, except my own bits of his- 
 tory, for more than a fortnight. Do everything a bit in 
 
THE BEGINNING OF REASON 105 
 
 about ten minutes and can't get any further. My new bit's 
 learning the piano. I could always vamp a bit and play 
 tunes by ear, but I'm having regular lessons, now." He 
 paused a moment and then went on, "Miss Young's teach- 
 ing me. I expect you know her by sight. She and her 
 mother live in the Dogsthorpe Road ; ladies, of course, rather 
 hard up." 
 
 But Dickie did not know Miss Young by sight, and being 
 rather intent on his own plan of work, failed to offer 
 Bradshaw the encouragement he was plainly seeking. 
 
 "Only struck me," Bradshaw said, "that if you were going 
 to learn French, she teaches that, too, I know. . . ." 
 
 "My mother speaks French very well," Dickie said. "I 
 can get accent from her, if necessary but I shan't bother 
 about that, yet. I want to be able to read French and 
 German, not to speak them." 
 
 "You're a wonder," Bradshaw admitted with a sigh. 
 
 Dickie mumbled some advice about "not being a silly 
 
 ace " 
 
 ass. 
 
 
 
VII 
 EDWARD 
 
 DICKIE had been at the Bank nearly twelve months, 
 when Edward fell in love with Gertrude Leake. 
 
 He had been in love before; once he had been almost 
 engaged to a widow, ten years his senior, and might have 
 drifted into marriage with her if she had not let her house 
 in Medborough that spring and gone to Italy. By the time 
 she returned he had discovered that much as he admired 
 her, she was not to be the great inspiration of his life, and 
 Mrs. Blackwell had made no effort to recall him. She had 
 liked him well enough, but had feared the criticism of the 
 Precincts. 
 
 But this time, as Edward insisted, it was "absolutely 
 final." 
 
 He came into the City & County just before four o'clock 
 one Wednesday afternoon in August and asked for Dickie 
 who explained that he could not possibly get away for at 
 least half an hour, as Cartwright was away on his holidays 
 and there was much necessary work to be done after the 
 Bank was closed to the Public. 
 
 "All right," Edward said mildly. "I'll go to Hopkinson's ; 
 will you come on there? I thought we might walk home 
 together." 
 
 "All serene," agreed Dickie, and wondered why his elder 
 brother was so eager for his company. 
 
 The reason did not appear while they were having tea 
 at the Broad Street confectioner's, which only offered the 
 
 106 
 
EDWARD 107 
 
 hospitality of three little round-topped marble tables in the 
 front shop and was no place for the display of emotions. 
 
 Edward was unusually polite and considerate, and al- 
 though he had moments of intense abstraction, was very 
 ready to talk of the Medborough tennis tourney in which he 
 had been playing for the last two days. 
 
 "When do they finish it?" asked Dickie after he had 
 listened to a realistic account of how Edward and his part- 
 ner were knocked out in the semi-final. 
 
 "Oh ! they'll finish it this evening," Edward said. 
 
 "You don't care who wins particularly, I suppose?" 
 
 "I'm rather keen on young Hudson and his sister," Ed- 
 ward said. "It's between them and the Wetheralls, the 
 draper people in Priestgate, you know. I rather bar that 
 chap ; he puts on such awful side." 
 
 "Why didn't you stay and see it out?" asked Dickie by 
 way of keeping the conversation going. 
 
 Edward appeared pleasantly confused, and glanced across 
 at his brother with a look that said : "Haven't you the least 
 idea how things are?" Then he carefully picked up a 
 crumb of cake and dropped it into his tea-cup. "Didn't 
 seem worth while," he remarked in a tone that implied he 
 was deliberately keeping some important secret in reserve 
 and wished the enquiry to be pressed later. 
 
 He carefully led up to the same point when they were 
 out of the town, but Dickie was obtuse and they had passed 
 Thrapley and were in the stretch of road that cuts through 
 the Grinling woods before Edward could make his con- 
 fession. He might have delayed it even longer if the ro- 
 mance of his surroundings had not worked upon him and 
 made silence impossible any irrelevant conversation was 
 silence to Edward that afternoon. 
 
 "Let's have a rest," he suggested. "I'm a bit fagged; 
 playing tennis all day. Have a cigarette?" 
 
 Dickie was not a smoker, but he accepted the cigarette. 
 He had a vague idea of what Edward was going to con- 
 fide in him and was at once bored and embarrassed by the 
 prospect. 
 
108 THESE LYNNEKERS 
 
 Edward was leaning over the gate of the private grass- 
 road through the wood, staring up the dark tunnel of the 
 avenue to the distant brilliance of a sunlit clearing. In 
 his flannels he bore no mark of the parson; and his neat 
 dark moustache failed to disguise him. Dickie could only 
 see him as an elder brother, but he was just a rather sen- 
 timental, flattered schoolboy. 
 
 ii 
 
 "I suppose you can't guess," he said, after a long pause. 
 
 "You haven't made it up with Mrs. Blackwell ?" hazarded 
 Dickie. 
 
 "Good Lord, no!" The contempt of the denial was 
 mingled with irritation at Dickie's stupidity. "There never 
 was anything in that," he explained, frowning. "It was 
 never in the least serious." 
 
 "Sorry; I didn't know," apologised Dickie. 
 
 "Haven't you any idea?" 
 
 Dickie had no ideas on that subject. He wanted to get 
 home. He had wasted nearly two hours already. 
 
 "I should have thought it was pretty obvious," Edward 
 confessed modestly. "I should have thought everybody 
 would have seen how things were." 
 
 "Are you engaged?" asked Dickie. 
 
 "Practically. She was my partner in the tournament, 
 you know, and I had lunch at the Vicarage. And, after- 
 wards, we were alone in the drawing-room for about two 
 minutes. It was then . . ." 
 
 "Did you propose to her?" Dickie's question was asked 
 in desperation. He knew, now, the name of this incarna- 
 tion of his brother's ideal. She was the eldest daughter 
 of the Vicar of Medborough. Dickie had seen her once or 
 twice, and remembered her as a buxom, high-complexioned, 
 fair young woman, who got very hot and dishevelled when 
 she played tennis. It was certainly not a type he admired, 
 and in the front of his thoughts was an epithet he had 
 
EDWARD 109 
 
 heard from Bradshaw. Bradshaw was undoubtedly coarse 
 at times, and his reference to his Vicar's daughter as 
 "blowsy Gertie," was in odious taste, but the epithet had, 
 at the moment, seemed horribly apt. 
 
 Edward shook his head impatiently as if anything so 
 gross and commonplace as a proposal was hopelessly out 
 of the picture. 
 
 "You said you were 'practically' engaged," Dickie said. 
 
 "I I held her hand for about two seconds," Edward 
 confessed intrepidly; "and afterwards, on the courts, she 
 said something about my going to St. Peter's as her father's 
 curate after I've taken my priest's orders in the autumn." 
 
 "That would be rather decent," commented Dickie. 
 
 "I should see her every day," mused Edward. 
 
 Dickie had not considered that aspect of his brother's 
 possible preferment, and tried to include it by saying: "It 
 would be an awful score for you in every way." 
 
 "It would, wouldn't it?" Edward said. 
 
 "Rather," Dickie assured him. "I say, oughtn't we to be 
 getting on?" 
 
 "Where's the hurry? It's only just six," Edward pro- 
 tested. "I don't feel quite in the mood for going home, 
 yet. I want to think about it all. It has been so sudden, 
 in a way. I've been very keen, of course, for the last six 
 weeks; ever since we played two sets together at Allerton 
 at the Buckley's garden party. But I never guessed that 
 she cared till to-day." 
 
 "Shall you tell them at home?" 
 
 "Great Scott, no. Not yet, anyway. I might tell the 
 mater, perhaps. No one else." 
 
 "I suppose there's no chance of Mr. Leake objecting?" 
 
 "I haven't thought about it." 
 
 "When do you expect to see her again ?" 
 
 "To-morrow, I hope. She goes to the Cathedral pretty 
 often in the afternoon, and she'll be there to-morrow, I 
 know, because the St. Peter's organist is going to take the 
 service, and she told me she wanted to hear him in the 
 Cathedral." 
 
110 THESE LYNNEKERS 
 
 "Are you going to ask her to marry you, then ?" 
 
 Edward frowned. "You're dreadfully gauche, Dickie," 
 he said. 
 
 "Why? What was wrong with that?" Dickie asked. 
 
 Edward put on what his younger brother called his 
 "confounded supercilious look." 
 
 "You're so disgustingly business-like," he said. "Perhaps 
 you would like me to ask her for a contract, and make it 
 a condition that I should have the curacy. You don't 
 seem to have a grain of poetry in your composition." 
 
 "Dare say not," replied Dickie carelessly. "Shall we be 
 getting on?" He thought it was rather rough on him that 
 after wasting three blessed hours, more or less, just to 
 listen to this meander about that fat Leake girl, he should 
 be hauled over the coals for not being sentimental about it. 
 
 Dickie was rapidly coming to a criticism of the methods 
 of his family. "They fiddled about so much," was the 
 phrase that expressed the slight irritation of his mind. 
 
 in 
 
 His criticism was accentuated by his observation of Ed- 
 ward's "absolutely final" love affair. 
 
 A month after that conversation in the Grinling wood, 
 any definite engagement seemed as far away as ever. Mrs. 
 Lynneker had been taken into her son's confidence, and 
 shared with Dickie the honour of being the recipient of 
 various confessions of hope and despair. 
 
 The daring of Edward's advance in the Vicarage draw- 
 ing-room had been followed by a reaction. "She" Edward 
 used no other description had been, he thought, a little 
 cool when he met her after the Cathedral service. He had 
 boldly made a reference to the possibility of his becoming 
 her father's curate, and had been rather snubbed. 
 
 "We're not certain, yet, whether Mr. Grace is leaving," 
 she had said. 
 
 Edward was sure of her exact words, and had asked his 
 
EDWARD 111 
 
 mother's opinion, and Dickie's, on the precise significance 
 of that statement. 
 
 "It seemed to me, I don't know, that her tone was a 
 little cold," Edward explained. 
 
 Then something very like a quarrel followed. 
 
 She did not turn up at the Little Milton garden party, 
 and Edward could only suppose that it was because she 
 wanted to avoid meeting him. 
 
 Dickie had a trying time during the next six days. Ed- 
 ward took him out for "a pipe" on the back lawn after 
 supper, and seriously upset his work. His excuses were 
 met by a pleading expression, and the assurance that he 
 need only come for ten minutes; and his irritation was 
 not acute enough to prompt a flat refusal. 
 
 Edward was considering the idea of going to Central 
 Africa as a missionary at that time. He had even aired 
 the suggestion before the whole family, none of whom ex- 
 cept Adela had openly poured contempt on the proposal. 
 
 Mr. Lynneker had always been an ardent worker in the 
 cause of the Church Missionary Society, and he felt that 
 if his dear son had had "a call," it must be taken with a 
 great seriousness. He added an ambiguously worded clause 
 to family prayers on the evening after the announcement 
 was made, and Edward wore a very earnest, white-faced 
 expression all the next day. 
 
 Dickie, with the best intentions, urged his brother to 
 put his fate to the test with "her," and was met with the 
 reply: "I know it's hopeless. She's simply taking the 
 kindest way of showing me that she wasn't serious, when 
 'that' happened." 
 
 He spoke of the drawing-room incident as if it were the 
 outstanding experience of his life. And, indeed, in all his 
 love affairs, Edward had never reached the intimacy of 
 a kiss. . . . 
 
 Dickie's impatience increased rapidly during the six days 
 of that misunderstanding. 
 
11* THESE LYNNEKERS 
 
 IV 
 
 The new phase was begun by a letter from Mr. Leake. 
 He wrote to Mr. Lynneker: " . . . that splendid fellow 
 Grace has finally decided to work as a missionary in China, 
 and I have been wondering whether your son, Edward, 
 would care to come to me as junior curate, as soon as he 
 has taken his priest's orders. . . .?" 
 
 Dickie was late at the Bank that morning, for the first 
 time. Edward insisted on walking with him as far as the 
 Grinling wood. 
 
 "It must mean something," was the essence of Edward's 
 argument. "Surely, if she never meant to speak to me 
 again" (he had reached that stage by a priori methods), 
 "she would have done something to prevent the Vicar 
 from writing to the pater." 
 
 Dickie, uncomfortably conscious of the fact that he had 
 less than twelve minutes for the remaining three miles, at- 
 tempted to be shatteringly conclusive. 
 
 "Rather," he agreed. "Of course, she would. I always 
 told you you were being depressed about nothing. The 
 mater told you that she was probably ever so much shyer 
 than you are yourself. I say I must go." 
 
 "Oh ! wait half a shake," Edward implored him, and laid 
 a hand on his brother's sleeve. 
 
 "I shall have to be very careful not to offend her again," 
 Edward explained and began to outline a tremulous plan 
 of campaign, the chief attacking movement of which was 
 to be a patient, beseeching silence. 
 
 "Oh! I shouldn't," Dickie interrupted him. "Why not 
 be a little brave for a change and ask her right out ?" 
 
 "You've simply no idea of tact or decency," replied the 
 outraged Edward. "That would simply put her off alto- 
 gether. You don't in the least understand." 
 
 "Perhaps not," Dickie agreed. "Why you bother to tell 
 me about it 1^ don't know." It was half-past nine by then, 
 and his patience was at last evaporated. 
 
EDWARD US 
 
 "Well, you needn't be a cad, anyway," Edward returned, 
 blushing with indignation. 
 
 "I suppose it's the effect of working in a Bank/' Dickie 
 said as he threw his leg over the saddle of his bicycle. 
 
 "I should have thought that you might still have tried 
 to be a gentleman," was the reproof that followed him. 
 
 But Edward was willing to reinstate Dickie that evening, 
 even to suggest some kind of apology for the insult that 
 Dickie had forgotten. Edward's amende was another ver- 
 sion of Latimer's visit to the stable-yard, after he had been 
 so disgracefully licked by his younger brother. The Lyn- 
 nekers might quarrel, but they could not bear the fret of 
 sustaining unfriendly relations; sooner than endure that, 
 they preferred graciously to admit the fault. 
 
 Edward had not been into Medborough that day but he 
 was going to the Vicarage to tea the next afternoon, and 
 despite Dickie's "caddish" remarks of the morning, he was 
 evidently expected to sympathise with the re-elaboration of 
 the policy of laissez faire. Presumably Dickie's morning 
 comments had been due to bad temper, and were to be 
 excused on the ground that he had to mix with some "rather 
 rotten people" at the Bank. 
 
 Dickie displayed great patience, but he sincerely hoped 
 that the whole affair would soon be settled one way or the 
 other. 
 
 The serene, almost holy elation of Edward's face when 
 he returned from Medborough the next day would have 
 been sufficient acknowledgement of the fact that he was at 
 last "engaged" ; even if the affair had not been solemnly reg- 
 istered in the family annals. This was something to be taken 
 seriously, and Mrs. Lynneker, alone, ventured a little gentle 
 chaff over the supper table. Edward frowned sedately, 
 with an air that tolerantly deprecated his mother's humour. 
 
 Eleanor apparently considered marriage subject for 
 
114 THESE LYNNEKERS 
 
 prayer and meditation; Adela, although she did not risk a 
 leading question, continually looked at Edward with a new 
 curiosity, as if she had been surprised by some aspect of him 
 hitherto unsuspected. She may have been trying to see 
 him with the eyes of Miss Leake. 
 
 Dickie fully expected to be haled out for a pipe on the 
 lawn after supper, and on this occasion he was not unwill- 
 ing. He had followed the affair through its infinitely tenta- 
 tive stages, and he was curious to hear how the last, enor- 
 mous chasm had been bridged. 
 
 But when they all rose from the table, Edward exhibited 
 no particular desire to be alone with his younger brother, 
 and it was actually Dickie who said : 
 
 "Coming out for a breather?" 
 
 "Might as well," Edward replied without enthusiasm. 
 
 And when they were outside in the cool air of the gusty 
 September night, he began to talk of the weather. 
 
 "Blowing up for rain," he remarked. "I suppose the 
 summer's over. Always depresses me rather when the 
 autumn begins in earnest." 
 
 Dickie mumbled an agreement, and then went on, "How 
 did you bring it off?" 
 
 "It wasn't a question of 'bringing it off' in any sense," 
 Edward returned irritably. For a man who had won his 
 long-delayed heart's desire a few hours before, he was 
 singularly touchy, Dickie thought. 
 
 "I'm sorry," he apologised. 
 
 For a few moments they paced the lawn without speak- 
 ing and then Edward said : 
 
 "It isn't a thing one can talk about, you see. Before . . . 
 before anything had happened, it was quite different. Now 
 it's it's sacred, if you can understand me?" 
 
 "I understand," Dickie said. "Shall we go in? It's a 
 bit chilly to-night." 
 
 "You're not offended, old chap?" Edward asked, with a 
 sudden burst of affection. 
 
 "Oh, no ! rather not." Dickie understood that he was 
 relieved for the future from the duties of a confidant, and 
 
EDWARD 115 
 
 was willing enough to buy himself out at the price of an 
 unsatisfied curiosity; but his thoughts returned now and 
 again to the problem of how Edward had found the will 
 or the courage to commit himself to an open declaration. 
 
 VI 
 
 A study of Miss Leake s personality, when she came over 
 to Halton a fortnight later, helped to suggest the probabili- 
 ties of that unreported scene in Medborough vicarage. 
 
 Among looser social influences Miss Leake might have 
 developed into an easy-mannered, rather loud, warm- 
 hearted young woman who would have been considered 
 "bad form" in the Precincts. Her clerical circumstances 
 had curbed the natural expression of her temperament, 
 and a certain abundance of vitality in her found an outlet 
 in playing games with remarkable vigour. She was the 
 only lady tennis-player in the Medborough neighbourhood 
 who served overhand. 
 
 Dickie liked her. He found her a "jolly" girl on nearer 
 acquaintance. If he had pressed his examination a little 
 further, he might have discovered that it was her general 
 interest in life that appealed to him. He walked with her 
 round the garden after tea, and showed her his make-shift 
 carpenter's shop in the stables ; and they talked without em- 
 barrassment. 
 
 She was the first person in Dickie's home circle who had 
 observed the peculiarities of Bradshaw's appearance. 
 
 "That dear, funny-looking man in the Bank," she called 
 him, and asked, "What is he like, close to ? Is he as odd in 
 his ways as he is to look at?" 
 
 "Quite," Dickie said. "He's a born funny man, you 
 know. Makes you yell with laughter when he lays himself 
 out." 
 
 "He ought to go on the stage," Miss Leake said, and her 
 hackneyed suggestion had some warmth of interest that 
 saved it from banality. 
 
11(5 THESE LYNNEKERS 
 
 "He's rather queer about that/' Dickie told her. "Rather 
 sensitive about being made fun of, I think." 
 
 "Poor dear," commented Miss Leake, as if she would 
 be glad to stand between Bradshaw and the unsympathetic 
 world who laughed at him. 
 
 It appeared that she had a second Christian name and 
 was to be known as Helen in the family; Edward pre- 
 ferred it. 
 
 "I think Gertie suits me better," she told Dickie. "Helen 
 sounds dark and statuesque, but I don't care, really." 
 
 "I prefer 'Helen,' too," Dickie said, and wondered 
 whether his future sister-in-law would change her attitude 
 towards Bradshaw, if she heard of his epithet for her. 
 
 "I suppose that's because you're a Lynneker," she said. 
 
 Dickie did not understand that reason. 
 
 "Always a bit on the high horse," she explained. 
 
 "Are you making some joke about Troy?" he asked. 
 
 She laughed. "Goodness, no," she said. "I leave classical 
 jokes to father. I meant that you are all just a wee bit 
 supercilious, aren't you ?" 
 
 "Are we ?" asked Dickie. "/ didn't know. I'm dead cer- 
 tain I'm not." 
 
 "Perhaps you aren't," she said. "But you do all of you 
 rather keep your noses in the air. And you aren't the only 
 people who come from Staffordshire, you know." 
 
 "Funny! It's never struck me," Dickie admitted. "I 
 always thought that family history tosh, myself. But I 
 say, Helen, do you mean that Edward and Latimer and 
 Eleanor and Adela put on side?" 
 
 "Oh ! it isn't as bad as that," she assured him. "It's just 
 a way you have. I shall soon chaff Edward out of it." 
 
 The statement of that intention seemed in some way 
 incongruous to Dickie ; and later, when he saw the engaged 
 couple together, he wondered if the marriage would be a 
 success. He knew that Edward would not like being 
 "chaffed out" of his little peculiarities. He had always 
 been sensitive about being chaffed and since he had taken 
 deacon's orders appeared to think that he was above criti- 
 
EDWARD 117 
 
 cism. And Helen displayed an effect of managing him that 
 even then Edward resented with a feebly deprecating frown. 
 Dickie decided in his own mind that Miss Leake had, 
 also, "managed" that proposal. 
 
 VII 
 
 If she had, Edward never confessed the fact. Indeed, 
 he had quite abandoned confessions to either Dickie or his 
 mother. 
 
 Mrs. Lynneker had moments of uneasiness. 
 
 "Do you think Edward is really in love with Helen?" 
 she asked Dickie one evening, nearly a year after her eldest 
 son's engagement. 
 
 "I don't know," Dickie said. "He never confides in me." 
 
 The engaged couple had been at the Rectory that after- 
 noon and Helen's tendency to management had been more 
 pronounced. Once Edward had fretfully objected to one 
 of her commands and had been laughingly ruled into a 
 submission that had an air of sullenness. 
 
 "He's so like your father in some things," Mrs. Lynneker 
 said. 
 
 "She bosses him rather, doesn't she?" returned Dickie. 
 
 "She's nice ; I like her," his mother went on reflectively. 
 "But I'm not sure that she understands Edward." 
 
 She paused on that, dimly conscious, perhaps, that she, 
 too, had not understood when she had married Edward's 
 father nearly thirty years before. The Lynnekers were a 
 queer family ; their men never seemed to make happy mar- 
 riages. And she had an intuition that Edward, also, would 
 have reserves from his wife; that those two would carry 
 on the tradition and live separate lives under one roof. 
 Helen would not respect his weaknesses, and the Lynnekers 
 were proud of their weaknesses ; they wanted not comrade- 
 ship, but a slavish, worshipping devotion. 
 
 "I feel as if I want to kick him, myself, sometimes," 
 Dickie commented. 
 
118 THESE LYNNEKERS 
 
 "Dick!" expostulated his mother. 
 
 "There's something so weak-kneed about him," Dickie 
 explained. "I should like to see him absolutely rude to 
 some one, for a change. It's all this slackness of trying 
 always to please the people you're with, that annoys me. 
 Latimer's just the same. Every one says they've got such 
 nice manners. I don't know, I'm rather glad I haven't." 
 
 "You're so brave," Mrs. Lynneker said, taking her son's 
 arm. "I think you must get it from my father. He never 
 cared what he said to people." 
 
 "It isn't only that, you know," Dickie went on. "It's that 
 Edward and Latimer never do anything. I can't explain it 
 exactly, but you know what I mean, don't you ?" 
 
 "I think I do," his mother said, and pressed his arm 
 affectionately. "I know some one who's going to do some- 
 thing," she added. 
 
 "I'll have a try, anyhow," Dickie admitted. "But it is 
 true, mater, isn't it, about their confounded manners. 
 Doesn't it annoy you, too, sometimes?" 
 
 She was a little uncertain on that point, despite the fact 
 that neither Edward nor Latimer had been as tender to 
 her as Dickie. But in her heart she was a little afraid of 
 her youngest son; he was so frank and so strong. And 
 there was a confession she knew must presently be made 
 to him, for she dared not tell his father, and the others 
 were not in a position to help her. 
 
 Dickie had always been very gentle with her, but she 
 dreaded the making of that confession. 
 
VIII 
 MRS. LYNNEKER 
 
 MRS. LYNNEKER suffered various weaknesses fos- 
 tered by her early Victorian education. She had a 
 quick, clever mind; she could quote Shakespeare with rele- 
 vance, not by the suggestion of the prominent word, and 
 she could appreciate and savour the quality of his phrase; 
 she could be witty in the manner of her period; several 
 good things were credited to her ; she was a capable pianist. 
 But after nearly thirty years of life in a country rectory, 
 years that had narrowed and hardened her in many ways, 
 she was still the victim of certain nervous inabilities en- 
 couraged by her training. 
 
 She could not endure to ride behind a horse that displayed 
 the least tendency to shy; she was terrified by the sight of 
 a gun; she hid herself in a cupboard at the first warnings 
 of a coming thunderstorm. Without doubt she was by 
 nature a timid woman, and during all her early life she 
 had not married until she was twenty-nine and hopelessly 
 passee by Victorian standards all her weaknesses had been 
 sedulously encouraged. They had been regarded in those 
 days as the marks 'of proper feminine gentility. If she 
 had not been stiffened by the comparative robustness of 
 life in a parsonage, and by the bearing of five children, she 
 might have developed the affectations and vapours of the 
 typical spinster of that time. 
 
 She had been saved from those simpering graces and 
 shallow airs by the urgency of her life, but the stamp of 
 her early lessons in conduct had left a mark on her char- 
 
 119 
 
120 THESE LYNNEKERS 
 
 acter. She was a moral coward. It seemed as if those 
 cultivated timidities had affected her mind and will. 
 
 ii 
 
 And, indeed, the confession she had now to face might 
 have daunted a less fearful woman. No euphemisms or 
 excuses could palliate the horrid fact that Mrs. Lynneker 
 had been guilty of a crime that would have landed any of 
 her husband's parishioners in the police court. The Rector 
 had made no overstatement when he had confided to his 
 sons that their mother had "no idea of the value of money." 
 
 Her father had lived in good style during his life-time. 
 He had had a big house in Bloomsbury, had kept a black 
 servant, and moved in the best rank of a society that, if 
 its most distinguished members rose no higher than City 
 knights, could boast a greater wealth than the aristocrats 
 of Belgravia. But when he died two years after his young- 
 est daughter's marriage to the Rector of Halton, the old 
 merchant had made no further provision for her than a 
 charge on his business of 60 a year. The business itself 
 had gone to his two sons, both of them married and with 
 large families, and they complained that the China tea trade, 
 as represented by the firm of Williams & Son, had greatly, 
 depreciated. Mrs. Lynneker knew that she could expect no 
 financial assistance from her brothers. 
 
 Her sixty pounds a year should have sufficed for her 
 needs, but she was generous to her children, liked putting 
 her name down for subscriptions, and when she went into 
 Medborough, as she did at least once a week, she invariably 
 spent more than she had intended for the most part on 
 trivialities that brought her no kind of satisfaction when 
 the delightful act of purchasing was accomplished. Quite 
 early in her married life she had begun to anticipate her 
 half-yearly dividend, but by such shifts as postponing the 
 payment of bills and neglecting her wardrobe, she had con- 
 trived on most occasions to avoid the awful ordeal of 
 
MRS. LYNNEKER 
 
 appealing to her husband for money. Only three times dur- 
 ing their married life had she dared to face the making of 
 that request. 
 
 The Rector certainly had not made the way easy for 
 her, and she blamed him in her heart for driving her to a 
 less legitimate resort, to the borrowing of money from the 
 "Coal Club." 
 
 She managed the Coal Club without interference from 
 any examining authority. The members paid her a shilling 
 every month throughout the year, and their contributions, 
 reinforced by charitable subscriptions, procured them a 
 whole ton of coal at Christmas. Towards the fall of the 
 year Mrs. Lynneker would have charge of between twenty 
 and thirty pounds, money that she kept in cash in a tin box 
 in a drawer of her wardrobe. 
 
 And little by little she had come to regard this horde as 
 a bank upon which she might draw to anticipate her 
 September dividend she always received the half-yearly 
 allowance from her brothers on the 25th of March and the 
 29th of September until she discovered on one terrible 
 occasion that if she were to pay a bill that had been run- 
 ning for over three years and had become unpleasantly 
 pressing, she would not have enough left to make good her 
 deficit of club money, to say nothing of fulfilling her prom- 
 ises for various subscriptions and the inconvenience of being 
 left without a single penny until the following March. 
 
 She had faced her husband, then, for the third time with 
 the firm intention of making a full confession. But that 
 was the year before Dickie left Oakstone, and after sum- 
 moning up her courage to beg the interview, her spirit had 
 suddenly failed her and she had ended by asking for ten 
 pounds. It was not a third of what she required, but it 
 seemed an enormous sum when it was reluctantly stated 
 in the Rector's study; and her husband's forbearing, damn- 
 ing silence made her thankful at the moment that she had 
 not dared to be decently truthful. 
 
 It was after this ineffectual interview that she fell into 
 the clutches of the "Medborough Loan Co." 
 
122 THESE LYNNEKERS 
 
 The methods of that institution were the familiar meth- 
 ods of its type. The principal never appeared, or if he did 
 was so well disguised by the assumption of being his own 
 clerk that the innocent borrower never suspected his iden- 
 tity. The nominal rate of interest charged was ten per 
 cent., but introduced into the printed form of agreement 
 between the "loan agent" and the borrower, were various 
 ingenuities that considerably augmented that modest charge 
 for the use of the capital advanced. Chief among these 
 tricks was the principle of making the sum lent repayable in 
 three or five years by annual instalments, with the proviso 
 that if any instalment was not repaid within seven days 
 of the due date, the amount of it should be debited as a 
 new loan, bearing the same rate of interest. The punctual 
 borrower who was not too hard pressed, might escape from 
 the clutches of the Medborough Loan Company without fur- 
 ther penalty than the payment of about twenty-five per cent, 
 for his loan; but Mrs. Lynneker and her kind, by whose 
 custom the Loan Company existed, rolled ever deeper and 
 deeper into debt. 
 
 in 
 
 She had suffered many qualms before she had dared to 
 enter those inconspicuous offices in Cross Street; but she 
 had finally burnt her boats in that interview with her hus- 
 band, and of the many ignominies with which she was faced, 
 this seemed to incur the least open disgrace. Nevertheless 
 she realised that her adventure was only one degree less 
 shameful than a visit to the pawnbroker's. 
 
 The path of the borrower was made easier Dy the fact 
 that the Loan Company's offices were sandwiched vertically 
 between a ground floor coal merchant and a photographer's 
 studio. Unless the victim was actually caught knocking at 
 the prescribed door, he was safe from the criticism of the 
 casual passer-by. Mrs. Lynneker grasped the advantages 
 of the strategical position, but she hesitated painfully before 
 
MRS. LYNNEKER 
 
 she entered the building. Even when she was actually 
 facing the generous invitation to "knock and enter," she 
 nearly turned back. 
 
 The well-dressed young man who greeted her with an 
 appraising stare and a non-committal "good afternoon," 
 further increased her nervousness by his air of aloofness. 
 She was hot and flustered ; her veil was sticking to her face, 
 and no scrap of dignity remained to her. "Are you the 
 Loan Company?" she asked desperately, conscious that her 
 enquiry was not happily phrased. 
 
 "These are the offices of the Medborough Loan Com- 
 pany," replied the smart young man coldly, and added: 
 "Are you desirous of effecting a loan ?" 
 
 "A small loan," Mrs. Lynneker said. She had a sense 
 that smallness in this direction must be a guarantee of her 
 good faith. She was prepared at this eleventh hour to halve 
 the minimum amount she required and trust to Providence 
 for the remainder. 
 
 The unconcerned young clerk in charge conducted her to 
 an inner room before he enquired the extent of the loan she 
 required. He had judged her to be the wife of a small 
 farmer and was not inclined to be gracious. He even 
 pursed his lips at the mention of 10. 
 
 "On what security?" he asked. 
 
 Mrs. Lynneker blushed. "In your advertisement . . ." 
 she began. 
 
 "In some cases we are willing to advance money without 
 security," was the reserved answer. "Are you married? 
 Well, would your husband be willing to guarantee the 
 amount ?" 
 
 Mrs. Lynneker blushed still deeper and set her lips. She 
 felt horribly degraded, but she was afraid to retreat now. 
 
 "I would sooner not ask him," she said. 
 
 The clerk sighed and took down a printed form. 
 
 "Will you fill this up?" he demanded. 
 
 Mrs. Lynneker glanced down a list of questions that 
 searched her private life to its depths. She had nearly 
 reached that extremity of the meek, when submission turns 
 
THESE LYNNEKERS 
 
 unexpectedly to aggression. She felt that she could face 
 any suspicion of the well-dressed clerk sooner than fill in 
 that paper. Unhappily for her he saved the situation by 
 suggesting that she might give him her name. 
 
 She admitted to "Lynneker." 
 
 The clerk's change of manner was altogether too sudden. 
 He convicted himself of a gross failure in tact; but his 
 unhappy victim was too relieved to draw uncomplimentary 
 inferences just then. Indeed, the thought of going away 
 empty-handed opened a prospect she dared not contemplate. 
 
 The representative of the M. L. C. was trying to retrieve 
 his mistake by explanation of his fiduciary cares, but the 
 only item of his eloquent appeal that touched Mrs. Lyn- 
 neker came at the end of his speech. "Will ten pounds 
 really be enough, Madam?" he asked. "I ought to explain 
 that one year's interest is payable in advance, and there will 
 be charges of a guinea in connection with the agreement, 
 including the stamp." 
 
 She knew very well that a net ten pounds would repre- 
 sent no more than half her liability, and with the partial 
 return of her self-respect, she was tempted to plunge. The 
 clerk's new manner was reassuring and his explanation of 
 the M. L. C. methods presented them as peculiarly framed 
 to meet her own needs. 
 
 She resisted weakly until he reached her limit, but at 
 thirty pounds she stopped him with determination. She had 
 some idea at that time of repaying the whole sum when 
 she received her next half-yearly allowance, and the men- 
 tion of that precise sum of 30 shocked her into a realisa- 
 tion that she was exceeding her capacity. 
 
 She experienced but the faintest twinge of conscience as 
 she signed the agreement ; and when she was safely back 
 in Cross Street carrying 25.19.0 in cash, her last doubt 
 was drowned in elation at the knowledge that she was, at 
 last, saved from the immediate worry that had so terribly 
 oppressed her during the past few months. And her future 
 obligations were in effect provided for by the fervour of 
 her determination to set aside 15 of her March allowance 
 
MRS. LYNNEKER 125 
 
 for the purposes of liquidation. In a year, she thought 
 hopefully, she would be "straight" again, and in future . . . 
 
 What chiefly betrayed her was the optimism of her esti- 
 mates. The six pounds or so of ready money that she 
 had counted upon to carry her on to March, was gone 
 before the New Year. In calculating her weekly expenses 
 she had overlooked, among other items, Christmas presents 
 for her own children and for that long tale of nephews 
 and nieces, the children of her two brothers at Highgate. 
 She had always sent them something, she argued; it would 
 look so mean not to send them anything. And then she 
 was tempted into spending more money upon them than 
 usual. 
 
 Another drain upon her resources that had not been en- 
 tered in her calculation was provided by the house-accounts. 
 She paid in cash for various items of household expendi- 
 ture, advancing the money, herself, against her husband's 
 inclusive cheque at the end of the month. And when she 
 came to make up her books and found that the total, as 
 always, exceeded her anticipation, she was tempted to omit 
 any record of her own cash payment, sooner than increase 
 the total to that point at which the Rector would be moved 
 to proclaim that he didn't know how much longer this sort 
 of thing could go on. 
 
 Finally, when Dickie went into the Bank and there seemed 
 to be a prospect of comparative financial security, she had 
 a brief period of quite unjustifiable reaction during which 
 she bought clothes for herself and Adela. 
 
 By February she was at the Club cash-box again, and 
 that autumn her indebtedness to the Medborough Loan 
 Company was increased by six pounds. She had only suc- 
 ceeded in saving two pounds towards her first re-payment 
 instalment, and the other eight were officially entered as a 
 "further loan." 
 
 It is true that she wondered vaguely why it was that she 
 received that eight pounds neither in cash nor credit, but 
 the intricacies of the smart young man's explanation of 
 what he called a "specific term" loan convinced her that the 
 
126 THESE LYNNEKERS 
 
 subtleties of high finance were beyond her understanding. 
 Two years later her debt to the M. L. C. was over fifty 
 pounds, and she had decided that she could no longer bear 
 the strain of the anxiety. She dared not tell her husband, 
 but, given a favourable opportunity, she might tell Dickie. 
 He was so practical. 
 
 IV 
 
 She would have preferred to wait until the perfectly 
 suitable moment presented itself, but early in October, a 
 few days before her next payment became due, she reached 
 the limit of her endurance. She understood clearly enough, 
 now, that this "snowball" system of borrowing could not 
 go on indefinitely; and on that Sunday evening she set her 
 lips very firmly, made an excuse to the Rector for missing 
 evensong, and asked Dickie to stay at home with her. 
 
 "I've got a confession to make," she told him, and was 
 relieved to be so far committed by the statement that 
 retreat was impossible. 
 
 If it had not been Sunday evening she would have had 
 some fancy work for her hands to play with while she 
 made confession to her youngest son; but any work being 
 out of place, she fiddled with the fringe of the antimacassar. 
 She sat at one end of the sofa, and Dickie at the other, 
 formally separated by the small, oval back of the empty 
 middle seat that Victorian piece of furniture seemed de- 
 signed to accommodate two parents and their child, all 
 three respectably upright and prim. No one could have 
 offended propriety by reclining on such a frigid, angular 
 couch. 
 
 Mrs. Lynneker's opening was framed to anticipate a cer- 
 tain aspect of Dickie's criticism. Fear of censure was her 
 dominant emotion; but she was suppliant to the little boy 
 she had nursed and taught because she desperately hoped 
 to retain something of his respect. 
 
 "I've got myself into a horrible muddle, dear; and I 
 
MRS. LYNNEKER 
 
 want your advice as a business man," she began hopefully 
 and with a touch of playfulness, "the only business man of 
 the family." 
 
 Dickie nodded and frowned slightly. For one moment 
 he looked unfortunately like his father, and his mother ex- 
 perienced a chill of discouragement. It came to her with 
 alarming clearness now that the need to put her confession 
 into words was inevitable, how little excuse she had for 
 her cowardice, or, at least, how little excuse she would be 
 able to plead, if her last confidant were to take up the atti- 
 tude she so well knew and dreaded. 
 
 "Do try to understand, dear," she pleaded in a failing 
 voice, and then she grasped at some fiction of maternal 
 dignity and added, "You've no right to judge me until 
 you've heard the truth." 
 
 "I'm not," returned Dickie, with the specious air of one 
 advising a criminal that he would receive fair trial. 
 
 Mrs. Lynneker wondered if, after all, she could go 
 through with this confession. It was not a "fair trial" she 
 wanted she had already pleaded guilty but sympathy and 
 encouragement. 
 
 "Oh ! Dick, do try to understand my position," she said. 
 
 She knew that she was prejudicing her case by these 
 ominous preliminaries, but she felt that she could not state 
 the horrible, repulsive facts in cold blood. The nearer 
 she came to the framing of any specific statement, the more 
 criminally weak her own conduct appeared to her. And 
 yet, half an hour earlier she had reached the pitch of be- 
 lieving herself abundantly justified. The insuperable diffi- 
 culty that stood between her and the approach to Dickie's 
 sympathy was the impossibility of laying the blame upon 
 his father's shoulders. 
 
 She made a hopeless attempt by beginning again with, 
 "You know how difficult it is to talk to your father about 
 money. . . ." and then the realisation of her own misery 
 overcame her. She made a final effort to maintain the 
 respect due to a woman of fifty-seven and the mother of 
 five grown children, but even as she drew herself up with 
 
128 THESE LYNNEKERS 
 
 the flickering intention of preserving her dignity, she sud- 
 denly and incontinently burst into tears. 
 
 And even then she sought to save her prestige. She 
 tried to escape ; and when Dickie stopped her in the middle 
 of the room with a strong, sympathetic hand on her arm, 
 she made a petulant effort to repulse him. 
 
 "It's no use you can't any of you understand," she 
 blurted out girlishly, relieving her heart of the admission 
 that for twenty-five years she had been alone. 
 
 "I say, mater, I'm fearfully sorry. I suppose I didn't 
 understand, but I'll try if you'll give me a chance," Dickie 
 said. He was a little overwhelmed and embarrassed ; the 
 whole scene had such an absurd likeness to a lovers' quar- 
 rel ; but he was hers, now ; completely won by the appeal to 
 his strength. 
 
 And she knew so well when that tender support was at 
 last offered to her after twenty-five years' loneliness, that 
 she happily forgot the dignity due to her age and pathetic- 
 ally clung to him. 
 
 "Oh ! Dickie, you don't know what tortures I've suffered," 
 she sobbed. "I wouldn't let your father know for worlds." 
 
 "That'll be all right, mater," he said. "Come along and 
 tell me about it." 
 
 It seemed impossible for those two to achieve a sym- 
 pathetic understanding, unless for this one evening they 
 made some common cause against the man who was at that 
 moment on his knees before the Almighty, and, in his own 
 manner, not less conscious of loneliness than his wife. 
 
 Yet, after all, she did not give Dickie her full confidence. 
 
 All her ignominious dealings with the Loan Company 
 were set out. Once the admission of her first weakness was 
 made, the rest followed as a matter of course. But she 
 could not bring herself to confess her misuse of the Club 
 money. She slurred over her reasons for the first borrow- 
 
MRS. LYNNEKER 129 
 
 ing she had anticipated her allowance. Wetherall had 
 pressed her for payment, she said ; and Dickie made further 
 explanations unnecessary by his comment that young Weth- 
 erall had been in rather a tight corner three years ago, and 
 had collected all the accounts he could. 
 
 Dickie was not curious as to the immediate cause of 
 his mother's first injudicious visit to Cross Street. He 
 wanted to come as quickly as might be to figures ; to under- 
 stand precisely what could be done to relieve her from the 
 burden of debt. 
 
 "Well, what's the total now, mater ?" he asked, interrupt- 
 ing her puzzled account of how the loan seemed to grow 
 with every repayment. 
 
 "Nearly forty pounds, I think," she told him, and his 
 astounded whistle checked her impulse to be quite truthful 
 and admit the full amount as an afterthought. "At least 
 I think so," she added. 
 
 "Have you got any account of it ?" was his next question, 
 and she got up and produced a little notebook from a 
 drawer of her secretaire. 
 
 She had meant to hide her fuddled record from him, 
 but he came up to her end of the sofa and looked over 
 her shoulder. 
 
 "You mustn't flurry me, dear," she said a little impa- 
 tiently. 
 
 Dickie smiled quietly. "It's all right, mater; don't you 
 worry any more," he said. "But you must give me all the 
 particulars. I know it's a nuisance, but I must have some 
 sort of a case when I go to see this fellow to-morrow." 
 
 "Are you going to see him?" she asked, a little shocked 
 and frightened. 
 
 "Of course. I must." 
 
 She knew that it was useless for her to combat that quiet 
 statement of his intention, and she preferred that he should 
 have the truth from her rather than from the detestable 
 young man in Cross Street. 
 
 "I began by borrowing thirty pound," she said. (Despite 
 all Edward's well-intentioned efforts to correct her, she 
 
130 THESE LYNNEKERS 
 
 occasionally lapsed into the habits of speech she had learned 
 from her father.) 
 
 "Well," prompted Dickie. 
 
 She understood her own figures and she could infer the 
 dates. Little by little the dreadful climax was reached and 
 the total of 51.15.0 declared. 
 
 Dickie hardly seemed to notice it. 
 
 "But good heavens," was his comment, "you don't mean 
 to say you've always paid the interest up to date ?" 
 
 "Oh, yes, always," she assured him with a new hopeful- 
 ness. 
 
 "But then how has the amount increased?" he asked. 
 
 "I never could quite make out why it did," she said 
 with a perplexed sigh. "The man did explain it to me. I 
 think it was something to do with the thirty pound only 
 being borrowed for three years." 
 
 "And you paid the interest in advance?" 
 
 "Yes, always." 
 
 "I suppose you realise that it's a most infernal swindle," 
 Dickie said. 
 
 "Do you mean that I might get out of paying it?" she 
 asked. 
 
 Dickie shrugged his shoulders. "I don't know, yet," he 
 admitted. "What documents have you got? Receipts and 
 things?" 
 
 "He never gave me a receipt," she said. "I was very 
 stupid about it all, I know ; but I dreaded going to that place 
 and I was so afraid of a fuss." 
 
 Dickie ruffled his hair. He saw very clearly that his 
 mother was typical of the average borrower from the Med- 
 borough Loan Company. They were all afraid of a fuss, and 
 the company thrived on the use it made of that knowledge. 
 
 "I can't db anything till I've seen the chap," he said. 
 
 For a moment or two they sat in silence and then Mrs. 
 Lynneker held up her hand. 
 
 "Listen!" she said. 
 
 From the church, less than three hundred yards away, 
 came the sound of a deep, musical rumble, above which 
 
MRS. LYNNEKER 131 
 
 they could intermittently distinguish the faint lilt of a tune. 
 
 "Can you hear?" Mrs. Lynneker asked. 
 
 " 'Lead Kindly Light/ I think," was Dickie's judgment. 
 
 His mother's look of anxiety returned. 
 
 "Yes," she agreed. "It's the hymn after the sermon. 
 They'll be out in a minute or two." 
 
 "Well, look here, mater, there's no earthly need for you 
 to worry any more," Dickie assured her. "You leave it 
 absolutely to me. I'll see this swindling beggar to-morrow ; 
 and even if I can't do anything with him, I'll get the money 
 somehow." 
 
 She put out her hands to him. 
 
 "You've no idea of the weight you've taken off my mind, 
 dear," she said. 
 
 Dickie kissed her. 
 
 "You ought to have told me before," was his only re- 
 proach. 
 
 She made no answer to that. She would have liked, 
 even now, to make final confession; to tell him that she 
 had hidden something from him. It seemed that that one 
 reservation was still interposed between her and the under- 
 standing and sympathy which were so suddenly possible. 
 And yet, she dared not tell him the story of the Coal Club 
 money ; not because that peculation seemed to her a serious 
 sin, but because she knew intuitively that Dickie would be 
 shocked. Her mind worked on that, without making fur- 
 ther discovery. She covered her fault and believed that 
 her own reservation was the ultimate barrier between her 
 and her son. If she had gone a little deeper she would have 
 understood that it was the fundamental difference between 
 their modes of thought. 
 
 She hesitated another moment before she ventured to 
 say timorously, with a hint of apology, "I should have liked 
 to have had a little prayer with you about it." 
 
 "Oh, all right, mater, if you like," Dickie returned care- 
 lessly. He was coming to dislike the particular form of 
 petition that he expected on this occasion. He had begun 
 to wonder whether Edward and Eleanor, for example, 
 
THESE LYNNEKERS 
 
 would not have done better to trust more to their own 
 efforts and less to the merciful interposition of Providence 
 on their behalf. Both of them had the habit of praying 
 for things, and accepting refusal as a sign that they were 
 not "intended" to have them. Edward had prayed con- 
 siderably at one time about Miss Leake, and Dickie had felt 
 then that the method was nothing less than an attempt to 
 evade responsibility. Eleanor submitted every trifling inci- 
 dent of her life to the Court of Heaven. 
 
 "If you like," he repeated as he got up from the sofa, 
 and then he added, with a self-conscious frown, "But all 
 the same, I feel that it isn't much good praying about things 
 if you never try to do them." 
 
 Mrs. Lynneker looked slightly distressed. 
 
 "St. Paul says we are to 'pray without ceasing,' " she 
 said in that weakly obstinate, half-ashamed manner she 
 had always worn when she had given religious instruction 
 to the children. 
 
 "Yes, but we've surely got to buck up a little on our 
 own account as well," argued Dickie. 
 
 She agreed to that with the reservation that "we must 
 not trust too much to our own powers," and the discussion 
 saved Dickie from the actual performance of the ceremony, 
 for while they were still talking they heard the sound of 
 voices outside, and of steps on the gravel drive. 
 
 "Here they are; it's too late now," he said, with obvious 
 relief. 
 
 "I'm afraid you're a little careless about religious matters, 
 dear," Mrs. Lynneker said with evident steadfastness. 
 
 She had succeeded in recovering some fragment of ma- 
 ternal authority, but the achievement gave her little satis- 
 faction. 
 
 Adela came in, flushed and excited, with a long story of 
 how "one of those dreadful boys in the free seats" had 
 smuggled a dog into church, and of how "Young Frank 
 Oliver had been rather splendid" and had got up in the 
 middle of the sermon and turned the dog out. 
 
 Frank Oliver was the son of the village carpenter. 
 
MRS. LYNNEKER 133 
 
 "Decent chap, young Oliver," Dickie said. "He's awfully 
 good at his work much too good for a little place like 
 this." 
 
 Adela thought somebody ought to thank him for what 
 he had done in the church. 
 
 VI 
 
 Before Dickie went to Cross Street next day he made a 
 casual enquiry of Mr. Bell, and discovered that the nominal 
 proprietor of the Medborough Loan Co. was a certain Mr. 
 "George Smith" who had a very creditable account with 
 the City & County, an account to which he almost invariably 
 paid in in bank notes, and drew upon by cheques payable 
 to his own order. 
 
 "Must have another account somewhere/' Mr. Bell said, 
 and then, looking at Dickie with a fatherly air, added, "I 
 hope you don't intend to patronise him, Lynneker? I've 
 good reason to believe that that Loan Company is a rather 
 doubtful affair." 
 
 "Rather not, sir," Dickie assured him. 
 
 The young man in Cross Street was suave and slippery. 
 He evidently knew his visitor by sight, and the "good morn- 
 ing, Mr. Lynneker," with which he was immediately greeted 
 warned Dickie that he must exercise all his discretion. 
 
 "I believe my mother, Mrs. Lynneker, borrowed a sum 
 of thirty pounds from you, three years ago," he began 
 abruptly. 
 
 "It is possible," admitted Mr. Smith. "I could not say 
 for certain without referring to my books." 
 
 "Well, will you look it up?" asked Dickie. "I want to 
 discuss it with you." 
 
 Mr. Smith politely refused. 
 
 "I'm afraid I can't do that, Mr. Lynneker," he said. "As 
 a bank official you will understand, I'm sure, that all our 
 transactions are necessarily personal and private." 
 
 "I'm here on my mother's authority," Dickie returned. 
 
134 THESE LYNNEKERS 
 
 "You have a written authority?" 
 
 Dickie cursed himself for a fool. He ought, he knew, 
 to have anticipated that demand. "I haven't a written au- 
 thority," he said. 
 
 Mr. Smith shrugged his shoulders and made a gesture 
 with his two hands as if he were testing the weight of an 
 empty parcel. 
 
 "But it surely isn't worth your while to quibble over 
 that," Dickie said. "If you won't discuss it to-day I shall 
 come back with the written authority to-morrow." 
 
 "If you would do that," replied Mr. Smith, and politely 
 opened the door. "We have to be so particularly careful 
 in our business," he explained. 
 
 "I can quite understand that," Dickie said with emphasis. 
 
 Mr. Smith smiled as if he had been complimented. 
 
 "What time shall you be here to-morrow ?" asked Dickie. 
 
 "I shall not be in Medborough again until Thursday," Mr. 
 Smith said, "but one of the other clerks . . ." 
 
 "Aren't you the principal then?" Dickie put in. 
 
 Mr. Smith's deprecating gesture implied that he could 
 not take that suggestion seriously. 
 
 "But you are the responsible manager ?" Dickie persisted. 
 
 "I am allowed to exercise a certain discretion," Mr. 
 Smith admitted. 
 
 "Well, what time on Thursday, then?" Dickie asked. 
 
 "Three o'clock?" 
 
 When he was back in the office Dickie remembered that 
 he had forgotten to ask the man if his name were George 
 Smith. A reference to Bradshaw, however, clearly fixed 
 the identity. 
 
 "Greasy-mannered blighter," was Bradshaw's description 
 of the depositor, George Smith. "Paddles about with his 
 hands and smiles at you as though you'd just been kind to 
 him." 
 
 "That's the beggar," agreed Dickie. "You're sure he is 
 George Smith?" 
 
 "Seen him draw a cheque," Bradshaw said. 
 
 "Does he draw notes as well as gold?" asked Dickie. 
 
MRS. LYNNEKER 135 
 
 "Big 'uns, sometimes." 
 
 "Any of 'em ever come back here?" 
 
 Bradshaw could not answer that question, but Dickie 
 found time to make a few investigations before he saw Mr. 
 Smith again. 
 
 VII 
 
 Mrs. Lynneker demurred strongly to the suggestion that 
 she, also, should go to Cross Street on the following Thurs- 
 day, but Dickie was patiently resolute and overbore her 
 objections. 
 
 "He's such a beastly, slippery beggar," he explained. "It's 
 ten to one he'll wriggle out of it somehow if I go alone." 
 
 "And you must bring that little notebook," he added, 
 "and you might help me to make a clear statement of the 
 account for my own use." 
 
 The only consolation Mrs. Lynneker received lay in the 
 explanation that she was not expected to say anything un- 
 less appealed to by her representative. She was merely to 
 act as a document, for reference. . . . 
 
 She sat through the first part of the interview with a 
 set frown of magnificent determination. She knew she was 
 unequal to any struggle with the evasive, intimidating 
 Smith; but she believed that her expression of stony dis- 
 approval would be a help to Dickie in his tremendous un- 
 dertaking. 
 
 Not until Mr. Smith politely intimated that she had 
 actually received the various additions to her loans in cash 
 paid over that very counter, did she awake to positive in- 
 dignation. When she had to choose between the contempt 
 of Mr. Smith and that of Dickie, she suddenly lost her 
 fear of asserting herself. 
 
 "Indeed, I never did," she put in. "The only money I 
 had was the twenty-six pound I borrowed first." 
 
 "Thirty pounds," corrected Mr. Smith. 
 
 Dickie interfered to stop the threatened quibble as a side 
 issue. 
 
136 THESE LYNNEKERS 
 
 "Thirty pounds," he agreed, "less interest in advance and 
 the cost of the agreement. There's no dispute about that. 
 I want to know, now, what evidence you have of having 
 lent a further sum of over twenty pounds in cash ?" 
 
 Mr. Smith nodded in the soothing manner of one de- 
 ferring to the wishes of a petulant child, and produced a 
 numbered cardboard box, from which he extracted various 
 receipts bearing the authentic signature of Mrs. Lynneker. 
 
 "You signed all these?" Dickie asked, turning to his 
 mother. 
 
 "I understood it was a necessary matter of form," she 
 explained timidly. 
 
 "You acknowledged receiving money in cash that you 
 never had ?" Dickie expostulated. 
 
 Mrs. Lynneker saw an ironical smile ~ound the corners 
 of Mr. Smith's mouth. 
 
 "Yes, I did," she said firmly. 
 
 "Oh, damn it!" Dickie murmured quite audibly. 
 
 Mr. Smith permitted his eyebrows to express a faint dis- 
 approval. 
 
 "Our books are quite open to examination, so far as 
 they refer to this particular transaction," he said. 
 
 "I don't doubt that you've protected yourself pretty 
 well," Dickie growled. "This is obviously a case for the 
 police." 
 
 "Or for a libel action," put in Mr. Smith suavely. 
 
 "It doesn't matter much which so long as it comes before 
 the court," was Dickie's opinion. "You've been obtaining 
 money under false pretences," he went on, "and nothing will 
 stop you, I suppose, but a prosecution." 
 
 Mr. Smith appeared to be bored. "If that is Mrs. Lyn- 
 neker's intention . . ." he began. 
 
 . She shook her head in great distress and looked pathetic- 
 ally at her son. 
 
 Dickie scowled gloomily. 
 
 "How much will you take to settle this account?" he 
 asked. 
 
MRS. LYNNEKER 137 
 
 Mr. Smith glanced wearily at the ledger he had brought 
 out and put on the counter. 
 
 "Fifty-one pounds, fifteen shillings is the amount still 
 owing," he said. 
 
 "Yes, I know, and how much will you take in settle- 
 ment?" asked Dickie. 
 
 Mr. Smith smiled sweetly. 
 
 "Fifty-one pounds, fifteen shillings, Mr. Lynneker," he 
 said. 
 
 "And if we refuse to pay it?" 
 
 "I should, most unwillingly, have to take the usual steps 
 for recovery." 
 
 "You would have the impudence to prosecute?" 
 
 Mr. Smith pursed his mouth and nodded gravely. 
 
 "Don't you think, dear . . ." Mrs. Lynneker began on a 
 tremulous note of appeal. 
 
 Dickie's frown cut her short. 
 
 "I think you'd better go, mater/' he said. 
 
 She got up obediently and then looked anxiously at her 
 son, blinked her eyes and made a movement of her head 
 towards the door. Dickie knew that she wanted to make 
 him promise not to let the matter come into court "what- 
 ever happened." He felt that he had blundered badly in 
 his conduct of the whole affair. In the first place he ought 
 to have come with a written authority, and in the second he 
 had made a foolish mistake in insisting that his mother 
 should be present at the interview. She had handicapped 
 him hopelessly. 
 
 "Oh, leave it to me, mater," he said irritably; but as he 
 opened the door for her, he smiled gently and added : "It'll 
 be all right." 
 
 And for once she found a quality of real assurance in 
 the family phrase. 
 
 Mr. Smith was looking at his watch. 
 
 "Now," Dickie said with a new confidence in his voice. 
 
 "I have nothing more to say, Mr. Lynneker," Mr. Smith 
 returned; and his manner intimated that he had no more 
 time to spare. 
 
138 THESE LYNNEKERS 
 
 "Will you take thirty pounds in final settlement?" 
 
 Mr. Smith smiled contemptuously, slapped his ledger 
 together, and returned it to the shelf behind him. 
 
 "You see it's like this," Dickie said quietly. "I can raise 
 thirty pounds; but that is my limit. If you insist on a 
 penny more, my father must be told about the whole busi- 
 ness." 
 
 Mr. Smith had turned his back and was apparently ab- 
 sorbed in studying the contents of another account book. 
 
 "Tell him, then," he snapped without looking up. 
 
 Dickie decided that it was time to play his last card. He 
 was doubtful of its value; his facts were deduced from 
 questionable inferences and the production of his authority 
 was impossible without revealing some of those office secrets 
 he was pledged to guard. He had, indeed, decided that he 
 would not, in any case, play that particular card. But he 
 was full of a righteous anger that was directed not so 
 much against Mr. Smith in person, as against the system 
 he represented. 
 
 Dickie had had his first near sight of gross misdealing 
 and injustice; and he was greatly shocked by the realisa- 
 tion that such institutions as the Medborough Loan Company 
 could flourish by preying upon any unfortunate who came 
 within its grasp. He had to believe, moreover, that such 
 frauds could prosper under the eyes, as it were, of English 
 law. If his mother's case came before the magistrates, 
 they might believe her assertion that those "further loans" 
 had been purely imaginary, but they would be unable to 
 give a judgment in her favour in face of the indisputable 
 documentary evidence. And the injustice of it angered 
 him beyond endurance. He felt that it was his duty to 
 champion the cause of the oppressed, even if he risked dis- 
 missal from the Bank. 
 
 He made a strong effort to recover his self-control before 
 he said: 
 
 "Very good, Mr. Smith, if you persist in refusing to ac- 
 cept a settlement, I'm going to take this affair up. Not in 
 my mother's name." He paused and carefully weighed the 
 
MRS. LYNNEKER 139 
 
 form his statement should take before he continued, still 
 addressing the callous back of his audience, "I shall have 
 an unofficial meeting of some of your creditors. There is, 
 for instance, Mrs. Barrett, who keeps the small general 
 shop in Cowgate; William Powell, the farmer, of Yax- 
 well; the chap upstairs; Mr. Atcherley of Narrow Street, 
 and oh, half a dozen others whose names I needn't men- 
 tion just now. . . ." 
 
 He broke off to judge the effect he was making. 
 
 Mr. Smith had put down his account book and was 
 standing very still. The attitude of his back suggested 
 rigid attention. And when, at last, he turned round and 
 put his hands on the counter, his face was noticeably pale. 
 
 "Are you accusing the company of fraud?" he asked. 
 
 "I am," Dickie said with feeling. 
 
 "And that being so, you are willing to compound a felony 
 for the amount mentioned? Or is this merely an attempt 
 at blackmail ?" 
 
 Dickie stood up. 
 
 "You are quite right, Mr. Smith/' he said. "I've made a 
 third mistake. I see that this particular account must be 
 paid in full before any action is taken. You shall have the 
 amount to-morrow." 
 
 "We might allow a discount for prompt settlement," 
 returned Mr. Smith, watching his adversary warily, and 
 trying to calculate precisely how much he would take. 
 
 Dickie picked up his hat. 
 
 "Oh ! Lord, no," he said with a laugh. "You've warned 
 me. I'll admit I didn't understand what I was doing be- 
 fore; but I do now. The money shall be paid in full, 
 to-morrow." 
 
 He hesitated a moment, decided that any veiled threat, 
 however satisfying to his feelings, was out of place, and 
 then, disregarding the invitation to "wait a minute," he 
 went out, closing the door behind him with a slam which 
 so startled the photographer upstairs that he dropped the 
 plate he was developing. 
 
 "All right, my boy," murmured the photographer. "Now 
 
140 THESE LYNNEKERS 
 
 you've done it; smashed the one perfect portrait I ever 
 took. That goes down per contra and wipes out my debt 
 to the uttermost farthing." 
 
 He kicked the broken glass under the shelf with a pleased 
 smile. 
 
 "Wish I'd never started these infernal midgets," he re- 
 marked. 
 
 VIII 
 
 Mrs. Lynneker greeted her son with an anxious face. 
 
 "No good," he said curtly. 
 
 "Whatever are we to do?" she implored him. 
 
 "Pay it," he said. 
 
 "But won't that mean telling your father?" she expostu- 
 lated. 
 
 "We ought to have told him before," Dickie said. 
 
 His mother's face set into the expression of weak stub- 
 bornness that meant she would not be driven. Her chil- 
 dren had come to learn that when they had driven her to 
 that defence, she could neither be bullied nor entreated into 
 submission. 
 
 "I can't do that," she said obstinately. 
 
 "I've told him that the whole amount will be paid to- 
 morrow," Dickie said, and went on : "Look here, mater, we 
 shall just have time to catch the 3.55 if we hurry." 
 
 She had intended to do a little shopping, but it was early- 
 closing day, and she gave way on that question with the 
 one proviso that she must get some fish in Broad Street, 
 which was on their way to the North-Western Station. 
 Dickie went with her, leaving his bicycle at the Bank. 
 
 Mrs. Lynneker hardly spoke as they walked the half- 
 mile to the station. She was quite determined that she 
 would not confess to her husband, and she was regretting 
 her weakness in having confided in Dickie. He had done 
 no good and had now become a source of further tribula- 
 tion to her. She knew that she would have great difficulty 
 
MRS. LYNNEKER 141 
 
 in persuading him that she could not and would not ask his 
 father for the money. 
 
 She maintained her obstinate silence during the fifteen 
 minutes of the railway journey. There were two other 
 people in their compartment and conversation would have 
 been difficult in any case. But when they had come out 
 of Halton Station (two platforms and a tiny house stand- 
 ing in the fields a mile away from the village), she opened 
 the topic by saying firmly: 
 
 "I can't tell your father." 
 
 She was prepared for an argument of the kind that was 
 familiar to her in dealing with her husband and children. 
 The usual counter to such an assertion as she had just 
 made was, "Oh, mother, why not?" followed by, "But I 
 can't see. . . ." And she knew that she had only to persist 
 in her determination against those weak responses in order 
 to defend herself. None of them was equal to maintaining 
 an attack against that stubborn, veiled defence; the single 
 assertion, reiterated without argument. Yet she had never 
 deliberately adopted those tactics to win small victories. 
 She was not capable of that. Only when she was fully 
 convinced in her own mind could she thus resolutely per- 
 sist in making her one unshakeable affirmation. 
 
 Dickie surprised and shook her defences from the out- 
 set. He ignored her declaration, and went on with an 
 undercurrent of anger : "I offered him thirty pounds, and 
 when he asked me if I accused him of fraud and I said 
 'Yes,' he put it that if I thought that, I was offering to 
 compound a felony. He was right enough there, you know, 
 mater. I hadn't thought of that, but directly he said it, 
 I saw that I had been taking a bad line altogether. If it 
 were only you he'd swindled it wouldn't matter so much, 
 but there are heaps of other unlucky beggars in it, too. And 
 we can't do a blessed thing to help 'em while we owe this 
 blighter money ourselves. I'm going to put it all straight 
 to the pater this evening. That slimy beast, Smith, must 
 be paid to-morrow, and after that . , ." Dickie's expres- 
 
THESE LYNNEKERS 
 
 sion implied that Mr. Smith was going to have a particularly 
 unpleasant time. 
 
 Mrs. Lynneker realised that a mere repetition of her 
 assertion would be quite out of place. She was not con- 
 verted, but she was greatly confused. 
 
 "I don't see what your father could do," she ventured 
 weakly; "I'm sure he wouldn't like to be mixed up in any- 
 thing of that kind." 
 
 "Rather not," agreed Dickie. "His job will begin and 
 end by settling our account with Smith. The rest I'm going 
 to tackle on my own." 
 
 "I would much sooner not say anything to your father," 
 persisted Mrs. Lynneker. 
 
 "Oh, I'll do that all right," returned Dickie cheerfully. 
 
 "But you'll have to tell him . . ." 
 
 "Everything. I know. We've got to be perfectly honest 
 about it all. We'll never beat Mr. Smith at his own game." 
 
 Mrs. Lynneker winced, and thought of the Coal Club. 
 "I can't see that I've been dishonest," she said with an 
 injured air. 
 
 "Not in a way," Dickie replied, brutally. "But what I 
 meant is that we've got to be perfectly frank and open. 
 That little beast in Cross Street gave me a shock when he 
 suggested that I was trying to blackmail him he said that, 
 too. He was so dead right. And just at the last he offered 
 me a discount for a cash settlement ; the only time he came 
 anywhere near giving himself away." 
 
 "And you didn't take it?" asked Mrs. Lynneker with a 
 surprise which showed that she had still failed to grasp her 
 son's ethic. 
 
 "Well, of course not," he explained patiently. "My dear 
 old mater, can't you see yet that if the man's a swindler, we 
 can't let him go on swindling? We must stop him, some- 
 how. And we can't do a blessed thing until we've paid 
 him in full. Even if we accept a discount, we are con- 
 doning his methods, and, in a sense, putting ourselves under 
 an obligation to him." 
 
 "But what are you going to do ?" his mother asked. 
 
MRS. LYNNEKER 
 
 "Get him prosecuted," replied Dickie promptly. "You 
 needn't worry about that. He can't drag us in, if our 
 affair's settled and done with." 
 
 And yet, with the feeble persistence of the weak, Mrs. 
 Lynneker made one more effort, as she and Dickie came 
 to the door of the Rectory garden. The sight of the familiar 
 place revived all her old dreadful anticipations. She could 
 see her husband's frown and hear that exasperating doubt 
 repeated as to how much longer this sort of thing could 
 go on. 
 
 "I would so much rather not tell your father," she said. 
 
 "Must," was Dickie's only rejoinder. 
 
 IX 
 
 Both the Rector and his wife came to a recognition of 
 some unfamiliar quality in the mental calibre of their 
 youngest child during his conduct of the loan affair. 
 
 The difference between him and the rest of his family, 
 a difference that none of the Lynnekers was able to analyse, 
 lay in the fact that he was not thinking of the effect he 
 was producing on his immediate audience. He was intent, 
 in this particular matter, on destroying what he regarded 
 as a crying evil. His effort to rescue his mother had 
 brought home to him the methods of the Loan Company 
 and incidentally the type of victim it entrapped. The 
 detail of its extortions had outraged the sense of commer- 
 cial fair-dealing he had learnt at the City & County, and 
 then he had entered through an intuition of his mother's 
 weakness into an understanding of the hardships imposed 
 upon those other unfortunates, who as he had correctly 
 enough inferred from his comparison of bank-note num- 
 bers, were being driven and cheated by the unscrupulous 
 Mr. George Smith. They, too Mrs. Barrett, old Powell, 
 the farmer ; the struggling photographer, Atcherley the sad- 
 dler in Narrow Street were all, no doubt, making a des- 
 perate fight to avoid the misery and disgrace of failure; 
 
144 THESE LYNNEKERS 
 
 and were without question being preyed upon in different 
 ways by the money-lender. 
 
 Dickie was full of an indignation that had been brought 
 to a fever heat by his own rebuff; and in his characteristic 
 manner he was bent upon saving these poor, small-spirited 
 people from the results of their own imprudence. 
 
 And whereas Edward, Latimer or their father would 
 Have considered in the first place how such an effort would 
 present themselves in the eyes of their audience, Dickie 
 tumbled headfirst into the fight without a single thought of 
 how the conduct or the issue of the campaign would affect 
 himself. 
 
 His enthusiasm carried him triumphantly through the 
 interview with his father, who almost forgot that he was 
 being bled to satisfy an incredibly foolish debt of his wife's, 
 in the thought so abundantly suggested by Dickie's fire of 
 righteous purpose that he was, in effect, financing a just 
 and magnificent cause. 
 
 Mrs. Lynneker, trembling, and yet at the same time 
 nursing a distinct sense of grievance, in the sitting-room, 
 was amazed into silence when her husband presently called 
 her into the study, not to frown or complain, but to forgive. 
 
 They achieved something approaching an understanding 
 that evening. When her husband had shown that he was 
 willing to sympathise with her trouble, the tightness of her 
 mouth relaxed, and then her reaction carried her so far 
 that she came, at last, to full confession. Indeed, she found 
 it easy, once she had admitted her weakness, to tell her 
 husband the essential fact she had withheld from Dickie. 
 
 It was the request that her one criminal failing should 
 be kept from their son, that brought them to a considera- 
 tion of Dickie's quality. 
 
 The Rector had taken much the same view as his wife 
 regarding the use of the Coal Club funds as a temporary 
 means of accommodation. He shook his head gently, and 
 gave no sign of being outraged by the thought that his wife 
 might have appeared in the eye of the world as a fraudu- 
 lent trustee. Possibly he took consideration of the fact 
 
MRS. LYNNEKER 145 
 
 that at the last resort she would have come to him, and 
 any esclandre would have been avoided. 
 
 They prayed together and afterwards, feeling as if they 
 had come out of great tribulation, they warmed to an 
 appreciation of Dickie's instrumentality. 
 
 "I shouldn't like him to know about the Club money," 
 Mrs. Lynneker said, and her husband agreed with a readi- 
 ness he might have found it hard to defend. 
 
 '"A queer boy!" he commented. 
 
 "He's so practical," Mrs. Lynneker said. 
 
 "And so tremendously full of energy. He completely 
 carried me away with his fury against this horrible money- 
 lender. But, honestly, I don't see what the boy can do. 
 I hope he won't involve us in any way." 
 
 "He said not" Mrs. Lynneker said. "He told me that 
 after this dreadful money was paid, the man could not 
 possibly bring us in." 
 
 "Dick has got his head pretty well screwed on, I think," 
 the Rector commented, with a glow of pride. "I should 
 feel very much inclined to trust his common-sense." 
 
 "He's very clever; I'm sure he's tremendously clever," 
 his wife agreed, and, after a moment's silence, she added: 
 
 "I'm so glad it's all over." 
 
 That evening the father and mother came to a tender- 
 ness for each other and a mutual pride in their children 
 that they had not felt for twenty years. They were united 
 by a strong emotional experience and believed that in future 
 they would understand each other better. They made re- 
 solves to be more forbearing, like a young married couple 
 after their first quarrel, although the Rector was only three 
 years short of seventy and his wife but ten years younger. 
 
 And if they were far too old, not in years but in habit, 
 to alter their manner of life or thought, they at least 
 achieved a glow of sympathy and happiness that faded al- 
 most imperceptibly ; and they were certainly awakened to a 
 new respect for Dickie respect tinged with a fear that 
 neither of them would admit. 
 
IX 
 
 GEORGE SMITH 
 
 A NOTHER individual who came to fear Dickie within 
 -/~V the next few weeks was Mr. George Smith. 
 
 Dickie went to Cross Street at lunch time next day, pro- 
 duced the full amount of his mother's debt in cash, and 
 demanded a carefully worded form of release. 
 
 Mr. Smith made no quibble about that. He was exceed- 
 ingly polite and gracious, but at the same time quite busi- 
 nesslike. He took the draft of the receipt Dickie produced, 
 and obediently copied it in his own handwriting on a form 
 bearing the imprint of the company. And until that was 
 done, he made no effort at conciliation. 
 
 Dickie had taken up his hat and was, about to leave the 
 room, when Mr. Smith said: 
 
 "I don't think you realise, Mr. Lynneker, how different 
 our business is from that of a Bank." 
 
 Dickie made no attempt to conceal his surprise at that 
 astonishing statement. "I thought I'd made that clear 
 enough," he returned, looking suspiciously at Smith. "If I 
 haven't, I can tell you that that's about the one thing I 
 have realised." 
 
 "On one side only," Mr. Smith submitted with a slightly 
 injured air. "What you haven't realised, Mr. Lynneker, is 
 that we are a butt for every swindler, and that we have to 
 protect ourselves as best we can." 
 
 "By taking it out of other people in order to make your 
 losses good?" 
 
 "No, Mr. Lynneker." Mr. Smith looked Dickie steadily 
 
 146 
 
GEORGE SMITH 147 
 
 in the face. "If you would give me time to explain . . ." 
 he said. 
 
 "Go on," returned Dickie. 
 
 "The principle that we have adopted to protect our- 
 selves is that of the short-term loan," Mr. Smith explained. 
 "In our agreement we make it quite clear that the rate of 
 ten per cent, only applies to loans repayable within a speci- 
 fied time, and failing repayment what we do is, in effect, to 
 raise the rate of interest." 
 
 "And the amount of the capital?" 
 
 "We never insist upon the repayment of that extra capi- 
 tal, Mr. Lynneker. It is only a device to protect ourselves. 
 But we are absolutely bound to insist upon the full amount 
 up to a certain point of the negotiations. It may not ap- 
 pear to you businesslike ; I admit that it is not ; but unhap- 
 pily for us, nearly all our dealings are with unbusinesslike 
 people." 
 
 "But you insisted in this case . . ." put in Dickie. 
 
 "Pardon me, sir, you insisted," replied Mr. Smith firmly. 
 "And we are prepared, now, as we always are, to refund 
 any money that you claim was not due to us." 
 
 Dickie fingered the receipt in his jacket pocket. 
 
 "Well," he sai'd, "as the interest has always been paid, I 
 suppose all my mother really owed you, was the original 
 thirty pounds." 
 
 "Not quite all the interest was paid," Mr. Smith said. 
 "I looked up the account this morning, and found that the 
 amount we are willing to forgo, is nineteen, thirteen, seven." 
 
 "Do you want any acknowledgment of that?" 
 
 "We have a special form. . . ." 
 
 Dickie shook his head. 
 
 "But in this case . . ." Mr. Smith added quickly. 
 
 "I'm not going to accept any bribes," Dickie said. 
 
 "Oh, bribes!" repeated Mr. Smith with a laugh, and 
 went through his business with the imaginary parcel. "There 
 is no possible question of bribes, Mr. Lynneker. Our 
 business together is settled and done with." 
 
148 THESE LYNNEKERS 
 
 "Not yet," Dickie said, and went out before the other 
 could reply. 
 
 Mr. Smith's expression changed on the instant from po- 
 lite forbearance to the bitterest malignity. On his mantel- 
 piece were a carafe of water and a tumbler possibly for 
 use in the case of a client's sudden collapse. He took the 
 tumbler in his hand, glared at it for a moment, dashed it 
 violently into the grate, and then stamped furiously upon 
 the broken glass. After he had thus relieved his over- 
 burdened feelings, he rang the gong on his desk, told the 
 office boy who answered it to clear away the mess in the 
 grate, took out a slip of paper on which were entered the 
 names of the clients mentioned by Dickie the day before, 
 and set himself with great deliberation to compose four 
 letters. 
 
 Nevertheless, Mr. Smith spoke English without any trace 
 of a foreign accent. 
 
 ii 
 
 Dickie's first grave mistake had been his warning to 
 Smith that their business together was not "settled and 
 done with"; his second was to approach Mr. Bell with a 
 perfectly true account of his sources of evidence. 
 
 Mr. Bell was shocked. He was an honest man and a good 
 Christian. His faith was not a convenient form of insur- 
 ance on which he paid a weekly premium of devotion to 
 cover the sinful risks of business life. His belief in God 
 was only second to his belief in the Bank, and in theory 
 he put God first. But in practice his loyalty to the Bank 
 was the ruling motive of his life. 
 
 He made it quite plain to Dickie that on no account what- 
 ever could he countenance any use of the sacred evidence 
 in his keeping in order to confound the Medborough Loan 
 Company. Incidentally he made it clear that he had no 
 wish to lose the charge of Mr. Smith's deposit. 
 
 "But there's no doubt that the man's a beastly swindler, 
 sir," urged Dickie. 
 
GEORGE SMITH 149 
 
 "That does not come within our province, Lynneker," 
 Mr. Bell said gravely. "I am greatly perturbed to hear 
 that you have already broken your trust. It is a very 
 serious matter; most serious. I'm not at all sure what I 
 ought to do about it. But, in any case, it must go no fur- 
 ther." 
 
 "You mean that you would have to sack me, sir?" 
 
 "I'm afraid so, Lynneker. I should be exceedingly sorry 
 to do so. You are the most promising clerk who has ever 
 worked with me, and I've no doubt whatever that you'll 
 rise to a very high place in the Bank with ordinary pru- 
 dence. But . . ." and Mr. Bell insisted with perfect steadi- 
 ness that any further breach of trust must be punished 
 by dismissal. 
 
 The whole matter came up again, and with a new heat, 
 after Mr. George Smith had called on Saturday morning 
 to close his account. 
 
 Smith was too clever a man to be vindictive. He had 
 no intention of adding to the irritation of Mr. Richard 
 Lynneker by complaining to the manager that the secrecy 
 of his accounts had been violated. But Smith had a weak- 
 ness. In certain matters he was timid; and he could not 
 rest while he knew that the details of his business might 
 be ferreted out by the clever deductions of the boy who 
 had so distinctly threatened him. 
 
 Smith's present game was mollification, but he had not 
 the courage to let his accounts continue to pass through 
 the City & County. 
 
 "He made no kind of complaint," Mr. Bell reported, when 
 Dickie had been summoned to the manager's private room, 
 "and it was, of course, impossible for me even to hint that 
 there had been any leakage of private information." 
 
 "Didn't mention me?" Dickie interpolated. 
 
 "Certainly not. He didn't bring any charge against us 
 of any sort ; but there can be no question why he has with- 
 drawn his account; none whatever. I am very distressed 
 about the whole affair, Lynneker. I shall have seriously 
 to consider what to do about it." 
 
150 THESE LYNNEKERS 
 
 Dickie meditated for a moment and then said cheerfully : 
 "Anyway, now he's no longer a depositor, there's no rea- 
 son why I shouldn't go for him, is there, sir?" 
 
 "There's every reason," snapped Bell. "If you antagonise 
 Mr. Smith he will put a report about through the town that 
 we make a private use of our knowledge of customers' busi- 
 ness. We should lose half our depositors." 
 
 "He wouldn't do that, sir," Dickie said. 
 
 "We mustn't run the risk," Bell returned. 
 
 "If he did, you know, sir, we could prosecute him for 
 libel in no time," Dickie went on, "and I'm absolutely cer- 
 tain the chap would cut his right hand off to keep out of 
 court. Besides that, sir, I shouldn't think his influence in 
 the town would have the least weight against yours. You 
 are frightfully well known and trusted, I mean and I 
 should think he's suspected by lots of people." 
 
 Mr. Bell was sincerely flattered by the perfect sincerity 
 of Dickie's compliment. To be "frightfully" well known 
 and trusted was the report of himself for which he had 
 patiently laboured. 
 
 "I'm sure it's very good of you, Lynneker," he mur- 
 mured, and he saw a picture of a despised chorister on his 
 first day at the King's School, regarding the "gentlemen 
 boarders" with eyes of awed respect. "They don't mix 
 with us, o' course," one of his fellow choristers had told 
 him. 
 
 Dickie failed to appreciate the allusion for a moment, 
 and then wondered why his chief should have been so 
 evidently pleased. 
 
 "Oh, that!" Dickie said, and imperceptibly a faint note 
 of condescension crept into his tone. "I should have 
 thought you could have taken that for granted, sir." 
 
 Mr. Bell looked up and blinked modestly. 
 
 "I hardly know what grounds you base that estimate of 
 me upon, Lynneker," he said, smiling. 
 
 Dickie wanted to push that aside and passed it by saying, 
 "Oh, well, my father's always told us how much you were 
 respected and trusted in the town." 
 

 GEORGE SMITH 151 
 
 Mr. Bell blushed. 
 
 "But about this chap, Smith, sir," Dickie went on. 
 
 Mr. Bell waved a deprecatory hand. 
 
 "Never mention it to me again, please, Lynneker," he 
 said. "I must insist! So long as I am a servant of the 
 Bank, I must consider the Bank's interests before anything 
 else." 
 
 He made the statement with pride. He seemed glad to 
 admit that he was a bank-manager first, and an independent 
 individual afterwards in so far as the tendency of his pri- 
 vate impulse did not conflict with his theory of official 
 integrity. He was a kind man and generous, and his great- 
 est ambition was to be a trustworthy servant. 
 
 "I must go on with this affair, you know, sir," Dickie 
 said. 
 
 Mr. Bell clicked his tongue. "So long as you don't make 
 use of our private information, and don't mention the thing 
 to me, Lynneker," he said, and made a stammering gesture 
 with his hand to indicate that the Medborough Loan topic 
 was finally dismissed. 
 
 Dickie accepted that dismissal as a permission to do what 
 he liked, if he observed the two restrictions his chief had 
 specifically imposed. 
 
 Ill 
 
 With a respect for authority that had not been shaken 
 by his sight of Mr. Bell's limitations, he went to see the 
 Medborough chief of police. 
 
 Chief Inspector Barnes listened attentively to Dickie's 
 account of Mr. Smith's methods, and then, by way of an- 
 ticipating criticism, remarked: 
 
 "We've had our eye on the fellow for some time." 
 
 "Well, it ought to be pretty easy to scotch him," re- 
 sponded Dickie hopefully. 
 
 The Chief Inspector drew a writing-pad towards him, 
 and dipped his pen in the ink. 
 
152 THESE LYNNEKERS 
 
 "You say that this account you've given me particulars 
 of has been paid, Mr. Lynneker?" he asked. 
 
 Dickie nodded. 
 
 "And the principal in that affair would not appear in 
 evidence ?" 
 
 "No." 
 
 "Then who's to prosecute?" 
 
 "Can't you?" 
 
 "On what grounds?" 
 
 "Can't you raid the place?" 
 
 "We've no evidence on which to obtain a warrant; but 
 in any event this wouldn't be a case for a raid." 
 
 "Do you mean that you can't do anything ?" asked Dickie. 
 
 "I think not, at present, Mr. Lynneker," Barnes returned 
 judicially. "As I've said, we've got an eye on this fellow, 
 and I've no doubt that he'll hang himself in time if we 
 give him plenty of rope." 
 
 "Meanwhile he's to go on swindling any unlucky beggar 
 he can get hold of?" 
 
 The Inspector looked rather offended. 
 
 "As a matter of fact, Mr. Lynneker," he said, "this Loan 
 Company has not, so far as I can judge, put itself within 
 reach of the law as yet. The case you summarised would 
 only be one for a civil action for recovery; and even so, 
 I doubt very much if you would get a verdict." 
 
 "I know; I thought of that," Dickie admitted. "But if 
 we were to threaten this chap, Smith . . ." 
 
 The Inspector shook his head reprovingly. 
 
 "Come, come, now, Mr. Lynneker," he said, "you must 
 see that we couldn't possibly proceed on those lines." 
 
 "You couldn't think of any scheme . . ." Dickie began, 
 but Mr. Barnes was far too good a servant of the Med- 
 borough corporation to consider wild schemes for the trap- 
 ping of criminals. 
 
 "We must give this fellow a little rope, Mr. Lynneker," 
 he said firmly. "The police have to be very careful not 
 to go outside their own province. Careful as we are, it 
 has happened before now, I assure you, that we have had 
 
GEORGE SMITH 153 
 
 one or two raps over the knuckles at the Sessions for ex- 
 ceeding our duty. I can promise you that we shall con- 
 tinue to keep an eye on this fellow, and when the occasion 
 offers . . ." The Inspector rose solidly to his feet and 
 held out his hand. . . . 
 
 Dickie went on to see Mrs. Barrett, the old widow who 
 kept a small general shop in Cowgate. She did not know 
 him by sight and the cheerful "Good afternoon, sir," with 
 which she greeted him was merely an anticipation of prob- 
 able custom. 
 
 "Good afternoon, Mrs. Barrett," Dickie replied, and 
 added : "You are Mrs. Barrett, aren't you ? I want to see 
 you about the Medborough Loan Company." 
 
 "Oh, dear," was Mrs. Barrett's alarmed response, and she 
 sat down suddenly on a stool that was evidently her habitual 
 seat, so promptly and instinctively did she locate it. For 
 one moment Dickie caught an expression in her face that 
 reminded him of his mother. 
 
 "Is it about the letter you wrote me ?" the old lady asked. 
 
 "No, I don't come from the Loan Company," Dickie ex- 
 plained. "I want to talk to you about them. They've been 
 swindling you, you know." 
 
 "And what's it got to do with you, young man?" asked 
 Mrs. Barrett ; "and might I ask 'ow you come to know about 
 it?" 
 
 "Does that matter?" Dickie said. 
 
 Mrs. Barrett seemed to think that it mattered consider- 
 ably. 
 
 "I'm sorry. I can't explain how I've come to know that 
 you've borrowed from these Loan people," Dickie said, 
 "but I know that they're jolly well thieves and I want to 
 prosecute them." 
 
 "Dear, dear," commented Mrs. Barrett sympathetically, 
 "you 'aven't nothin' to do with the police, 'ave you?" she 
 added with a touch of alarmed suspicion. 
 
 "Nothing whatever," Dickie said. 
 
 "An' what is it you want with me, young man?" asked 
 Mrs. Barrett. 
 
154 THESE LYNNEKERS 
 
 "I want you to refuse to pay anything more to the Com- 
 pany," Dickie said, and, in answer to Mrs. Barrett's stead- 
 fast shake of the head, he went on : "It won't be only you, 
 you know. There are some other people in the same hole 
 I'm going to see. I want you all to stick together." 
 
 "I've always kept myself honest/' Mrs. Barrett said. 
 
 "Oh, yes, of course," Dickie agreed. 
 
 "And I don't want my affairs talked about." 
 
 "They won't be. The only people who will know will 
 be a few other people who have borrowed from the Loan 
 Company, too." 
 
 " 'Oo are they ?" enquired Mrs. Barrett innocently. 
 
 Dickie smiled. "I can't tell you yet," he said ; "not until 
 I get their permission." 
 
 Mrs. Barrett considered that statement with an expres- 
 sion of approval. 
 
 "An* you won't tell no one about me, till I say you may, 
 then?" she asked. 
 
 "Certainly not," agreed Dickie. 
 
 Mrs. Barrett rose with some little difficulty from her 
 stool and summed up. 
 
 "Well, you go and see them others first, young man," 
 she said. "There's somethin' about you as rather takes my 
 fancy, but you're rather young, it seems to me, for what 
 you're tryin' to do. That Mr. Smith's rare an' artful. 
 But you go and see them others, and I'll talk it over with 1 
 my son-in-law, George Cummin. . . ." 
 
 "The chemist in Priestgate?" put in Dickie. 
 
 "Yes, that's 'im," replied Mrs Barrett, and looked up at 
 Dickie with an expression of simple cunning. 
 
 "He knows, then, that you've borrowed from Smith?" 
 commented Dickie. 
 
 " 'E do," returned Mrs. Barrett, still wearing that look 
 of searching scrutiny. " 'Ow many 'ave you got on your 
 list?" she asked. 
 
 "Only four besides yourself," Dickie admitted. 
 
 "Any of 'em live in Priestgate?" 
 
GEORGE SMITH 155 
 
 Dickie realised then why Mrs. Barrett had confided in 
 her son-in-law. 
 
 "Does Mr. Cummin owe them money, too?" he asked. 
 
 "Oh! that's neither 'ere nor there, young man," Mrs. 
 Barrett said. 
 
 "The more people I can find, you know . . ." began 
 Dickie. 
 
 "Of course," Mrs. Barrett agreed. "An' meanwhile, 
 p'raps, you'll go on with your calls and give me another 
 look in, in a day or two's time?" 
 
 "Oh, all right, I will; thanks very much," Dickie said. 
 
 He raised his hat as he went out. 
 
 Mrs. Barrett looked after him with an expression of 
 decided approval. 
 
 IV 
 
 Mr. Atcherley, the saddler of Narrow Street, angrily 
 denied any knowledge of the Loan Company. He was a 
 small, freckled man with sandy hair and he seemed to 
 regard Dickie's visit with an irritable suspicion. 
 
 "Young Mr. Lynneker from the Bank, isn't it ?" he asked ; 
 and when Dickie had persuaded him back into the solitude 
 of his workshop, he was obviously on the defensive. 
 
 "Medborough Loan Company? What's that got to do with 
 me?" was the line he took, and made it quite clear that he 
 strongly resented any interference with his private affairs. 
 
 "Oh, all right, Mr. Atcherley," Dickie concluded, rather 
 in the Lynneker manner ; "I suppose I 've made a mistake." 
 
 "You 'ave," assented the saddler with emphasis. 
 
 "But I don't see that you need be so ... put out about 
 it," continued Dickie. "I know this chap Smith is a swin- 
 dler, and I want to get evidence against him." 
 
 "Very good," returned Atcherley, "but why come to me ? 
 What made you think I'd got anything to do with 'im?" 
 
 "An inference I drew from certain evidence, that's all," 
 Dickie said. He realised that he was being severely handi- 
 capped by Mr. Bell's restriction. 
 
156 THESE LYNNEKERS 
 
 The saddler pinched his underlip and looked more sus- 
 picious than ever. 
 
 "Sorry I can't 'elp you," he said. . . 
 
 Mr. Powell, the farmer of Yaxwell, was sympathetic 
 enough within certain limits, but he was hardly sober when 
 Dickie saw him, and the five-mile ride out on the further 
 side of Medborough was scarcely justified by the result ob- 
 tained. 
 
 The farmer admitted his liability, and agreed verbally 
 with every suggestion made to him; but the fiabbiness of 
 his answers and his general attitude gave little promise of 
 enthusiastic support. His "Well, sir, you'd know best about 
 that," gave Dickie some vague power of attorney, but small 
 hope of active support. 
 
 Dickie moodily reflected that even if he could get a team 
 together, the members of it would be a very difficult lot to 
 handle. 
 
 He saw Mrs. Barrett's son-in-law, George Cummin, be- 
 fore tackling the photographer in Cross Street. The chem- 
 ist, who was not a customer of the City & County's, came 
 into the Bank the day after Dickie's ride to Yaxwell, and 
 invited him to come over to the shop in Priestgate at five 
 o'clock. 
 
 Mr. Cummin assumed an elaborately mysterious manner 
 when proffering the invitation, but in his own parlour over 
 the shop, he wore rather the air of an examining counsel. 
 
 "Now, Mr. Lynneker," he said with a serious frown, "in 
 the first place I'd like to know how you found out as my 
 mother-in-law was in debt to this Loan Company?" 
 
 "Does that matter ?" replied Dickie. 
 
 Mr. Cummin pushed that aside as irrelevant. "If she was 
 a depositor at your Bank, you might have got at it through 
 reading her cheques or what not," he continued, and was 
 plainly ready to discuss the whole evidence at great length. 
 
 Dickie lost patience with the necessity to combat this 
 critical curiosity. 
 
 "Oh ! Mrs. Barrett put her name on a bank note that had 
 been issued to Smith," he said, "and as it came back to us 
 
GEORGE SMITH 157 
 
 through another customer within two days, I assumed that 
 your mother-in-law was probably the recipient of the loan." 
 
 "Ah ! smart !" commented the chemist. "But now, when 
 was that note issued? Recently?" 
 
 "No; eighteen months ago," returned Dickie irritably. 
 "Some one had made an entry in the register to the effect 
 that the note was endorsed A. Barrett, Cowgate. What has 
 all this got to do with what we want to discuss?" 
 
 "Well, I'm one o' those that like to have what I may call 
 the elements of a case quite clear from the start, Mr. Lyn- 
 neker," Mr. Cummin explained, and after an hour's con- 
 versation the elements were still engaging his curiosity. 
 
 Dickie came near despair during that interview. There 
 could be no doubt that the chemist was in serious financial 
 difficulty, but he was far more intent upon demonstrating 
 his own acumen, which consisted, as far as Dickie could 
 judge, in sifting useless evidence and throwing doubt on 
 every suggestion than upon taking any practical measures 
 for averting his threatened bankruptcy. 
 
 When he was out in Priestgate again, Dickie shook his 
 head with a kind of savage bewilderment. These men, 
 Powell and Cummin, had been so foolishly anxious to create 
 some impression upon himself, one by his feeble agreements, 
 the other by the attempt to demonstrate his cleverness. 
 "What did that matter, one way or the other? 7 Dickie 
 wondered. "Why couldn't they do something to help them- 
 selves? Now, that fellow, Atcherley, the saddler, had 
 been infernally rude, but he was the kind of man that might 
 have been useful." 
 
 "I wish I could get at Atcherley," Dickie reflected as he 
 made his way moodily to the photographer's in Cross 
 Street. 
 
 On the threshold of the outer door he met Mr. George 
 Smith. 
 
 "Good evening, Mr. Lynneker," he said with a gracious 
 smile. "Were you coming to see me?" 
 
 "Going to have my photograph taken," growled Dickie. 
 
158 THESE LYNNEKERS 
 
 He lied so rarely that he took it for granted Mr. Smith 
 would believe him. 
 
 The "studio" was closed, but the proprietor, Wilfred 
 Geach, appeared at the door of another room on the same 
 landing in answer to Dickie's third knock. 
 
 "What is it?" he asked wearily. "Midgets?" 
 
 "Are you Mr. Geach ?" replied Dickie. 
 
 "I suppose so," admitted the photographer, and then, as 
 his visitor came into the light of the gas burner that flared 
 within the room, he added : "Seen you in the Bank, haven't 
 I?" 
 
 "Yes ; I want to see you about the Loan Company, down- 
 stairs," Dickie said. 
 
 "Come for a reference for their respectability?" asked 
 Geach. "I thought you'd been to them already." 
 
 "How did you know that?" asked Dickie. 
 
 "Oh, intervals of business," returned Geach carelessly. 
 
 He was a young, fair man with a light moustache and a 
 loose wave of hair that sloped across his forehead. He 
 leaned against the door post as he talked and smoked a 
 cigarette. "Medborough don't keep me so infernally busy 
 that I've no time to look out of the window," he said. 
 
 "D'you mean that you know most of Smith's victims?" 
 asked Dickie eagerly. 
 
 "Victims, eh?" returned Geach. "Victims is good. Now 
 I guessed the old lady having had some herself had tried 
 to save you. Bad shot, what? If you'd been on the bor- 
 rowing game, you wouldn't have been talking about victims 
 for a few months yet." 
 
 "Look here," said Dickie ; "can I talk this over with you ? 
 I want to drive this chap Smith out of the town, and I 
 believe you're the very man I've been looking for to help 
 me." 
 
 "Come in," Geach said. "There's some tea that ought 
 
GEORGE SMITH 159 
 
 to be keeping fairly warm yet. This is my bed-sitting room ; 
 had to use the other room for a dark room." 
 
 The photographer's knowledge of Smith's clients proved 
 to be extensive. 
 
 "When I first came to this silly place, four years ago," 
 he explained, "I rigged up a mirror over one of the studio 
 windows, trying a new dodge with lighting. It didn't work, 
 of course; none of my dodges do, but I found it con- 
 venient for looking down into the street without opening 
 the window. I'm used to seeing people upside down on the 
 focussing screen. First of all, I used to watch for cus- 
 tomers, and then I got more interested in Smith's clientele 
 more of 'em, for one thing. And after I'd got to know 
 some of the people in the town by sight, I was fairly fas- 
 cinated. I've stood on the stairs, sometimes, and heard 'em 
 talking. It's more amusing than waiting for customers, I 
 assure you." 
 
 "Well, go on," Dickie prompted him. 
 
 "I went to Smith myself a little over a year ago," Geach 
 announced, and Dickie thought it well to pretend surprise. 
 
 "After all you know about him?" he said. 
 
 "Well, my case was rather different, you see," returned 
 Geach airily. "I never meant to pay him back." 
 
 "Splendid !" commented Dickie. 
 
 "Think so? You would, anyhow, if you knew all I do 
 about that snake, Smith. He's a caution." 
 
 "I know," agreed Dickie. "How are you going to get 
 out of paying him?" 
 
 "Sit tight and smile," said Geach. "There's nothing to 
 come. I'm broke in any case. I should have gone before 
 this if it hadn't been for the fifty quid, less interest and 
 cost of agreement, I took off Smith. Fair job I had to 
 get it, too. I spent nearly a week composing a new set of 
 account books to show him. If he had as much time to 
 spare looking out of the window as I have, he'd have known 
 they were written especially for him. But he keeps his 
 ugly face in the back room the best part of the time. It's 
 under my dark room, and sometimes, when there's a real 
 
160 THESE LYNNEKERS 
 
 row on, I can hear 'em at it. 'It's a shameful imposture, 
 Mr. Smith/ they say, and then he oily gurgles at 'em, and 
 presently they come out trying to look as if they'd only 
 just been up here for a dozen midgets." 
 
 Dickie's ethical sense was not outraged by Geach's frank 
 admission of villainy, but he remembered Mr. Smith's de- 
 fence, his statement that he was a butt for every swindler. 
 This was, no doubt, a fair instance of the fraud against 
 which he insured by putting an extra premium on to the 
 account of other borrowers. 
 
 "You're a criminal, of course," Dickie remarked thought- 
 fully. 
 
 "Those account books, you mean ?" Geach returned. "Ob- 
 taining money under false pretences ? Yes ; I suppose I'm a 
 criminal, right enough. I hadn't looked at it that way be- 
 fore; but it won't keep me awake. Nothing has yet." 
 
 "And Smith takes it out of the others." 
 
 "Does he? Yes, of course, he would." 
 
 The two young men looked at one another with a friendly 
 interest. They had one characteristic in common; neither 
 of them was concerned as to the personal effect he was mak- 
 ing on the other. 
 
 "Well, what are you going to do?" asked Dickie. 
 
 "Enlist," Geach said. "I'll make a damned bad barrack 
 soldier, but I don't see what else there is going." 
 
 "I want to smash this fellow Smith," Dickie said; "and 
 I want you to help me. After that you can enlist as much 
 as you like." 
 
 "And what am I going to live on, while you are indulging 
 your private spite against poor Smith?" 
 
 "Midgets, I suppose," Dickie said with a laugh. 
 
 Geach swore without reticence. 
 
 Dickie winced. It was the first time he had heard that 
 mingling of the profane and the obscene. His brothers' 
 strongest expression was "D. the thing;" and the worst 
 oath he had heard used at school or at the Bank was rela- 
 tively Biblical, drawing only upon such classical words as 
 Damn, Hell and Devil; very rarely with any invocation of 
 
GEORGE SMITH 161 
 
 the Deity. Geach's condemnation of the midgets to unutter- 
 able defilement offended Dickie's ear. The meaning of 
 one prominent word was unknown to him, but the sound 
 of it was revolting. 
 
 The young photographer stuck out his underlip. 
 "Shocked?" he asked. 
 
 "I hate that sort of muck," Dickie said. 
 
 "Brought up pious, I suppose?" 
 
 "Clean, anyhow," replied Dickie. 
 
 Geach shrugged his shoulders and lit another cigarette. 
 "If you ivill seek the society of criminals . . ." he re- 
 marked. 
 
 "What's the matter with you?" Dickie asked. "Why 
 have you made such a mess of things, I mean?" 
 
 Geach looked at him shrewdly. 
 
 "Built that way," he said. "I'm a born slacker. Never 
 did any good at school. Rotten school for one thing I 
 was a day boy at Oakstone." 
 
 "Good Lord !" interrupted Dickie. "I was at Oakstone." 
 
 "What's your name?" asked Geach. 
 
 "Lynneker." 
 
 "I was before your time," commented Geach. "I can give 
 you ten years ; but I remember a mealy sort of ass in the 
 third form, called Lynneker. I kicked him once, and he 
 told me it was infernal cheek because I was a day-boy. I 
 kicked him again for that, of course." 
 
 "That must have been my elder brother," Dickie ex- 
 plained. "He's a curate at St. Peter's now." 
 
 Geach nodded carelessly. "I don't see much of the 
 clergy," he remarked. "They go in more for the cabinet 
 size." 
 
 "He said something about being photographed the other 
 day," Dickie suggested helpfully. "Shall I send him 
 along?" 
 
 "Don't bother," returned Geach. "I should want to 
 kick him again. Curates always make me feel like that. If 
 I'd known your brother was going to be a curate, I'd have 
 done the job more thoroughly when I was at Oakstone." 
 
162 THESE LYNNEKERS 
 
 Dickie pursed his lips. He was strongly interested by 
 the man, and at the same time definitely repelled. He had 
 an inclination, now, to treat him as Edward had been treated 
 at Oakstone. 
 
 "You want kicking, too, you know," he said. 
 
 "That's only your point of view," replied Geach. 
 
 "Don't you want to kick yourself, sometimes?" 
 
 "Dunno that I do." 
 
 "Don't you want to make money?" 
 
 Geach yawned. "I thought you came to talk about our 
 dear old pal Smith," he said. "If you came to enquire into 
 my morals, you can go as soon as you like." 
 
 "Well, will you help me about Smith ?" asked Dickie. 
 
 "It might be rather a joke," Geach thought. 
 
 And presently Dickie had a fresh set of names of bor- 
 rowers from the Medborough Loan Company, some of them 
 marked as those of individuals who were probably near 
 desperation. 
 
 "When they don't trouble to do the casual act when they 
 come out," Geach said, "you may bet your shirt they've got 
 it in the neck." 
 
 VI 
 
 It was after seven o'clock when Dickie came away, and 
 he had to go round to the rear premises of the Bank to 
 fetch his bicycle. As he was wheeling it out into Angel 
 Lane he met his brother Edward. 
 
 "Hullo ! you're late to-night," Edward said. 
 
 "I had some business to do in the town," Dickie explained, 
 and went on at once. "I say, weren't you saying something 
 about being photographed the other day? I wish you'd 
 go to that fellow Geach in Cross Street." 
 
 "Who is Geach ?" asked Edward fastidiously. 
 
 "He's an old Oakstone boy, rather senior to you. Don't 
 you remember him at all?" 
 
 "Can't say I do," Edward said without reflection. There 
 was a note of remonstrance in his voice, as if he wished 
 this impossible young brother of his to understand that one 
 
GEORGE SMITH 163 
 
 did not remember Oakstone boys who became professional 
 photographers. 
 
 Dickie overlooked the implication. "Fair chap with rather 
 dark blue eyes and a swipe of hair across his forehead/' 
 he suggested. 
 
 "There was an awful bounder of a day-boy, the son of 
 the chemist. . . ." 
 
 "That's the man," exclaimed Dickie. "He's got a studio 
 in Cross Street, now, and he's infernally hard up. Couldn't 
 you go there?" 
 
 "I don't think I could, now," Edward said deliberately. 
 "I rather thought of going to Haywards in the Market 
 Place. Helen went there. They're rather good." 
 
 "You haven't arranged with them yet?" 
 
 Edward frowned. "I really can't see that it would be any 
 good my going to this chap, Geach's," he said. "To tell 
 you the truth, I'm not the least anxious to meet him again." 
 
 "You wouldn't care to do him a good turn ?" 
 
 "Not particularly," Edward said, and avoided further 
 pressure by adding, "I'm frightfully late, too. I had to 
 do some people up at the back of the town ; ghastly neigh- 
 bourhood. And I want to get home, now, " he paused 
 and concluded with great feeling, "to wash." 
 
 Dickie made no reply, so by way of emphasising what 
 he intended to be a moral lesson for his brother, and of 
 vindicating his own attitude, Edward went on, "I loathe 
 the feeling of not being clean, and however careful you are, 
 when you have been in the houses of people of that sort, you 
 get a sense of being dirty. I always must have a hot bath 
 before I can eat after district visiting." 
 
 "How splendid!" commented Dick, with great solemnity, 
 and swinging his leg over his bicycle, he rode away before 
 the other could reply. 
 
 "I wonder what it is exactly that's wrong with Dickie?" 
 Edward reflected later, when his longing to overtake and 
 kick his young brother had passed its first violence. 
 
164 THESE LYNNEKERS 
 
 And Dickie, pedalling furiously homewards, demonstrated 
 his kinship by giving expression to precisely the same won- 
 der with regard to Edward. 
 
 Edward found a reasonable solution in the explanation 
 that Dickie was lacking in a feeling for "decency," probably 
 due to a vulgar strain he had inherited through their mother. 
 She, too, had rather queer ideas about "common" people 
 and was apt to be abominably careless about the details 
 of her appearance. Edward frowned irritably. It annoyed 
 him that he should be placed in the unfortunate position 
 of having to criticise his own mother, but he had positively 
 been ashamed the last time she had come to the Vicarage; 
 she had been so unforgivably untidy. He tried hard not to 
 remember that Helen, also, was a little careless about her 
 clothes. He put that aside with the confident statement 
 that it was "bound to be all right" when they were mar- 
 ried. . . . 
 
 Dickie floundering among the attempts to analyse the 
 same problem, was confounded by the fact that he himself 
 was the exception within his own experience of his class. 
 His father and Latimer, and without question the majority 
 of their friends, all wanted to wash their hands after contact 
 with such individuals as young Geach. The first and second 
 fingers of the photographer's right hand were brown with 
 the stain of cigarette smoke, his room was indescribably 
 untidy and dirty; the man's whole appearance and sur- 
 roundings would have revolted Edward, not less than the 
 "criminality" and uncleanliness of his mind. But Dickie, 
 while he criticised Geach, and was to a certain extent re- 
 pelled by him, had no sense of contamination. On the con- 
 trary, his interest in the photographer was such that he 
 fully intended to visit him again. 
 
 "I don't know," Dickie said to himself. "I suppose it 
 is that they're not really interested in that kind of people." 
 
 He was unable, as yet, to carry his deductions beyond 
 that preliminary statement. 
 
GEORGE SMITH 165 
 
 VII 
 
 Dickie's task of assembling any determined body of debt- 
 ors to the Medborough Loan Company, was little lightened 
 by the new list of names he had obtained from Wilfred 
 Geach. 
 
 On broad lines the borrowers could be divided into two 
 categories the poor spirited who had undoubtedly been 
 cheated but were afraid to take any action ; and those who 
 had comparatively little ground for complaint. Mr. Smith 
 was evidently a fine judge of character in the rough, and 
 made his contracts according to the innate tendencies of his 
 clients rather than according to the nature of their security. 
 
 Furthermore, Mr. Smith was aware of the conspiracy 
 against him, and was taking measures to protect himself. 
 
 Dickie found that carefully worded letters had been writ- 
 ten to Mrs. Barrett, Powell and Cummin, in which it was 
 made quite clear that repayment of the original sum lent, 
 together with interest up to date, would be accepted at any 
 time in full settlement. 
 
 Dickie was beginning to have doubts whether he would 
 be able to make any sort of case, when he received unex- 
 pected help from the saddler in Narrow Street. 
 
 Mr. Atcherley was standing on the pavement in front 
 of the Bank one afternoon in early November, and nodded 
 familiarly to Dickie as he came out. 
 
 "Fine afternoon for a Thursday," Mr. Atcherley re- 
 marked, pointing the fact that it was early-closing day. 
 
 Dickie nodded carelessly, wheeled his bicycle across the 
 pavement and was in the act of mounting when the saddler 
 came over to him and said : 
 
 '* 'Ere, one minute, Mr. Lynneker. I'd like to 'ave a talk 
 with you. What d'you say to popping round to the Angel 
 for 'alf an hour?" 
 
 "Is it about the Loan Company?" Dickie asked. 
 
 "Sh!" hissed Atcherley, and contorted one side of his 
 face into an expression intended to convey warning. He 
 
166 THESE LYNNEKERS 
 
 put his hand up to his mouth as he continued in a whisper, 
 "I know a little room at the Angel where we shan't be dis- 
 turbed." 
 
 "All right," Dickie agreed. 
 
 They entered the Angel Hotel by way of the tap room, 
 and as they passed through it, Atcherley nodded to the 
 barmaid and made a movement of his head in the direction 
 of the first floor. "Send 'em up," .he remarked, and then 
 to Dickie, "What'll you take?" 
 
 "I won't drink, thanks," Dickie said. 
 
 Atcherley removed his grey bowler hat and scratched his 
 head. "Just one," he suggested. 
 
 Dickie frowned impatiently. 
 
 "Oh! well, if you won't . . ." Atcherley said, and con- 
 tinued as an afterthought, "No reason why I shouldn't." 
 He winked at the barmaid by way of giving his order, and 
 relieving himself of the responsibility of bringing a tee- 
 totaler into those premises. 
 
 He took Dickie into a small but rather luxuriously fur- 
 nished room on the first floor. 
 
 "Landlord's private parlour," he explained, nodded with 
 an air of immense secrecy, and again behind the unnecessary 
 cover of his hand, added, "Where we make our little ar- 
 rangements, y'know. Ever do anything in that line ?" 
 
 "What line?" asked Dickie. 
 
 Atcherley stuck out his neat little leather-gaitered legs, 
 and regarded them sadly. "Nor you don't smoke, I sup- 
 pose?" he said. 
 
 "No, thanks," returned Dickie. 
 
 "Christ!" murmured Atcherley softly. He appeared to 
 reflect on the profoundly saddening problem of his com- 
 panion's limitations for a moment, and then briskly drew in 
 his legs, leaned forward, and touching Dickie on the chest 
 with a stubby, red forefinger, said, "Now, then, what about 
 this 'ere George Smith ?" 
 
 "I thought you told me . . ." began Dickie. 
 
 "That was before the Newmarket meetin'," Atcherley 
 returned, and with one gesture of his sandy hand cancelled 
 
GEORGE SMITH 167 
 
 anything he might have said in that hopeful period. "And 
 it didn't come off, good though it looked," he went on; 
 "which, as you'll understand, makes a very remarkable dif- 
 ference." He broke off as a waiter came in with a tray, 
 made a few cryptic remarks to him concluding with "Red- 
 start for Liverpool; twenties," drank the company's health 
 with one of the usual formulae, and then as soon as he 
 and Dickie were alone again, promptly returned to the ques- 
 tion at issue by saying, 
 
 "I was talking to young Geach a couple o' nights ago." 
 
 It appeared that young Geach, also, was admitted to the 
 landlord's private parlour in the evenings, and that he had 
 done rather well for himself at Newbury. "Borrowed a 
 couple o' quid from me, put it all on at twenty-five and came 
 home," Atcherley explained with a half despairing lift of 
 his head. He had to drink again before he could continue, 
 "So 'e's in funds just now, talked about payin' 'is rent! 
 Certainly 'e was three parts drunk at the time. 'E's a 
 caution! Well, 'im and me we've been layin' our 'eads 
 together." 
 
 They had, indeed, evolved a plan. It seemed that there 
 was a lawyer known to them, who would be willing to give 
 professional help. The idea was to get up a test case and 
 let it be known that on the issue depended a score of other 
 cases of the same kind. They were to force Smith to pro- 
 duce one of those short-loan contracts, and generally to stir 
 up public feeling against him, even if, as was quite probable, 
 they were unable to obtain a verdict. Afterwards there was 
 to be a federation of debtors to the company, all of whom 
 were to refer any applications made by Smith to the common 
 lawyer. 
 
 "Make Smith prosecute in every [stigmatised] case," was 
 the effect of Atcherley's summary, stated with the emphasis 
 necessary for the occasion. 
 
 Dickie saw at once that the plan was likely to be an effec- 
 tive one, but the whole affair had taken for him a new, dis- 
 tasteful colour. He could no longer regard the prosecution 
 of Smith as the attack upon a malefactor undertaken for 
 
168 THESE LYNNEKERS 
 
 purely ethical motives to protect such innocent weaklings as 
 his own mother. Geach and Atcherley were going to play 
 Smith's own game ; and no doubt those two were typical of 
 a small minority of the other debtors. They were all able 
 to defend themselves, and, now that Dickie had given them 
 the idea, they would carry through the conspiracy to a suc- 
 cessful issue. And, in effect, they were swindlers no less 
 than Smith. They had borrowed money for their own pur- 
 poses at a fairly high rate of interest, and now they were 
 scheming to avoid repayment of the capital. 
 
 " 'Ow does that go ?" asked Atcherley. 
 
 Dickie moodily kicked the leg of the table. "It sounds 
 feasible," he said. 
 
 " 'Ow far er you dipped, yourself, might I ask ?" enquired 
 the saddler. 
 
 Dickie looked up quickly. "I don't owe Smith anything, if 
 that's what you mean," he said. 
 
 "One of your f am'ly, perhaps ?" 
 
 "No," Dickie replied firmly. "Nor any of my family." 
 
 "Well, then, where do you come in?" Atcherley asked, 
 and his astonishment was such that he paused with his glass 
 half way to his mouth. 
 
 "I'm not coming in any further," Dickie said. "Geach 
 has all the particulars. You and he and this lawyer chap 
 can manage the rest of the business between you." 
 
 Atcherley considered that for a moment, finished his 
 second whiskey with an unnecessarily loud gulp, and then 
 remarked in his enriched manner that he would rather like 
 to know why he had been permitted to waste his afternoon. 
 
 "Chiefly because I've been a damned fool," Dickie said, 
 getting to his feet. "You see, Mr. Atcherley, I didn't under- 
 stand quite what I was doing. I knew this fellow Smith 
 was a swindler, and I wanted to protect people like Mrs. 
 Barrett, and Farmer Powell, who were getting cheated right 
 and left and couldn't defend themselves. But I'd no inten- 
 tion of trying to cheat Smith, on my own account, which is 
 really what you and Geach want to do." 
 
 "Only people like me and Geach is to suffer, eh?" com- 
 
GEORGE SMITH 169 
 
 mented Atcherley. "Your friend Powell of Yaxwell, for 
 instance, owes me pretty near ten pound at the present 
 moment. Well, Mr. Lynneker, I'd like to know what you 
 consider I've done, if you can spare the time ?" 
 
 Dickie shook his head. "You haven't done anything/* he 
 said. "It's the principle of the thing. But it's no good 
 our discussing that. I'm out of this, altogether. I'm not 
 going to stand in your way. You can go on and prosecute 
 Smith, and dupes like Mrs. Barrett and twenty others of 
 the same kind will score, too, I suppose." 
 
 Atcherley put down his glass on the tray with a crash. 
 "Oh ! yes, me and Geach are going on," he said, "even with- 
 out your valyble 'elp, Mr. Lynneker." He looked up thought- 
 fully and then said with a complete change of manner, 
 "You might tell 'is reverence that them breechings I been 
 doin' for 'im, is ready any time 'e cares to send for 'em." 
 
 VIII 
 
 The ethical problem that had begun to intrigue Dickie 
 was further complicated for him by the attitude of his 
 father and mother. He felt that he must report to them 
 the whole story of what he regarded as his failure, and ap- 
 proached his confession with a sense that he had proved 
 his incompetence. The three of them adjourned to the 
 Rector's study after tea. The Rector and his wife came to 
 the 'conference, with something of childish eagerness. If 
 they had a subconscious inclination to treat this strange child 
 of theirs with fear and respect, they had a perfectly con- 
 scious feeling of surprised curiosity concerning the details 
 of his amazing persecution of that "horrible loan man," 
 as Mrs. Lynneker always referred to him. 
 
 "I've made a mess of it," Dickie began humbly. "I can 
 see now that I rushed at the thing in an idiotic way without 
 knowing a bit what I was doing. If I'd thought about it a 
 bit more first, I suppose, I should have seen what a tre- 
 
170 THESE LYNNEKERS 
 
 mendously complicated affair it was. I I want to kick 
 myself, badly." 
 
 The Rector looked grave. He found an ominous sug- 
 gestion in his son's tone, and his mind leapt at once to the 
 consideration of two terrible alternatives : either he had 
 been let in for more money or he was threatened with some 
 exposure of his wife's transactions with this dreadful loan 
 company. And, like Dickie, Mr. Lynneker had a sudden 
 desire to "kick himself badly" for not having foreseen the 
 inevitable result of trusting so delicate and dangerous a 
 business to a youth of nineteen. 
 
 "Well, well, Dick, what is it youVe done?" he asked, 
 and his charming boyish interest gave place to the petulance 
 of an old man suffering the fret of a life-long annoyance. 
 
 "I've chucked the whole affair," Dickie said, and looked 
 up to receive well-merited reproach. 
 
 "And have you become implicated in any way ?" his father 
 asked, frowning. 
 
 Mrs. Lynneker looked on with an expression of terrified 
 anticipation. 
 
 "Only to the extent that I began it," Dickie said. 
 
 "Yes, yes, but what does that imply?" 
 
 "Implies that I've made a mess of it." 
 
 Mr. Lynneker became explicit. "Is there any fear that 
 our name may appear?" he asked, "or that I may be let in 
 for any more money?" 
 
 "Oh ! no," Dickie said with a shade of contempt, "not the 
 least chance of either of those things. I'm right out of it." 
 
 "But I don't see . . ." his mother began. 
 
 "Why you are so blue about it, my dear boy," her hus- 
 band added. They were both so relieved by Dickie's state- 
 ment that they were ready to laugh at his immense serious- 
 ness. 
 
 "Well, I've been such an idiotic ass," explained Dickie, 
 and went on to give them a fairly articulate account of his 
 earlier negotiations and his vision of the doubtful ethic 
 which had been revealed that afternoon. 
 
 The Rector smiled, fondly, paternally. "Really, I had no 
 
GEORGE SMITH 171 
 
 idea Atcherley was at all that kind of man," was his first 
 comment. "I have never found anything to complain of 
 in his manner." 
 
 "They're all quite different when you get at them out of 
 their shops," was Dickie's summary of his two years' experi- 
 ence at the Bank. 
 
 His father nodded sadly, as if he greatly deplored the 
 possible truth of this depressing generalisation concerning 
 the humanity of those tradespeople whose counter aspects 
 were so particularly encouraging. It was distinctly un- 
 pleasant to contemplate the possibility that the polite trades- 
 man might be a radical in private life. The Rector was in- 
 clined to blame the example set by "that blackguard, Glad- 
 stone," whose influence remained to work evil, even though 
 he had retired from active politics. 
 
 "But do you think they will prosecute that horrid loan 
 man ?" Mrs. Lynneker asked. 
 
 "Oh! they'll drive him out of the town, for certain," 
 was Dickie's confident opinion. 
 
 "It will all be your doing, really," his mother encouraged 
 him ; and his father, assenting to that implied congratulation, 
 murmured, "Capital, I call it, eh?" 
 
 Dickie looked uncomfortable. "It hasn't turned out a bit 
 the way I meant it to," he said. 
 
 His father complacently misunderstood the significance of 
 that statement. 
 
 "Just as well, just as well," he said. "To tell you the 
 truth, I'm most uncommonly glad that you shouldn't ap- 
 pear in the case in any way. It wouldn't have done for 
 many reasons. You've achieved your end, and we shall 
 give you full credit for it, if no one else will." 
 
 But Mrs. Lynneker, staring at her son's face, had some 
 wavering, uncertain idea of what was in his mind. 
 
 "Don't you think he ought to be punished, dear?" she 
 asked. 
 
 "I don't know," Dickie said. "Anyway, if he ought, so 
 
172 THESE LYNNEKERS 
 
 ought Atcherley and Geach. I don't see that there's much 
 to choose between the three of 'em." 
 
 "But think of all the other people, like that poor old 
 Mrs. Barrett in Cowgate," urged Mrs. Lynneker. 
 
 "Yes, there is that in it," agreed Dickie, contemplating 
 for the first time the fallacious proposition of "the greatest 
 good to the greatest number." "I know there is that in 
 it. Only . . ." 
 
 His father and mother could fall back so comfortably 
 on their belief in "the inscrutable ways of Providence." The 
 soreness of their respective hurts was soothed by the balm 
 of the knowledge that God had as might well have been ex- 
 pected in this case declared himself on their side. George 
 Smith had unwarrantably injured them, they could appreci- 
 ate his wickedness, and with the demure reservation of a 
 willingness now to forgive him, they were humbly grate- 
 ful for the boon of Divine vengeance. Atcherley's and 
 Geach's wickedness was outside their scope. Doubtless 
 there had been some excuse for it they had been exas- 
 perated by this horrible fellow Smith and there was 
 reasonable hope that in future they would lead respectable, 
 if not godly, lives. 
 
 Dickie, floundering through a maze in which no path 
 could reach the goal except by the most devious of cir- 
 cumlocutions, could do nothing but repeat the certainty 
 he had of the contingent he indicated by his "Only . . .," 
 the contingent he could not define. He knew that he had 
 blundered, but why or how he could not understand. 
 
 And for a time he put that problem aside, as he had put 
 aside certain intricacies of higher mathematics, with a firm 
 resolve to return to it when his mind was cleared by a 
 period of distraction. His reading had been seriously in- 
 terrupted during the last few weeks, and he returned to it 
 with new vigour. He added a new subject to his steadily 
 widening course of study by including Herbert Spencer's 
 "Principles of Ethics." 
 
GEORGE SMITH 173 
 
 IX 
 
 Mr. Smith did not wait for the test case to come into 
 court. One morning in the following March, his office 
 in Cross Street was found closed by a tardy borrower who 
 had come to make repayment on the very easy terms that 
 the Loan Company had recently been offering. The visitor 
 was not on the conspirators' list lately something depleted 
 by fearful individuals who had accepted Mr. Smith's tempt- 
 ing offers of settlement but the news soon ran through the 
 town. 
 
 Smith had gone, but no one was interested in following 
 him. He had left many debtors in Medborough, but not a 
 single creditor. . . . 
 
 Five years later Dickie saw him in a first-class carriage 
 and he was wearing an overcoat lined with undeniable 
 sable. He had no air of having been crushed by his ex- 
 pulsion from Medborough. 
 
X 
 
 THE GOD OUT OF MAYFAIR 
 
 T? DWARD was married after a two years' engagement ; 
 -L^ and the affair did something to invade the peace of 
 Halton by bringing four visiting relatives to the Rectory. 
 
 The family was fairly well represented. Canon Lynne- 
 ker, then in his 79th year, was too old to leave home, but 
 the two Culver cousins, Grace and Diana, came "the 
 girls," as the Rector always called them, although Grace 
 was nearly forty and Diana not more than four or five 
 years younger. Aunt Mary, the widow of "poor Dick," 
 also stayed in the house; and Martyn, the son of the 
 stipendiary, and now the head of the family, was accom- 
 modated with a bed in the Rector's dressing-room. 
 
 Of these four relations, Martyn was the only one who 
 held any particular interest for Dickie. He knew the 
 Culver girls better than any of his cousins, and had stayed 
 at Culver for a week of his last summer's holiday. He 
 liked Aunt Mary, although she was apt to be an embarrass- 
 ment. Her strong evangelical tendencies would not permit 
 her to neglect enquiry into the state of her nephew's be- 
 liefs; and just at that time Dickie felt that he could not 
 honestly face such an enquiry. But Martyn was almost 
 a stranger to the Halton family. 
 
 He was apparently an exception from his generation. 
 He had inherited a small income from his father, had been 
 called to the Bar and had then married the only daughter 
 of the late Sir Gregory Stroud. Miss Stroud was some ten 
 years older than Martyn, but she was possessed of a con- 
 
 174 
 
THE GOD OUT OP MAYFAIR 175 
 
 siderable private fortune. Martyn's profession could not 
 have been highly remunerative he appeared as a junior 
 now and again, but he counted as a success. He and his 
 wife were frequently mentioned in the Morning Post. They 
 were invited to important houses, and entertained modestly 
 at their own little place in Mayfair. And, incidentally, 
 Martyn kept the Lynneker pedigree and knew more about 
 the family than any other member of it. He was, indeed, 
 writing a monograph on the Lynnekers, and had recently 
 been staying with the Carronbridges in Scotland in order 
 to look up material in their records. 
 
 He gave himself no airs while he was staying at Halton ; 
 his four girl cousins, Mrs. Lynneker and Aunt Mary were 
 unanimous in their verdict upon him, expressed in the 
 single adjective "charming"; but in some way he made 
 them all appear a little provincial by contrast. He was so 
 well kept. He achieved a neat correctitude in every detail 
 of his dress and person without producing any effect of 
 spruceness. He certainly used no scent that could be 
 characterised, but a clean smell, like a faint country air, 
 diffused from him, as if he had just been using some par- 
 ticularly nice soap. And without the least hint of patronage 
 or snobbery, he seemed to include all these provincial rela- 
 tions of his in the high circle of his town acquaintance. He 
 spoke so naturally of his relations with the titular aris- 
 tocracy or the great figures of political life, that his hearers 
 received the impression that these important people were 
 the natural compeers of the Lynnekers. And yet the 
 contrast between Martyn and say Edward or Latimer could 
 not be forgotten. 
 
 It was impossible for the Rector to forget that his 
 nephew had influence, that he might, for example, "do 
 something for one of the boys." Mr. and Mrs. Lynneker 
 had visions of preferment for Edward; or, possibly, for 
 Latimer, now qualifying for his deacon's orders. They 
 had no thought for Dickie in this connexion. No one con- 
 sidered the necessity for influence in their regard of Dickie. 
 
176 THESE LYNNEKERS 
 
 Nevertheless it was Dickie who was singled out by the 
 admirable Martyn. 
 
 ii 
 
 At the enlarged and greatly reinforced supper table on 
 the evening of Martyn's arrival, he soon picked out his 
 younger cousin for particular notice. 
 
 "And Dick?" he asked. "What is cousin Dick doing, 
 now ?" He had a rich, well-modulated voice, and his enun- 
 ciation produced an effect of being a little cleaner and 
 sharper than that of his country relations. 
 
 "I'm in the City & County Bank at Medborough," Dickie 
 said, and looked at his cousin with frank curiosity. 
 
 Martyn nodded, as if he would weigh before finally ap- 
 proving that occupation. "Good Bank," he remarked. "Do 
 you like the work?" 
 
 "I shall stay there for a couple of years more," Dickie 
 said. "I've been there three already." 
 
 "And then?" Martyn appeared to be giving his whole 
 attention. He could not have displayed a greater interest 
 if he had been listening to some important statement made 
 to him privately by a Cabinet Minister. 
 
 "I haven't decided yet," Dickie replied. "There are a 
 lot of muddles I want to clear up first." 
 
 Martyn smiled, an encouraging, ingratiating smile. "What 
 kind of muddles, Dick?" he answered. 
 
 "Oh ! political and social and ethical, chiefly," Dickie ex- 
 plained, and transiently wondered why he had hesitated to 
 add religious. "I want to understand that sort of thing a 
 bit better, you know," he went on. "I didn't get the hang 
 of them at school." 
 
 The others had listened to this duologue with a slight 
 sense of strain. They were a little afraid that Dickie's 
 frankness might prejudice the high social standing to which 
 they had been so recently elevated by the sweet implications 
 of Martyn's conversation. 
 
THE GOD OUT OF MAYFAIR 177 
 
 "Dick is so tremendously thorough," put^ in the Rector 
 with a nervous laugh, and then Latimer with an obviously 
 ironical intention said, "He's the one bright hope of the 
 family, you know, Martyn." 
 
 Martyn's nod might have meant anything. "Do you 
 find much time for reading?" he asked Dickie. 
 
 "Oh ! every evening, and an hour or two before break- 
 fast," Dickie said, and then being engrossed in the thought 
 of his subject, he added, "and Sundays, of course." 
 
 His father and mother and Eleanor, the three people 
 who had a prescriptive right to be shocked, would probably 
 have conveniently overlooked that statement for the time 
 being, if Mrs. Richard Lynneker had not been present. They 
 all no doubt had had suspicions of Dickie's violation of the 
 Lord's Day, but his general behaviour was so good that they 
 had preferred not to ask him what he was reading, when 
 he took his books out on to the lawn or up to his bedroom 
 on Sunday afternoons. But Aunt Mary's presence forbade 
 any shirking of responsibility. 
 
 The Rector moved uneasily in his chair and his wife 
 blushed and looked compromisingly uncomfortable. "Not 
 on Sunday, Dickie?" Eleanor said, and she, too, blushed. 
 
 But before he could reply to that, Aunt Mary, quivering 
 a little, but very bright and determined, bravely took up the 
 examination. 
 
 She was a tiny woman with a sweet, kind face ; a modest, 
 gentle creature. But her religion was the most precious 
 thing in her life. In defence of that she was willing to suf- 
 fer the martyrdom of intruding into the secret thoughts of 
 a casual acquaintance, or of making herself conspicuous in 
 a large company. On occasions such as this she found the 
 "strength to bear witness," by offering one brief, silent 
 prayer before she spoke. 
 
 "You don't mean that you do any secular reading on Sun- 
 day, Dick?" she asked. She was willing to give him a 
 chance. He had, she thought, such a brave, honest face. 
 
 Dickie was possibly the least embarrassed person at the 
 table, with the doubtful exception of Adela, who, although 
 
178 THESE LYNNEKERS 
 
 she secretly applauded his courage, was uncomfortably 
 conscious that he was defending an attainted cause. He 
 had recognised for some time past that this struggle must 
 be fought, sooner or later. He had had no hesitation in 
 facing it on his own account, but he had decided that until 
 he was definitely questioned, he had no reason to give his 
 parents unnecessary pain. 
 
 "Yes, Aunt, I do," he said, quietly. "I don't see any rea- 
 son why I shouldn't." 
 
 " 'Thou shalt do no manner of work,' " his aunt quoted 
 with a gently reproving air of producing an authority that 
 must override all human reasons. 
 
 Dickie still hoped to confine the argument to the side issue 
 of Sabbatarianism. "Yes, I know," he said ; "but don't you 
 think it's a bit difficult to define 'work' in this connexion? 
 There can't be any hard and fast line. To a theological 
 student, for instance, my books might be a relaxation ; and 
 it would certainly be 'work' for me to have to read theology. 
 Anyway, I don't count reading sociology as work." 
 
 Aunt Mary was slightly confused by his dialectic. She 
 had all the simplicity of the fanatic. Her rules of life were 
 founded upon a particular exposition of the Biblical text, 
 and to attempt any other reading was in her phrase "dan- 
 gerous," savouring of delusion and heresy. 
 
 And, before she could reply, the Rector cleared his throat 
 and said with a half -supplicating frown, "St. Paul quite 
 distinctly makes that point, my dear Dick, when he says 
 'neither walking in your own ways, nor doing your own 
 pleasure/ " 
 
 Dickie could not place that passage in his mind, but he 
 did not question the accuracy of its application. He saw 
 himself being driven back to his fundamental defence, and 
 for that he was not prepared. He had already come to a 
 vague question of the theory of the divine inspiration of 
 the Bible, but he had put the problem on one side until he 
 could find time to give it full attention. In a way, he had 
 considered that problem as being unimportant. He had 
 
THE GOD OUT OF MAYFAIR 179 
 
 never suffered any of the religious fervours and emotions 
 that had occasionally shaken his brothers and sisters. 
 
 For a moment he wore his mother's expression of rather 
 stupid stubbornness. Indeed, he looked so like her for an 
 instant that he gave Martyn the chance he had been waiting 
 for. 
 
 "How like Aunt Catherine Dick looks, now and again," 
 he said genially. "And I should guess that he had something 
 of her determination. I distinctly remember her being very 
 firm at Dick's christening. Wasn't it Leopold Albert she 
 wanted for him ? And poor Uncle Richard even went off to 
 the church all prepared for Leopold Albert and nearly 
 dropped our friend here when he was told to baptise him by 
 the name of Richard Henry." He laughed pleasantly, and 
 concluded, "You strongly resented the little water you got, 
 Dick, old boy. I don't know what you would have said to 
 a font-full." 
 
 Every one, except Aunt Mary, cheered up at once. They 
 were all glad to avoid the unhappy topic that Dickie had so 
 stupidly opened. 
 
 "Great Scott, what a young ass you are," Latimer said 
 to him after supper, and Edward heartily concurred in the 
 description. 
 
 "What on earth's the good of starting a theory like that 
 before Aunt Mary?" 
 
 "Well, what do you think about reading those sort of 
 books on Sunday ?" Dickie asked. 
 
 "Rotten; like using bad grammar," retorted Latimer. 
 
 Dickie reflected. "Oh ! 'those sort,' " he remarked. 
 
 "Quite a bright little chap in some ways," commented 
 Edward. 
 
 Obviously, his brothers regarded his lack of tact as more 
 reprehensible than his attitude towards Sunday observances. 
 But Aunt Mary drew him into a corner of the drawing- 
 room later and asked him if he would not come and have 
 "a very serious talk" with her next morning. 
 
 These reactions were precisely those he could have an- 
 ticipated and he could place the others. His father would 
 
180 THESE LYNNEKERS 
 
 communicate his displeasure through his wife, who would 
 probably be a little pathetic in her appeal to Dickie's better 
 feelings. Eleanor would reprove him, as she would have 
 reproved a little boy in her Sunday school class. The Cul- 
 ver cousins would carefully avoid any further reference to 
 the subject. And Adela, he thought, might back him up. 
 
 But Adela went further than he expected. 
 
 She drew him aside, as they were all saying good-night 
 after prayers; she took him by the arm and pulled him 
 into the hall. 
 
 "I say, Dickie," she said in a whisper ; "don't you believe 
 in anything ? You know, in the Bible and all that?" 
 
 "I don't know," he told her honestly. "I haven't made up 
 my mind, yet. But don't say anything, old girl, to Eleanor, 
 or the mater or any one, will you?" 
 
 "Rather not," Adela said. She hesitated a moment, and 
 then whispered very urgently : "I'm not quite sure, either. 
 I'm glad you're not." 
 
 She fled away upstairs as if she were afraid of being 
 followed. 
 
 in 
 
 He reflected on Adela's confession as he sat with the 
 others on the front lawn after the women had gone up 
 to bed. That was another tradition of Halton; all the 
 women were sent upstairs at ten o'clock, and then the men 
 smoked, either in the dining-room or when, as now, the 
 weather was warm enough, on the front lawn. The Rector 
 never smoked a pipe in his wife's presence, although he 
 permitted himself a cigar when he drove her out from 
 Medborough. 
 
 The garden smelt very sweet that night, and Dickie, who 
 had refused one of Martyn's cigarettes, sat a little apart 
 from the smokers and inhaled the warm scent of the roses 
 that climbed all over the front of the house. He was con- 
 scious of a slight elation. He was glad to have had some 
 
THE GOD OUT OF MAYFAIR 181 
 
 confirmation, however hesitating, of his own doubts. He 
 had been alone, so far, in this particular speculation. He 
 knew too well the Rectory's attitude towards "atheists," to 
 expect any sympathy from his own people. And even 
 Bradshaw had been aggrieved when the subject had been, 
 tentatively, broached to him. 
 
 "Take my tip and leave that sort of thing alone, Lyn- 
 neker/' he had said. "What's good enough for the Bishop's 
 good enough for me, or for you, too." He had steadily 
 refused to listen to any argument. "There's an answer to 
 all these things," had been his defence ; "but I don't happen 
 to know it. It's no good talking to me. If you went and 
 argued it out with the Bishop, you'd get the worst of it in 
 no time." 
 
 Dickie had not been able to deny the probability, for Dr. 
 Stewart Browne, then Bishop of Medborough, was a dis- 
 tinguished historian. 
 
 Remembering this conversation now, he mused on the 
 absurdity of being influenced by his sister's opinion when 
 he had to set it against that of the author of the "History 
 of the Church Through the Dark Ages." He had read that 
 work and had greatly admired both the manner and ma- 
 terial of it. It was so convincingly full of sound scholar- 
 ship, and so singularly free from the least suspicion of sec- 
 tarianism. He saw that his pleasure in finding an ally in 
 Adela was purely emotional. 
 
 And from that he came to the amusing reflection that 
 Browne's Church History would have been regarded even by 
 Aunt Mary as an eminently suitable book for Sunday 
 reading. He felt that the illustration was too good to be 
 missed ; that he must put that point to Latimer and Edward. 
 
 He found that they were admiring the quality of Martyn's 
 cigarettes. 
 
 "You really can't get anything decent down here/' Ed- 
 ward was saying, and Latimer grunted a warm endorse- 
 ment. They spoke in low tones, unconsciously influenced, 
 perhaps, by the gracious calm of the night. 
 
 Martyn's soft, refined voice came out of the further 
 
182 THESE LYNNEKERS 
 
 gloom with the announcement that he bought his cigarettes 
 at a little shop just off .the Haymarket. "They import 
 nothing but Egyptians," he explained. "I must send you 
 some when I get back." 
 
 "Awfully good of you," Edward said, and went on to 
 tell of his failure to obtain just this quality of tobacco, 
 even at Cambridge. 
 
 Dickie waited for a more favourable opportunity, but 
 the subject of tobacco seemed likely to hold the conversa- 
 tion indefinitely. They presently came to the topic of 
 cigars, and the Rector joined in with a recondite criticism 
 of crops, a criticism to which Martyn responded with the 
 assured touch of an expert. 
 
 Dickie sighed and looked up at the stars. Discussions 
 about food or tobacco bored him unutterably. He had 
 given up hope of posing his illustration, when Martyn di- 
 rectly addressed him. 
 
 "Are you still there, Dick?" he asked. "You're very 
 quiet." 
 
 "Don't know one tobacco from another," grunted Dickie. 
 
 "Well, you don't smoke," commented Latimer in a slightly 
 aggrieved tone. 
 
 "Does it make you ill ?" Martyn asked. 
 
 "No ! I smoke sometimes," Dickie said. "Doesn't appeal 
 to me, that's all." 
 
 "I suppose you think it's waste of time," put in Edward 
 ironically. 
 
 "Suppose anything you jolly well like," returned Dickie. 
 "Here, I wanted to ask you, would you say that Browne's 
 'Dark Ages' was a book for Sunday reading?" 
 
 The Rector at the far end of the line mumbled some- 
 thing that Dickie could not catch. 
 
 "Oh ! well, of course, you young ass," snapped Latimer. 
 
 "I don't see why," Dickie replied eagerly. "It's as much 
 work or for 'my own pleasure,' as Conic Sections." 
 
 "Good Heavens, can't you understand the difference?" 
 broke out Edward peevishly. "It's the subject . . ." 
 
THE GOD OUT OF MAYFAIR 183 
 
 He stopped abruptly as if his impatience with such crass 
 stupidity had unexpectedly boiled over. 
 
 "Perhaps it's taken for granted that no one would ever 
 read a theological subject for his own pleasure," Dickie 
 suggested caustically. 
 
 The Rector stood up ; and 'the outline of his figure be- 
 came visible as a vague blackness against the dark of the 
 shrubbery across the drive. "Well, Martyn," he said, "don't 
 let me hurry you . . ." 
 
 "Latimer and I have to go down to 'The Wheatsheaf,' you 
 know, pater," Edward said. "I believe they shut at 
 eleven." 
 
 Dickie was the last of the five to enter the house. His 
 father's good-night was noticeably cold, and Latimer found 
 occasion to repeat, with a slight click of the tongue and a 
 lift of the head, his confirmed persuasion that his younger 
 brother was a "supreme idiot." 
 
 Up in his own little attic Dickie wondered what they 
 would have said if they had heard Adela's confession. Also 
 he wondered whether it was his duty to study the brands 
 of tobacco, as a necessary social accomplishment. 
 
 "It's the only kind of thing they're really interested in," 
 he reflected. . . . 
 
 He and his brothers annoyed each other; and on either 
 side the feeling of intolerance increased as they grew 
 older. He hardly ever met Edward or Latimer, now, with- 
 out starting some argument. If you could call it an argu- 
 ment. His brothers invariably fell back upon some assump- 
 tion of superior knowledge, as if they had received some 
 imprimatur conferred by the privileges of their education 
 and calling. They contemptuously dismissed him as "a 
 young ass," and asked him if he "couldn't see. . . ." And 
 yet, they sometimes gave him the feeling that they were 
 afraid of him. It seemed as if he threatened them he 
 could not say how but they appeared, he thought, more 
 and more anxious to shut him up before he had had time 
 to explain himself. If he had not been a mere bank-clerk, 
 he might have suspected that they were jealous of him. 
 
184 THESE LYNNEKERS 
 
 He wanted to understand that attitude of theirs just as 
 he wanted to understand the ethic of his interference in 
 the affairs of George Smith. . . . 
 
 It was very hot in that sloping attic of his. The Rectory 
 faced a trifle west of south, and even the good Collyweston 
 slates and sound old workmanship of the roof had been 
 unable to keep out the heat of the July sun. He looked 
 impatiently at his little iron bedstead. He had no desire to 
 sleep; he wanted to argue the whole theory of life with 
 some intelligent antagonist; some one who would sincerely 
 try to answer his questions and not put him off by implying 
 that he was too foolish to understand. 
 
 He thought with sudden longing of the river ; and decided 
 that he would go and have a swim. He believed he could 
 get out of the house without waking any one. . . . 
 
 And then on the half- landing of the stairs, he met his 
 father coming out of his dressing-room. 
 
 "What do you want, Dick?" he asked sharply. 
 
 "I was so hot, pater, and not a bit sleepy," Dickie said. 
 "I'm going down to the river to have a bathe." 
 
 "Absurd nonsense," his father returned. 
 
 Dickie had never yet failed as both his brothers had 
 often failed in a decent respect for either of his parents, 
 but to-night he felt that he could no longer endure these 
 cobwebs of restraint. 
 
 "Really, pater, it isn't anything of the sort," he said 
 quietly, but with much the authority of a parent speaking 
 to a child. "It's frightfully hot upstairs and I couldn't 
 possibly go to sleep. I know people don't usually go down 
 to bathe at eleven o'clock at night, but that's probably be- 
 cause they haven't got the energy. Well, I have ; that's all. 
 Don't you think it would be very silly of me to lie stewing 
 upstairs when I might be having a glorious swim?" He 
 was trying so hard to be calm and reasonable*. 
 
 The Rector looked up, half furtively, at this confident, 
 determined youth, taller than himself by four or five inches, 
 and physically capable of picking him up and carrying him 
 downstairs. But the furtiveness of his glance was due 
 
THE GOD OUT OF MAYFAIR 185 
 
 to an intellectual and moral intimidation; no question of 
 physical advantage could ever enter into the relations of 
 father and son. The Rector fully recognised that fact 
 and could have traded upon it. He had but to stand in his 
 son's way in order to maintain his authority. Dickie would 
 never have attempted to push past him, nor even have 
 threatened such a resort to force. Nevertheless the Rector 
 stepped aside, frowning, tacitly condemning his son's pro- 
 posed excursion and the method of his argument, and yet 
 unable to oppose the force of the boy's determination. 
 
 Dickie's resolution to have his own way in this affair 
 thrust aside the typical Lynneker weakness, with the sheer 
 strength of a primitive force. All the attitudes and devices 
 of manner that served to maintain an appearance of equi- 
 poise in the affairs of ordinary life must inevitably collapse 
 before the command of this unequivocating will to a single 
 object. 
 
 And Dickie made no attempt to apologise, to explain, to 
 surrender, for the sake of present approval, the advantage 
 he had won. He was not flushed with temper, nor con- 
 sciously proud of his achievement. He betrayed at that 
 moment no single sign of his Lynneker blood. 
 
 The Rector walked sulkily up to his own room, unaware 
 of the fact that Martyn, still fully dressed, had witnessed 
 the encounter from the top of the short flight of steps 
 leading up to his uncle's dressing-room. The old man's 
 anger was shot with a curious strain of resentment not 
 only against his son, but against the coming dominance of 
 the new generation. Edward and Latimer had often been 
 rude in moments of temper, but they had always charm- 
 ingly apologised later. They had never made him feel 
 that he was beaten and finally out of the race. They were 
 still his contemporaries, representative members of his own 
 family ancftn all essentials of his own period of thought. 
 
 He found his wife still awake. 
 
 "Dick has gone down to the river to bathe/' he announced 
 with the old fretful temper. 'Tm sure I don't know what 
 to do with that boy." 
 
186 THESE LYNNEKERS 
 
 Mrs. Lynneker sat up in bed, so great was her surprise. 
 She usually pretended to be sound asleep when her hus- 
 band came in. 
 
 "To bathe?" she echoed. 
 
 "Some absurd nonsense about being too hot in the attic," 
 the Rector explained. "You will have to speak to him very 
 seriously. I didn't at all like the tone of that discussion at 
 supper, and he began it again while we were on the lawn. 
 I wonder if Mary could do anything with him ?" 
 
 Mrs. Lynneker looked as if her house-accounts had been 
 excessive. Perhaps it was the tone of her husband's voice, 
 or it may have been her consistent misunderstanding of 
 him, but she always felt on occasions of this kind that it 
 was she who was being criticised. In her mind she was 
 defending herself against an inferred attack upon her up- 
 bringing of Dickie. Everything, virtually, had been left 
 to her and, now, she was to be blamed because her youngest 
 child had read secular literature on a Sunday, and amaz- 
 ingly chosen to bathe at midnight. . . . 
 
 Six months ago Dickie had brought his parents into a 
 closer relationship than they had known for many years; 
 but, now, all his work in that direction was undone. And 
 he, alone, of all their children had any real power over 
 them. 
 
 "I'll talk to Mary about him," Mrs. Lynneker conceded 
 grudgingly. 
 
 She and her husband said no more that night. . . . 
 
 "Did I hear you say you were going to bathe, Dick?" 
 asked Martyn, when the Rector had entered his own bed- 
 room. 
 
 Dickie had been standing at the bottom of the little flight 
 of stairs, waiting for his cousin to speak. 
 
 "Beastly hot up in the attic," he said. He felt unusually 
 strong and vigorous. He had a sudden desire to tackle this 
 interesting unknown cousin, to find out if he had any 
 theories of life. 
 
 "Care to come?" he asked. 
 
 Martyn smiled that intimate,, inviting smile of his. 
 
THE GOD OUT OF MAYFAIR 187 
 
 "If you could bear to wait while I found a pair of 
 shoes," he said. "You seem to have a habit of impetuosity, 
 cousin Dick." 
 
 "Oh! I'll wait. There's no hurry," Dickie returned. 
 "I'd like to talk to you about one or two things." 
 
 Martyn appeared faintly amused. "Quite, quite," he said ; 
 "I'll be with you directly." 
 
 IV 
 
 The moon in its third quarter was rising in the south- 
 east as they started, and in the windless warmth of the 
 night it seemed to glow with its own heat. Down in the 
 wide meadows by the river, the cattle were moving uneasily, 
 as if they, too, were unable to sleep. The darkness seemed 
 unnatural ; the gloom of an annular eclipse rather than that 
 of midnight. 
 
 And now that they were out, Dickie felt suddenly dis- 
 inclined to open the discussion he had so eagerly antici- 
 pated a few minutes earlier. He was intrigued by the 
 strange glamour of the night that seemed as if it could 
 disclose to him the mystery of all religion, the hidden 
 origins of all worship and ceremonial. The thought came 
 to him that through these dim, placid meadows he might 
 walk down into the far deeps of a past that existed still, 
 constant and unchangeable, challenging the fiction of time 
 invented by mankind. Those fundamental things remained, 
 the unmoving background of a human cycle of change that 
 was but a surface figuring of the eternal present. 
 
 And then the unfocussed phantasm of his imagination 
 flickered and spun itself into the shape of an unsatisfied 
 desire. It was no new form that was thus entrancingly 
 presented. It had intruded its seductions into his work at 
 the bank, and had come between him and his sociological 
 and ethical speculations on warm Sunday afternoons as 
 he sprawled on the Rectory lawn. But all his training had 
 taught him to thrust these visions from him, as the image 
 
188 THESE LYNNEKERS 
 
 of a thing obscene and impure that was the immediate 
 invention and temptation of the devil. He had been warned, 
 obliquely and obscurely, that by this way he might fall into 
 the horror of unclean living. And he had been strong in 
 self-control. He was no downcast, inhibited creature 
 trained into a habit of futile asceticism. He had natural 
 powers of determination that were the simple expression 
 of his inherent force of character. Nevertheless, in this 
 particular, he was confined by an old rule, he had never 
 faced truth. His disgust was a false, unnatural attitude 
 imposed from without. He might dismiss, with an angry 
 frown, the thoughts and sensations that had come to him 
 in sleep, but he had built up no permanent barrier between 
 him and the urgent temptations of love. For all his re- 
 straints, he was weak in this ; because his inhibitions were 
 artificial and not of his own expression. 
 
 He thrust the vision from him, now, with a faint spasm 
 of irritation. It seemed that it had interfered between 
 him and the glimpse of some enduring beauty. He broke 
 suddenly into speech, as the easiest means of escaping from 
 the implacable seduction of nature that had taken form 
 and walked with him through the night. 
 
 "What do you think about it all, cousin Martyn?" he 
 asked abruptly. 
 
 " 'All' having especial reference in this connexion to 
 Sunday reading?" returned Martyn. 
 
 Dickie decided to narrow the issue. "Let's take that 
 as an instance," he said. 
 
 They had passed the field bridge under the railway, and 
 Martyn was no longer hampered by a fastidious need to 
 pick his way. The wide pasturage under foot was visible 
 enough, now, in the light of the rising moon. 
 
 "I think our little cousin Richard is by way of being 
 rather too radical," he said with the intimation of a gesture 
 
THE GOD OUT OF MAYFAIR 189 
 
 that he might have used in court. "Not politically, but 
 generally. It's rather a waste of good time, you know, 
 Dick," he explained. "Certain broad questions have been 
 very equably settled by the experience of generations, and 
 you only handicap yourself by regauging the evidence with 
 altogether insufficient material. Speaking generally, you 
 understand." 
 
 "But in this case . . ." Dickie began. 
 
 "Don't be so impetuous, old boy/' Martyn interrupted 
 him ; "I am coming to your particular application. You see, 
 I don't think you have good enough reason to run counter 
 to the opinions of your own people in this case. Personally, 
 of course, I think those opinions er a little narrow, per- 
 haps. But you, for the present at least, have to abide by 
 them. You can never hope to change your family's atti- 
 tude; that's beyond the powers of the most youthful en- 
 thusiast. You must take that as irrevocably fixed. So, 
 really, don't you think it's rather for your own benefit to 
 conform, in outward appearance at least, so long as you're 
 living with people who regard the principles of Sabbatarian- 
 ism as a well, as a Divine ordinance?" 
 
 Dickie looked puzzled. He had already caught some 
 glimpse of the possible necessity for this semblance of con- 
 forming in relation to the larger question, but there he had 
 been willing to procrastinate because he had, as yet, no 
 clearness of mind. He believed that his parents' attitude 
 towards Sunday reading was demonstrably illogical and 
 unsound, even from their own premises. 
 
 "But, look here," he said, after a pause, "if you're sure 
 you're right . . ." 
 
 "We are all sure of that," laughed Martyn, pleasantly. 
 
 "Well, then, what about what Aunt Mary calls 'bearing 
 witness' ?" 
 
 "I rather think Aunt Mary does it, and advocates it, 
 for more disinterested reasons." 
 
 "Oh! yes, I know, she does," Dickie admitted. 
 
 "You see, old fellow," Martyn went on genially. "If 
 we were all to begin bearing witness, whenever we thought 
 
190 THESE LYNNEKERS 
 
 we had proved that our own convenience would be served 
 justly served, if you like by upholding our own opinions, 
 the world would be a horribly unpleasant place to live in. 
 One needn't press the adage about Rome and the Romans 
 too far, but there is an underlying truth in it. So often 
 it isn't expedient, for every one's sake, to set up our own 
 little private standard, and declare that we're going to 
 abide by it. It reminds one of those terrible people who 
 seem to go abroad merely in order to brag of being English. 
 It's so provincial, Dick; it's so parochial." 
 
 They had come to the river, to a place at which the 
 abundant growth of rushes, waterlily and floating weed 
 had left the bank clear for a few yards above deep water, 
 and the bank fell perpendicularly from six feet above the 
 stream. 
 
 "My diving pool," Dickie explained ; "only you can't get 
 out here. I swim round and come out at what they call 
 the bathing place." He went on without a pause as he 
 rapidly stripped himself. "There's an awful lot in what 
 you've just been saying, Martyn; and I haven't got any 
 answer ready for you yet. We'll discuss it going back, 
 shall we?" 
 
 "Quite," agreed Martyn. 
 
 He carefully felt the grass and having assured himself 
 that it was dry, sat down and took out his cigarette case. 
 The burnished gold of it flashed once in the moonlight, and 
 Dickie thought of the City & County and then of its 
 financial test of position. The word "expedience" was ring- 
 ing in his mind. All his commercial life was, in effect, ruled 
 by some version of this key to cor rectitude in the respectable 
 business of banking. "Expedient" was a favourite word of 
 Mr. Bell's, and Dickie had never criticised his use of it. 
 But out here, in the freedom of the night, the thought of 
 expedience and the flash of gold irked him with a dozen 
 reminders of all that stale dusty business of the handling 
 and calculation of money. 
 
 He stood quite still for a few moments, thinking pro- 
 foundly. He was stark naked, now, but he had the absolute 
 
THE GOD OUT OF MAYFAIR 191 
 
 modesty of the unashamed. The perfect unconsciousness 
 of his attitude revealed the fine chastity of his mind. It 
 was incredible that he could ever make a jest of the grosser 
 functions of his body. 
 
 For one instant, as he stood there, he seemed to be the 
 representative of some finer race still to come, the race 
 that shall have acquired a greater independence of mind, 
 that in their humour shall laugh over greater issues than 
 their own mechanical limitations. And five seconds later 
 he was a modern schoolboy, revelling and sporting in the 
 touch of the cool water; calling to his cousin that he "ought 
 to come in," that the river was "ripping" and "clinking"; 
 tossing his head and splashing and blowing like a porpoise. 
 
 Martyn had winced when Dickie plunged, but he need 
 not have feared a sprinkling. Dickie had gone into his pool 
 with the clean grace of an accomplished diver. Now, as 
 he listened to his cousin's boyish shouts of enjoyment, 
 Martyn was congratulating himself on the accomplishment 
 of a desired object. 
 
 His belief in the tradition of the Lynnekers and in the 
 advantages of family was the most real thing in his life. 
 He had always cherished the ambition of reinstating him- 
 self in the old family home, of rebuilding the house and 
 taking up again some semblance of the old state. But he 
 had soon realised his own limitations as a barrister. He had 
 manner, presence, even eloquence, but not that apprehensive 
 mental grasp which is essential to the successful lawyer. 
 The Lynneker vein of incapacity, the inability to maintain 
 attention for any protracted length of time was fatal to 
 him. No ease of manner or quickness of wit could com- 
 pensate for the fact that when he came into court, he had 
 not mastered his brief. The lawyers who had engaged 
 him as junior on some recommendation or another, soon 
 marked his weakness. They said it was a "pity"; that 
 he had many qualifications and might have done well if he 
 had not been so "damnably careless." He was not careless ; 
 at thirty he had been anxious and eager, but he suffered 
 from the awful Lynneker inertia. There were times when 
 
192 THESE LYNNEKERS 
 
 he could not by any effort of will concentrate his attention 
 on the dull details of a case. 
 
 His marriage had given him new hope, but his wife had 
 proved difficult. Her father's baronetcy, now held by her 
 cousin, was one of the oldest in England. From her 
 standpoint the Lynnekers were merely good yeoman stock, 
 and as she had no children, she intended the bulk of her 
 fortune to return to the Strouds. 
 
 And so, tentatively, for the last year or two, Martyn had 
 been toying with the fancy that he might play fairy-god- 
 father to one of his own people ; and he had looked round, 
 trying to discover among his younger cousins some sign 
 of aptitude or capacity that might be worth encourage- 
 ment. That preliminary survey had been a complete fail- 
 ure. He knew his own breed so well, and was peculiarly 
 quick to note the marks of his own inertia. He had had 
 one of the Culver boys staying with him for a month in 
 town that May, a desperate hope that had ended rather 
 disastrously in a liaison with one of the Mayfair house- 
 maids. 
 
 But, to-night, his sanguine temperament induced him to 
 believe that his object was attained; and as he watched the 
 boisterous Dickie revelling in his midnight bathe, Martyn 
 was, in thought, genially congratulating his uncle on having 
 introduced that strong plebeian strain of the tea-merchant 
 to qualify the poor Lynneker blood. Edward and Latimer 
 had missed the benefit ; but this gloriously radical young 
 dissenter, with his aptitude for figures, his robustness and 
 his beauty (Martyn had missed no detail of that handsome 
 head and firm strength of body, faintly mystified by the 
 failing moonlight), was an ideal hitherto beyond the ampli- 
 tude of his most inspired imaginings. 
 
 All this suggestion of nonconformity was but the ebul- 
 lience of youth, he thought ; a little instruction in the ways 
 of the world, a little experience under the influence of good 
 example, a little tactful management and these anarchic 
 symptoms would quickly be reduced. 
 
THE GOD OUT OF MAYFAIR 193 
 
 Dickie's head suddenly emerged in the middle of the 
 bathing-pool. 
 
 "I'll just swim down and come out, now," he announced 
 breathlessly. "Had a clinking bathe." 
 
 The black ripples that marked his passage down the river 
 were edged and inlaid with a delicate filigree of silver 
 moonlight. 
 
 They did not revert to their discussion on the way home. 
 Dickie was abounding with physical energy; he jumped 
 ditches for the sole reason of jumping back again; and 
 once he threw himself down and rolled exuberantly in the 
 grass. 
 
 "I feel awfully fit, to-night," was the only apology he 
 offered to his cousin. 
 
 Martyn smiled affectionately. He was glad to be left 
 alone with his mounting dreams. 
 
 A little tact, he thought, a little management, was all 
 that was required. 
 
 VI 
 
 He suffered a slight reaction the next morning. The 
 atmosphere of the breakfast table was a little chilly. Ed- 
 ward, Latimer and Adela had all been late for prayers. 
 This was a special occasion, and their excuses would have 
 been accepted by their father if the family had been alone, 
 but Aunt Mary's presence compromised him. Both he and 
 his wife were conscious of coming under criticism. They 
 were both very fond of their sister-in-law but her amaz- 
 ingly consistent piety rather shamed them at times. 
 
 And if she made no reference at breakfast to the defect 
 of earnestness implied in missing family worship, she was 
 ominously quiet, and made what might have been a preface 
 to the general attack by asking Dickie if he could come 
 and have a quiet talk with her that morning. 
 
 "I'm afraid not, Aunt," he said without a shadow of 
 hesitation. He looked very fresh and vigorous, and was 
 eating quite an astonishing breakfast, Martyn noticed. 
 
194 THESE LYNNEKERS 
 
 Aunt Mary looked up with a little flush of hurt sur- 
 prise. "I should very much like . . ." she began with the 
 hint of a quiver in her voice. 
 
 "But I'm just off to the Bank, you see, Aunt," Dickie 
 explained. 
 
 "Oh! I didn't know. I thought you would be sure to 
 have a holiday, to-day," she said. 
 
 Dickie smiled tolerantly. "I don't know why every one 
 seems to think I can take a day off whenever I like," he 
 remarked. "Mater and Edward suggested that I should 
 stay at home to-day. And as a matter of fact, Mr. Bell has 
 to go up to the head-office this morning, and Bradshaw and 
 I will be in charge, with two confounded juniors to look 
 after into the bargain. Been rather hard work since Cart- 
 wright was transferred, he was our head cashier, you 
 know, Aunt." 
 
 "I suppose you feel tremendously important," put in 
 Latimer. 
 
 Dickie leaned forward and looked at his brother, who 
 was sitting on the same side of the table. He was not 
 angry with Latimer. Those foolish sneers of his never hurt 
 Dickie; they were always too wide of the truth. But he 
 was peculiarly conscious of the web about him that morn- 
 ing. He had been up since a quarter to seven overhauling 
 his decadent bicycle, and as he had worked, he had been 
 harried by a feeling of restraint. The influence of the night, 
 and the strange sense of liberty it had brought, was still 
 strong about him; and now, the threat of this futile con- 
 versation that he must hold with Aunt Mary, had come 
 to symbolise all the petty hindrances that prevented the 
 free expression of his thought. He cared so much for his 
 family that he desired all the more eagerly to be per- 
 fectly frank with them. 
 
 "Why important, Latimer?" he asked, with a challenging 
 air. 
 
 Latimer flushed and kept his eyes averted as he muttered, 
 "Sounded as if you thought the Bank would smash if you 
 weren't there." He was always embarrassed by his broth- 
 
THE GOD OUT OF MAYFAIR 195 
 
 er's direct attack. He had preferred to avoid any direct 
 encounter ever since the historic fight in that dining-room 
 in which they were now sitting; but he thought he was 
 safe in the present company. 
 
 Dickie still leaned forward. "Well, can't you distin- 
 guish between sticking to your job and imagining it can't 
 get on without you ?" he asked. "Or is the idea of sticking 
 to any job beyond your conception?" 
 
 A perceptible shiver ran round the table. He had touched 
 them all, except Aunt Mary, who was not a Lynneker, 
 on their most sensitive side. Even Martyn looked thought- 
 ful and perplexed. They were offended, and every one 
 of them was prepared to deny strenuously that the implied 
 charge was true. But they broke into no clamour of ex- 
 postulation. Latimer mumbled something half audible 
 about "infernal bumptiousness"; the Rector looked osten- 
 sibly at his watch; Edward frowned in the very manner 
 of his father; and then one of the Culver girls began very 
 brightly to relate an adventure with "such a tremendous 
 moth," that had invaded their room last evening. 
 
 Without question, they were all relieved when Dickie 
 took his father's hint, and said that he was afraid he must 
 go. It was characteristic of him that in face of all that 
 implicit disapproval he would not forsake his point. 
 
 "I suppose you'd feel important, Latimer, if you were 
 ever in time for anything," was his parting shaft. 
 
 But Martyn, although he had been glad to be spared the 
 unpleasantness of a scene at the table, and although he 
 was beginning to realise that the proper training of Dickie 
 was not a work to be lightly undertaken, was nevertheless 
 very conscious of regret at Dickie's absence during the 
 day. Something went with him out of the air of the Rec- 
 tory. Latimer's assertions of Dickie's requirements in the 
 matter of kicking when he and Edward and Martyn were 
 out in the garden after breakfast, appeared as stupid, rather 
 boyish brag. Edward's man-of- the- world air, and his at- 
 tempts to revive last nightjs discussion of tobacco were 
 flat and boring. The Culver girls were so obvious, and 
 
196 THESE LYNNEKERS 
 
 Mrs. Richard Lynneker's piety an intrusive nuisance. It 
 was all so stale and familiar, so terrifyingly representative 
 of the do-nothing, charming Lynneker type. 
 
 Martyn, moving delicately and tactfully among his rela- 
 tions, found his thoughts continually dwelling with a sense 
 of expectation on Dickie's return from the Bank. In 
 Martyn's thoughts that day, Dickie rose to become Prime 
 Minister. 
 
 The ambition wore an air of sufficient plausibility. The 
 Bar was to be the gate of entry. Influence could be used ; 
 influence would be found easily enough to back such un- 
 doubted ability. In five or six years he could be tried at 
 some hopeless by-election. After that, a seat would be 
 found for him. And the moment was a happy one. Mar- 
 tyn knew that the impending election would return the 
 Salisbury ministry to power with a thumping majority. 
 The Liberals were no longer a party. Chamberlain and 
 Devonshire had come over to the right side. Rosebery 
 was at loggerheads with Harcourt ; and the country at large 
 was sick of Home Rule, and regarded Local Veto and 
 Welsh Disestablishment with no particular favour. The 
 Liberals had no men and no platform. Martyn was quite 
 confident as to the result of next week's general election. 
 
 VII 
 
 In the afternoon he expounded that subject to his uncle, 
 who listened with respect, was greatly comforted by his 
 brilliant nephew's assurance of victory, and only made one 
 reference to the scoundrelism of Gladstone. And then 
 Martyn, warmed by the obvious appreciation of his gifts, 
 and elated by the consciousness of power and the fervour 
 of his dreams, opened his proposition with regard to Dickie 
 already the plan had taken practical shape. He went so 
 far as to assert that Dickie had the brains of the family. 
 
 The Rector made but a single protest. When this 
 startling proposition was opened, he was "still suffering per- 
 
THE GOD OUT OF MAYFAIR 197 
 
 plexed qualms anent the increasing difficulty of "managing" 
 his youngest son. He was like a little child confronted by 
 some petty obstacle, and confusedly trying to overcome it 
 while a dozen other paths lay open to him. He had become 
 entangled in the intricacies of his own plans to set Dickie 
 right concerning the need for respect of the Church's teach- 
 ing. He had been conscious of an added strength in the 
 presence of Aunt Mary. The Rector and his wife had 
 confessed that they always "felt better" for her visits. She 
 was such a splendid example of "godly life." 
 
 And so, just at the opening of Martyn's proposition to 
 adopt Dickie, Mr. Lynneker frowned uneasily and pro- 
 tested that he did not know what to do with the boy, and 
 asserted that he was headstrong and self-opinionated. But 
 Martyn's enthusiasm and his confidence that these faults 
 were but the first indication of a strong personality, soon 
 diverted the Rector's imagination into another channel. 
 Before the probable glories of Dickie's career had been 
 half unfolded, his father was thrilling with a faith that 
 even outran his nephew's. The old dream of the Oakstone 
 prize-day returned with a new force, returned and took a 
 stronger, more definite shape. . . . 
 
 The tea-party in the drawing-room despatched Latimer, 
 at last, to see "what had become of your father and cousin 
 Martyn," as Mrs. Lynneker put it. She was in very good 
 spirits that day. She liked the company of the extra 
 visitors, she was always at her best among a large com- 
 pany, and she looked forward to the exciting ceremony 
 of the next afternoon. 
 
 The Rector's chair had been kept empty for him, but 
 he refused to take it when he came in, pressing Martyn 
 into it, and then announcing, without preface, that his 
 nephew had something to tell them. 
 
 Edward looked self-conscious and modestly busied him- 
 self with an empty tea-cup. In the circumstances he could 
 feel no doubt that the announcement concerned himself; 
 and Martyn certainly seemed to know the right people. 
 
198 THESE LYNNEKERS 
 
 For one ecstatic moment the vision of a future bishopric 
 danced before Edward's eyes. 
 
 "Oh! it's nothing, nothing," Martyn said with his in- 
 gratiating, aristocratic smile. "Uncle Henry and I have 
 been discussing Dick's future, that's all. You see, Aunt, 
 I have as great a faith in Dick's possibilities as you have, 
 yourself." 
 
 "Martyn has most generously offered to pay all Dick's 
 expenses and train him for the Bar, under his own aegis," 
 put in the Rector. 
 
 "With the idea of putting him forward, later, as a candi- 
 date for Parliament," added Martyn casually. 
 
 One of the Culver girls was heard to whisper that Martyn 
 was such "a capital person." 
 
 Edward came forward with the remark that "it would 
 be a magnificent chance for Dickie." He wanted to make 
 it quite clear, at once, that he had never imagined it pos- 
 sible that Martyn could do anything for him. And Latimer 
 had no choice save to display his generosity and his ready 
 forgiveness of the breakfast-table incident by admitting 
 that Dickie had "certainly got a lot in him." (Even when 
 they were alone, together, later, Edward and Latimer were 
 at immense pains to disguise their chagrin from each other.) 
 
 Mrs. Lynneker beamed her gratitude. "You're the deus 
 ex machina, Martyn," she said. "Doesn't that mean the 
 god out of Mayfair?" 
 
 "Can you see Dickie in a wig and gown?" asked Adela 
 of the company in general, and Diana, the youngest Culver 
 girl, who had the reputation of a mimic, was suddenly in- 
 spired to "do" her cousin. She had caught one or two of 
 his gestures and produced a very fair imitation of his 
 voice. 
 
 Aunt Mary, after she had entered the hesitating sugges- 
 tion that London was full of temptations for the young, 
 seemed pleased that her nephew should have such wide 
 opportunity to develop his powers. 
 
 Without doubt, they all believed in him. Even Edward 
 and Latimer had faith in his ability. They felt it to be 
 
THE GOD OUT OF MAYFAIR 199 
 
 their duty to criticise the form his ability had taken, it 
 was uncharacteristic, it did not conform to their natural 
 tastes or to the traditions of the family, but, however 
 grudging their admiration, and they were excusably biassed 
 by the reflection cast upon their own competence, they 
 recognised the virtue of just those qualities which they 
 themselves lacked. In small ways they had secretly at- 
 tempted to imitate him. 
 
 The whole party sat so long over tea discussing Dickie's 
 future, that they were still in the drawing-room when he 
 returned from the Bank. 
 
 VIII 
 
 Diana had the happy impulse to stand up and bow to him 
 as he came into the room. His mother instantly accepted 
 the cue and followed suit ; and then all the others, even his 
 father and Aunt Mary, rose and faced the hero of the occa- 
 sion. They were in a mood to chaff him; a little self-con- 
 scious of the inherent weakness in themselves that made 
 them build such high hopes on his power to bring honour 
 to the family. 
 
 Dickie stopped in the doorway and looked back at them 
 with a tolerant smile. 
 
 "I haven't got the joke, yet," he said. 
 
 "We're doing honour to the future Prime Minister," his 
 mother announced. 
 
 "The hope of the family," Aunt Mary added, in her clear, 
 sweet voice. 
 
 "I hadn't heard of it, you know," Dickie said. "I sup- 
 pose there isn't any tea going? It's frightfully hot." 
 
 Martyn stood with his arm on the mantelpiece, quietly 
 conscious of the fact that he was the god from May fair 
 who had wrought all this happiness and excitement. 
 
 Dickie learnt the story of his promotion piecemeal as 
 he drank his cold tea. He rose to the ministry by Adela's 
 suggestion through the chancellorship of the Exchequer 
 because he was "so good at counting money." 
 
200 THESE LYNNEKERS 
 
 He made no reply to the battery of chaff that lit up the 
 background of his father's half-humorous recountal of 
 "Martyn's generous offer"; but once or twice he looked 
 up questioningly at his cousin, who nodded intimately as 
 if to say that they two would discuss the true inwardness 
 of this, later. 
 
 "It's most tremendously good of you, cousin Martyn," 
 Dickie said, at last, when it was evident that all the essen- 
 tials of the Grand Announcement Adela's phrase had 
 been told. 
 
 "You're putting the shoe on the wrong foot, Dick," re- 
 turned Martyn gracefully. "I'm looking to you to do some- 
 thing for the family. We want some one to represent us." 
 
 "Aren't you going to bow ?" interpolated Edward. 
 
 Dickie blushed uncomfortably. He was embarrassed by 
 all these compliments, whether they came direct as from 
 Martyn, or were couched in the half-ironical manner of his 
 own people. He was by no means sure, as yet, if he wanted 
 to accept the offer that had been made to him. There were 
 so many problems to be settled ; and if he were to read 
 for the Bar he would have, he thought, no time for other 
 issues. And he would no longer be free. He would owe 
 everything to his cousin. It would be his duty to follow 
 Martyn's direction, and already Dickie knew that that would 
 conflict with his own ideal of conduct. Expedience! He 
 would always be confronted with that oily word, expedience. 
 
 He got to his feet and bowed clumsily to Martyn. "I say, 
 you won't mind if I think this over a bit, will you?" he 
 asked. 
 
 "Oh! quite, quite," agreed Martyn readily. "And we 
 must discuss it with each other." 
 
 "Oh, rather ! Thanks," Dickie said awkwardly, and then, 
 "Isn't it getting awfully late, mater?'' 
 
 "What an extraordinary chap you are," commented Ed- 
 ward. 
 
 A chill had come over them. They could not help feel- 
 ing that they had in some way been reproved for their 
 enthusiasm. It had never occurred to any of them that 
 
THE GOD OUT OF MAYFAIR 201 
 
 such a plan as this could require to be "thought over." 
 It was the obvious, romantic introduction to fame ; naturally 
 they had accepted Martyn's offer with enthusiasm and made 
 an occasion of it. Now they felt a little like children, called 
 to order in the middle of a romping, noisy game. And they 
 excused themselves and their resentment by finding fault 
 with Dickie. Edward had summed up the general feeling 
 when he declared that his brother was an extraordinary 
 chap. He was, indeed, not "ordinary" by Lynneker stand- 
 ards; and for these ten people in the rectory drawing- 
 room any other standard was a thing suspect, savouring 
 of radicalism. 
 
 IX 
 
 Even Martyn, who could not count himself among the 
 rebuked, was slightly depressed. He had anticipated dif- 
 ficulties in the progress of Dickie's social education; but 
 not an initial obstacle to be overcome. 
 
 He hesitated on the verge of an excuse when Dickie 
 proposed that they should go out into the garden after 
 supper. "There are one or two things I should like to 
 ask you," Dickie said. 
 
 Edward, the only other person in the dining-room at that 
 moment, was provoked to remonstrate. 
 
 "You don't seem to realise," he said, getting very red, 
 and indignant, "that cousin Martyn has made you an ex- 
 traordinarily generous offer. I suppose it doesn't strike 
 you that you might be decently grateful, and leave him to 
 ask the questions." And then he got so hot over his ina- 
 bility to express his condemnation that he descended to 
 something approaching vituperation. "Is it that you haven't 
 got any sense of decency ?" he asked. "Or do you get your 
 manners from those cads in the Bank?" 
 
 Dickie looked at his brother with restrained contempt. 
 He was growing tired of these Lynneker rules of life, these 
 conventions of what they called decency. 
 
202 THESE LYNNEKERS 
 
 "Oh ! good Lord !" he said, "this is my affair, not yours, 
 and I'm going to consider it in my own way. I can't help 
 it if it isn't your way. If you don't like it, go upstairs and 
 wash as you do after you've been visiting your parishioners. 
 But don't talk all this rot about decency to me; I'm sick 
 of it." 
 
 Edward's flush did not subside, but he could not meet 
 his brother's quiet, unshrinking stare. He looked down at 
 the table-cloth and began to fidget with the salt-cellar. 
 "You're so infernally . . ." he began, and then passion- 
 ately upset the salt-cellar and went out, slamming the door 
 behind him. 
 
 He had done as much as any Lynneker could, in the face 
 of great opposition. The utter abandonment implied by 
 his spilling of the salt must surely show that he was in- 
 tensely in earnest. But until the threat of his violence 
 had had time to produce an apology, he meant to keep his 
 temper at white heat. He could not face the company in 
 the drawing-room, and had reached the first floor before 
 he realised that there was no bedroom in which he could 
 take refuge. And presently, when he had stood gloomily 
 staring out of the landing window for nearly twenty min- 
 utes, he came agreeably to the decision that, after all, 
 Dickie's rudeness was not worth all this trouble and fuss. 
 
 As he returned to the society of his family, he deter- 
 mined to be very polite and distant with his younger brother 
 in future. He found consolation in the thought that he 
 was to be married next day. Helen would necessarily take 
 his part after to-morrow ; and he would have more authority. 
 They would ask Dickie to stay with them and set him an 
 example of good manners. . . . 
 
 And Dickie had forgotten the scene before Edward had 
 been gone two minutes. 
 
 "You see, Martyn," he began, "I do feel that your offer's 
 so tremendously important. Perhaps Edward is right; I 
 expect I'm a bit rude sometimes; but I take these things 
 more seriously than they do." 
 
 Martyn had turned his back on the two brothers and 
 
THE GOD OUT OF MAYFAIR 203 
 
 walked over to the window while the quarrel was in 
 progress. He came back into the room, now, and smiled, a 
 little abstractedly, at his cousin. "Oh ! yes, quite," he 
 said. 
 
 "Shall we go into the garden?" Dickie continued, with 
 a glance at the supper table. "I expect they want to 
 clear away." 
 
 Martyn nodded, as if he were thinking of something, 
 else. He often used an appearance of absent-mindedness 
 as a defence against direct attack. 
 
 He wore that look, still, as he listened to Dickie's case 
 in the twilit garden; and his replies were largely confined 
 to his agreeable "Quite," or to *a nod of the head that 
 seemed to admit his ability to appreciate the point of view 
 presented, while he held some difficult objection per- 
 manently in reserve. His manner was a criticism of his 
 cousin's case ; it implied an exquisitely polite tolerance of the 
 other's immaturity. 
 
 "You see," Dickie said, "I haven't at all made up my 
 mind yet about politics. I admit I haven't had much experi- 
 ence ; but two years and a half ago when there was all that 
 fuss about Home Rule, I heard speakers on both sides, and 
 it didn't seem to me that either of them played the game. 
 They weren't a bit honest, Martyn. Their arguments all 
 seemed to me so jolly low down. They were just trying to 
 make people wild with the other side; they never, really, 
 put the case for Home Rule at all ; either of 'em." 
 
 And then after the attentive punctuation of Martyn's 
 reserved nod, he went on, "And I couldn't do that, you 
 know. Of course, I don't know that I could speak at all 
 from a platform I should be blue with funk, I expect 
 but if I could, I should have to say what I felt about the 
 thing. I couldn't put up any kind of rot just to make people 
 think that the other party were a deadly set of blighters, 
 who couldn't be trusted." 
 
 Martyn's "Quite" seemed to indicate some agreement 
 with that opinion ; but somewhere behind it lurked the sug- 
 
204, THESE LYNNEKERS 
 
 gestion of that expediency, which Dickie was beginning 
 seriously to suspect. 
 
 "Is it always necessary, Martyn, to pretend something you 
 don't feel, in politics and society ?" he asked. 
 
 Martyn roused himself a little, to deal with that. 
 
 "You don't believe in tact or diplomacy in any walk of 
 life, eh, Dick?" he commented with genial condescension. 
 
 "I don't know. I suppose I do," replied Dickie. "They 
 all say I'm an awful blunderer. I think I've got rather too 
 fed up with a certain kind of tact. It's so jolly like letting 
 things slide." 
 
 "That wouldn't be the kind of tact you would be expected 
 to exercise in politics and society," remarked Martyn. 
 
 "No. I can see that," remarked Dickie. "But what about 
 being absolutely dishonest? Is there any real difference 
 between concealing a truth, and telling a lie outright ?" 
 
 "Certainly, I should say," Martyn said. 
 
 "Even if what you're after is just to deceive people?" 
 
 "You are so horribly fundamental, Dick," Martyn said 
 with a rather whimsical tolerance. "Believe me, even in 
 ethics there are more than two categories. I quite under- 
 stand that you would never consent to be a 'trimmer/ but 
 surely, you might make a few concessions to the common 
 acceptances of nineteenth century manners." 
 
 Dickie impatiently ruffled his hair. He could see dimly 
 some vision of an honest attitude that was neither self- 
 assertive nor rude, but whenever he tried to focus his sight 
 of it, it began to take on some air of his family's weak- 
 ness. He could not realise how hopelessly he was still 
 prejudiced by his reaction to one, very limited, set of quali- 
 ties and opinions. 
 
 "But there's too much damned 'expedience' about it," 
 he broke out intolerantly. "It's all done to push oneself 
 and get a position. That's all right, no doubt, but what I 
 want chiefly to do is to to find out about things. I I want 
 to know what's at the bottom of things." 
 
 "Oh ! quite," agreed Martyn. 
 
 Honesty was an admirable quality, he reflected; but it 
 
THE GOD OUT OF MAYFAIR 205 
 
 might be overdone. Carried to an extreme, honesty was 
 nothing but stupidity. 
 
 Martyn was afraid that, after all, his young cousin was, 
 in some ways, rather stupid. It would be a colossal task 
 to educate him in the ways of the world. 
 
 "Shall we talk it over again to-morrow?" he asked. "I 
 don't know whether it was our midnight excursion, Dick, 
 but I'm feeling a little tired to-night." 
 
 But when they joined the family in the drawing-room, 
 neither Martyn nor Dickie suggested the possibility that 
 the scheme might fall through. Martyn, indeed, referred 
 to it as to a fait accompli, although no longer with the same 
 enthusiasm. His manner was a trifle absent-minded and 
 tired that night; he was very silent when the men of the 
 party were smoking on the lawn after prayers, and went 
 to bed early, with the smiling excuse that he wanted to be 
 in his best form for the great function to-morrow. 
 
 Edward, too, was very quiet that evening. He had had 
 time to consider his quarrel with Dickie ; and now, out here 
 under the stars, filled with the noblest thoughts and resolu- 
 tions concerning the great change that was coming over his 
 life, he was determined to set his house in order, as he put 
 it, so that he might go to bed with a clear conscience, and 
 be able to enter the holy state of matrimony free from all 
 offence. He had been mentally studying the familiar mar- 
 riage service with new inspiration during the last half-hour, 
 and had found it full of material for solemn resolutions. 
 
 And when he and his father and brothers were alone, he 
 pushed his chair nearer to Dickie's and said, with a confused 
 blush, that was covered by the darkness, "Care to take a 
 stroll?" 
 
 Dickie had been deep in the intricacies of a problem 
 that sought to reconcile ethics and current manners, and he 
 started and asked absently, 
 
206 THESE LYNNEKERS 
 
 "Where to?" 
 
 "Just up and down the lawn," Edward said on a note 
 of faint reproof. It was incredible to him that his brother 
 could be considering any subject other than their recent 
 quarrel. 
 
 "All serene," agreed Dickie. He remembered, now, that 
 he was in for one of the usual scenes of reconciliation; 
 scenes that bored and irritated him by what he regarded 
 as their futility. But to-night was an exception. Even 
 Dickie was prepared to give Edward a little special con- 
 sideration on the night before his marriage. 
 
 Edward took his . brother's arm as soon as they were 
 on their feet, and immediately plunged. 
 
 "Sorry, old chap," he said. "I'm afraid I rather lost my 
 temper." 
 
 The proper response to this generous admission was an 
 instant disclaimer and a personal assumption of all blame; 
 from that one could go on, without overt sentiment, to a 
 warm feeling of brotherhood. Dickie failed, as usual, to 
 say the right thing. 
 
 "Oh! I'd forgotten all about it," he said casually. 
 
 His intention was to pass over the absurd incident as 
 quickly as possible, but Edward inferred an obstinate 
 grievance. 
 
 "Well, I'm sorry," he said, with a little stiffening of 
 manner. "I can't say more than that." And then, with 
 a more elder-brother air, he went on, "We do try to make 
 all allowance for you, Dick, but I suppose you don't 
 realise it you are rather annoying at times." 
 
 "I daresay," Dickie agreed carelessly. 
 
 "I do think, you know," Edward continued gently, "that 
 you might have shown a little more enthusiasm over Mar- 
 tyn's offer." 
 
 "But I don't feel enthusiastic," submitted Dickie. 
 
 "What an extraordinary chap you are!" commented Ed- 
 ward, and returned to his point with the suggestion that in 
 a case like that one might at all events make a show of 
 gratitude. 
 
THE GOD OUT OF MAYFAIR 207 
 
 "I don't know," Dickie replied solemnly he was right in 
 the thick of his problem, here ; "I'm not at all sure of that, 
 yet. It seems to me that all that pretended gratitude would 
 have been rather dishonest. What it would have come to 
 was that I should have been trying to flatter Martyn and 
 keep a hold on the offer until I'd made up my mind whether 
 I'd accept it or not." 
 
 Edward was growing impatient. He hated these ignorant 
 criticisms of established things. He had no argument to 
 meet such attacks. Argument on such subjects was mani- 
 festly absurd. These things were so, and if a young fool 
 like Dickie couldn't jolly well see it for himself, he ought 
 to be jolly well kicked. 
 
 "Oh! rot," he commented tersely. 
 
 "You say it's rot, but you won't say why," Dickie re- 
 turned. 
 
 "It's so obvious," Edward said. 
 
 "Well, tell me why a lot of blarney I didn't mean would 
 have been a better way of treating Martyn than being per- 
 fectly frank with him." 
 
 Edward snorted. "It isn't a question of blarney," he 
 said, trying to curb his impatience by a resolute thought of 
 his coming marriage. "But what riles me is that when a 
 generous offer is made you, a confoundedly generous offer, 
 you turn up your nose at it and say you'd like to think it 
 over . . . and cross-examine Martyn on it ... and gen- 
 erally behave as if you'd been rottenly insulted." 
 
 "What utter bosh !" laughed Dickie. "I thanked him in 
 the drawing-room." He paused for a moment but before 
 his brother could find the necessary exaggeration to stigma- 
 tise the manner of that thanksgiving, he went on: "No, 
 it comes to this; really it does; we are all so infernally 
 anxious to please the person we're talking to. We're 
 smarmy, in a polite sort of way. I've seen it with all of 
 us, when we've been talking to Martyn. It isn't that we 
 want to get anything out of him, but we want him to think 
 what nice people we are; and that's the easiest way to do 
 it, we always take the easiest way. If Martyn had of- 
 
208 THESE LYNNEKERS 
 
 fered you a perfectly rotten job, you'd probably have ac- 
 cepted it just to please him at the moment. We're awfully 
 condescending to the servants as long as they don't take 
 any liberties; and to the parishioners and everybody. It's 
 not only that it isn't, in one way, honest; it's so beastly 
 flabby. We're always afraid of any unpleasantness, we're 
 afraid of being criticised. I know what it is, we're afraid 
 of losing our good opinion of ourselves." 
 
 He was so carried away by the sense he had of being 
 definitely on the right track at last, that he stopped with 
 an absurd idea that his brother must, now, agree with 
 him. 
 
 But long before the tirade was finished, Edward had 
 dismissed it as futile, so futile, indeed, that he could keep 
 his temper in face of it and reply without heat. Neverthe- 
 less, he felt the necessity for sting in his reply. 
 
 "What it all comes to," he remarked, "is, that for some 
 incomprehensible reason, you don't seem to realise the 
 necessity for politeness." 
 
 "Not for politeness before any other possible considera 
 tion," amended Dickie. 
 
 That was his last shot. He had realised that he was 
 speaking to an audience that could not understand him. 
 And with the realisation came the thought that in society 
 and politics, his audiences also would not understand him. 
 He would be expected to conform to their habit of thought. 
 He would have to appeal to them through their prejudices, 
 as those local politicians had done. Martyn had told him 
 that he was "horribly fundamental," and obviously that was 
 a fault and a handicap. He ought to be content to accept 
 the tradition and go on from that, build higher on the 
 present edifice. And he would have done that, he told 
 himself, if it had not been for the fact that whenever he 
 had examined the old building he had found it faulty, 
 even rotten. He was probably a blunderer and far too 
 radical, but he was made that way, and he must go on 
 with his examination of fundamentals, difficult as it was. 
 There was that perplexing, perpetually confronting prob- 
 
THE GOD OUT OF MAYFAIR 209 
 
 lem of religion, for instance, which was made responsible 
 for so much authority. Adela, too, had doubts; he must 
 talk to Adela. 
 
 "That is obviously absurd," was Edward's final answer 
 to his brother's commentary. 
 
 "Don't you see, old chap," he went on, more tolerantly, 
 "that it is absolutely essential to observe the convenances 
 of society? This bull-in-the-china-shop business of yours 
 doesn't do any good to yourself and upsets everybody else. 
 It's a waste of energy. If every one were to adopt your 
 methods, society couldn't go on. You remember what 
 Bishop Magee said: that if we all observed the principles 
 of the Sermon on the Mount, society couldn't exist for a 
 week. Of course, he didn't mean that we shouldn't all try 
 to observe them to the best of our ability ; but we are abso- 
 lutely bound to conform to a certain extent to to social 
 usages, you know. Can't you see that? Isn't it pretty 
 obvious, I mean?" 
 
 Dickie sighed. "To a certain extent, I suppose," he ad- 
 mitted. 
 
 He felt that he had crossed some boundary that day. 
 He was being driven into the necessity for a partial accep- 
 tance of standards that were accepted as universal by the 
 people he mixed with. Even Bradshaw accepted them. 
 Indeed, the only exception he could place was that of young 
 Geach, the photographer; and his was not an example that 
 Dickie wished to follow, although he had certainly admired 
 a characteristic boldness in his general attitude. 
 
 This problem of expedience, like all the others, was most 
 horribly complicated. There was, apparently, no straight, 
 simple path. Right and wrong were not absolutes, they 
 were merely relative. Had not Edward suggested that even 
 the Sermon on the Mount was relative, and he most cer- 
 tainly believed the religion he preached, with an unwavering 
 fidelity. . . . 
 
 Edward went to bed with a pleasant feeling of self- 
 congratulation. He had kept his temper and he had finally 
 had the best of the argument. 
 
210 THESE LYNNEKERS 
 
 He spent a long time on his knees that night, praying 
 for help to live a godly life and make his marriage a suc- 
 cess. He prayed with intense earnestness, and with utter 
 humiliation. Dickie might have thought that he was trying 
 to please God by showing how perfectly sincere and humble 
 he was. 
 
 Latimer, who shared his room at the inn, thought his 
 brother was never coming to bed. Latimer had a secret, 
 shameful opinion that Edward was a little overdoing it. 
 
 XI 
 
 Dickie went off to the Bank as usual next morning. He 
 had been offered a half-holiday by Mr. Bell, but had re- 
 fused it on the grounds that there would be nothing for 
 him to do at home. If he might leave at a quarter to twelve 
 for the day, it was a Thursday and he would be leaving 
 at two in any case, that would suit him quite well. 
 
 "Very good, Lynneker," Mr. Bell had said, and then had 
 looked at him almost affectionately and added, "I think 
 you'll break our record by becoming the youngest manager 
 in the service." 
 
 Dickie had not replied to that suggestion, but the thought 
 of it came back to him as he sat in the big nave of St. 
 Peter's, inattentively following the wedding service. He 
 ought to have been sitting with his family in the chancel, 
 but he had stayed to finish his books and had not arrived at 
 the church until after the ceremony had begun. 
 
 The thought of his possible future as an official, 
 probably, in time, a high official, of the City & County, 
 arose from his recognition of the degrees that separated 
 the congregation into three groups. His own family was 
 not included; the members of it were set apart for this 
 occasion; they were the entertainers without distinction of 
 class. The congregation proper began at the front of the 
 nave in line with the brass eagle of the lectern. 
 
 Those foremost, privileged seats were reserved for the 
 
THE GOD OUT OF MAYFAIR 
 
 real aristocracy of Medborough and the neighbourhood. 
 The Precincts were well represented. The Bishop's eldest 
 daughter was there, sitting next to the Dean and his sister, 
 backed up by quite an assemblage of minor dignitaries from 
 canons in residence down to rural archdeacons, country rec- 
 tors* and curates. It was not only Lynneker prestige that 
 brought this splendid crowd; many of its members were 
 certainly followers of Mr. Leake. Sir Frederic Hope, for 
 example, the Squire of Thrapley, whose absent-minded man- 
 ner was often satirically commented upon by the Rector of 
 Halton. 
 
 These first ranks, the elect of God and Society, were 
 separated from the common crowd by a red cord stretched 
 across the centre aisle. 
 
 Behind them came the smaller professions and the trades- 
 people; spotted by an occasional governess or upper ser- 
 vant. Between the middle classes and the final ruck stretched 
 one stern forbidding trench of empty seats. And it was in 
 one of these seats that Dickie had taken refuge despite the 
 urgently whispered protestations of a verger, who was proud 
 of his competent maintenance of this admirable arrange- 
 ment for marking distinctions. 
 
 "You ought to be up in the chancel, Mr. Lynneker," he 
 had insisted. "I can take you round by the vestry and 
 pop you in at the back." 
 
 Dickie had smiled and firmly shaken his head. 
 
 His place, he thought, was in this second division. If 
 he became a bank-manager, he would be the servant of 
 this and the upper class. They would be his customers; 
 it would be his duty to propitiate them ; to be discreet with- 
 out rudeness; to profess ignorance of the private affairs 
 of his depositors; to have a bright, general knowledge of 
 local politics while avoiding any idiosyncrasy in partisan- 
 ship; to have at command an automatic, but not too hack- 
 neyed, set of cliches concerning the crops and the weather. 
 . . . He would be a tradesman, wooing increased custom; 
 and his efficiency would be measured by his success in that 
 direction so long as he was the head of a provincial branch. 
 
THESE LYNNEKERS 
 
 ... By that and by his ability to gauge the solvency of 
 applicants for an overdraft. . . . He might come in time 
 to use that single measure of valuation in judging his 
 fellow townsmen; estimating the worth of every man by 
 the extent of his resources or credit. What other standard 
 could he use, after twenty years' communion with ledgers 
 and with the specie that gave a meaning to those inexhaust- 
 ible permutations of the ten ciphers? 
 
 Up there at the altar rails the same traffic was going on. 
 By concentrating his attention, he could distinguish the 
 low drone of the marriage service and catch an occasional 
 phrase. Edward and Helen were making a bargain before 
 witnesses ; and Edward's liability was the onus of support- 
 ing and cherishing his wife. He promised to endow her 
 with all his worldly goods. 
 
 And yet by the Bank's standard Edward was a very 
 small fish. Above the red cord, money was not the single 
 touchstone. Nevertheless it counted. Old Spentwater, the 
 timber-merchant, had found his way into the upper divi- 
 sion, although he had never attempted to master his H's. 
 Dickie had seen him whispering to Sir Frederic Hope, prob- 
 ably on a matter of business, Sir Frederic's eldest son 
 had been spending too much money and some of the fine 
 old Thrapley oaks were being sacrificed, but old Spent- 
 water's equality, in some respects, was surely acknowledged 
 by this intimate conversation during a religious ceremony. 
 No doubt Sir Frederic was not too absent-minded to recog- 
 nise the timber merchant when he met him in the streets 
 of Medborough. 
 
 Dickie found that his father was giving an address from 
 the altar rails. He tried to listen for a moment or two 
 and then allowed his thoughts to wander again. The Rector 
 was obviously greatly moved by the occasion. His strong 
 musical voice was wavering. He would stop directly to 
 recover his self-control. Dickie frowned and looked away. 
 He had seen his father overcome in this way in the Halton 
 pulpit, and the open display of emotion embarrassed and, 
 in some way, annoyed him. He knew that his mother, also, 
 
THE GOD OUT OF MAYFAIR 213 
 
 greatly disliked to see his father cry in the pulpit. It was 
 strange that a man who was so reserved and apparently 
 unemotional about his own more intimate affairs, should 
 be unable to restrain this evidence of weakness in 
 public. . . . 
 
 By an effort of attention Dickie returned to his musings 
 on class distinctions in relation to his own future. Only 
 one conclusion was quite clear to him : he was in a net 
 that bore a trademark on every strand. He was harassed 
 and bound and gagged with this delicate unbreakable stuff 
 that was everywhere stamped with the detestable brand of 
 "expediency." It had been woven by law and society and 
 by countless generations of his ancestors; and he could 
 never be free from it. ... 
 
 The organist was magnificently pumping out the hopping 
 jubilations of Mendelssohn's wedding-march. The bargain 
 had been made good before God, and now the parties had 
 also completed the civil contract in the vestry. 
 
 Dickie wondered if Helen were satisfied. It seemed to 
 him that she was giving altogether too much. Even if 
 Edward got the living of Thrapley as he probably would, 
 now, and a minor canonry, he wouldn't have more than 
 500 a year. Whereas when old Leake died, Helen and her 
 two sisters would have their father's big private fortune 
 to divide. Edward was no catch apart from the fact that 
 he was a Lynneker. For some inexplicable reason that 
 seemed to count. . . . 
 
 For an instant Dickie found himself thinking of another 
 aspect of Helen's bargain. Bradshaw, decent fellow as he 
 was in most ways, had made a disgustingly coarse allusion 
 that morning; and Dickie had snubbed him crushingly as 
 was the duty of a Lynneker and a public-school boy. But 
 now the thought returned to him without any suggestion 
 of vulgarity. He dismissed it only because it came within 
 that group of ideas which he had come to inhibit almost 
 automatically. . . . 
 
 He found Martyn when the crowd came out of the vestry, 
 and walked with him to the Vicarage. 
 
THESE LYNNEKERS 
 
 "I want to ask you, Martyn," Dickie began, as soon as 
 they were a little separated from the rest of the walking 
 procession the distance was so short that few carriages 
 had been provided u what do you gather was the origin of 
 this separation of the classes?" And he explained the 
 verger's classification. 
 
 Martyn shirked the issue with a whimsical smile. "The 
 lot behind the empty line of seats," he said, in a confidential 
 undertone, "have all got fleas, my dear old chap." 
 
 But later Dickie returned to that little evasive jest as 
 to some shadow of the analogy he was seeking. The red 
 cord was a mere pretext, marking an imaginary division; 
 but as things were, it was, indeed, necessary to defend 
 oneself by a gulf of empty pews against contact with the 
 lowest grades. 
 
 They had fleas. 
 
 Once or twice during the wedding breakfast, Dickie 
 furtively scratched himself. 
 
 XII 
 
 The speeches after the "breakfast" were reduced to a 
 minimum. Edward and Helen had to catch the 2.45 train 
 at the London & North-Western Station. They were going 
 to the Lakes for their honeymoon. Helen, indeed, dis- 
 appeared from the table before the speeches were finished. 
 
 When Dickie saw her again, she was wearing a close- 
 fitting grey coat and skirt. He had thought she looked pretty 
 in white satin, particularly in church when her contours 
 had been softened by the fall of her veil. Now, she looked a 
 little coarse, and extraordinarily solid. The bold curves 
 of her figure might have been modelled in wood. And, once, 
 in the hall, Dickie saw her put both hands to her waist 
 and make a movement as if she were twisting her body 
 within a tightly confining cage. He thought that that tweed 
 dress must be very hot on a July afternoon. . . . 
 
 Edward had borne himself with a kind of earnest dignity 
 
THE GOD OUT OF MAYFAIR 
 
 during the ceremony and the ordeal of the "breakfast." He 
 had caught, temporarily, something of Martyn's air of cool 
 self-assurance. But just at the last Dickie had a sight of 
 some feeling that his brother had, perhaps, concealed under 
 his assumption of gravity. 
 
 Helen was already seated in the brougham, and Edward 
 stood hesitating, alone for one moment, between her and 
 the group of their relations who were crowded upon the 
 half-dozen wide steps that led up to the vicarage front door. 
 
 His wife put out her hand to him and touched his arm 
 a little impatiently. 
 
 "Oh ! come along, Ted, we shall certainly miss that train," 
 she said, and her tone carried the suggestion of a com- 
 mand. 
 
 Dickie saw a flicker of irritation cross his brother's 
 face; saw him withdraw his arm from his wife's touch 
 with a compromised impatience that in some way mingled 
 apology with reproof. He was smiling again as he closed 
 the door of the brougham, but his attitude and expression 
 still seemed to convey a faint hint of reluctance. 
 
 Dickie wondered if Edward would have evaded that 
 marriage if he had not been tied by his devotion to ex- 
 pediency. What would come of it ? Contentment, a relative 
 success, the respect of just the group of people represented 
 by these wedding guests ; placidity among familiar interests ; 
 a sense of competence within the tiny circle of kindred 
 attainment any form of mild happiness ; but no new knowl- 
 edge, no struggle, no growth. 
 
 Would there be children? Quite absurdly, it seemed to 
 Dickie impossible that Edward should have children. . . . 
 
 It appeared that Martyn was not returning to the Rectory. 
 Dickie had left the house before the arrangement had been 
 made. Some unexpected call had summoned his cousin 
 to town, and he had brought his dressing case in with him 
 and left it at the Great Northern Station. 
 
 Dickie walked down with him to catch the 3.30. 
 
 "You must let me hear from you occasionally," Martyn 
 
216 THESE LYNNEKERS 
 
 said, as they went through the town. "That offer of mine 
 is still open, you know. Possibly next spring . . ." 
 
 "If I needn't make up my mind for a month or two," 
 Dickie submitted. 
 
 "Quite, quite; think it well over, by all means," Mar- 
 tyn agreed quickly. 
 
 "I'm tremendously grateful to you, you know," Dickie 
 went on. "I hope you won't think I've been frightfully 
 casual about it all. But it is an important thing to decide 
 about, isn't it? I mean that I should have to stick to it if 
 I took it on." 
 
 Martyn nodded thoughtfully. "Yes, I imagine you would 
 stick to anything you took up/' he said. 
 
 They had to run when they came to the station approach, 
 and Dickie rescued his cousin's bag from the cloak-room 
 while Martyn took his ticket. 
 
 Dickie's last sight of Martyn was of a gravely approving 
 smile seen through the window of a first-class smoking 
 carriage; a smile that seemed to express the spirit of a 
 well-mannered superficial agreement with any suggestion 
 that Dickie might care to offer. Even Martyn's smile said 
 "Quite." . . . 
 
 A faint air of exhaustion hung about the Rectory that 
 evening, and Mrs. Lynneker gave a voice to the general 
 spirit of reaction when, after supper, the arresting note of 
 the tenor bell gave notice that a peal was to be rung in 
 honour of Edward's marriage. 
 
 "Oh ! dear, we're not going to have those dreadful bells ?" 
 she expostulated. 
 
 Eleanor looked up with cold reproof. "For Edward !" 
 was her staid reminder of the eternal fitness of weddings 
 and chimes. 
 
 Her mother sighed and puckered her forehead. "They're 
 so so desolating," she explained, "and after every one is 
 gone . . ." 
 
 Aunt Mary, the one remaining visitor, smiled, and her 
 bright eyes twinkled as she said, "Rejoice with them that 
 do rejoice, Catherine. Think of Edward and Helen !" 
 
THE GOD OUT OF MAYFAIR 217 
 
 "Yes, they won't be able to hear the bells in Westmore- 
 land," returned Mrs. Lynneker whimsically, as if that alone 
 were sufficient to ensure the success of the honeymoon. 
 
 "Oh ! dear, I agree with mother," Adela said, getting to 
 her feet as the peal broke out. "I simply feel as if I couldn't 
 stand them to-night." 
 
 "What nonsense!" murmured Eleanor, calmly absorbed 
 in her sewing. 
 
 "All very well for you," retorted Adela. "You like 
 making yourself miserable." 
 
 "Do I?" commented Eleanor, quietly, as her sister left 
 the room. 
 
 Dickie got up and followed her. He had been waiting for 
 an opportunity to be alone with her. He wanted to hear 
 how she had come to share his doubts with regard to the 
 Divine institution of the English Church. 
 
 "Shall we go for a walk?" he asked, as he came up with 
 her in the hall. 
 
 "Oh! not to-night, Dickie," she said quickly. "I I 
 want to be alone." 
 
 "All serene," he agreed imperturbably. "But I should 
 like to have a talk with you sometime about what you said 
 the other night." 
 
 "Yes, of course, so should I," Adela returned. "Fright- 
 fully. But I'm not a bit in the mood, now. You don't think 
 me a pig, do you?" 
 
 "Great Scott, no," Dickie said. "I shall go up and read 
 a bit before prayers." 
 
 He came down at twenty to ten, and found that the 
 whole party was still waiting for Adela. 
 
 "She has no business to go out alone at this time of 
 night," the Rector was saying irritably. 
 
 "She can't have gone further than the garden," urged 
 Mrs. Lynneker. 
 
 They all turned to Dickie when he came in. "Do you 
 know where your sister is?" his father asked sharply. 
 
 "She went out, I think," Dickie said. "I've been up- 
 stairs, reading. Shall I go and find her?" 
 
218 THESE LYNNEKERS 
 
 "I wish you would," the Rector replied. 
 
 But as Dickie reached the hall, Adela came in at the front 
 door. Her face was flushed and she put up her hands and 
 pressed them to her cheeks. 
 
 "Goodness, Dickie, have they had prayers ?" she asked. 
 
 "They're waiting for you," he told her. "What on earth 
 have you been doing?" 
 
 "I've been up at the top of the garden," she said. "I 
 think I must have gone to sleep when the bells stopped. I 
 say, Dickie, do I look very awful?" 
 
 "A bit flushed," he admitted, "and you look as if you'd 
 been sitting on the grass. You're all over bits." 
 
 "I have," she said, and bent down and began eagerly 
 to shake and brush the little brown particles from her 
 skirt. 
 
 "I say, buck up," Dickie advised her. "The pater is fear- 
 fully ratty, now." 
 
 Dickie thought she carried it off very well when she came 
 into the drawing-room. "I've been asleep under the elm 
 at the top of the garden," she announced, "dreaming of 
 fairies. So sorry." 
 
 She had a new air of self-confidence, as if she did not 
 care, after all, what her father and mother and Eleanor 
 thought of her. 
 
 "How flushed you are !" was Eleanor's quiet comment. 
 
 The Rector seemed almost to have forgotten his irrita- 
 tion. 
 
 "Well, well, ring the bell, Latimer," he said. "I'm sure 
 every one must be very tired." 
 
XI 
 ADELA 
 
 DICKIE'S talk with Adela developed spontaneously the 
 following Sunday afternoon; after he had been "col- 
 lared," as he put it, by Aunt Mary and taken into the draw- 
 ing-room for a serious hour's conversation and Bible read- 
 ing, while the rest of the family were at Sunday-school. 
 
 He came out, restless and perplexed, to find Adela in a 
 deck-chair under the big apple-tree on the back lawn. He 
 went to her at once and sat down on the grass at her feet. 
 He was immensely relieved, just then, to find an oppor- 
 tunity for some expression of his own attitude. 
 
 "Look here, Adela," he began at once, "I must talk 
 this out with you. I've been with Aunt Mary for an hour, 
 and I feel like bursting. She's a jolly old sport in most 
 ways, and I like her awfully; but when you get up against 
 her religion she's like ... I don't know . . . she's like 
 that donkey we used to have when we were kids. Do you 
 remember it?" 
 
 Adela said she remembered it very well. "Mother used 
 to say it suffered from an idee fixe," she reminded him. 
 
 Dickie leaned back on the prop of his two hands and 
 stared up into the apple-tree. "M yes," he said. "It isn't, 
 perhaps, a very good example. There's a lot more than 
 that in this religious business." 
 
 Adela shut the bound volume of "The Quiver" that she 
 had been reading and folded her hands on it. "What do 
 you mean, exactly, Dick ?" she asked. "How much do you 
 believe?" 
 
 219 
 
220 THESE LYNNEKERS 
 
 "Don't know that I believe anything," Dickie said with 
 an air of starting free from prejudice. 
 
 "But you believe in God?" Adela returned with immense 
 emphasis on her principal word. 
 
 "Which one?" Dickie asked, casually. 
 
 "But there is only One," gasped Adela. 
 
 "Dozens," was Dickie's caustic reply. 
 
 "But . . ." 
 
 "Well, Allah, for example." 
 
 "Oh! I see what you mean," Adela's tone expressed re- 
 lief. "But that's only another Name." 
 
 "D'you think Aunt Mary would admit that?" asked 
 Dickie. "Or the pater, or the mater, or Edward, or any 
 of them ? If they believe that why are they always collect- 
 ing for the Church Missionary? No, it's no bally good, 
 Adela; they say that the Mohammedan god is all a fraud, 
 that he doesn't exist; and the Mohammedans say 
 the same thing about ours. There isn't any almighty cer- 
 tainty that we're right any more than that they are. It 
 just depends which god you're brought up on. It has 
 been so jolly well drummed into us from the cradle that 
 we take everything for granted. If you'd been brought 
 up by Mohammedans, you'd be dead certain that you hadn't 
 got a soul." 
 
 Adela frowned. "Well, then, what about the Bible?" she 
 asked. 
 
 "What about the Koran?" 
 
 "I don't know anything about that," Adela returned im- 
 patiently. "But surely the Bible's true"; she hesitated and 
 then gave away her own case by adding : "Most of it, any- 
 way." 
 
 "Some of it's true, in a sense," Dickie said. "The Old 
 Testament is a kind of garbled, romantic history of the 
 Hebrews, you know. And they weren't much to boast 
 about in the moral line, according to our ideas." He picked 
 up a small green apple from the grass and split it open 
 with his thumb nail. "Maggot," he remarked, and threw 
 the pieces away. Then he looked up at the intent, rather 
 
ADELA 
 
 frightened face of his sister and went on, "I've got a sort 
 of notion that the maggot in the Christian religion was 
 theology, Addles." 
 
 She could not grapple with that. In this thing she 
 was more fundamental than Dickie, himself. He had read, 
 discursively but intelligently, and had come past the facts 
 to the need for a more inclusive theory. 
 
 "But the New Testament ?" she said. 
 
 "There's an awful lot of fake in it," Dickie explained. 
 "The first of the gospels was probably St. Mark's, written 
 a long time after Christ died, of course, and there's sup- 
 posed to have been an earlier book called the Logia, made 
 up of Christ's sayings." He paused and decided to drop 
 that as too technical. "But the point is, you see, old girl," 
 he summarised, "that the Bible, all of it, is only a collec- 
 tion of men's writings, just like any other collection, in 
 some ways. There's a lot of good stuff in it, of course ; but 
 so there is in the Koran and the Vedas in fact, there's 
 an awful lot in Buddhism that's tremendously convincing," 
 he concluded, glancing a little wistfully at the promise of 
 that fascinating by-path. 
 
 Adela sat quite still and stared out through the reality 
 of the sunlit garden; trying to make a new picture of a 
 past that had never existed in the form she had always 
 imagined. She saw the story of the New Testament as 
 a series of steel engravings, and more particularly her at- 
 tention was focussed on the "Descent from the Cross," and 
 "Christ coming down from the Praetorium," framed copies 
 of which hung in the Rectory dining-room. 
 
 "But Christ must have lived," she said, and saw quite 
 distinctly the presentation of an effeminate Greek face with 
 a thin beard, crowned by a symmetrically wrought coronet 
 of thorn twigs. 
 
 "Quite probably," Dickie said. "Doesn't follow that he 
 was the Son of God, though." 
 
 "But, Dickie," Adela persisted; "where do you get all 
 this from?" 
 
 "Various sources," he told her. "I've got the run of the 
 
222 THESE LYNNEKERS 
 
 Cathedral Library, you know. They keep it up better than 
 you'd think, but hardly any one uses it, except for sermons. 
 And I've picked up a lot of books second-hand. There's 
 a chap called Ernest Renan, for instance. I've got four 
 of his books upstairs, they're in French, of course." 
 
 "Can you read French?" Adela asked, suddenly diverted 
 by the interest of this unexpected fact. 
 
 "Fairly well," Dickie admitted. "Bell told me that French 
 and German might be useful, and I've swatted at 'em 
 intermittently." 
 
 "But when do you get time to read all these things?" 
 Adela's note of wonder grew more pronounced. 
 
 "I always get a couple of hours before breakfast, you 
 know," Dickie said. "I've practically given up going down 
 to the river, this year, and I try to make up another three 
 hours at night. You can do a lot with five hours a day if 
 you stick to it." 
 
 "But don't you get very tired ?" 
 
 He shook his head. "Not a bit," he said. "I've won- 
 dered sometimes whether I can really count it as work; 
 it'll all so interesting. I want to go on all the time, you 
 see. It's often an effort to go to bed at twelve o'clock; only 
 I've got an idea that I shan't be fresh at the Bank next day, 
 if I don't." 
 
 "And you get up at six?" 
 
 "I always wake then," he said, as if that explained every- 
 thing. 
 
 Adela gave the problem her earnest attention for a mo- 
 ment before she confessed her heredity and training by 
 the announcement, "Of course, you'll break down if you 
 go on like that. Nobody could stand it." It was certainly 
 within her experience that no Lynneker could stand it. 
 
 "Well, I don't feel like it, at present," Dickie said, care- 
 lessly. "Sometimes at school, I used to think there was 
 something wrong with me. I used to forget everything 
 quite suddenly, in class. But I never get like that, now. It 
 seems to make such a difference being interested in things. 
 And I was an awful young ass when I was at Oakstone. I 
 
ADELA 
 
 didn't understand Latin and Greek particularly. They're 
 tremendously useful, really; but at school they seemed awful 
 tosh, I don't know why unless it was because I was such 
 a blithering young idiot." He paused to reflect on that for 
 a moment and then put it away as not worthy of further 
 consideration. 
 
 "We seem to have got off the point a bit," he went on. 
 "Let's go back to the last remark but one. You haven't ex- 
 plained a bit yet, you know, Adela, what it is exactly you 
 do or don't believe in." 
 
 Adela recalled her attention to the problem of her religious 
 beliefs by an effort. She had been greatly interested by 
 the discovery of her brother's knowledge and powers of ap- 
 plication. She was aware that he was supposed to be 
 working in the evenings, but she had instinctively discounted 
 the amount of reading he might be getting through at those 
 times. She knew her family, and had taken them as the 
 general standard of humanity. Here and there she had 
 read of exceptional individuals with wonderful powers of 
 mind; the kind of people, as she classified them, who be- 
 came Bishops, or Premiers, or something. But she had dis- 
 tantly regarded these exceptions to the rule of humanity as 
 creatures set apart; they were celebrities, not ordinary 
 human beings. She could not picture them talking or think- 
 ing as she and her family talked or thought. And it was a 
 shock to her to find her own intimate brother was capable 
 of keeping fit on six hours' sleep and thirteen or fourteen 
 hours' work out of the twenty-four. The study of this 
 phenomenon was a personal and fascinating adventure ; and 
 she came back to the subject they had set out to discuss 
 with the bored patience of a child brought in to continue its 
 dull, mechanical lessons. 
 
 "I really hardly know," she said, knitting her forehead, 
 and clasping her hands with an expression and gesture 
 reminiscent of the school-room: "I've thought that some 
 of it couldn't be true. Eternal punishment and things 
 like that." 
 
 "Yes, that seemed pretty obvious to me," Dickie agreed. 
 
THESE LYNNEKERS 
 
 "But then, surely, you've got to accept the whole boiling or 
 nothing at all. If you once question a single point, you 
 throw doubt on all the others. They all rest on the same 
 authority. If you chuck one, you may as well chuck the 
 rest. You've asserted your . . . well, your ability to judge." 
 
 "I suppose you have," Adela admitted. "But I do be- 
 lieve in God, Dickie. I feel sure there must be a God." 
 
 "Quite likely," returned Dickie. "The point is, do you 
 believe in the Divinity of Christ ?" 
 
 Adela gave that the consideration she would have given 
 to a question in an examination paper. "Yes, I think I 
 do," she said judicially. 
 
 "Why?" 
 
 She shook her head, a little embarrassed to confess that 
 her lesson was not well learnt. "I feel like that," she 
 said. 
 
 "You ought to read Kenan's 'Life of Jesus/" Dickie 
 advised her. "You can read French, can't you?" 
 
 She blushed faintly as she said, "Oh ! yes, of course. Will 
 you lend it to me? I won't let any one else see it." 
 
 In her mind she was making a strenuous determination 
 to "rub up" her French with the aid of a dictionary, and 
 "really to work hard at that book of Dickie's." She wanted 
 to show him that she, too, was capable of mental applica- 
 tion. She saw that her task would be a very difficult one 
 she had all the flowers to see to, she had promised to 
 sew the new cretonne covers for the drawing-room chairs, 
 a certain amount of time must be given to the parish ; there 
 was her organ and piano practice to be kept up, and quite 
 a heap of other things that could not be neglected. It 
 seemed so much easier, somehow, for Dickie. But in 
 spite of everything she made a solemn vow that she would 
 find, at least, . . . two hours, yes, two hours a day for 
 Renan. 
 
 "I'll begin after tea," she said; and then: "Don't let's 
 talk about it any more, now. Wait till I've read that book. 
 I wish you'd tell me what you want to be, Dickie. I should 
 think you could easily become a bishop, if you wanted to." 
 
ADELA 
 
 She imagined that Dickie must necessarily be eager to 
 discuss such a delightfully personal subject. 
 
 But he looked a trifle disappointed and said : "I don't 
 know, yet, what I'm going to do when I leave the Bank. 
 I'm not sure that I shan't stick on there for a bit. In any 
 case, old girl, you may take it as a dead certainty that I 
 shan't be a bishop." 
 
 He had hoped for some kind of a discussion that would 
 give him a new point of view, and had found himself in 
 the position of a tutor, giving instruction and setting his 
 pupil a task. That did not help him. But no one ever 
 had materially helped him unless it were Mr. Bell in the 
 technicalities of banking, and already Mr. Bell was begin- 
 ning, indirectly, to consult his junior's opinion. Dickie 
 was consciously aware at that minute of a certain isolation 
 he had hitherto hardly noticed. He had no contempt for 
 other people's opinions, but they continually failed to pro- 
 vide him with the kind of knowledge he was more par- 
 ticularly seeking at that time. The fact of that failure was 
 no sort of discouragement to him, but he made a mental 
 note of it as a matter that might be worth his attention 
 at some future time. Obviously it had a bearing on his 
 relation to society in general. It occurred to him that he 
 might be wanting in some quality of perception. . . . 
 
 "But, Dickie," Adela was saying in a beseeching tone, 
 "I'm sure you could do something better than that rotten 
 old Bank." 
 
 ii 
 
 Every one remembered afterwards that Adela had been 
 "a little odd," the phrase was Eleanor's, during the three 
 weeks that immediately followed Edward's marriage. She 
 had been gentler, less selfish and more diligent. She had 
 even taken to getting up at seven o'clock in order to go 
 over to the church and practise the organ before breakfast. 
 Such outstanding endeavours as that were remarked at 
 
THESE LYNNEKERS 
 
 the time, the general attitude of being "a little odd," was 
 recalled later. 
 
 Dickie, wondering a little, believed that the change he 
 noticed in his sister was due to the absorption she was now 
 showing in the pursuit of new knowledge. She was cer- 
 tainly persistent, if slow, in her study of Renan ; and when 
 opportunity offered and they could be safely alone, he talked 
 to her, expounding rather than arguing the engaging topic ; 
 and occasionally he read Renan aloud to her, translating 
 roughly as he read. 
 
 "It's good practice for me," he explained, and Adela, 
 comparing her own halting efforts with his, was moved to 
 fresh wonder at the ease of his accomplishment. 
 
 "You read it like English, Dickie," she said, paying him 
 the sincerest compliment she could find. 
 
 Dickie pushed that away as waste of time. "Oh! that's 
 easy enough," he said. "But, now, doesn't this make the 
 story of Christ more understandable? Just as a possible 
 story, I mean, and not as a sort of impossible miracle that 
 couldn't happen again?" 
 
 Adela admitted that she was gaining admiration for 
 Christ as a human teacher, even as she began to doubt the 
 fable of His being the only Son of God. 
 
 But, chiefly, she was becoming more and more impressed 
 with the qualities of her younger brother; although even 
 in that period of docility she had her moments of reaction. 
 
 There was, for example, a certain Thursday afternoon 
 when Dickie came home a little before three o'clock and 
 she persuaded him to walk up with her to the Hanglands. 
 She had packed bread and butter and cake and a bottle of 
 milk in a basket, and used that as an argument. 
 
 "You needn't work for one afternoon," she said. "It'll 
 do you good to have a walk, and besides, I want to get out. 
 I feel sometimes as if I want more air," she explained and 
 breathed deeply as if the air of the Rectory garden was 
 too thin and exhausted for her needs. 
 
 "All serene, old girl," Dickie agreed. 
 
 She breathed deep again when they were up on the 
 
ADELA 227 
 
 wide expanses of the Common, but this time with an 
 expression of relief. 
 
 "Don't you feel stifled at home sometimes?" she asked. 
 
 "Is anything up? Has there been a row?" Dickie said. 
 
 She shook her head passionately. "Oh ! no," she returned 
 with fervour. "I wish there had." 
 
 Dickie was puzzled, but not unsympathetic. "What's 
 bothering you?" he asked. "Have we been talking too 
 much religious history? Would you like to give it a rest 
 for a bit?" 
 
 "No, it isn't that," she said, and threw back her head 
 and made a gesture with her hands as if she were pushing 
 away a whole ring of imaginary obstacles. "No, I like our 
 talks about these things. They seem to be a way out." 
 
 "Out of what?" Dickie put in. 
 
 "Everything," she said vaguely. "Oh! everything at 
 home seems so small and so not worth while. It's always 
 the same, every day. And since we've begun to discuss 
 things, it all seems so futile prayers and church and all 
 that even my organ practice. I feel sometimes as if I 
 must get up and shout at them that it's all bosh, that it isn't 
 true." 
 
 "Hm!" commented Dickie thoughtfully, and then, after 
 a moment's silence, he said : "It wouldn't be the least use, 
 you know, Addles." 
 
 "I know it wouldn't," she said. "Only it would be such 
 a relief. Just to do it and get it over." 
 
 "I wouldn't if I were you," Dickie. advised her. "The 
 mater and pater would be frightfully hurt. I've thought of 
 it, too. I was pretty near it the night before Edward was 
 married. But it seems a rum thing to say I'm not sure 
 whether in a thing like that it's necessarily good to be 
 honest. I know it's pretty rotten to go on shamming that 
 one believes in their religion, but it would only be for one's 
 own satisfaction if one went and said one didn't believe in 
 the church and all that. It really would be an awful blow 
 to the pater and mater and it couldn't possibly do them 
 any good, could it?" 
 
228 m THESE LYNNEKERS 
 
 "Of course not," Adela said. "I didn't actually mean 
 that I should ever do it. I only said I felt like it, some- 
 times. Good gracious! Life wouldn't be worth living 
 afterwards. Eleanor would never give me a moment's 
 peace; I should be prayed over and talked to from morn- 
 ing to night." 
 
 "Perhaps we'd better give Renan a rest," decided Dickie. 
 
 "But I don't want to," Adela persisted. . . . 
 
 Later in the afternoon, when they had had their picnic 
 and were sitting in the woods, she displayed another mood. 
 
 "I suppose I am very selfish," she began suddenly. 
 
 "Every one is more or less, I suppose," Dickie said, help- 
 fully. 
 
 "Yes, but I'm more and you're less'/ she confessed 
 meekly. "How do you do it, Dickie?" 
 
 "Didn't know I did," he said. "Never think about it." 
 
 "You are an extraordinary person," Adela decided, after 
 a thoughtful pause. 
 
 Dickie wasn't interested in that pronouncement. "What 
 makes you think you're particularly selfish?" he asked. "I 
 hadn't noticed it." 
 
 She gave him particulars, detailing a host of little omis- 
 sions and personal indulgences; and the fluency of her 
 catalogue proved her self-examination must have been ex- 
 ceedingly rigorous and recent, even if she had not concluded 
 by saying with a sigh : "But I have tried to be better 
 lately. I believe even Eleanor has noticed it." 
 
 "Why lately?" Dickie asked. 
 
 She blushed and put her hands up to her face. "I think 
 our talks have made a difference," she said, and then hesi- 
 tated and went on : "I've been thinking more about those 
 things; and . . . and, Dickie, I want to ask you . . ." 
 
 "Well?" 
 
 "Would you forgive me whatever I did?" 
 
 He looked at her with a growing astonishment. "Good 
 Lord, yes," he returned. "What are you trying to get at ?" 
 
 "I think I should always come to you if I were in a real 
 mess," she said. 
 
ADELA 
 
 "Have you been running up bills or something?" he 
 asked. 
 
 "No! Oh! no; it's nothing," she said. "I was only 
 thinking if there was anything that could ever put you 
 against me. There isn't, is there?" 
 
 "I can't imagine anything," he told her. 
 
 She wanted to discuss Renan again on the way home, 
 but Dickie refused. "You've had enough of that for a 
 bit," he said, and told her stories of Bradshaw's peculiari- 
 ties instead. "He's an extraordinary chap, if you like," 
 was Dickie's summary. "I've told him he'd make no end 
 of money if he went into the entertaining business, like 
 Corney Grain, you know; but he's got the funniest kind 
 of scruples about not using his appearance to make people 
 laugh. I think he's really rather sensitive about it, at bot- 
 tom; but when he's talking seriously to me, he says that 
 he feels it's a sort of reflection on God to make fun of him- 
 self. He says God made him that way and he ought not 
 to criticise Him." 
 
 Adela had quite recovered her usual spirits by the time 
 they came to the big iron gates of the Rectory garden. 
 
 in 
 
 Since Latimer had come to a recognition of the observ- 
 ances necessary to one who was approaching deacon's 
 orders, the Rector had had little cause for complaint with 
 regard to the laxity of his children's attendance at morn- 
 ing prayers. Eleanor had always been punctual and Dickie 
 had never had any excuse for being late every one knew 
 that he was up and dressed long before eight o'clock. Only 
 Adela's occasional delinquencies remained as a cause for 
 mild apologetic remonstrance from her mother. "Your 
 father didn't say anything, but I could see he was vexed. 
 He waited for two or three minutes and asked if you 
 weren't coming," was a characteristic form of Mrs. Lyn- 
 neker's reproof. And for the past few weeks, Adela, also, 
 
230 THESE LYNNEKERS 
 
 had been scrupulously punctual; she had, indeed, so far 
 improved her reputation that when she did not appear on 
 the Wednesday following her walk with Dickie, Mr. Lyn- 
 neker proceeded with prayers as a matter of course, with- 
 out the least outward mark of vexation. One morning's 
 absence in four weeks was a permissible irregularity. 
 
 The family had begun breakfast before any reference 
 was made to the absentee. 
 
 "Why is Adela so late this morning?" her mother asked, 
 addressing the table in general, in the tone of one who 
 starts an agreeable conversation. 
 
 "She went out to her organ practice at seven," Eleanor 
 replied with her usual gravity. 
 
 "She didn't put in a very good morning," interpolated 
 Dickie. "I was reading upstairs with the window open, 
 and I heard her begin, but she only played for about five 
 minutes." 
 
 His innocent remark introduced a new mystery into the 
 question of Adela's absence. Anything like an intriguing 
 mystery was very rare at Halton, but the Lynnekers made 
 the most of the scanty material at their command. It was 
 an excitement to speculate on horrible possibilities with 
 the safe knowledge that a simple, harmless explanation was 
 almost certainly forthcoming. 
 
 Latimer, Eleanor and their mother took up that fas- 
 cinating game now, working themselves up into a state 
 of half-alarmed credulity in awful possibilities, possibili- 
 ties that were made more excitingly probable by the fact 
 that still Adela had not returned. 
 
 "You don't think anything can really have happened 
 to her?" Mrs. Lynneker asked, at last, with genuine solici- 
 tude. This game of make-believe was being carried too far ; 
 it had begun to grow a little terrifying. 
 
 Latimer, however, had not yet reached the boundary of 
 sincere apprehension. 
 
 "It's very funny," he said with an air of great gravity; 
 "it's nearly nine o'clock." 
 
 "Oh! she's gone for a walk/' put in Dickie, who had 
 
ADELA 231 
 
 taken no hand in the game of speculation. "And she hasn't 
 got a watch," he added, as he prepared to leave the table. 
 
 His father looked up with a slightly perturbed frown. 
 "Are you off, now, my boy?" he asked. "I wish you'd 
 just run over to the church, first, and see if she's there." 
 
 "All right, pater," Dickie agreed, and went at once. 
 
 His going seemed to relieve the tension that was begin- 
 ning to affect the nerves of his father and mother. 
 
 "Adela hasn't been quite herself, lately," Mrs. Lynneker 
 said. "I think she ought to have a change of some sort." 
 
 Her husband unexpectedly agreed to the suggestion. "I 
 had hoped that we might all get away/' he said; "but I'm 
 afraid that's hardly practicable." He looked at his wife. 
 "You might take Eleanor and Adela to St. Edmunds for a 
 fortnight," he suggested. "I might be able to get away 
 for the middle of the week . . ." 
 
 They debated that plan for a minute or two, and settled 
 upon it with a most unusual lack of consideration. 
 
 "Dickie's a very long time," Mrs. Lynneker said sud- 
 denly. 
 
 "Probably talking to Adela," the Rector suggested. 
 
 "Didn't you think she was rather funny last night?" 
 asked Latimer. 
 
 "She's been a little odd for the last three weeks," put 
 in Eleanor. 
 
 "Funny? Was she?" Mrs. Lynneker asked, replying to 
 Latimer's question. "I don't think I noticed anything." 
 
 "So affectionate," explained Latimer. 
 
 The Rector pushed back his chair with a nervous ges- 
 ture and his wife glanced at him with a quick, scared look, 
 and put her hand to her heart. "What is it, dear?" she 
 said. 
 
 Mr. Lynneker was leaning a little forward, his forehead 
 on his hand. He pulled himself together when his wife 
 spoke to him. 
 
 "I can't think that she . . ." he began. 
 
 "But what could she . . ." his wife echoed. 
 
 They all remembered, now, that Latimer was undoubtedly 
 
THESE LYNNEKERS 
 
 right. Certainly Adela had been unusually affectionate the 
 night before. But they could not guess what that show 
 of feeling might portend. Undoubtedly there was grave 
 cause for doubt and fear; but none of them had gone 
 further in their speculations than some vague apprehension 
 that "something must have happened to her," at worst 
 a fainting fit as she sat at the organ. 
 
 With a movement that seemed concerted they all stood up 
 and went to the window. They were just in time to see 
 Dickie coming slowly along the drive. 
 
 He walked with his head down, staring thoughtfully at 
 the gravel. He had a letter in his hand. When his 
 mother called to him, he looked up quickly and began to run. 
 
 He did not reassure them when he came into the room. 
 "She'd been to church," he said. "And she left this on 
 the organ keys. It's for you, pater." 
 
 His father took the letter quietly, stared at it for a mo- 
 ment, and then moved away in the direction of his study. 
 His wife looked round at her three children with a white, 
 shocked face, and then hurried after him. 
 
 "What do you suppose she's done?" asked Latimer 
 uneasily. 
 
 Dickie shrugged his shoulders. He was thinking that 
 Adela had asked him whether he would forgive her what- 
 ever she did. 
 
 Eleanor was staring out of the window. There was no 
 sign of forgiveness on her hard, pale face. She held her 
 head erect for once as if her Lynneker pride had mastered 
 for the time being her Christian humility. 
 
 "I suppose you know who it is ?" she said. 
 
 Neither Latimer nor Dickie had the least idea. 
 
 "Who?" Latimer demanded sternly. 
 
 "Young Frank Oliver, the carpenter," Eleanor said, and 
 she spoke the word "carpenter" with a bitter disgust that 
 expressed her sense of final outrage. 
 
 Latimer was utterly incredulous. "Oh ! rot, Eleanor," he 
 expostulated. "Adela would never do a ghastly thing like 
 that." 
 
ADELA 233 
 
 Eleanor's almost imperceptible movement of the eye- 
 brows said plainly that she did not care what he thought. 
 She had an air of being immensely withdrawn from any 
 kind of intercourse with her brothers ; as though she, alone, 
 were able to understand the full tragedy of this awful 
 morning, and was wrapt in the lonely pride of her contem- 
 plation. 
 
 Latimer hurled his protestations at a figure that appar- 
 ently heard without attention. And then, suddenly, he saw 
 that she was crying. She stood perfectly still, with an 
 unmoved face, and let the tears well and run unnoticed 
 down her cheeks. It was impossible to associate that 
 strange, steady weeping with any tenderness for her sister. 
 And yet wounded family pride was surely quite an insuf- 
 ficient explanation. . . . 
 
 Mr. and Mrs. Lynneker were staying a long time in the 
 Rector's study. 
 
 The housemaid came in half apologetically to clear the 
 breakfast-table. She looked now and again with a cu- 
 rious interest at the three figures standing in the window. 
 
 "Well, it's time I was off," Dickie said. 
 
 "I'll come and see you start," Latimer responded. 
 
 Eleanor followed them out of the room as soon as the 
 maid had taken her tray into the kitchen. 
 
 "I say, you don't believe that about that chap Oliver ?" 
 Latimer urged hopefully when he and Dickie were out of 
 the house. 
 
 "I do," Dickie said. "I hope she'll be all right. He 
 seemed a fairly decent chap." 
 
 "But, good God, Dickie," Latimer broke out fiercely. 
 "He's an infernal carpenter." He became aware, then, that 
 something ought to be done at once. "Perhaps it isn't too 
 late to stop them," he said eagerly. "Where d'you suppose 
 they've gone? Can't you go after them on your bicycle?" 
 
 "Oh ! keep your wool on," returned Dickie roughjy. "I'm 
 going into Medborough anyway. They'd have to go there 
 first." 
 
 Latimer had the satisfaction of seeing his brother ride 
 
THESE LYNNEKERS 
 
 off with even more than his usual energy, and returned to 
 the house, feeling that he had done something, at least, to 
 avert calamity. He wanted, now, to be enormously active 
 and foreseeing. He decided that if his father and mother 
 were still closeted together in the study, he must go and 
 interrupt them; that he must impress upon them the need 
 for some immediate action what, he was not quite cer- 
 tain. He paused to consider whether he would not give 
 orders to have the fyorse put into the Stanhope; and then 
 determined that he must see his father and mother first. 
 The three of them ought to decide. . . . He went quickly 
 back to the house. 
 
 IV 
 
 The flare of emotional revolt that had momentarily 
 flickered into being during her walk with Dickie on the 
 Common, had evidently been burning in Adela when she 
 wrote that farewell note to her father. She had been 
 defiant to the verge of hysteria; and her letter, hastily 
 written in pencil, bore the marks of urgent haste. 
 
 And neither the Rector nor his wife was wise enough to 
 guess that this desperate renunciation of family and creed 
 could only have been the last of many attempts to frame 
 some convincing defence of the writer's revolt from the 
 placidity and sameness of rectory life. Without doubt she 
 had burned intermittently with a consciousness of daring 
 rectitude, had been overwhelmingly sure, ever and again, 
 that she was gifted with a clearer vision of things as they 
 are, than was ever possible for any member of her own 
 family, with the one glorious exception of Dickie. But 
 the impossibility she must have tried of putting that de- 
 fence of hers on paper, had unquestionably daunted her. 
 She must have recognised the utter impregnability of the 
 wall she wished to scale. How could she have set down 
 any argument against their religion, when she had found it 
 impossible to grasp the argument in her own mind? She 
 had felt that Dickie was right; had vaguely seen a distant 
 
ADELA 235 
 
 light of relief that might guide her out of this muffled 
 restraint. She could not formulate her reasons even to 
 herself, and perhaps she was defiantly aware that she was 
 prejudiced by her inclination. Yet, her other defence was 
 so obviously hopeless. She could never explain her feelings 
 for the handsome, rather overbearing young carpenter. She 
 knew that her father did not like him, had said on more 
 than one occasion that "that boy of Oliver's put on airs 
 above his position." Edward and Latimer had both criti- 
 cised young Oliver's "side." And she had been too proud 
 to make any humilating confession of love. She may 
 have felt that she would have dishonoured her lover by 
 excusing her passion for him. . . . 
 
 Her father and Latimer were outraged by that brief 
 repudiation of their social and religious views; it stiffened 
 them into a righteous anger that saved the Rector tempo- 
 rarily from any depth of grief. He was, for a time, almost 
 too angry to be shocked ; and the butt of his wrath was so 
 simply the figure of young Frank Oliver that Adela was 
 nearly forgotten. 
 
 For that morning, it appeared that atheism, revolution 
 and all the crimes they begot were solely due to "educating 
 the lower classes above their position." The Lynnekers 
 were too old to brook this new rivalry of labour, but al- 
 ready the shadow of fear was falling upon them. 
 
 Latimer wanted to go at once and abuse young Oliver's 
 father. 
 
 But the real hurt that stood between Adela and forgive- 
 ness, the injustice to the family that outweighed the hys- 
 terical asseverations of her farewell letter, lay in the fact 
 that the scandal was all over the parish. The Lynnekers 
 had been attacked and partly crippled. The slight that 
 had been put upon them was no temporary hurt which 
 might soon heal and be forgotten, but an ever open wound 
 that they must perpetually carry for every villager to 
 stare at and whisper about when their backs were turned. 
 
 No self-deception was possible for them from that first 
 morning. Frank Oliver's father came to the Rectory back 
 
236 THESE LYNNEKERS 
 
 door at eleven o'clock and humbly asked to see Mr. Lyn- 
 neker. Latimer, suddenly aware of intense family feeling, 
 changed his mind with regard to venting his passion in 
 abuse, and vehemently shut the dining-room door to save 
 his eyes from the pollution of seeing the old man cross the 
 hall to the Rector's study. 
 
 Yet poor old Oliver was humble enough. There was 
 no sign of the revolt of labour about him. He had sung 
 an uncertain tenor in the choir for thirty years, and done 
 odd jobs about the Rectory ever since he had gone into 
 trousers. 
 
 He stood just inside the study door and fumbled his cap 
 like an inexpert criminal. 
 
 "I can't think what you and your wife can have been 
 about, Oliver," the Rector said peevishly. 
 
 "We hadn't no idea, sir, what was goin' on/' his daugh- 
 ter's future father-in-law explained. "Frank's been up in 
 Liverpool the last three weeks. He's been talkin' of goin' 
 to 'is brother in Canada for a long time past, and he told 
 us as he was makin' arrangements." He hesitated and 
 added by way of apology: "Mrs. Oliver and me was al- 
 ways against his goin'." 
 
 The Rector frowned and fidgeted. "But do you mean 
 that that you had no idea about about your son and Miss 
 Adela?" 
 
 Mr. Oliver was obviously confused. "A short while 
 ago we had, sir," he mumbled. "But we thought it was 
 all over and done with. We've spoken about it to Frank 
 more'n once ; but he was always very short with us, and we, 
 somehow, never thought anything'd come of it." 
 
 What could the Rector say or do ? He wanted most 
 impatiently to be rid of the man, who stood there by the 
 study door, furtively wiping his eyes with a dirty red hand- 
 kerchief; the man who was crying not for any disgrace, 
 but for the loss of his son. 
 
 "Well, well, Oliver, it's obvious that nothing can be 
 done," Mr. Lynneker said on a note of dismissal. 
 
 The carpenter turned obediently, and then paused to say : 
 
ADELA 237 
 
 "Frank has spoken of our gbin' out to him, sir/' a pos- 
 sible consolation that in no way softened the Rector's 
 present feelings towards his daughter. 
 
 Nevertheless it was not in the Lynneker blood to harbour 
 a perpetual resentment against Adela. The strain was at 
 least a century too old to maintain the stern, unforgiving 
 attitude of romance. Even before Adela's second letter 
 arrived from Liverpool they were beginning, a little inertly, 
 to find excuses for her. 
 
 Edward and his wife came over to Halton the next day. 
 They had returned from their honeymoon the night before, 
 to find the dreadful news conveyed to them at the Vicarage 
 by a note from Mrs. Lynneker. (For the next few months, 
 at least, they were to live with Helen's father; her mother 
 had been dead for ten years. The Vicarage was big enough 
 to provide them with a completely separate suite of apart- 
 ments ; but Helen was to carry on all the housekeeping for 
 a time. Her sister, Margery, was only nineteen.) 
 
 Edward was greatly shocked. He was not sure that this 
 horrible scandal in his family might not spoil his chance of 
 the Thrapley living; and the present incumbent had been 
 confined to his bed for two years, and every one knew that 
 the curate-in-charge was very unlikely to get preferment 
 for one thing, this was his first cure in the diocese. More- 
 over, Sir Frederic was a personal friend of the Vicar's. 
 Edward had good cause for a resentment that he did his 
 best to disguise. 
 
 Every one but the Rector was present that afternoon. He 
 had recovered, now, from his first indignation, and was 
 nursing in private the very real grief that had succeeded his 
 immediate reaction to Adela's defiance. When his wife had 
 gone to his study to tell him that Edward and Helen were 
 in the drawing-room, she had found her husband bowed 
 forward in his chair with his face in his hands. 
 
238 THESE LYNNEKERS 
 
 He had shaken his head without looking up, when she 
 had stammeringly made her announcement, and she had re- 
 treated at once, shutting the door behind her with the deli- 
 cacy of one who leaves a sanctuary. 
 
 Something of awe still lingered in her face as she re- 
 entered the drawing-room. "Your father's dreadfully up- 
 set," she said, in a hushed, mysterious voice. "I don't think 
 he will come in this afternoon." 
 
 That statement gave Edward the suggestion he had been 
 seeking, and he instantly grasped the opportunity to display 
 the attitude that might properly be expected from him. 
 
 He got to his feet with a look of grave concern. "Shall 
 I go to him, mater?" he asked, and there was a fine air of 
 solicitude in his manner as he most unnecessarily led his 
 mother back to the sofa. 
 
 "Better not, I think," she said. "He wants to be alone." 
 She looked up gratefully at her eldest son; she was glad 
 that he should show this concern for her and his father; 
 but her own feeling with regard to Adela still remained in 
 its first stage of utter perplexity. In her heart she had an 
 immense sympathy with her daughter that she dared not 
 proclaim. 
 
 "It's very hard on the pater," Edward said judicially. 
 "Very hard, indeed; and on you, too, mother." He felt 
 that the more tender form of address was called for, and 
 made quite an effect by his use of it. He had taken up his 
 stand on the hearth-rug and was prepared, now, with his 
 sermon. 
 
 "Frightfully hard," mumbled Latimer, responding on be- 
 half of the congregation. 
 
 Dickie, home early from the Bank, stared moodily out 
 of the window. Eleanor still wore that hard, inattentive 
 frown which set her apart from the others. Helen, having 
 taken off her gloves and rolled them into an untidy ball, 
 sat waiting with an air of resigned submission. It was 
 evident that she would have many questions to ask, pres- 
 ently. 
 
 Edward had the situation in hand for the next few min- 
 
ADELA 239 
 
 utes. He tried very hard to be reasonable and decent 
 about it. 
 
 "Of course, there's nothing to be done," he said. "We've 
 simply got to wipe Adela out of our lives. I must confess 
 that I can't understand what could have induced her to do 
 a thing like that. It's perfectly incredible to me, putting 
 aside altogether her impossible infatuation for a man of that 
 class ; it is, I think, perfectly incredible that she could have 
 had such an utter lack of consideration for for you, 
 mother; and and for the pater. She must have been 
 mad, absolutely mad." The thought of Thrapley gave his 
 voice an intense ring of conviction, and nearly diverted him 
 from the admirable line he had taken. "What riles me . . ." 
 he began, and then pulled himself up, clasping his hands be- 
 hind his back. "There's simply no other explanation," he 
 concluded tamely. 
 
 "I really don't think there is," came the dull response 
 from Latimer's cantoris stall. 
 
 "We've simply got to put her out of our lives," Edward 
 repeated, conscious that he had achieved no climax. 
 
 Even that judgment seemed to awaken no particular 
 fervour among his audience. His mother still looked up at 
 him with deliberate attention, as if she admired him greatly 
 and was anxious to agree with him if she possibly could. 
 
 "What's he like ?" put in Helen, suddenly ; either because 
 her patience was exhausted, or because she believed the ser- 
 mon was concluded. 
 
 No one affected to misunderstand the reference. "Oh! 
 a ghastly bounder," Edward replied impatiently. "Puts on 
 no end of side." 
 
 "But to look at," persisted Helen, turning to her mother- 
 in-law. 
 
 "He's certainly very good-looking," conceded Mrs. Lyn- 
 neker. 
 
 "Oh ! good Lord !" ejaculated Latimer. 
 
 "Yes, I know, but I want to understand," Helen said. 
 "Hadn't you the least idea of what was going on?" she 
 continued. 
 
240 THESE LYNNEKERS 
 
 Mrs. Lynneker shook her head and compressed her lips. 
 
 "Hardly likely that we should suspect her of a thing like 
 that," Latimer said superciliously. He was not going to be 
 snubbed for nothing. 
 
 Mrs. Lynneker was wishing that she could have a quiet 
 talk alone with her new daughter; they seemed to have a 
 curiosity in common that could never be satisfied by this 
 perpetual denunciation of young Oliver. 
 
 "She must have seen something in him . . ." she began 
 weakly, and stopped, ashamed, at the murmur of protest 
 she had evoked. 
 
 "Oh! mother," was Eleanor's reproach; her first con- 
 tribution to the symposium. 
 
 And then the other silent member of the party claimed 
 his right to a hearing. 
 
 He turned from the window with, a look of rather dis- 
 gusted resolution, as if he meant to perform a duty that 
 was altogether distasteful to him. 
 
 " 'Is not this the carpenter's son ?' " he said, staring some- 
 thing contemptuously at his elder brother. 
 
 "Oh! my dear chap, that's absolutely a different thing 
 in every way," Edward said. He was manifestly shocked 
 at the profanity of the quotation. "Christ was the Son of 
 God," he added reverently, giving the reference its proper 
 context by his manner ; and challenging his brother to com- 
 plete his analogy by any suggestion of young Oliver's pos- 
 sibly Divine origin. 
 
 "Yes, you preach that," Dickie said, "and I suppose you 
 preach, too, every one does, that he was born into that 
 class as an example of humility. I don't know ; I've always 
 taken it to mean that we weren't to judge a man simply 
 because he was a workman." 
 
 He had made them all uncomfortable, even his mother 
 and Helen. He had been guilty of bad taste in dragging 
 religion into the discussion. Religion was something to 
 be practised according to certain rules ; only non-conformists 
 mixed it up with their every-day conversation. Aunt Mary 
 
ADELA 241 
 
 was a possible exception, but they deprecated too overt ref- 
 erences, even in her case. 
 
 Edward shrugged his shoulders. "I don't think we need 
 discuss that," he said contemptuously. 
 
 "But it's the whole point in this case," Dickie returned. 
 "Don't you know that poor old Adela said in the letter she 
 left that she didn't believe in Christianity any longer?" 
 
 "Yes, we heard that," Edward admitted, impatiently. 
 "But really, I don't see that that . . ." 
 
 "You wouldn't," Dickie interrupted him. "You wouldn't 
 see, either, that Adela had the originality to think things 
 out for herself. But, great Scott," he continued with more 
 energy, "can you wonder that she began to doubt if there 
 was anything in your religion when you never dream of 
 living up to it? That's a test for girls like Adela; you 
 mayn't believe it, but it is. And she must have seen us 
 at lots of times like this, when we'd put any other mortal 
 consideration before the religious one. Young Oliver was 
 a carpenter, and a jolly fine workman. You've got noth- 
 ing in the world against him, morally; and if you believe 
 one atom of what you preach every Sunday, it's jolly well 
 your duty to be decent to him and Adela. If it isn't, the 
 Sermon on the Mount is the most piffling rot that was ever 
 preached." He paused for a moment and looked around 
 at the embarrassed faces of his horrified family, Mrs. 
 Lynneker, alone, looked as if here, at last, was the solution 
 of all her perplexities, and then he turned to his sister- 
 in-law and said : "Helen, can't you see that ? Surely, you 
 must see that there's no earthly good in a religion that 
 won't work?" 
 
 She met his gaze with the first hint of a smile on her 
 face, her mouth a little pursed, her eyes ready to twinkle. 
 "But, surely, Dick," she said, "there must be some kind 
 of limit." 
 
 "To forgiveness, for example?" he retorted. 
 
 The quotation needed no further pointing in that com- 
 pany; they all knew that the indefinitely large figure of 
 "seventy times seven" was the prescribed limit. And as he 
 
THESE LYNNEKERS 
 
 had no reasonable answer, Edward fell back on a pretence 
 of insulted authority. 
 
 "If you're going to be rude to Helen, I think you had 
 better leave the room," he said, and he stuck out his under 
 lip and looked at Dickie with the threatening frown that 
 had availed him in their school-days, when his six years' 
 seniority was a solid argument that had given him the 
 right to bully. 
 
 ''Don't be a silly ass," Dickie returned calmly. 
 
 Edward's face was suffused with blood and he began to 
 blink rapidly, as he said: "We all know you've got the 
 manners of a labourer . . ." 
 
 But Eleanor abruptly stopped his childish abuse by say- 
 ing: "And has our lack of religion upset your faith, too, 
 Dick?" Her voice rang out, clear and sharp, above the 
 spluttering anger of her brother. 
 
 "That and other things," Dickie said resolutely. 
 
 "You mean that you're an atheist?" Eleanor asked. 
 
 "That is what you would call me, no doubt," he agreed. 
 
 "And yet you dare to try and teach us our duty?" 
 
 The retort was quite illogical, but it cut the ground from 
 under Dickie's feet because it questioned his power of 
 judgment. If he were an "atheist," he was a criminal fool, 
 and certainly negligible as a teacher. 
 
 Edward found an opportunity. 'The fool has said in 
 his heart there is no God,' " he quoted pityingly. Surely, he 
 thought, they had the young idiot, now. He had given 
 himself away, hopelessly. Edward would not stand being 
 called a "silly ass" in front of Helen. . . . 
 
 Dickie stood quite still. He looked from Eleanor to 
 Edward and then threw a quick glance at Latimer, Helen 
 and his mother. 
 
 "You are wrong by my standard and wrong by your 
 own," he said. "Isn't that enough? Does it matter who 
 says it? Call me anything you like; put me out of it alto- 
 gether. I only want to know how you get out of that 
 command to forgive your brother and your sister, young 
 Oliver and Adela, unto seventy times seven." Then he 
 
ADELA 
 
 turned directly to Eleanor. "How do you excuse yourself ?" 
 he asked. 
 
 "I have never said that I can't forgive Adela," she re- 
 turned quietly. "I do forgive her." 
 
 There was no sign of forgiveness on her set face; but 
 she was prepared to do her duty by her religion; even to 
 make acknowledgment of her forgiveness in public. 
 
 She returned Dickie's questioning stare for a few mo- 
 ments, resolutely, with an exalted determination of pur- 
 pose; and then she got up quickly. 
 
 "I forgive them both," she said, with a little gasp as if 
 her confession gave her some .short, acute pain, "and I for- 
 give you, Dick, for the dreadful things you've said, because 
 I don't believe you can possibly be in earnest." She met 
 his eyes again and saw there the doubt of her sincerity. 
 "Oh ! I do, I do," she repeated, raising her voice. "I forgive 
 you all." She made a movement with her two arms as if 
 she would raise them in a wide gesture of appeal to Heaven, 
 and then dropped her hands to her side and walked to the 
 door. They all watched her with a tense anxiety as she 
 went out. She moved as if she were precariously upheld by 
 a violent effort of will. It was a relief to hear her footsteps 
 go more hurriedly down the passage, when she had closed 
 the door behind her. 
 
 VI 
 
 An awkward silence followed Eleanor's departure. Mrs. 
 Lynneker, at her end of the staid sofa, had buried her face 
 in her hands. She might have been praying or weeping; 
 she was certainly suffering some anguish of spirit. Helen 
 was nervously picking at the buttons on her gloves. She 
 wore an air of being absorbed in her own thoughts, but 
 once or twice she glanced anxiously at her mother-in-law. 
 Dickie had sat down on the little three-seated ottoman in 
 the middle of the room. He was leaning forward with his 
 elbows on his knees, staring at the carpet and abstractedly 
 ruffling his hair. 
 
244 THESE LYNNEKERS 
 
 Edward and Latimer looked at each other with an ex- 
 pression that implied a deprecating shrug of the shoulders. 
 Their sense of decency had been badly shocked. This polite 
 family conclave had been turned into a "scene"; and they 
 were not prepared with any nice formula of response. They 
 had been conscious of an emotional thrill at the dramatic 
 quality of Eleanor's reply to their brother's blundering and 
 gaucherie, but their education and training stood between 
 them and any frank expression of their feelings. They 
 had no weapon but their knowledge of proper behaviour. 
 
 "Well," Edward began judicially, trying the effect of 
 his voice on the silence ; "well, I don't see that it's any use 
 going on with this discussion." 
 
 "Not a bit of use," echoed Latimer. 
 
 "But you know, Ted, Dickie is quite right," Helen said, 
 looking thoughtfully at the portrait of Gordon that hung 
 over the piano. 
 
 Edward frowned irritably. "If you mean that we ought 
 to forgive Adela," he said, "I am willing to agree; I don't 
 think that I've ever said that we wouldn't." 
 
 "Got to forgive her as if you meant it ; it's no good just 
 saying you forgive her," grunted Dickie, without moving 
 his position. 
 
 "I should like to know very much why you think you've 
 got a right to teach us our duty," Edward returned with all 
 the irony he could muster. He was determined not to lose 
 his temper again. 
 
 Dickie sighed and sat up. "What a casuist you are, 
 Edward," he said. "Why don't you face the question 
 instead of trying to wriggle out on some side issue?" 
 
 "Yes, Ted, really you are," Helen agreed. "The point 
 is, are we all prepared to forgive Adela from . . ." she 
 flushed a little at the stiltedness of her phrase, "from the 
 bottom of our hearts?" 
 
 Edward lifted his chin and stared at the opposite wall 
 with a fine air of priestly reserve and judgment; he blinked 
 rapidly, as if that were an aid to detached thought. 
 
ADELA 245 
 
 "I have never denied that we were prepared to forgive 
 her," he said in his best voice. 
 
 "And Frank Oliver, of course," added Dickie. 
 
 Edward was obviously clenching his hands behind his 
 back. He was being pushed into a very uncomfortable 
 corner, and his only way of escape seemed to be in an 
 admission of his sacred calling. And he wanted to main- 
 tain not only his dignity, but also an appearance of strength 
 of character, before his wife. He must let her see that he 
 was big enough to put his duty before any personal inclina- 
 tion. 
 
 "It may be a more difficult thing to do," he said in a 
 muffled voice, "uncommonly difficult, but I admit that we 
 ought to forgive young Oliver, too." 
 
 Latimer threw himself back into his chair with a gasp 
 of impatience. "Oh! well, leave me out of it," he said. 
 
 Dickie glanced at him with a faint smile of relief. "You 
 don't feel like forgiving him, Latimer?" he asked. 
 
 Latimer realised that in some way he did not quite un- 
 derstand he had pleased the common enemy. His boule- 
 versement was unhappily too rapid. "No, old boy, I don't," 
 he said. "Honestly now, do you ?" 
 
 "I? Oh! Lord, yes," Dickie replied. "I don't feel like 
 you do about it. If he's kind to Adela, and they're happy, 
 I don't care a hang. If he isn't I'll go and break his con- 
 founded neck." 
 
 Edward sneered. "Is that your idea of Christianity?" 
 he asked. 
 
 "No, it isn't," Dickie said ; "but then, I suppose I'm not 
 what you'd call a Christian. The point is, it seems to me, 
 to be consistent. If you believe in it you ought to practise 
 it." 
 
 Mrs. Lynneker had kept her face covered during all 
 this conversation, but now she revealed the cause of the 
 pain she had been suffering. She dropped her hands and 
 stared at Dickie with an expression of anxious misery. 
 
 "Oh! Dick, you can't mean it," she implored him; "you 
 can't mean that you don't believe." 
 
246 THESE LYNNEKERS 
 
 He winced perceptibly. He knew that he was in the 
 toils now. He had meant to avoid that admission of un- 
 belief for a time in order to save his father and mother. 
 For that he had been willing to sacrifice his personal pride, 
 his consciousness of being open and honest. But the thing 
 had been forced upon him. He had been characteristically 
 unable to answer Eleanor's question with a bald lie. 
 
 "Don't take it like that, dear/' he said, gently. "It's only 
 that I've been reading and thinking a good deal about these 
 things lately/' 
 
 "Did you influence poor Adela ?" put in Edward. 
 
 Dickie disregarded him. "And, mother," he continued, "I 
 haven't said that I don't believe in God, you know. It's 
 absurd really to call me an 'atheist,' but people like Eleanor 
 don't understand any other word." 
 
 Mrs. Lynneker's fear lifted a little. She took no notice 
 of Edward's commiserating gesture ; he had stepped forward 
 as if he would come over and comfort her. "But if you be- 
 lieve that," she began. 
 
 Dickie went and sat by her on the sofa and put his arm 
 round her. "I think I do believe that," he said. 
 
 Helen's eyes were beginning to brim now. She was 
 hastily searching in some recesses of her dress for a hand- 
 kerchief. 
 
 Latimer got up and stuck his hands in his pockets, 
 glanced out of the window, and then sauntered carelessly 
 over to the door. He paused to adjust a photograph frame 
 that stood on a cabinet of old china, as he passed out. He 
 was conscious that he had missed his line on this occasion. 
 He was persuading himself that they were all making "a 
 most ghastly fuss about nothing." As he paced the back 
 lawn and blew relieving clouds of smoke from his pipe, he 
 was rather thankful to feel that he was still a man of the 
 world, that he had still two months before he need finally 
 accept the yoke of deacon's orders. That afternoon's dis- 
 cussion had certainly been rather illuminating. Young 
 Dickie had "had" Edward badly . . . clever kid, young 
 Dickie, too bally self-opinionated, of course . . . and that 
 
ADELA 247 
 
 point about the necessity for forgiveness was incontro- 
 vertible, even by Edward's casuistry. Rather a good shot 
 of Dickie's, that ; it was true ; Edward was a casuist when 
 you took orders, you signed away your liberty of thought. 
 You undertook to believe and practise all the teachings of 
 the church. You couldn't get away from that in theory; 
 and if you tried a line of your own, you could be had every 
 time as Edward had been this afternoon. 
 
 Latimer stopped in his walk and blew a balloon of 
 smoke that hung for a moment, a pale phantasm seen 
 against the solid green mass of the great elm at the top 
 of the lawn, before it was caught in a thin draught of air 
 and dispersed into nothingness. 
 
 But what was he going to do, if he didn't take orders ? 
 
 VII 
 
 The little group left in the drawing-room was recovering 
 its normal relations. 
 
 Mrs. Lynneker was almost cheerful again. She was 
 holding Dickie's hand, a permissible sentimentality in that 
 company, and had found courage, with his support, to say 
 something of what was in her mind. 
 
 "I don't know what I should do if I lost you, too," she 
 said, and then, realising that her intention had been slightly 
 invidious, she looked across at her eldest son, and added: 
 "And Edward is practically lost to me now." 
 
 Helen and her husband charmingly denied that, but when 
 their little outburst of affection was over, Mrs. Lynneker 
 returned to her point. 
 
 "I do feel that Dick is right about Adela and young 
 Oliver," she began with a slightly forced steadiness. "And 
 I believe your father will say so, too. It has been a dread- 
 ful blow to him." 
 
 "I suppose you don't know where they're going to live ?" 
 asked Helen. 
 
248 THESE LYNNEKERS 
 
 "His father told us they were going to Canada," Mrs. 
 Lynneker said. "Didn't I say that in my note ?" 
 
 "No, you certainly didn't," Edward replied. He saw 
 that this put quite a different aspect on the question of 
 forgiveness. It might not be so difficult to find excuses 
 for a carpenter's son when he was 3,000 miles or so away, 
 on the other side of the Atlantic. 
 
 He sat down in his father's arm-chair and crossed his 
 legs. He wanted to be very impartial and convincing; and 
 he carefully avoided looking at Dickie as he said: 
 
 "What does he propose to do out there ?" 
 
 "He has a brother in Canada," Mrs. Lynneker explained. 
 "Don't you remember him? Harry Oliver, rather a nice 
 young man, more diffident than Frank. I suppose that it 
 must have been seven or eight years ago that he went, 
 perhaps you were at Cambridge. Your father preached a 
 sort of farewell sermon." 
 
 "I believe I do remember hearing something about it," 
 Edward admitted. "Anyway, I remember the boy, dimly. 
 Have you heard how he's doing?" 
 
 "No, we haven't heard that. I must ask his father," 
 Mrs. Lynneker said. 
 
 Edward shrank a little from this statement. He remem- 
 bered that if his impossible brother-in-law had relieved the 
 family of his presence, he had left his relations behind him. 
 "You won't, of course. . . ." He began, and then stopped, 
 conscious that his brother was watching him. 
 
 "Won't what?" asked Dickie. 
 
 "I mean that our . . . our relations with the Olivers will 
 will be a little difficult," Edward said. 
 
 "The old man was very nice this morning," his mother 
 put in quickly. "He didn't attempt to presume in any way, 
 you know. I can't help feeling very sorry for him and his 
 wife. Your father told me that Oliver was crying this 
 morning; they've only those two children, you see. Oliver 
 said something about going out to join them." 
 
 "Yes, awfully sad for them in a way," muttered Edward. 
 
 "Poor old things," Helen remarked, with real feeling. 
 
ADELA 249 
 
 Edward had an inspiration. "Yes, it makes one feel that 
 something ought to be done for them," he said. "Do you 
 suppose the question of finding the passage-money is their 
 real difficulty? I was only wondering if . . ." 
 
 "If their society wasn't more likely to suit Adela than 
 it does us ?" suggested Dickie. 
 
 "Her own choice," returned Edward patiently. The best 
 way to treat this difficult young brother was to keep cool 
 and to score whenever possible, he decided. 
 
 Dickie exhibited no consciousness of having been snubbed. 
 "I don't suppose they've got fleas," he remarked thought- 
 fully. 
 
 "My dear!" his mother protested. Edward's lift of the 
 eyebrows proclaimed the offence done to his fastidious 
 sense of the niceties of conversation. Helen looked at her 
 young brother-in-law with an interested smile. 
 
 "Why fleas, Dick?" she asked. 
 
 "Oh! I was just thinking," he said. "It was a distinc- 
 tion of Martyn's that seemed to work, in a way;" and he 
 explained the verger's classification of the three estates. 
 
 "I know I must be fearfully muddle-headed about this 
 social distinction business," he concluded. "I can't get it 
 right in my own mind. I do feel as you do about it, gen- 
 erally. People like old Oliver are different from us in 
 heaps of ways. But I can't see why they should be. 
 When you come to think about it, it seems to be so largely 
 a question of the way they talk, and their manners 
 and washing." 
 
 "They're different in grain," Edward said. "I have had 
 more experience of them than you have." 
 
 "But isn't it all a difference of education?" Dickie sug- 
 gested. 
 
 Edward shook his head. "They're different in grain," 
 he repeated. He thought the phrase was rather effective. 
 
 They could get no further towards an understanding. 
 Dickie was wondering if he and his brothers were not in 
 some incomprehensible way, also different in grain. There 
 were points at which they could not meet. When he came 
 
250 THESE LYNNEKERS 
 
 to talk to them about religion or this strange social problem, 
 they came to positions at which no contact seemed possible. 
 A curious metaphor came to his mind, a figure drawn from 
 his study of physics. Perhaps the substance of thought 
 had qualities more or less analogous to the qualities of 
 matter. In certain relations he and his brothers could ex- 
 change ideas their thoughts were impenetrable as solid 
 matter is, and there was some clash of meeting and opposi- 
 tion, some friction of surfaces, some recognisable smooth- 
 ing of opinions. But in other relations he could not touch 
 their thought, nor could they touch his. His ideas seemed 
 to pass through theirs without effecting any change, with- 
 out actual contact ; there was some kind of spiritual osmosis, 
 in which the barrier opposed by his brothers' minds re- 
 mained unchanged and immovable, and at the same time 
 was quite ineffectual to stop the passage or alter the quality 
 of his own thought. 
 
 VIII 
 
 Helen rather annoyed her husband that evening. They 
 were alone in their own drawing-room after dinner (Hal- 
 ton dined in the middle of the day, but the Vicarage dined at 
 eight), and she displayed a reprehensible interest in the 
 subject of Dickie. 
 
 "He is a curious boy," she said. "But, Ted, I'm sure 
 he's quite extraordinarily clever." 
 
 "Yes, I think he is," Edward agreed without interest. 
 "I can't imagine where he gets that roughness of manner 
 from. He's too impossible, sometimes. I didn't at all like 
 the way he spoke to me this afternoon." 
 
 But Helen refused to be drawn, just then, into any ad- 
 miring sympathy with her husband's peculiar delicacy of 
 mind and habit. 
 
 "I rather like that roughness of his," she went on 
 thoughtfully. "He's so isn't 'drastic' the word I want? 
 I mean he's so outspoken. It is such a relief to meet brave, 
 honest people like that sometimes." 
 
ADELA 251 
 
 "I suppose you mean that I'm not," Edward said. 
 
 "I'm not comparing him with you, dear," Helen returned, 
 gently, putting away from her the disloyal thought that her 
 husband was somewhat apt to treat the universe as a set- 
 ting for the jewel of his own personality. 
 
 Edward frowned. "Well, personally, that rudeness of 
 Dickie's rather riles me," he said. "I can't see the particu- 
 lar advantages of being coarse." 
 
 Helen sighed and stared at the fire-screen. 
 
 "Well, do you?" Edward persisted. 
 
 "I didn't think he was coarse," Helen said. "And you 
 had to admit, yourself, that he was right about the neces- 
 sity for forgiveness." 
 
 "Oh ! well, I don't think we need discuss it all over again, 
 now," Edward returned. He wanted to talk about the prob- 
 abilities of his getting the Thrapley living and his chances 
 of a minor canonry. There was nothing fresh to be said, 
 but it was delightful to consider the possibility; and par- 
 ticularly delightful to take the most pessimistic view and 
 to hear his wife's comforting assurances. 
 
 "I wonder if Sir Frederic came in to-day," he said after 
 a decently long pause. 
 
 "Why?" asked Helen absently. 
 
 "I only wondered if there was any fresh news," he said, 
 casually. 
 
 "Father would have been sure to have told us," she re- 
 turned. 
 
 "I suppose he would." 
 
 Helen had set her lips into an expression that conveyed 
 a slight air of stubbornness. For one moment Edward 
 saw in her face a faint resemblance to his mother. 
 
 "I think I'd better go to my study and work for a bit," 
 he said. "You don't seem in the mood for conversation." 
 
 "Very well, dear," she agreed. "I was thinking about 
 Adela and Dickie." 
 
 Edward left the room, firmly determined that he would 
 have this point out with his wife on some future occasion. 
 What the point was he was not quite clear, but she had 
 
252 THESE LYNNEKERS 
 
 certainly been wanting in consideration that evening. When 
 he was in his study, he sat with a sheet of sermon paper 
 before him, and found a dozen different excuses for his 
 own attitude that afternoon. Indeed, he so completely ex- 
 onerated himself that he almost went back to the drawing- 
 room to state his case; and was only deterred by the con- 
 templation of the spiritual energy that would be required 
 of him. Nevertheless he was comforted by the reflection 
 that his case was unimpeachable. 
 
 He had no idea that his father had begun his married 
 life with much the same intentions, procrastinations and 
 reserves. 
 
 IX 
 
 Adela's letter from Liverpool helped to soften the chief 
 resentment she had left in the minds of her father and 
 mother. The letter was addressed to Mrs. Lynneker this 
 time, and the whole tone of it displayed an anxiety to 
 obliterate the impression that might have been created by 
 the hasty pencil note left on the manual of the organ. 
 
 Adela wanted to explain; she stated her want in those 
 words ; and it appeared that she would be perfectly happy, 
 now, if she could but wipe away the impression she knew 
 she must have left on their minds. 
 
 She came to that point at once, giving it precedence over 
 the interesting facts which her mother was far more eager 
 to have explained. Mrs. Lynneker did not actually skip 
 that explanation, but she flutteringly looked ahead more 
 than once, as if her patience could only be maintained by 
 the knowledge that the important material was certainly 
 coming later. 
 
 "Please forget that other letter," Adela wrote. "I hardly 
 knew what I was doing that morning!' She referred 
 throughout to her yesterday, as to some remote period of 
 her life. "I did try to write properly and I just could not. 
 Of course I did not mean a single thing I said in that other 
 
ADELA 253 
 
 letter, but I felt that morning as if I never could make you 
 understand." 
 
 The most comforting assurance among these repetitions 
 was the implied denial of Adela's religious manifesto. In- 
 deed, they came to find a peculiar solace in the thought of 
 her original statement of unbelief. They inferred so much 
 distress, so much anxiety and remorse from that original, 
 terrible negation. "The poor child must have been nearly 
 out of her mind/' as Mrs. Lynneker explained. 
 
 The remainder of the long letter contained the valuable 
 news that they had been waiting for; the account of her 
 marriage by license before the Liverpool registrar the 
 family had never once doubted that young Oliver would 
 marry her and plans for the future. They were to live 
 at Toronto where Harry Oliver was in business as a small 
 contractor. "He used to be at Peterborough, in Canada, not 
 far from Toronto," she commented. "Isn't it funny? 
 Fancy my still being so near Peterboro'!" They were go- 
 ing by steamer from Liverpool up the St. Lawrence to 
 Montreal and thence by train ; and as they were not sailing 
 until Saturday, there would be just time for Adela to re- 
 ceive a letter of forgiveness from the Rectory. And at 
 the end she displayed a note of anxiety concerning the ex- 
 pectation of that mark of forgiveness. After the com- 
 parative jubilance of tone displayed in the recital of her 
 prospects, the faint wistfulnees of the close was a little 
 pathetic. When the letter was read, aloud, the Rector 
 showed again signs of emotion at that final appeal. 
 
 There could be no question now of the family's willing- 
 ness to forgive her, despite the bitterness of one or two 
 casual allusions that showed how quickly Adela had accom- 
 modated herself to her new conditions. The references 
 to "Frank" and the whole-hearted admission, no longer 
 disguised, that he "was all the world to her," could be un- 
 derstood in the circumstances ; but the allusion in one place 
 to "Harry" and the expression of a sincere hope that 
 Frank's father and mother would presently join their chil- 
 dren in Toronto, seemed to imply a willing admission of 
 
254 THESE LYNNEKERS 
 
 her new social status that made the Lynnekers frown un- 
 easily. 
 
 Dickie had plenty of material for thought in his survey 
 of this intimate presentation of social differences. He saw 
 clearly that if his father and mother were ready, even 
 anxious, to forgive Adela, they were by no means pre- 
 pared to accept the Olivers as relations. He had not seen 
 either his father's or his mother's letter to Adela, but he 
 gathered that they contained little explicit reproach. The 
 fact that she was going "all those thousands of miles" away 
 from them Mrs. Lynneker frequently repeated that awful 
 measure of distance with a scared concern was a suffi- 
 cient reason for a thorough setting in order of the house 
 of charity. She might never come back, and how many 
 suns might have gone down upon their wrath before some 
 probable tragedy made restitution impossible. Edward and 
 Latimer were included as conforming to the same atti- 
 tude. But what puzzled Dickie was his wonder as to what 
 was, now, their real feeling towards Adela. The four per- 
 sons concerned might differ in various degrees, but he 
 could not avoid the conclusion that if they were all un- 
 equal to the effort of any positive dislike a thing that 
 irritated and chafed them, producing the fret that arose 
 from the consciousness of active antagonism they had 
 no longer any feeling towards Adela that could be properly 
 described as love. She was no longer playing on their side. 
 In brief effervescencies of emotion they might remember 
 her as one of themselves, and possibly long to see her 
 again. But, in effect, she had climbed the ring-fence that 
 separated the Lynnekers and their own kind from all 
 the rest of the world. She could never hope again to find 
 a place within that enclosure. 
 
 Eleanor remained in a separate category. As she had 
 been the first to profess forgiveness for her sister, so would 
 she be the last to experience, if she could ever experience, 
 any transient emotion during which she might momen- 
 tarily recover a measure of her old feeling. Possibly she 
 had never felt any love for Adela? Dickie frankly ad- 
 
ADELA 255 
 
 mitted to himself that he could not understand Eleanor. He 
 was quite unable to realise the motive of jealousy which 
 had tortured her; jealousy, not of the man her sister had 
 so disgracefully chosen, but of her youth and independ- 
 ence, and, though Eleanor might not admit it, of her 
 sister's success. Adela, indeed, had succeeded in an ambi- 
 tion that, however bitterly Eleanor might deny it even in 
 her lonely communications with God, was instinctively 
 her own. She was nearly twenty-eight, she had no charm 
 of personality, she had never attempted to attract a man's 
 desire by any deliberate snare of femininity. But deep 
 within her was a bitter rage against any woman who suc- 
 ceeded where she herself had failed. She professed a 
 faintly disgusted tolerance for small babies; she would 
 have been shocked and repelled by any overture of Frank 
 Oliver's; but subconsciously she envied Adela. And the 
 brief intimation of her own feelings had so hurt and hard- 
 ened her that she was, as yet, incapable of finding any 
 "relief" in the fact that Adela had been permanently re- 
 moved from Halton. For Eleanor's jealousy had not be- 
 gun with her sister's inexplicable surrender to the son of 
 the village carpenter. . . . 
 
 And mingled with all this foolish muddle of class dis- 
 tinctions, Dickie was intrigued by the problem of his own 
 religious professions. 
 
 He was sorry, now, that he had ever spoken to Adela. 
 He felt that he had blundered, again, in giving her a false 
 courage that had enabled her to dare the ultimate rupture 
 with her familiar life. For he doubted if that marriage 
 of hers would be a success. He had given his three reasons 
 in the drawing-room as speech, manners and washing. He 
 remembered the look of Frank Oliver's hands after he had 
 been French-polishing; and recalled also the ugly nails 
 and permanent callosities that were the mark of his breed 
 and his trade. 
 
 In a few weeks those things would come to be a vexation 
 to Adela; and, very uneasily, Dickie presently came to 
 wonder whether Edward had not been justified in assert- 
 
256 THESE LYNNEKERS 
 
 ing that between the Lynnekers and the Olivers there was 
 a difference in grain. And Frank Oliver was a masterful 
 man. Adela would never break him, though he might break 
 her. That, certainly, was a solution, but Dickie intensely 
 disliked the idea that Adela's spirit would be broken. 
 
 Then he had to admit that if he had done badly in in- 
 fluencing Adela's religious beliefs, he would probably do 
 worse by any profession of what they would irrevocably 
 call "atheism" to his father and mother, or his brothers, 
 or Eleanor. As Adela had said, they would never give 
 him "a moment's peace. He would be talked to and prayed 
 over from morning to night." They had the persistence 
 for that. They were so serenely confident in their knowl- 
 edge of an omnipotent backing. 
 
 He was not afraid of that struggle; but he was coming 
 to a realisation that, strong as he might be, the world of 
 his society in the mass was stronger still. And he had 
 no mission to preach to them; he would seriously dis- 
 turb the happiness of his father and mother, without 
 achieving any purpose save a doubtful consciousness of 
 his own integrity. 
 
 Over all these problems there hung the doubt of motive. 
 He felt that if the motive were unselfish, almost any action 
 might be justified. Just so had he been justified in his 
 prosecution of Smith, the money-lender ; whereas Atcherley 
 and Geach cast a slur on the same action by their dis- 
 honesty and self-seeking. 
 
 And could he defend the unselfishness of his own motive 
 in this desire to proclaim himself free of the restrictions 
 that he believed the Christian religion imposed upon his 
 liberty of thought? He thought not. The injury to his 
 family might outweigh his own gain. 
 
 Nevertheless, even as he decided, a decision from which 
 he would not turn back, that he would continue to profess 
 a decent subservience to the rule of the church, some spirit 
 within him sighed with a long regret. He had begun to 
 settle himself less rebelliously within the shackles of the 
 net, every strand of which was marked with the brand of 
 "expediency." 
 
XII 
 BRIAN LESSING 
 
 ADELA'S disgraceful elopement left a deep score on 
 the Halton system of chronology. The record of 
 Edward's marriage declined by comparison to the value 
 of a common incident. It had been foreseen and prepared 
 for, and he had so long been associated with St. Peter's 
 and the Vicarage, that the mere establishment of his rela- 
 tions with Helen hardly counted as an event. But if the 
 ceremony was in itself of small moment, it had a par- 
 ticular use as a synonym. The Lynnekers, as a family, 
 did not speak of the gross red line that had been ruled 
 across its historical chart. When they looked back for 
 some bold indication to date a memory, they ran, as it 
 were, a hurrying finger over the disfigurement, a finger 
 that afterwards hesitated and stopped inevitably at the pale 
 entry of Edward's wedding. 
 
 "Oh ! don't you remember," was the family's form, "that 
 was before before Edward was married in the summer 
 of '95?" 
 
 And the Rector and his wife would sigh thoughtfully 
 and then admit that they recognised the validity of the 
 mnemonic. As an aid to memory the triumphant return 
 of the Salisbury administration was quite overshadowed. . 
 
 Adela was forgiven ; they had written to her ; they were 
 ready to speak kindly of her among themselves. But she 
 had disgraced them ; and they hoped she and Frank Oliver 
 (they avoided speaking of him as "Adela's husband") 
 would remain in Canada. 
 
 257 
 
258 THESE LYNNEKERS 
 
 Within the family circle there were many variations of 
 mood. On certain days it was unwise to approach any 
 reference to Adela in the Rector's hearing, for fear the 
 allusion might provoke that nervous irritability which was 
 increasing with his years. On other days he would speak of 
 her, himself, probably as our "poor, little Adela" and 
 display, perhaps, a slightly maudlin tenderness over some 
 recollection of her youth. But to the world at large, even 
 to that select circle of Lynneker equals within the ring- 
 fence, the family were a shade more distant than they 
 had been. Strangers who could not understand that de- 
 fensive attitude, were apt to exaggerate Helen's original 
 criticism, the mild verdict delivered to Dickie in the stable- 
 yard, that the Lynnekers were "a wee bit supercilious," 
 that they "rather kept their noses in the air." 
 
 And yet they contrived through it all to maintain their 
 tendency to conciliation. Even as they hardened them- 
 selves against the attacks of imagined gossip, they were 
 willing and ready to please. Indeed, that added touch of 
 hauteur may only have been an attempt to bear themselves 
 conformably among their equals; an attempt to conciliate 
 the opinion of society by proving that as a family they 
 remained superior to the offence of a single member. 
 
 ii 
 
 And seven months later, that is to say in the early spring 
 of 1896, they had to face yet another trouble that was 
 certainly less outrageous than the last, but cast a further 
 slur on the Lynneker reputation. 
 
 Latimer had publicly announced his engagement to Mrs. 
 Blackwell, a widow fourteen years his senior. 
 
 To Halton there was something a little unseemly in the 
 contemplation of that marriage apart from all other con- 
 siderations. The Rector had fidgeted and frowned when, 
 four years before, his eldest son had shown an inclination 
 to pay attention to the same lady. He had told Mrs. Lynne- 
 
BRIAN LESSING 
 
 ker that he did not like the idea of so great a disparity of 
 age, on the wrong side, between husband and wife. And 
 it was also evident that he did not like Mrs. Blackwell. 
 
 She was a dark, handsome woman, growing steadily 
 stouter as she aged, who had come to live in Medborough in 
 the year of the first Jubilee. She had been regarded sus- 
 piciously at the outset by that inner circle of the Precincts 
 which it soon became manifest she was intently propitiat- 
 ing. The Precincts had at first looked down supercili- 
 ously at her big house in the Thrapley Road, just outside 
 the town; on her well-kept gardens and her victoria with 
 the two well-matched bays. No doubt, Mrs. Blackwell 
 was rich, but she might prove to be, also, ostentatious and 
 vulgar. She had come to Medborough without social intro- 
 ductions, and the Precincts decided to wait. 
 
 They waited for two years; and in all that time Mrs. 
 Blackwell was not guilty of a single faux pas. She was 
 called upon by the second grade of Medborough society, led 
 by such lesser clergy as the Principal of the Training Col- 
 lege and the senior assistant master of the King's School. 
 But she treated all these callers with an admirable restraint. 
 She was rude to none of them, but she kept them at a dis- 
 tance. She showed the Cathedral party very plainly that 
 she had no intention of being leader in any second-class 
 puddle. 
 
 She first gained admission to the Close through old Fol- 
 liett, the solicitor, the third son of Dr. Folliett who had 
 held the Bishopric of Medborough from 1829 to 1843. Old 
 Folliett, he had one son in his own office and two in the 
 church, one was an archdeacon and the other a missionary 
 in China, was esteemed and trusted as an arbiter of 
 social distinctions, and when he invited Mrs. Blackwell 
 to dinner, the Precincts began to consider the advisability 
 of leaving cards in the Thrapley Road. At first they dis 
 played a little human concern lest old Folliett should be 
 tempted to marry again. Mrs. Blackwell was only thirty 
 at that time, and unquestionably handsome in her striking 
 way. 
 
260 THESE LYNNEKERS 
 
 And yet, although Mrs. Blackwell had so bravely fought 
 her way up to and at last through the Palace gates not 
 to a mere diocesan function but to a social luncheon party 
 the Precincts had never been quite easy about her. They 
 had shown signs of alienation when Edward's brief af- 
 fection was near its crisis, and on one or two other occa- 
 sions their fastidious sense of an ultimate propriety had 
 been a little vexed. They knew so little about her previous 
 life, and she gave no confidences. No one knew anything 
 about her late husband, no one knew what her father had 
 been. Even the fact that she was a mistress of the 
 French and Italian languages was regarded with a shade 
 of suspicion. (The Bishop's wife's French was simply 
 abominable.) And why did she spend three months of 
 every year in Italy? She had never complained of delicate 
 health. 
 
 The fine conservatism of the Precincts was intermittently 
 fretted by the admission of Mrs. Blackwell. 
 
 And they could not sanction her engagement to young 
 Latimer Lynneker, a mere boy of twenty-three, fresh to 
 deacon's orders. 
 
 This clear mandate coming with such high sanction cast 
 a deeper slur on the engagement; the Lynnekers were con- 
 scious of new disgrace, before they had had opportunity 
 to live down the old one. And there was yet another 
 reason for regarding the affair with the strongest dis- 
 approval. 
 
 Mrs. Blackwell had bought the advowson of Culver. 
 
 No one at Halton, with the exception of Latimer, had 
 known that the living was likely to come into the market. 
 They had known that Canon Lynneker's two eldest boys 
 had been a great expense to him; and that only the third 
 son, Richard, who had taken orders and had a curacy 
 in Birmingham, was definitely earning his own living. But 
 Culver was worth eight hundred a year, and the Canon's 
 financial difficulties had never been taken seriously. 
 
 It was distinctly unpleasant to hear that the gift of the 
 living had passed out of the family, but it was even more 
 
BRIAN LESSING 261 
 
 unpleasant to face the suspicion that Latimer had been 
 acting meanly and even disgracefully. He had been help- 
 ing his uncle in the parish since January, and the whole 
 bargain wore an aspect of double-dealing (why had he 
 never said a word to Halton till the thing was done?), and 
 what was worse, of a quite unworthy trafficking with sacred 
 affairs; with the cure of souls in Culver (395 at the last 
 census) and with the divine institution of marriage. It 
 was impossible to avoid the inference that Mrs. Black well 
 had bought Latimer and that he was willing to be bought. 
 Certainly, the Precincts would make no effort to avoid that 
 inference when the bargain of Culver became public prop- 
 erty. 
 
 The Rector of Halton was beginning to feel that the 
 Lynnekers had fallen on evil days. He was in his seven- 
 tieth year, and his zest in life was steadily failing. 
 Physically the Lynnekers were a tough and wiry stock, 
 but when they lost their appreciation of life, they were 
 apt to decline rather rapidly. 
 
 In the early summer of that year, the Rector was become 
 increasingly anxious that Dickie should leave the Bank and 
 become a credit to the family. 
 
 Dickie was the last anchor that saved the old boat from 
 drifting out with the ebb. 
 
 in 
 
 Martyn's offer was, theoretically, still open. 
 
 He had written a very delicate letter to his uncle after 
 the affaire Oliver, a letter that had made the most tactful 
 references to the scandal, and had underlined Martyn's 
 nice sense of the family's superiority to any transient dis- 
 grace, by restating his willingness to do all that he had 
 suggested for Dickie. "Of course, little Adela's curious 
 elopement in no way affects our plans for Dick," had been 
 his phrase. "I am still awaiting that explanation he prom- 
 ised me," he had added. 
 
THESE LYNNEKERS 
 
 Halton was greatly exhilarated by that letter. The Rector 
 had read it to his wife and Eleanor in the middle of the 
 morning; and they both agreed with his description of 
 Martyn as "a charming fellow." Also, they all decided, in 
 conclave, that Dickie's reply must be supervised by them- 
 selves. Dick was so "impetuous," his father said. 
 
 Latimer, whose diligent morning study for orders had 
 not been interrupted, even to hear the heartening news, 
 declared at dinner that he would personally superintend, 
 and might possibly draft, Dickie's answer. "Pig-headed," 
 was the adjective he found for his brother, a description 
 that was accepted with little less reserve than the Rector's 
 "impetuous" had been. Either adjective seemed to fit well 
 enough at the time, although taken together they might 
 have been judged to lack consonance. 
 
 The four of them were almost united in their attack 
 upon Dickie at supper, and Latimer was so far emboldened 
 by the support of the flock that he actually put his morn- 
 ing's proposition into words. 
 
 "Look here, Dick, will you let me rough out an answer ?" 
 he asked. 
 
 The pig-headed, impetuous Dickie grinned as if his broth- 
 er's suggestion amused him. 
 
 "Will you be able to explain exactly wftat I feel about 
 being a barrister and standing for Parliament and all that ?" 
 he returned. 
 
 "My dear chap," Latimer said, "if you take my advice, 
 you won't say a word about your opinions." 
 
 "I hardly think it necessary, in the first instance/' the 
 Rector put in gravely. 
 
 And Mrs. Lynneker added, albeit with a shade of doubt 
 on her face, ' Mu^t you go into all that, dear? You know 
 you might so easily change your mind afterwards." 
 
 "I should have thought you could try it and see, in any 
 case," was Eleanor's contribution. 
 
 Dickie put his elbows on the table and stared past them 
 all, trying to visualise, not the problem of what he should 
 say to Martyn, but that of the impossibility of getting any 
 
BRIAN LESSING 263 
 
 kind of reaction to his idea from his family. They knew 
 he was not a fool, and yet they never attempted to under- 
 stand him. 
 
 "Would it be fair to Martyn," he asked, "if I let him 
 spend money on me and then decided that I couldn't go 
 on with the thing?" 
 
 Latimer snorted. "You'd jolly well have to go on," he 
 said. 
 
 "That's what I feel," Dickie replied. "And you see, I 
 don't feel inclined to pledge myself to that extent." 
 
 "It isn't only yourself that you have to consider," put in 
 Eleanor. 
 
 "But what is it precisely, Dick, that you're afraid of?" 
 his father asked. 
 
 "I don't want to be forced into one particular line of 
 thought," he said. 
 
 "What rot!" mumftled Latimer, and Dickie could not 
 doubt that however various might be the expression of 
 conviction, his brother had given a shape to the beliefs of 
 his family. For them, in religion, in politics, at the back 
 of all their social judgments, there was but one line of 
 thought worthy of acceptance; the others were tainted by 
 those detestable spirits of "atheism" and radicalism. 
 
 "Really, I can't understand your difficulty," his father 
 was saying, peevishly. 
 
 His mother looked disturbed and grieved. She was mani- 
 festly afraid that the Devil had been busy again, tempting 
 her son with doubts of the great, eternal truths "a lying 
 spirit in the mouth of his prophets" was a quotation that 
 hung vaguely in her mind. 
 
 Latimer preferred to keep to the safer ground of po- 
 litical life. "Do you propose to become a radical ; or a so- 
 cialist, perhaps?" he asked, as if he would tempt his brother 
 into the confession of some absurdity. 
 
 "I don't know, yet, you see," explained Dickie. 
 
 "Good Heavens!" ejaculated Latimer. (He had dropped 
 his favourite "Good Lord!" as slightly irreverent for one 
 so soon to be ordained deacon.) 
 
264 THESE LYNNEKERS 
 
 The Rector leaned back in his chair with a sigh of 
 despair. 
 
 "But my dear boy . . ." he expostulated. 
 
 Dickie realised that he must be a great trial to his family. 
 He could begin no argument, no explanation of his own 
 attitude without challenging some fixed, inalterable prin- 
 ciple that dominated the very character of their minds. 
 And he saw that he faced the same crisis which had threat- 
 ened him when he was compelled to abate something of 
 his honest intention in the matter of his religious doubts. 
 Now, again, his choice lay between sincerity and some 
 sacrifice of his own conscience for the sake of his father 
 and mother. They could not understand his doubts, whether 
 religious or sociological; they could not appreciate the 
 radical quality of his desire to understand the meaning and 
 reason of life. There was some difference of fibre between 
 his mind and theirs. They accepted, he questioned. But 
 he questioned, as he believed, with good cause and not from 
 any foolish tendency to upset for the sake of upsetting. 
 Indeed, he had had little wish to impress his own opin- 
 ions on other minds ; he was too doubtful of the validity of 
 his deductions. If he had found any satisfaction in his 
 family's theory of life, he would gladly have accepted it. 
 But the more he examined it, the more clearly he saw that 
 their theory did not work. It was a ready-made answer 
 like the misprint in Latimer's algebra key; and by no 
 juggling of figures could it be forced to satisfy the equa- 
 tion. They had all so placidly accepted the printed an- 
 swer. It was an answer that suited their temper, and 
 now they would defend its accuracy with an utter convic- 
 tion of its absolute truth. As he looked across at his 
 brother, Dickie felt inclined to repeat his old assertion 
 and say: "But 19 won't work, Latimer." 
 
 The alternative was to admit a second time the necessity 
 for some measure of compromise. 
 
 "Well, it isn't much good trying to discuss my political 
 opinions when I haven't got any," he said. "Let's get back 
 to the question of what I'm to say to cousin Martyn." 
 
BRIAN LESSING 265 
 
 He looked at Latimer as he spoke and it was his brother 
 who answered on behalf of the family. 
 
 "Exactly. And if you haven't got any political opin- 
 ions, I don't quite see why you shouldn't accept his offer 
 without all sort of idiotic quibbles and objections. We've 
 always been . conservatives, as a family, I mean. Isn't 
 conservatism good enough for you, or what?" 
 
 "It seems to me so horribly prejudiced," Dickie said. 
 
 "Prejudiced? In what way?" his father asked sharply. 
 
 Dickie turned his head and looked at him, with that 
 steady, honest gaze of his which was so exceedingly dis- 
 concerting. The Lynnekers could never argue without the 
 stimulus of losing their tempers, and Dickie's calm dia- 
 lectic gave them a sense of inferiority. 
 
 "Well, I'm sorry, pater," he said, trying to be particu- 
 larly clear and reasonable, "but I can't see, for instance, 
 why you're so frightfully down on Gladstone . . ." 
 
 He would have gone on to explain his reasons for that 
 opinion, but no opportunity was allowed him. In one 
 sentence he had denied all those eternal verities which 
 constituted the faith and profession of his family. 
 
 The Rector pushed back his chair with the same gesture 
 of finality with which Edward had upset the salt. 
 
 "Upon my soul, Dick, I've no patience with you," he 
 said, and left the room. 
 
 Mrs. Lynneker sighed. Eleanor's thin mouth was set 
 in an expression that summarised twenty generations of 
 Lynneker disapproval. Latimer shrugged his shoulders 
 and almost imperceptibly tossed his head ; he did not speak, 
 but every line of him was calling the universe to witness 
 that Dickie was "a young ass." - 
 
 IV 
 
 Dickie went up to his own room, and sat down to write 
 his letter to Martyn. He had intended to be very clear 
 in his presentation of the whole question; to explain his 
 
266 THESE LYNNEKERS 
 
 position and leave it to his cousin to decide whether he 
 would venture upon the task of training him for a profes- 
 sion he might subsequently refuse to pursue. 
 
 But when he began to write, he found a sense of pleasure 
 and relief in stating all those things his father would 
 never allow him to say in words. 
 
 "You see, Martyn," he wrote, when he got into his 
 swing after a rather stilted opening, "I can't believe that 
 there is any absolute answer to this particular question of 
 whether we should be a Radical or a Conservative, any 
 more than I can believe that one religious sect is neces- 
 sarily absolutely right and all the others wrong. Of 
 course, you will say that it is more expedient for me to 
 become a Conservative, but that would mean just shutting 
 off half my mind and ideas, and I'm not willing to do that. 
 I don't suppose I shall ever learn a thousandth part of 
 the whole truth about what we are and what our work 
 ought to be ; no one ever has, I suppose, or else we should 
 be more in agreement about fundamental facts. But what 
 I won't do is to throw in my lot with one limited set of 
 opinions, and be prepared to swear blind that any one 
 who doesn't agree with me is the most infernal blackguard 
 and traitor that was ever born. That really isn't much 
 of an exaggeration. I don't know much about politics, 
 but it seems pretty obvious that the principal game is to 
 slang the other side for all your worth, if you want to 
 make any impression. 
 
 Well, that isn't a bit my line, you know ; but, as I've just 
 said, I'm fearfully ignorant about these things, and I dare- 
 say if you and I could have a long talk, you might be able 
 to show me some way out of this initial difficulty. I have 
 no objection to politics qua politics, you understand, but 
 I feel pretty sure that if I went in for them, I should have 
 to follow a line of my own; and the point is whether you 
 would care to take me on, on those terms. 
 
 The pater and mater and Latimer and Eleanor all want 
 me to write and just accept your offer on your own terms ; 
 but I'm sure you would not want me to do that, and even 
 
BRIAN LESSING 267 
 
 if I did, I couldn't keep it up for half a week after I was 
 in town. Do you care to take the risk I mentioned? I 
 notice that I haven't once said how jolly good it was of 
 you to make the offer at all, but you will take that for 
 granted, won't you, I mean how grateful I am. 
 
 My people wanted me to talk this letter over with them, 
 but I couldn't very well do that You know I quite 
 understand their position in a way. They have always 
 been brought up to believe in the church and the Con- 
 servative party, and they are quite convinced that they 
 are right about them; and I think they are up to a point. 
 I can see that it would make them miserable and do no 
 kind of good if I were able (which I certainly am not) 
 to shake their faith in these things. I don't want to do 
 that; I only want to understand (to a certain extent, of 
 course) how things work, if you know what I mean . . ." 
 
 Down in the drawing-room, the Rector after an impatient 
 moment of delay, the two maids were standing reverently 
 expectant before their usual seats, asked his wife if Dick 
 were coming down to prayers. 
 
 "I haven't seen him since supper," she said defensively, 
 as if she had been accused of being privy to her son's 
 absence. 
 
 "Sulking, I suppose," murmured Latimer. 
 
 "Shall I call him, sir?" asked the housemaid. 
 
 The Rector shook his head. "You can shut the door," 
 he said. 
 
 He was aware of a feeling of loneliness. He looked up 
 at the engraving of Gordon and chose the hymn. "Abide 
 with me," he said. They all knew the number. 
 
 Dickie's general conduct in connexion with the letter to 
 Martyn seemed to justify either his father's or his brother's 
 adjective impartially. 
 
 Latimer maintained that pigheadedness alone could ac- 
 
268 THESE LYNNEKERS 
 
 count for Dickie's treatment of the situation. The young 
 idiot had refused the help of his seniors and written and 
 posted his letter without showing it to a single member 
 of his family, any one of whom, presumably, could have 
 given him very sound and useful advice. 
 
 Mr. Lynneker, as soon as he had recovered from the 
 shock to his political sensibilities, found an excuse for all 
 his boy's vagaries in the thought of the word "impetuous." 
 Much might be forgiven on that score. The boy was un- 
 questionably clever and he was not yet twenty-one. Youth 
 was apt to be misled by its own abilities. He would settle 
 down as he gathered experience. 
 
 And the reply from Martyn that came a week later largely 
 vindicated Dickie's conduct of the affair by proving that 
 his admirable cousin had not, as yet, been offended. 
 
 The offer was still open, although "unhappily somewhat 
 deferred," as Martyn explained. He was going out, with 
 a returning consul, to Japan in the following January, he 
 told them, and might be away for six months or even 
 longer. His own object was in no sense political and it 
 was still possible that he might change his mind, but he 
 had always had a curious interest in Japan, and his friend's 
 suggestion that they should take the voyage together had 
 at last turned the balance in favour of making the effort. 
 The effort, he added, was due to the fact that he was a 
 horribly bad sailor, but he was afraid that if he waited 
 until the Russian railway was built, he might never go at 
 all. He made little direct reference to the matter of Dickie's 
 letter, but the tone of his reply hinted that he anticipated 
 no difficulties in coming to an amicable arrangement with 
 regard to his young cousin's "critical views on political 
 methods," a hint that endorsed the Rector's opinion with 
 regard to Dickie's probable growth towards orthodoxy. 
 Without doubt, he would settle down presently. 
 
 The family took fresh hope from that letter and marked 
 a hypothetical but highly entertaining date on their next 
 year's calendar. "When Martyn came back from Japan," 
 many wonderful things were to happen. 
 
BRIAN LESSING 269 
 
 They canvassed the advisability of approaching Mr. Bell 
 with a question as to whether he would allow Dickie to 
 leave at the end of four years. Martyn would almost cer- 
 tainly be home again by the following October, and it 
 might be well, Mr. Lynneker thought, to prepare the way 
 for taking up his offer. 
 
 Dickie's own attitude was the one depressing influence. 
 
 "You ought to be satisfied now, I should think/' Latimer 
 said. "You've made your own terms, apparently, and got 
 everything your own way." 
 
 "Oh! yes, if it ever comes off," Dickie said, thought- 
 fully. 
 
 "But Martyn has practically promised," Latimer re- 
 monstrated. 
 
 "Yes, I know," Dickie returned, "but it's about some- 
 thing a year ahead." 
 
 They all attacked him for his insinuation against Mar- 
 tyn's probity, and he did not explain his reasons for doubt- 
 ing his cousin's good faith ; but already Dickie had seen 
 evidences of the family spirit in Martyn. Would not any 
 of the Halton or the Culver Lynnekers be willing to prom- 
 ise any concession, if no fulfilment were expected for twelve 
 months ? And why had not Martyn boldly faced the argu- 
 ment of Dickie's letter, instead of hinting the probability 
 that they would inevitably come to some form of com- 
 promise ? 
 
 VI 
 
 The great events that were to succeed Martyn's home- 
 coming were still a matter of hope and faith at the be- 
 ginning of October, 1896. Dickie was twenty-one and fac- 
 ing the last of his five years at the City & County, when 
 Mr. Bell offered to raise his salary with a leap to 130 a 
 year and give him the responsible post of head-cashier. 
 
 "It's quite an exceptional offer, Lynneker," Mr. Bell 
 explained ; "we have never put any man under twenty- 
 six in such a position before; but . . ." he smiled with an 
 
270 THESE LYNNEKERS 
 
 unusual intimacy as he added, "You are quite an exceptional 
 clerk." 
 
 "I don't mean to stick to banking, you know, sir," Dickie 
 said. 
 
 "It will be a great pity, a great pity if you do not," 
 Mr. Bell advised him. "I may tell you in the strictest 
 confidence that your advance is practically assured. I 
 can't hope to keep you here, of course, I have heard, un- 
 officially, that you will be transferred to London, next year 
 you have splendid chances before you, Lynneker you 
 are already a marked man in the service . . ." He hesi- 
 tated, feeling that little more temptation could be needed, 
 before he concluded, "You may well be earning a thousand 
 a year before you are forty." 
 
 "But I don't particularly want to earn a thousand a 
 year," Dickie explained. 
 
 Mr. Bell's smile was more patronising this time. 
 
 "Ah! well, you are very young yet, Lynneker," he said. 
 "We'll see what you have to say on that score in twelve 
 months' time; meanwhile, I suppose you're prepared to 
 stay on with us for the last year of your agreement, and 
 to take Bradshaw's place you had heard he was leaving 
 us? and," his smile became faintly ironical, "to accept my 
 offer of a considerable rise?" 
 
 "Yes, of course, sir," Dickie agreed; "if it is on the 
 clear understanding that I don't pledge myself to stay 
 beyond the five years." 
 
 "Certainly, of course," Mr. Bell said. He had no doubt 
 in his own mind that when the time came his protege would 
 accept the offer that would be made to him. 
 
 As he passed to his own seat, Dickie thumped Bradshaw 
 familiarly on the back. 
 
 "Secretive bounder," he whispered, "why didn't you tell 
 me you were going?" 
 
 Bradshaw glanced nervously at the two juniors. "Will 
 you come and have tea at Hopkinson's ?" he asked. He and 
 Dickie shared responsibility, now; and they could never 
 be out together in the middle of the day. 
 
BRIAN LESSING 271 
 
 "All serene/' Dickie agreed. . . . 
 
 Bradshaw reserved his story an almost tangible air of 
 mystery hung about him as they had tea until he was 
 safely alone with Dickie in the desecrated cloisters ; two of 
 its sides were never used by the ordinary wayfarer whose 
 business led him from the Yard to the Close. And even 
 when he was facing that deserted walk, Bradshaw evi- 
 denced a marked reluctance to begin his confidence. 
 
 "You see, old man," he said, "I don't suppose you'll hardly 
 credit it, but I'm I'm hoping to get married," and he 
 looked searchingly and with a sensitive contraction of his 
 little button mouth at Dickie to see if even his quiet ac- 
 ceptance of all peculiarities would carry him over this 
 grotesque announcement. 
 
 "Good for you," Dickie said ; "but it hardly seems a rea- 
 son for leaving the Bank. Do I know her?" 
 
 Bradshaw drew up his narrow figure with an air of 
 relief, almost of pride. 
 
 "You're the only fellow I know, Lynneker," he said, 
 "that I'd really like to call my friend." 
 
 "Rot," commented Dickie. "Who's the lady?" 
 
 "I have mentioned her to you before," Bradshaw said, 
 
 "She's been giving me lessons on the pianofort on the 
 piano, I should say." 
 
 "Oh! Miss Young?" put in Dickie. 
 
 "Lord! What a memory you've got, old man," Brad- 
 shaw remarked admiringly. 
 
 "I've heard of her more than once, you know," Dickie 
 explained. "When am I to meet her?" 
 
 "As soon as you like," Bradshaw said. "Care to come 
 up there, now ? It's only in the Dogsthorpe Road. They've 
 heard a lot about you, I can tell you. I told Ruth," he 
 stammered shyly over the name, "that I should bring you 
 up one afternoon." 
 
 "All serene," Dickie returned cheerfully. "But why leave 
 the Bank?" he asked as they turned back towards the 
 Cathedral Yard. "Or have you only been transferred ?" 
 
 "Well, that wants explaining, too," Bradshaw said. 
 
THESE LYNNEKERS 
 
 "You see, Miss Young," he evidently felt safer with that 
 description, "is a year or two older than me and a very 
 great dea} cleverer; I've decided, at last, to take up the 
 other line." 
 
 "Entertaining?" put in Dickie. 
 
 "That sort of thing," Bradshaw acknowledged. "I feel 
 pretty sure it's right, too," he went on. "She understands. 
 She's a lot too good for me, of course, every way . . ." 
 
 "And how are you going to begin?" 
 
 "We talk of giving a combined concert at the Drill Hall. 
 In fact, we've booked a date for the middle of November, 
 and the bills are being printed. She'll carry the thing 
 through; she's very wonderful, Lynneker, and I expect 
 I'll be all right after the first go off. You see, I'm not 
 nervous in the ordinary way, old man, funny that, isn't 
 it? I mean that I shan't care a cuss when I'm up on the 
 platform, I know I can make 'em laugh all right. It isn't 
 that. You remember what I've said to you, though, about 
 not caring for the job in one way. Silly, really, I sup- 
 pose. But there you are. She's agreed with me all along. 
 I've had to persuade her into this business, so there must 
 be something in it. Only, you know, she's a year or two 
 older than me, and we don't want to wait for ever, and I'm 
 not going to marry her on two-fifteen a week that's about 
 what it works out at. And it's funny, but I know I can 
 make money at the other thing." 
 
 "I don't see any earthly reason why you shouldn't go 
 in for entertaining," Dickie said. 
 
 "I know you don't," Bradshaw agreed. "That's had 
 a lot of weight with me, too. But it isn't altogether a thing 
 you can argue about. Damn silly of me, that's all. I am 
 rather a damn silly cuss someways. What she can see in 
 me, I don't know." 
 
 As they walked up the Dogsthorpe Road, Miss Young 
 and her mother lived in one of the small houses at the 
 far end, Dickie was aware of a desire to defend his 
 companion not against the criticism and laughter of the 
 crowd at the Drill Hall, but against the woman he was 
 
BRIAN LESSING 273 
 
 going to marry. Why had she given way and let Brad- 
 shaw sacrifice his scruples? In order that she might 
 live in greater ease? Dickie suddenly pictured her with 
 selfish eyes and a sharp chin ; a designing creature plotting 
 to escape the limitations of her hard-working gentility. 
 Instinctively, Dickie felt the need to protect Bradshaw from 
 this snare, even as he had sought to release his mother or 
 old Mrs. Barrett from the cramps of the Medborough Loan 
 Company. 
 
 And then the contrast between his picture and his first 
 sight of Miss Young was so grotesque that for one moment 
 he could not realise that he was actually shaking hands with 
 the woman he had come to see. When he had recovered 
 from his amazement, he could have shouted with happy 
 laughter. 
 
 She was broad and short, almost squat, with wide, ear- 
 nest grey eyes and brown hair that grew low on her fore- 
 head. Certainly she was not beautiful, but the sweet in- 
 tentness of her generous smile was compensation for any 
 physical short-coming. This was a woman whom every 
 one must trust. 
 
 And she manifestly adored Bradshaw even as he adored 
 her. They so admired and respected each other that Brad- 
 shaw's long silence respecting their engagement it trans- 
 pired presently that they had been engaged for over three 
 years was suddenly comprehensible. He had not dared 
 to expose so fine a devotion to any chance of possible 
 ridicule. It may have been that his recent shrinking from 
 the advertisement of his own peculiarities had had its 
 origin in this source he had winced at the thought of dis- 
 playing Ruth Young's chosen lover as a mere clown. From 
 that to the thought of thankfulness to God for such as 
 He had given, was a short step. 
 
 Dickie felt a sense of relief in the companionship of 
 those two lovers. They touched the reality that uncon- 
 sciously he was always seeking; they gave him an answer 
 to one of his many problems. He could not accuse them 
 of offering palliations to expediency. Either was imper- 
 
274 THESE LYNNEKERS 
 
 furbably ready for any personal sacrifice. He understood 
 that with them he could be utterly frank. He told them 
 of the vision he had had in the Dogsthorpe Road. 
 
 Miss Young did not laugh. Her wide eyes became very 
 grave and earnest as she said, 
 
 "And you wanted to protect Mark from me?" 
 
 Dickie grinned. "I'm always blundering into that sort 
 of mistake," he explained. 
 
 "I wish every one blundered like that," Miss Young said, 
 looking at Dickie with immense approval. "I often wanted 
 Mark to tell you about us. He's always talking of you 
 and I've thought that you couldn't be as nice as he said 
 you were or else he would have told you." 
 
 "You were quite right, of course," muttered Bradshaw. 
 
 "He's a rotter," Dickie said genially. 
 
 "He certainly is, in this case," Ruth agreed. 
 
 Bradshaw blushed at the flattery of attention he was 
 receiving. 
 
 "I've told Lynneker about the concert," he said by way 
 of diverting the conversation. 
 
 "And you agree that it's the best thing to do, don't 
 you?" put in Ruth eagerly. "Mark is so sensitive about 
 it, and I haven't wanted him to go in for entertaining we 
 could quite well have got married on a hundred and forty 
 a year and I could have gone on teaching, but he wouldn't. 
 He says he has been silly about that; about what he calls 
 making an exhibition of himself, and that he ought to have 
 begun long ago. But do you think he will really like it 
 when it comes to the point ?" 
 
 They both looked at Dickie as to an oracle. 
 
 "He'll be all right," Dickie returned with conviction; 
 and the Lynneker cliche had a new force ; it was no longer 
 the expression of a feeble procrastination, but a ringing 
 prophecy. 
 
 Ruth and Bradshaw looked at each other with happy 
 relief. They had so often debated the problem and now 
 it seemed that it was finally solved for them by this one 
 bold announcement. 
 
BRIAN LESSING 275 
 
 "Anyway, you've pretty well burnt your boats," Dickie 
 added ; "given notice to the Bank, booked the Hall and that 
 sort of thing." 
 
 "Yes, I know we had. We thought we must do some- 
 thing desperate to settle it," Ruth said. "But we were still 
 a little uneasy ; and, now, you've convinced us." 
 
 "Hooray," Dickie said. "We'll all come, of course." 
 
 "Do you think the Cathedral people . . . ?" began Ruth. 
 
 "Rather," Dickie interrupted her. He felt equal to lead- 
 ing in the Bishop by the nose if necessary. He might not 
 be able to persuade Edward or Latimer he could hear 
 their excuses but he would get the others. 
 
 "I'll begin with the Dean," he said. "He's been rather 
 decent to me once or twice lately, in the Cathedral Library." 
 He would have gone immediately if they had had the 
 tickets ready for him. 
 
 He had lifted the prospects of their concert out of the 
 hesitation that had perceptibly clouded their immediate hap- 
 piness. He had made their venture appear a splendid 
 enterprise. They talked no more of Bradshaw's scruples, 
 but of his coming fame. They remembered that Corney 
 Grain had stayed the night as an honoured guest in the 
 house of Archdeacon Fortescue the winter before. 
 
 "But I'll have to be very careful with my show if the 
 Cathedral people are coming," Bradshaw said. "I'd been 
 thinking rather of the shop-keepers and that lot. I'm not 
 sure, dear, whether I won't rough out another sketch in- 
 stead of that one I told you about." 
 
 The artist in Bradshaw was all alight. 
 
 "He's tremendously clever at getting ideas and things, 
 you know," was Ruth's chorus. "He can even make me 
 laugh when he wants to." 
 
 "Well, of course," agreed Dickie. "It's a gift with 
 him. . . ." 
 
 And yet, as he rode home he had one passing moment 
 of doubt as to whether those two fond lovers would not 
 have found greater happiness on 140 a year than they 
 would in a future, however successful, founded on Brad- 
 
276 THESE LYNNEKERS 
 
 shaw's gift for making laughter. It came to him that 
 his friend might lose something in the applause that awaited 
 him. 
 
 VII 
 
 At the end of October, when the bills and tickets for the 
 Bradshaw Concert were printed and delivered, Dickie un- 
 dertook his canvass of the Precincts with the same eager- 
 ness and determination that he had displayed in his attack 
 upon the Loan Company. On this occasion he was not 
 worried by the ethic of his endeavour, he had not again 
 reverted to his doubt concerning the ultimate betterment 
 of his friend ; and would not, in any case, have trusted his 
 own judgment on so obscure a matter. He regarded his 
 advocacy of the Bradshaw cause as the obvious thing for 
 him to do, and he took a great pleasure in doing it. 
 
 His success was not due to any special virtue of per- 
 sistence, but to his lack of self-consciousness and to his 
 convincing manner of advertising Bradshaw's qualifica- 
 tions as a man and an entertainer. 
 
 "Certainly, I will take tickets, Lynneker," the Dean said 
 without the least hesitation when he was canvassed in the 
 Cathedral Library one Thursday afternoon. 
 
 "But you'll come, too, sir, won't you?" Dickie insisted. 
 "It isn't really the money they want so much as the eclat. 
 And I should immensely like you to see him, sir," he con- 
 cluded. 
 
 Before he escaped, the Dean had promised both his 
 personal attendance and his active patronage. He had 
 promised to mention the Concert to his friends. 
 
 Dickie had hopes of getting the Bishop. 
 
 And after that there was no trouble, even with Edward 
 and Latimer. The Bradshaw venture had been made a 
 Cathedral function, and every one who counted, or wished 
 to count, was anxious to be seen there. The modest pro- 
 posal of two rows of five shilling seats was soon shown to 
 be absurdly inadequate. Eventually they had seven. 
 
BRIAN LESSING 277 
 
 "Oh! don't thank me, thank the Dean he did it all," 
 expostulated Dickie, embarrassed by the gratitude of his 
 two friends. 
 
 "But you did the Dean," Bradshaw said, and Ruth had 
 a long accusation of other work done that Dickie could 
 not defend. After he had made sure of the five-shilling 
 seats, he had whipped up the shopkeepers. . . . 
 
 Socially and financially the success of the concert was 
 assured a fortnight before the date of performance; but 
 there was a terrible moment on the night when Bradshaw's 
 success as an artist hung in the balance. 
 
 The programme was not a long one. Ruth opened with 
 a piano solo, the middle was filled by a professional soprano 
 known to Ruth, the well-known glee quartette of men's 
 voices led by Mr. Bell, and the pet chorister, Willie Butler, 
 who delighted all Medborough and its neighbourhood, not 
 only by the sweetness of his voice in the Cathedral anthem, 
 but also by his splendid aplomb on the concert platform. 
 He was, indeed, the perfect chorister of romance ; he even 
 had curly hair. 
 
 And Bradshaw, the fount and origin of the whole affair, 
 wound up the first part by singing to his own accompani- 
 ment two unpublished songs of Scott-Gatty's, by kind 
 permission, namely, "Who d'you think was there ?" and 
 "My dear Aunt Jane." The songs, themselves, were un- 
 impeachable by Cathedral standards, but the performer 
 overdid his facial contortions. It was then that his fate 
 hung in the balance. 
 
 The Precincts laughed, but they were just a shade un- 
 easy. The applause they vouchsafed lacked enthusiasm, 
 and the comments that Dickie heard were not of the kind 
 he desired. 
 
 "Amusing person . . . certainly funny . . . such an 
 oddity . . ." were phrases conveying a hint of the reserva- 
 tion which was no doubt plainly spoken in the dropped 
 voices that followed the audible comment. Dickie, stand- 
 ing in his capacity of steward against the wall of the side 
 aisle, knew too well that the whispered confidences ex- 
 
278 THESE LYNNEKERS 
 
 pressed in some form or another the criticism that Brad- 
 shaw was "slightly vulgar." 
 
 If there had been any tendency among those first ranks 
 to leave the Hall at that moment, the affair would have 
 been a failure. Dickie, debating the possibility of prevent- 
 ing a rout by addressing the audience at large, stood rigid, 
 with his eyes fixed on the stooping shoulders of the Dean. 
 While he stood firm, all would be well. And the Dean 
 stood firm; he sat nearly at the end of the third row with 
 a vacant chair on his right hand, and in the middle of the 
 interval he beckoned Dickie over to him. 
 
 "I suppose your friend Bradshaw will give us his best 
 at the end of the second part in this sketch of his, eh?" 
 asked the Dean confidentially. 
 
 "Yes, sir, that's his big thing," Dickie said. 
 
 "Er do you know what it's about?" the Dean asked. 
 
 "I heard him rehearse it, sir," Dickie said. 
 
 "The truth is," went on the Dean, dropping his voice 
 still lower, "that the Bishop said he might come in at the 
 end of the performance I am keeping this chair for him, 
 and I wanted to be sure d'you think he'll like it, Lyn- 
 neker?" 
 
 "I'm sure he will, sir," Dickie said without hesitation. 
 "He's got a jolly sense of humour, hasn't he? You can see 
 it in his history." 
 
 The Dean smiled gravely. "If you say so . . ." he be- 
 gan and gave his characteristic nod of the head. "Well, 
 well, if you say so, Lynneker. . . ." 
 
 "I'm sure it will be all right, sir," Dickie returned as he 
 got up. 
 
 After that the situation was saved for the time being. 
 The final result depended upon Bradshaw. Dickie con- 
 sidered the advisability of a visit to the retiring-room and 
 of a hint that the facial contortion business might be over- 
 done. He decided against it on the ground that Brad- 
 shaw might be upset and made self-conscious. He had 
 conveyed the impression that he had, after all, been rather 
 
BRIAN LESSING 279 
 
 nervous during his first performance ; that he had, perhaps, 
 been over anxious to get a laugh. 
 
 He made no mistake on his second appearance. His 
 sketch, "No one takes me seriously/' contained more than 
 a hint of pathos; and when, at the conclusion, in the last 
 chorus of the song on which he based his sketch, he changed 
 suddenly into the minor and wound up in a whisper to the 
 accompaniment of one desolate chord, the house was obvi- 
 ously moved. 
 
 Bradshaw had touched them to response ; and the Bishop, 
 who had crept in quietly and sat by the Dean, and who 
 had laughed quite uproariously at the right moments, led 
 the applause with a vigour that alone would have inspired 
 the Precincts to acclaim the lowest of low comedians. 
 
 "Capital, capital," approved the Bishop in a comfortably 
 audible voice; and the Dean looked over his shoulder and 
 smiled his approbation to Dickie. . . . 
 
 Dickie found Ruth in happy tears when he went to the 
 retiring-room after the last call had been responded to; 
 but Bradshaw's eyes were very bright and there was a new 
 note in his self-depreciation as he came forward and wrung 
 Dickie's hand. 
 
 "It's all your doing, old chap," Bradshaw said, excitedly. 
 "I say, the Bishop was there; and laughed, too, didn't he? 
 Ruth and I simply owe it all to you. She's naturally a bit 
 overcome for the minute, aren't you, dear? Awful rot, 
 that stuff of mine, of course, but it seemed to go. That 
 touch of pathos at the end?" 
 
 "Oh! wasn't he simply splendid?" asked Ruth. 
 
 Certainly, there had always been the making of an artist 
 in Bradshaw. 
 
 VIII 
 
 Martyn got home from Japan just in time for Latimer's 
 wedding in February, and came down to Halton, making 
 an excuse of the occasion in order, as he wrote, to have "a 
 long talk with cousin Dick about his future plans." 
 
280 THESE LYNNEKERS 
 
 The wedding itself was a less ostentatious affair than 
 Edward's and the Lynneker connexion was not well repre- 
 sented. Since the Culver deal had been finally settled, the 
 relations between Latimer and his cousins had been grow- 
 ing steadily more distant. The Canon's eldest son, Richard, 
 had come home for a week from his Birmingham curacy, 
 and although there had been no open quarrel, he had prob- 
 ably influenced his sisters ; and, now, that he had the 
 money comfortably in hand, the old Canon himself was 
 regretting the loss of the advowson. He had apologised in 
 a stately way to his son, and after that he became increas- 
 ingly anxious to forget Latimer's existence. So at the end 
 of November an exchange of curates had been arranged 
 with the Bishop's consent, and Latimer was now to receive 
 his title for priest's orders in the parish of Bessington at 
 the other end of the diocese. Luckily there had been 
 "rather a good house" vacant at Bessington, and Mrs. Black- 
 well had taken it on a short lease (the Canon could not 
 live for ever) and had advertised the place in the Thrap- 
 ley Road to let unfurnished. She had finished with Med- 
 borough. The Precincts had shown her plainly enough since 
 the engagement that they had only accepted her on suf- 
 ferance, and were glad to have a valid excuse for dropping 
 her. Even Latimer was still ignorant as to the characters 
 and professions of her father and the late Vincent Black- 
 well. 
 
 But Bessington, and later Culver, would be her own 
 kingdom. She could rule there as she could never have 
 ruled in Medborough, Nevertheless in face of clerical and 
 family disapproval, she was well advised to plan the least 
 ostentatious of weddings. 
 
 Martyn was the only guest at Halton. His long visit to 
 Japan had had no perceptible effect upon him. He talked 
 little of his experiences and observations of the country, 
 and the little he said was chiefly in the nature of a foot- 
 note to his ordinary conversation. It seemed that his great 
 monograph on the Lynneker family had been hanging fire 
 
BRIAN LESSING 281 
 
 and that for the next few months he was going to devote 
 himself to that work. 
 
 And the "long talk with cousin Dick" never satisfactorily 
 matured. On the one hand, he frequently implied that the 
 arrangement was taken for granted and that Dickie would 
 come up to him in the following September; on the other, 
 he continually shirked any definition of his attitude towards 
 the frank statement of his cousin's desire to avoid any 
 pledge of adherence to the principles of the conservative 
 party. Martyn's "Quite" left so many questions unan- 
 swered in that connexion. 
 
 But when the Lynnekers reduced, now, to such a small 
 family-party were alone again, the Rector began to mani- 
 fest his increasing anxiety to see his youngest son estab- 
 lished under the aegis of his cousin. Indeed, so sincere 
 was the Rector's desire for the accomplishment, of this 
 ambition that he put the greatest restraint on his natural 
 disinclinations and talked politics quite reasonably with 
 Dickie after prayers. 
 
 "I feel that it's there the hitch comes, Dick," the old 
 man said on a typical occasion. "I think Martyn is a 
 little afraid of committing himself too definitely unless you 
 are prepared to take up the work of our own party." 
 
 "I know," Dickie agreed. "Not that he has ever said 
 it in so many words." 
 
 The Rector hesitated and frowned, bracing himself to a. 
 tremendous control of his feelings. "I've never understood 
 just what your difficulty is . . ." he suggested. 
 
 "I'm not at all clear myself," Dickie said. 
 
 "But in that case," urged his father more hopefully, 
 "wouldn't it be possible for you to to compromise in 
 some way?" 
 
 Dickie tried a side movement. "You are a great admirer 
 of Charles Kingsley, aren't you, pater?" he asked. 
 
 "Magnificent fellow," agreed the Rector. 
 
 "But, pater, he was a socialist you remember 'Alton 
 Locke' and 'Yeast'." 
 
THESE LYNNEKERS 
 
 "A Christian socialist," the Rector said. "Kingsley was 
 a splendid Christian." 
 
 "But can one believe one thing religiously and advocate 
 the exact opposite politically?" asked Dickie. 
 
 "I don't think I have ever advocated the opposite of 
 Christianity," his father returned, after taking a fresh grasp 
 of his self-control. 
 
 "I don't want to make this a personal question," Dickie 
 pleaded. "But on general lines well, Kingsley certainly 
 carried his religious convictions into some kind of action 
 the Working Men's Club in London and that sort of 
 thing and conservatism, as far as I can understand it, 
 is chiefly concerned to keep property in the hands of the 
 rich." 
 
 The Rector found an escape for his impatience in a short 
 summary of what he considered to be the aims of the Con- 
 servative party. He touched lightly on education he had 
 worked very hard, and so far successfully, to keep the 
 hated "Board School" with its infamous neglect of re- 
 ligious teaching, out of Halton but he warmed to the 
 construction of a prettily coloured picture of the generous 
 over-lordship theory; of the paternal treatment of the 
 poor; incidentally of the poor's Christian duty of thank- 
 fulness; and of the necessity to have the government of 
 the country administered by those superior minds the pres- 
 ent Premier, for example who could regard the broad 
 problems of legislation with informed and unprejudiced 
 opinions. 
 
 "Socialism would put government in the hands of the 
 rabble, my dear boy," he concluded. "We should have an- 
 other 'Reign of Terror.' Surely you must see that?" 
 
 "But don't you think there ought to be equality of op- 
 portunity?" persisted Dickie. "There have been some 
 splendid men who have come up from the people." 
 
 "The good men always come up as it is," the Rector 
 said, "refined by the struggle." 
 
 He was, on the whole, well satisfied with his own argu- 
 
BRIAN LESSING 283 
 
 ment, and wanted, now, to end on the excellent note he had 
 just sounded. 
 
 "Well, well, dear boy," he said, getting to his feet. 
 "Think it over and we'll have another chat to-morrow 
 night." 
 
 Dickie, thinking it over in his attic, was quite prepared 
 to admit that there was much to be said in favour of his 
 father's views ; but he could not reconcile them with any 
 theory of Christianity ; and, while he, himself, was inclined 
 to deny the historical validity of the New Testament, he 
 had lost none of his admiration for the spirit of the Chris- 
 tian ethic. 
 
 Dickie had been endowed with the wonderful gift of 
 sympathy ; and the gift gave him a breadth of outlook that 
 was noticeably precocious in a young man of twenty- two. 
 Also, his reading and thinking during the past five years 
 had been unusually catholic and thorough. 
 
 IX 
 
 His affairs seemed to be hurrying towards a crisis 
 that summer, and he was aware of a steady desire to post- 
 pone decision. He wanted time, and confused himself 
 by an attempt to cram years of work into a few weeks. 
 During April and May he read feverishly; history, sociol- 
 ogy, economics, anything that might enlighten his imme- 
 diate search, and only found himself wading ever deeper 
 into perplexity. He saw no clear issue, and his genuine 
 anxiety to please his father and mother was pushing him 
 towards a decision that he instinctively dreaded. 
 
 For himself he had no fear. He had perfect confidence in 
 his own ability to succeed, a confidence that none of his 
 family was able to understand. They all dwelt so per- 
 sistently on the fact that Martyn's offer was a great 
 "chance" for him; and their tone implied that the refusal 
 of a "chance" was certainly a rash, if it were not an un- 
 godly act. And Dickie, who felt capable of finding his own 
 
284 THESE LYNNEKERS 
 
 chances when the need arose, failed completely to make 
 any of his relations understand that time, and not oppor- 
 tunity, was what he chiefly sought. When he pleaded his 
 youth and ignorance, they turned the plea against him as 
 an argument for trusting their superior knowledge and 
 experience; and while he acknowledged the force of their 
 reasoning, he was conscious, without the least conceit, that 
 they knew nothing of the problem that intrigued him, and, 
 with even greater force, that they could never know. They 
 were all different from him, he thought, but he considered 
 that difference without reference to any abstract concep- 
 tion of superiority. He was, indeed, beginning to regard 
 himself as a person of eccentric and possibly reprehensible 
 opinions. 
 
 Two experiences finally helped him towards a more defi- 
 nite judgment of himself and the choice of a career. 
 
 The first was Martyn's invitation to stay with him for 
 five days in Mayfair and see the Diamond Jubilee proces- 
 sion. And so little did his father and mother and sister 
 understand Dickie, that when he read Martyn's invitation 
 aloud to them at breakfast, they were instantly prepared to 
 make a united effort to force him into acceptance. They 
 glanced at one another as if mutely electing a spokesman, 
 and then Eleanor said, "Well, really, Dick, I think you'll 
 be very foolish if you don't go." She spoke in the tone 
 of one who delivered judgment on a past event. 
 
 "I'd like to go," Dickie said, cheerfully, and rather em- 
 barrassed them all by thus anticipating all the fervent 
 reasons with which they were, at last almost triumphantly, 
 prepared. 
 
 "Come, come, that's settled, then," Mr. Lynneker said, 
 and only Eleanor was left to attempt a kind of posthumous 
 chiding for something that had never existed. 
 
 The Rector offered to advance some of the expenses of 
 this grand visit an outfit would be needed but Dickie 
 preferred to draw upon his own reserves of capital. Dur- 
 ing his four and three quarter years at the Bank he had 
 saved nearly 150. 
 
BRIAN LESSING 285 
 
 "I want a lot of new clothes, anyhow," he explained. 
 
 But despite the pressure put upon him by Edward, Dickie 
 definitely refused to buy a tail-coat and a top-hat. 
 
 "Too much expense just for one visit," was his first 
 defence, and when that was broken by the assumption 
 that he would certainly, now, be going up to town "for 
 good" in the autumn, he fell back on the surer ground that 
 the formality of a top-hat was not his "style." Nothing 
 could move him from that. He merely grinned in his 
 obstinate, annoying way when Edward laid down the law 
 concerning London fashions. 
 
 "I've had to get a new dress-suit, you see," was his last 
 and most irritating prevarication. "My old one has split 
 across the shoulders." 
 
 The procession dazed him at the moment, and left him 
 critical when he had time to reconsider his impressions. 
 
 After those long hours of waiting, interrupted rather 
 than enlivened by the distracted conversations peculiar to 
 such an occasion, the atmosphere of expectancy so wrapped 
 him about that he rose automatically to the climax and 
 cheered with the swaying emotion of the crowd. This was 
 his first experience of a great infectious excitement, and 
 it seemed to him as he sat perched on the staging that his 
 culminating sight of the stout little woman in black was 
 an immense and glorious satisfaction. The overwhelming 
 dignities of idea and phrase exalted her beyond conception ; 
 the idea of controlling kingship, of a great nation typified 
 in this one exhibited figure; and in that supremely moving 
 moment when colour and music had exalted and concen- 
 trated the thought of the multitude, such a phrase as 
 "Empress of India" rang through his mind with the visual- 
 ised glory of a transcending epic. For an instant national 
 sentiment and emotion had found a focus. 
 
 Afterwards he was a little ashamed. It seemed to him 
 
286 THESE LYNNEKERS 
 
 that in some unanalysable way he had been false to his own 
 opinions. 
 
 But the great fact of the Procession was less lasting 
 as an influence than his various meetings and attempted 
 rapprochements with Martyn's friends and with Martyn 
 himself. 
 
 Dickie could find but one answer that satisfied the equa- 
 tion of his general inferences. All these people in the 
 five days he had met one Government Whip, a Conservative 
 peer, and several less prominent members of the Lower 
 House were tinged with the Lynneker tradition. There 
 were so many formulae that they accepted without question. 
 The Whip had been embarrassed and uneasy when Dickie 
 had asked him why the obvious paradoxes of the suffrage 
 could not be done away with. 
 
 "You see, I've lived all my life in a country parish," 
 Dickie had explained; "and down there it's quite obvious 
 that the country labourer has no definite ideas as to the uses 
 of his vote." 
 
 "We are educating him," the Whip said, evasively. 
 
 "Yes, but so is the other party," argued Dickie, "and 
 each of you is trying to teach him a system of rigid ideas, 
 and the two systems contradict each other." 
 
 The Whip looked across the table for help and found 
 that he was being momentarily neglected. "Your labourer 
 is left with the power of choice," he said. 
 
 "I know," Dickie returned, "he's left to decide which 
 of you has been lying. It doesn't seem to me an intelligent 
 method of education. . . ." 
 
 "You've won the reputation of an ardent radical, Dick," 
 Martyn said to him at breakfast on the last morning of his 
 stay in town. 
 
 "And I'm not a bit of a radical," Dickie replied. "How 
 is it, Martyn?" 
 
 "Your devotion to radices, I suppose," Martyn said. 
 His smile had the tolerant admiration of a musician ap- 
 proving a brilliant performance on the banjo. 
 
 "I shouldn't object to taking the premisses for granted 
 
BRIAN LESSING 287 
 
 if there were only one set," objected Dickie. "But as there 
 are at least two, I must justify my choice of one set to the 
 exclusion of the others." 
 
 "Are they mutually exclusive, Dick?" asked Martyn, 
 and his tone and manner implied that he posed some ulti- 
 mate question the answer to which had been esoterically 
 revealed to himself and the favoured few, and might be 
 discovered by the eye of genius. 
 
 "Absolutely," Dickie said. 
 
 Martyn sighed, but still smiled as if it must be admitted 
 that this banjo-player was after all, really, quite clever. 
 
 Unfortunately Dickie was not impressed by that hint of 
 some inspired knowledge. He had fully recognised by this 
 time that the brilliant Martyn was a true Lynneker. 
 
 XI 
 
 The second experience was of another kind. 
 
 Brian Lessing, the most influential director of the City 
 & County, came to Medborough in August ; principally, Mr. 
 Bell said, in order to interview Dickie. 
 
 Lessing was only incidentally one of the Bank's di- 
 rectors; although that office was, perhaps, the most im- 
 portant of the three or four held by him. He was one of 
 the unobtrusive powers of English finance. The public 
 hardly knew his name, but it was eagerly sought for the 
 more substantial City flotations, and very rarely granted. 
 
 He was a big, flat-chested man, with thick, short hair 
 and a closely cropped moustache. He was dressed in hairy, 
 strong-smelling tweeds when he came to Medborough and 
 he lounged in Mr. Bell's desk chair with one leg lifted, 
 most uncomfortably, over the wooden arm. 
 
 "Well, Lynneker, you're Bell's prize clerk, I hear," was 
 his opening when Dickie was brought in to him by the 
 obviously nervous Mr. Bell. "Your father's a parson, he 
 tells me." 
 
 Dickie's "Yes, sir," might have been taken to confirm 
 
288 THESE LYNNEKERS 
 
 either or both statements. He and Lessing stared at each 
 other without any sense of confusion. They took stock 
 of one another without any conflict of wills, and with no 
 more self-consciousness than a butcher might feel in ap- 
 praising the flesh of a bullock. 
 
 "What made you go in for banking?" asked Lessing, 
 still watching Dickie's face. 
 
 "Force of circumstances," Dickie said. He unconsciously 
 dropped the formal "sir" in speaking to Lessing; he met 
 him intuitively as an equal. 
 
 "Mathematical genius?" enquired Lessing. 
 
 "No, not genius," Dickie returned. "I'm pretty good 
 up to a certain point, that's all." 
 
 Mr. Bell, hovering nervously in the background, cleared 
 his throat, but Lessing waved him back with a curt gesture 
 of his broad hand. 
 
 "Want to make money?" he asked, continuing his cross- 
 examination. 
 
 "It isn't a passion with me," Dickie said. 
 
 "Don't want to stop in Medborough and count other peo- 
 ple's, in any case?" 
 
 "No." 
 
 "What is a passion with you? Have you got one?" 
 
 "Yes, I want to understand . . ." Dickie paused and 
 grinned at his examiner. "What it's all about, you know," 
 he concluded. 
 
 Lessing released his leg from the arm of the chair and 
 put his hands on Mr. Bell's table. 
 
 "Got the reforming spirit?" he asked, still in the same 
 dry, almost rude, tone. 
 
 Dickie shook his head. 
 
 "Don't want to do any Good in the world?" Lessing 
 suggested. 
 
 "What sort of good ?" Dickie asked. 
 
 Lessing did not answer that. "Would you be willing to 
 stay on here for another five years," he said, "if I gave 
 you my word that you'd get a first-class job at the end of 
 that time, thousand a year job, you know?" 
 
BRIAN LESSING 289 
 
 Dickie took a moment to consider that before he shook 
 his head again. 
 
 "Well, what do you want?" Lessing asked sharply. 
 
 "To gratify my passion," Dickie said. "I should have 
 thought you could have inferred that." 
 
 "To know what life means?" 
 
 "You can put it that way." 
 
 "And when you've found a solution that satisfies you?" 
 
 "I can't see as far as that," Dickie said. 
 
 "Interested in politics?" the examination continued. 
 
 "From one point of view. The present system, so far 
 as I can understand it, which isn't far certainly,- seems to 
 me so infernally unintelligent." 
 
 "Oh! does it?" remarked Lessing in another tone, as 
 though he had at last found what he had been seeking. 
 "That's where your lack of experience shows. As a sys- 
 tem, it's most infernally intelligent, so intelligent that we 
 gamble on it without being able to understand it. But I'll 
 talk to you about politics another day. Will you take my 
 word for it that you're wrong there?" 
 
 Dickie looked thoughtful. "All right," he said; "but 
 just tell me this: is the system founded on the personal 
 interests of the various classes? One lot trying to keep 
 what they've got, and the other lot wanting to get a bit 
 of it away; and the whole business carried on publicly 
 under the pretence that it's something quite different?" 
 
 "There's that in it," Lessing agreed; "that's the more 
 obvious side. But there's real government, you. know, 
 public safety, facilities for trade enterprise, national wel- 
 fare, all that kind of thing. It's a thundering big job to 
 carry on, and it is carried on. And it works. It gives you 
 and me and Bell, here, a chance to do things." 
 
 "Government by expediency . . ." murmured Dickie. 
 
 "Why, of course, my dear chap," returned Lessing, vig- 
 orously. "There's no other way for government. Our 
 government has to serve the needs and protect the rights 
 of forty million people and that means that it's a mighty 
 big machine. There are plenty of injustices, no doubt, and 
 
290 THESE LYNNEKERS 
 
 the balance of benefit goes to the people who've got 
 position and money, because they've got the balance of 
 intelligence and they made the law." 
 
 "So you have to lie to the comparatively unintelligent 
 voter?" Dickie put in. 
 
 "That's nothing to do with government," Lessing said. 
 "That's party politics, the superficial tinkering with the 
 machine. It serves its purpose incidentally; adds new im- 
 provements and that sort of thing, you know. And that's 
 the way to ... to steady progress. The motto of govern- 
 ment is 'festina lente.' Has to be. Idealism and revolu- 
 tion break up the machine and leave nothing in its place. 
 You can't construct a brand new machine in a year or in 
 ten years. No man, no group of men, have got the fore- 
 sight for a thing like that. It's too big." 
 
 "Yes, I see the point," Dickie said. "But I should like to 
 have a long talk with you about it." 
 
 "Right you are, my boy," Lessing said. "Come and have 
 lunch with me at the Great Northern. I've got to catch 
 the two o'clock to Edinburgh. There are one or two things 
 I want to say to Bell, first. I'll pick you up as I come 
 through. . . ." 
 
 Dickie learnt many things in the course of that lunch 
 at the Great Northern Hotel, but the lesson he principally 
 pondered later was that of his own ignorance. He was 
 provincial and he was superficial, he decided. He had failed 
 to comprehend the intricacies of these problems of govern- 
 ment, of economics and sociology, as he had failed to com- 
 prehend the subtler theorems of the calculus, or the ethics 
 of his attack upon George Smith. He had been too ready 
 to come to a conclusion. Even the word "expedience" had 
 taken a new colour when it had been elaborated by Brian 
 Lessing. The Lynnekers saw expedience as a goal, and so 
 Dickie had come to hate it. Lessing saw it as a means, as 
 a useful, necessary tool that might be discarded on occa- 
 sion. Dickie had a vision of him as a free man outside 
 the net, using it for his own purposes. 
 
 And Lessing and himself were of the same fibre. They 
 
BRIAN LESSING 291 
 
 had both realised that. But Dickie alone had perceived 
 that behind their likeness was a fundamental difference. 
 Lessing wanted knowledge for his own purposes; Dickie 
 wanted it without ulterior object. 
 
 XII 
 
 At the end of the lunch Lessing had made a proposition. 
 It seemed that while he had been talking fluently and 
 convincingly of the business of right government, some 
 part of his mind had been engaged with other things. 
 
 He had stopped abruptly in his exposition and looked at 
 his watch. 
 
 "Well, Lynneker," he had said. "That will have to do 
 for now. You can work for yourself on what I've told 
 you." 
 
 And then he had made his proposition, cut and dried, 
 with no question of alternatives or contingencies. 
 
 "I want you to stay on with Bell for another year," he 
 had said ; "and then I'll take you into my office. You're too 
 good for any Bank too much routine, not enough scope. 
 We needn't bother about salary, you can have what you 
 want. ... I shall take you into my own room no me- 
 chanical work, you understand. I want you for the big 
 things. ... I shall be sending you to America and Berlin, 
 and Europe, generally. You'll be qualified to represent me 
 in five years' time. ... By the way, do you read French 
 and German? Good! Keep that up. You'll get practice 
 in conversation later. And train yourself to think in foreign 
 moneys." 
 
 Throughout he had taken Dickie's acquiescence for 
 granted. 
 
 XIII 
 
 Nor was there any serious doubt in Dickie's mind as 
 to his acceptance of the offer. It meant so many things; 
 
292 THESE LYNNEKERS 
 
 intimacy with the strong, clear mind of Brian Lessing, 
 for example ; but above all education. Dickie had a clear 
 picture of himself as absurdly provincial. He had been 
 narrow; he had been biassed by the limitations of his cir- 
 cumstances. America, Berlin, Europe generally, would 
 give him wider views. 
 
 And that other offer, the tentative, hesitating, contingent 
 offer of Martyn's, slid suddenly into contempt. It had 
 the quality of a dream, of a weakly coloured romance. 
 Perhaps it had never had real substance, but had arisen 
 from the imaginings of Martyn's mind. And at the best 
 it had proposed a dalliance with the essential things of life : 
 a moving on the surface ; a regard for dress as a means 
 to social advancement; a respect for social conventions, 
 for the "right" people, for manners and decency; these 
 were the idols of Martyn's world. At the end, perhaps, an 
 ornamental seat in the Cabinet, as a respected minister; 
 too wise to interfere with the capable administration of 
 the permanent secretaries. . . . 
 
 Lessing was strong enough to despise the lesser rules 
 of expediency. (His tweeds had had an air of being used 
 to him; and Dickie thought it probable that he wore them 
 in town as well as in the country.) He would supple his 
 back to nobody. He was almost a free man. 
 
 By contrast Martyn appeared as little better than a 
 fortunate marionette. . . . 
 
 Mr. Bell had a half -expectant, half-anxious air when 
 Dickie returned to the Bank after lunch, but business was 
 unusually brisk that afternoon, and the manager and his 
 cashier found no opportunity for private conversation until 
 after four o'clock. 
 
 And then Mr. Bell's hitherto suppressed impatience was 
 manifested by an instant departure to his private parlour. 
 Dickie followed with reluctance. He had more than an 
 hour's solid work before him. 
 
 "Well, Lynneker, what do you think of Mr. Lessing?" 
 Mr. Bell asked eagerly. "A remarkable personality, eh? 
 
BRIAN LESSING 293 
 
 I suppose he gave you no hint as to his future intentions 
 with regard to yourself ?" 
 
 "He wants me to stay on here for another year," Dickie 
 said, "and then he is going to take me into his own 
 office." 
 
 Mr. Bell's face expressed perplexity. "His own office?" 
 he repeated vaguely. 
 
 "He said he could find a better use for me than the 
 mechanical work of banking," Dickie explained without 
 a thought for the brutality of his implication. 
 
 "Ah ! yes, I see," Mr. Bell said. His expression of boyish 
 expectancy had vanished; he looked down at his desk and 
 began to smooth out a perfectly flat sheet of blotting 
 paper. 
 
 "You will accept that, of course?" he said, without 
 looking up. 
 
 "I think so, sir," Dickie said. 
 
 The manager nodded absently. "Oh, well," he said. 
 "Perhaps I ought to have guessed." He paused and took 
 up a bunch of forms. "I expect you have a lot of entries 
 to make," he added. 
 
 Dickie accepted his dismissal without comment. 
 
 He understood his manager's pique, and reflected on it 
 while he rapidly and neatly (he was always a good work- 
 man) made up his books. He understood that he had been 
 especially marked out and trained for the Bank's service; 
 that he had, perhaps, been the particular "find" of Mr. 
 Bell's life. And his disappointment was certainly excus- 
 able, if a little selfish. The manager of the Medborough 
 branch of the City & County had not been eager in the first 
 place for his clerk's success ; he had wanted the prestige of 
 making the discovery, of demonstrating still further how well 
 he served his employers. Dickie was sorry to have caused 
 that disappointment, but a little resentful, nevertheless. 
 Had he not always made it quite clear that he had no inten- 
 tion of remaining in the Bank's employ? 
 
 Dickie could not know that his manager still sat in his 
 private room, idly playing with the bunch of forms and 
 
294 THESE LYNNEKERS 
 
 thinking of himself, for the first time, as a failure. His 
 success had seemed so much to him who had once been a 
 chorister. The adequate house in the Upminster Road, 
 his wife and his two little daughters were the vouchers for 
 his achievement. And he had a position in the town; he 
 was respected for his professional capacities; admired for 
 his musical gifts. He had won all that by his own effort. 
 He knew that he was a figure in Medborough, something 
 more dignified than your average bank-manager. 
 
 And, now, in one careless sentence, this boy of his find- 
 ing had poured contempt on all that achievement. At 
 twenty-two he had been found too good for employment 
 in this service which had always seemed so fine to his chief. 
 His work had been stigmatised as mechanical, and for 
 one long half-hour, Arthur Bell drooped before the presen- 
 tation of his own limitations; before the thought that he 
 had pitched his ambition too low; that, perhaps, he also 
 might have aspired to be "too good" for mere banking. 
 Beyond that humble employment, immense vistas of fame 
 and power stretched, as it seemed, almost inimitably. . . . 
 
 Nor could Dickie instantly appreciate his own family's 
 attitude when he gave them an account of his offer from 
 Brian Lessing. 
 
 The Rector smiled his general satisfaction at the com- 
 pliment paid to his boy's ability, and then said, "But, of 
 course, you wouldn't give Martyn the go-by for that," an 
 opinion that was instantly endorsed by sounds of feminine 
 approval. 
 
 "I'd sooner go to Mr. Lessing," Dickie said. 
 
 His father, mother and sister expressed shocked sur- 
 prise. 
 
 "But why?" they asked and gave the reasons for their 
 own choice. 
 
 "Was Mr. Lessing a gentleman? Could he introduce 
 Dickie to people with influence? What would come of it? 
 And then : Martyn was such a Capital Person ; he had 
 such perfect manners, was so much at home in Any 
 society. . . ." 
 
BRIAN LESSING 295 
 
 They discussed the whole magnificent, beneficent aspect 
 of Martyn's proposal among the three of them, while Dickie 
 waited patiently until they should return to their direct 
 enquiry as to the reason for his own prejudice. 
 
 And as he listened, the Lynneker attitude, the English 
 attitude, towards this one question, came out before him 
 in one concise, vivid picture. 
 
 They accepted and glorified the past. They referred to 
 it as to an ideal that might and should be reconstructed. 
 The old had been tried and was approved; the new was 
 suspect, and better avoided. His father's test began : "In 
 my day . . ." that comfortable day in which, it seemed 
 now, was never anything new and disturbing; although 
 the Rector's father had used the same phrase and had 
 abhorred the propaganda of the Utopists, and the Reform 
 Bill, and the coming of steam traction. And so, no doubt, 
 had generation after generation of Lynnekers found some 
 imagined ideal in the past. Before this, that and the other, 
 the French Revolution, the Hanoverian Succession, the 
 Civil War, everything had been, somehow, more glorious, 
 finer, more desirable. Step by step they might be followed 
 back to some primitive ancestor who had preferred flint 
 to the new-fangled bronze weapon that had driven his tribe 
 westward. But always they had been driven forward. 
 Some power, invisible and indefinable, had always over- 
 come their inertia, tumbled them one step onward, and 
 left them to deplore the wonderful past out of which they 
 had been mercilessly thrust, and to congratulate them- 
 selves on the fact that in spite of almost insuperable diffi- 
 culties they had risen to the occasion. 
 
 They sought no explanation of life; the explanation had 
 always been given by a preceding generation. . . . 
 
 And Martyn's name figured in the Morning Post among 
 the guests at great houses; and Brian Lessing was only 
 "something in the City," as Mrs. Lynneker smilingly put it. 
 
 They so brilliantly convinced themselves of the truth of 
 their objections to the new scheme, that at last they turned 
 
296 THESE LYNNEKERS 
 
 to Dickie with the happy certainty that they had not left 
 him a leg to stand on. 
 
 "I really do not think, my boy, that you can afford to 
 give Martyn the go-by now," the Rector said. 
 
 "He doesn't want me," Dickie said, and after that state- 
 ment had been denied and disproved at length, he continued : 
 "He never meant it quite seriously. He dreams about it, 
 and he may go on dreaming about it for years, but he'll 
 never do anything." 
 
 And so, pushing past a weakening barrier of denials, he 
 came to a statement of his own position. 
 
 "And even if Martyn's offer came to anything," he said, 
 "I should be dependent on him for some years, and I don't 
 want to be dependent on anybody. But that hardly counts. 
 The point is that I shan't learn anything if I get called to 
 the Bar and go into society and all that. It's only the same 
 old stuff over again. I saw the sort of thing I should be 
 expected to do and say, when I was up there for the 
 Jubilee. If I go to Lessing's I shall go abroad to America 
 and Europe, and meet people who have different points of 
 view. And I like Mr. Lessing himself. He doesn't take 
 everything for granted. He has thought things out for him- 
 self. . . ." 
 
 He could not reach the end of his explanation. His 
 father's rising irritability broke into petulance. Deep down 
 in the Rector's consciousness was an inherited memory of 
 old injuries, and instinctively he fought against the rein- 
 carnation of the detested power that had once driven him 
 westward with a bronze spear. 
 
 "Of course, if you know better than your father and 
 mother," he began, getting to his feet, and then, choked by 
 the very righteousness of his own evidently just cause, he 
 left the room with more anger than dignity. 
 
 Out of her distress Mrs. Lynneker evoked one last des- 
 perate poser. 
 
 "But what would you be if you went into Mr. Lessing's 
 office?" she asked. 
 
BRIAN LESSING 297 
 
 "Nothing particular," Dickie said. "I don't know that 
 I want to be anything particular ; I want to learn." 
 
 They could not understand him. They were afraid of 
 him. He was bronze to their flint, and they clung with 
 desperation to their familiar, comprehensible home. 
 
BOOK TWO 
 
XIII 
 JULY, 1903 
 
 DURING his five years' probation in Brian Lessing's 
 office in Austin Friars, Dickie found a new valuation 
 of Halton and Medborough. All that placid country and its 
 associations settled into a steady, unchanging background, 
 against which each new impression glared briefly in bright 
 relief. The recent orderliness of Berlin, the flamboyance 
 of Paris, the naked boast of New York appeared to him 
 now and again as the perspective of splendid gardens, raised 
 against a setting of long, grey hills. But certain quarters 
 of Paris and much of heterogeneous, untidy London would 
 suddenly revive in him the deep impressions of the back- 
 ground. It was as if in the midst of cultivated and exotic 
 flowers, he came unexpectedly upon some primitive fallow 
 or deep, waste wood, upon the simple enduring growths 
 from which every bloom in those gay parterres had won- 
 derfully sprung. On the Isle of Notre Dame, in the cloisters 
 of Westminster or facing the sturdy masses of the Tower, 
 he found another aspect of Halton and Medborough that 
 confronted and perplexed him. 
 
 For if he had come during those six years in the London 
 & County Bank to deny the value of all that he had sym- 
 bolised by the word "expediency," so now he felt an increas- 
 ing urgency to free himself from the ruthless fighting of 
 the money market. He had escaped from his net, and 
 taken the thing in his hands to discover that the only use 
 for it was to snare his fellow-men. 
 
 301 
 
302 THESE LYNNEKERS 
 
 And he was aware that whereas during his imprisonment, 
 the desire to free himself had steadily grown, now that he 
 had won to a measure of control over others, he was hard- 
 ening, crystallising. Already he had lost something of the 
 virtue of sympathy, and used his power to read men's minds 
 rather than to understand their spirit. His longing for new 
 knowledge was giving place to pride in the use of that he 
 had already gained ; and the new knowledge he still sought 
 was desired as a means to greater power. The magic of a 
 game that "worked" had nearly enchanted him. . . . 
 
 He had come to a knowledge of his ability within twelve 
 months of his establishment in the Austin Friars office. 
 Brian Lessing had put a case to him one morning at the 
 beginning of September, 1899 ; and after a brief considera- 
 tion of the known side of the problem, Dickie had given it 
 as his opinion that a war between England and the Boer 
 Republics was an improbable eventuality. He had given 
 his reasons with conviction, and Lessing had listened quietly 
 and nodded approval. 
 
 "Very good, Lynneker," he had said when the case had 
 been argued. "I wanted an opinion that would be represen- 
 tative of the shrewder business man, and yours fits well 
 enough. Now, let us take a fresh set of suppositions." 
 
 And then he had stated new premisses that were depend- 
 ent upon subtle inferences, the bases of which were un- 
 known to the public his protege had represented, and Dickie 
 had had a sight of the fine intricacies and delicate finesse of 
 the game he was being taught to play. He had argued with 
 and cross-examined his teacher at great length that morning 
 before admitting that they were justified in selling to the 
 buyers who believed in the integrity of purpose of the 
 British Government. 
 
 Those revelations of Lessing's which had been apparently 
 so well justified by the event, influenced Dickie to a strong 
 sympathy with the Boer Republics during the critical year 
 of war. Under advice from his principal, he made at home 
 no profession of what in that emotional, hysterical period 
 would have been regarded as his traitorous opinions, but in 
 
JULY, 1903 303 
 
 America and on the Continent he talked freely to many men 
 of position and learnt to criticise England from the outside. 
 He had gained immensely in knowledge and in power before 
 the Peace of Vereeniging, and had lost something he could 
 not clearly indicate. The certain gain had seemed for a time 
 to outweigh the uncertain loss. 
 
 And it was not until July, 1903, when his five years' pro- 
 bation was nearly over and Lessing had made him an offer 
 amounting to a junior partnership, that Dickie paused to 
 consider his balance before committing himself to a de- 
 cision. 
 
 "I must have time to think this out," he said more in his 
 old manner, when the offer was made. 
 
 Lessing had looked at him keenly. "You can have three 
 months," he returned. "I shall be going to America in 
 September." 
 
 "It must be three months' independence then," Dickie 
 stipulated. "I can't see the fence from here." 
 
 "Where shall you go?" Lessing asked. 
 
 Dickie gave a day's thought to that before he decided to 
 go home to Halton. He had seen little of his own people in 
 the past five years. He had had no fixed holidays, and had 
 taken a few days here and there when he had been abroad, 
 in preference to a regulation month devoted to a prescribed 
 idling. Also, he had dreaded the subject of the war during 
 those short week-ends he had occasionally spent at the 
 Rectory. 
 
 A casual sight of the Tower of London had finally 
 clinched his decision. For one moment he had seen again 
 an aspect of Halton in that stolid monument, and had suf- 
 fered a pang of home-sickness. He had seen the calm, 
 wide-browed church on the hill and it had spoken to him of 
 something he had lost, of some permanent spirit that had 
 found expression in Gothic architecture, and was now seek- 
 ing another likeness in the fierce evolution of the new cen- 
 tury. 
 
 Dickie had known then that he was in danger of crystal- 
 lising before his growth was complete. 
 
304 THESE LYNNEKERS 
 
 At twenty-eight he decided to throw all his experience 
 into a mental flux, and make a new, unprejudiced choice. 
 
 When he communicated his decision to Lessing, his chief 
 frowned impatiently. 
 
 "You'll be a damned fool if you chuck this, Dick," he 
 said, and after a pause he added, "There's nothing any 
 better." 
 
 "I haven't said I should chuck it," Dickie returned. 
 
 "Every business, every road to power, goes by our route," 
 Lessing went on. "You have to choose whether you'll be 
 slave or master, that's all. And you haven't the makings 
 of a slave, my son." 
 
 II 
 
 In the train going home from Kings Cross, Dickie re- 
 flected on that saying and dismissed it as an insufficient and 
 faulty generalisation. He was travelling first-class from 
 force of habit and he sat opposite the new Bishop of Med- 
 borough, Dr. Stewart Browne had received his preferment 
 and gone to London some ten months before. 
 
 Dr. Olivier, his successor, was of a different type, more 
 aristocratic and less scholarly. His ritualistic tendencies 
 were regarded with a slight suspicion by the older Cathedral 
 clergy, but he had the full support of the new Dean the 
 only person of importance in this connexion. The late 
 Dean, who would have brooked no interference with his 
 authority over the Cathedral services, had been promoted 
 to the Bishopric of Worcester eighteen months before Lon- 
 don fell vacant, and those who understood the policy that 
 influenced the choice of those high appointments, had 
 guessed that the way was being prepared for Olivier. In- 
 deed, some of the prophets went further and predicted that 
 their new bishop was destined for York, if not for Canter- 
 bury. Medborough was an acknowledged stepping stone to 
 the highest ecclesiastical offices. 
 
 Dr. Olivier regarded his sole fellow passenger with an 
 
JULY, 1903 305 
 
 enquiring interest during the first half of the journey from 
 Kings Cross to Medborough. He had come from a West- 
 end living, and rather flattered himself on his ability to 
 "place" strangers. Dickie, at the age of twenty-eight, proved 
 uncommonly difficult to place. His tweed suit and the soft 
 hat that he wore well at the back of his head, his big, 
 powerful frame and the strong movements of his capable 
 hands, all seemed to indicate the athlete. On this evidence 
 he might have been judged to be, perhaps, one of those 
 brilliant amateurs who devote the whole summer to first- 
 class cricket a young man of independent means whose 
 ambition was satisfied by the certainty of a place in the 
 Test Matches between England and Australia. 
 
 The Bishop, leaning back in his corner and taking quiet 
 observations from behind the cover of his Church Times, 
 hesitated over the theory of the independent amateur and 
 rejected it on physiognomical grounds. Dickie's face was 
 not the face of a man who lived for games ; and that steady, 
 incisive stare of his had a quality that Olivier remembered 
 in one or two successful business men among his late con- 
 gregation. And then those two contradictory inferences 
 were both qualified by a notable air of boyishness, even of 
 innocence. This was a man, Olivier thought, who might 
 suddenly ask some absurdly ingenuous question. 
 
 The Bishop recrossed his gaiters and laid the Church 
 Times on his apron. Dickie had not attempted to read since 
 he entered the compartment. For a moment the two men 
 looked thoughtfully at each other, and then the Bishop 
 smiled graciously and said: 
 
 "I have been taking the liberty of speculating as to your 
 profession. I must admit to a quite impertinent curiosity 
 in my fellow-men." 
 
 "You are Dr. Olivier, aren't you?" returned Dickie, 
 bluntly. 
 
 "Your deduction was not a difficult one," the Bishop said, 
 "if you happen to take an interest in the affairs of the 
 church." 
 
306 THESE LYNNEKERS 
 
 "My father is one of your clergy," explained Dickie. 
 "My name is Lynneker." 
 
 "Ah! the Rector of Halton," Olivier exclaimed, paused 
 as if he would make some comment and went on: "And 
 then there are two of your brothers surely in my diocese, 
 at Thrapley and Culver. Are you the only one of the 
 family out of orders?" 
 
 "I was in the City & County Bank of Medborough for six 
 years," Dickie said, "and since then I've been five years 
 with Brian Lessing, you may have heard of him, a finan- 
 cier in the grand style, you know, now I'm going home for 
 three months to decide what I'm going to do." 
 
 "Finance does not interest you ?" Olivier enquired. 
 
 "It does, immensely ; but I can't see my future in it." 
 
 "You want to make money more quickly; or is it fame, 
 perhaps ?" 
 
 "That isn't the point at all," Dickie said. "I want to be 
 sure about certain things. Look here, sir. Lessing said a 
 day or two ago that one must be either a master or a slave. 
 Now that seems to me a faulty classification, don't you think 
 so?" 
 
 "Too categorical, perhaps," Olivier hazarded safely, with 
 a doubt as to whether he would be understood. That brief 
 account of his travelling-companion's business career held 
 little suggestion of any acquaintance with philosophy. 
 
 "Precisely," Dickie agreed with approval. "I am getting 
 sick of these water-tight compartments they don't work." 
 
 "Mankind is certainly not to be classified under arbitrary 
 headings," admitted the Bishop, and reflected that this 
 original young man had little in common with his two 
 elder brothers. He found that his companion was regard- 
 ing him with steady enquiry. 
 
 "You can't believe that, you know," Dickie remarked. 
 
 Olivier smiled gravely. "I don't see why not," he said, 
 his thoughts still busy with the classification of Brian Les- 
 sing. 
 
 "It's the essential of your whole dogma," Dick returned. 
 "Good men and sinners, sheep and goats, heaven and hell. 
 
JULY, 1903 307 
 
 All hard and fast categories. The English church doesn't 
 admit the fine shades that get their chance in Purgatory." 
 
 But the Bishop was on his own ground there. "In effect 
 it does," he said and proceeded to give his authorities for 
 the doctrine of the "Saving Grace." 
 
 Dickie listened attentively. "That is all splendid com- 
 mon sense," he said, when the argument had been rounded 
 up, "but how do you reconcile it with your subscription to 
 the Athanasian Creed and the thirty-nine articles?" 
 
 Olivier's smile became slightly whimsical and he leaned 
 forward and touched Dickie's knee. "I don't try very hard," 
 he said, "but you must not give me away at Halton. Your 
 father might be a little shocked if he knew that I had dis- 
 carded the idea of Eternal Punishment. But to be quite 
 honest with you, that idea nearly kept me out of the church." 
 
 Dickie grinned his appreciation of the confidence. 
 "Doesn't that make it a little difficult for you episcopally ?" 
 he asked. 
 
 "Only with a few of the older clergy," Olivier said, and 
 went on to expound the need, as he saw it, for vitalising 
 the church. It seemed that he was of the new school and 
 sought a greater rapprochement between science and 
 theology. 
 
 "You're horribly handicapped by the necessity for ex- 
 pediency, aren't you?" was Dickie's comment when the 
 other had finished. 
 
 "In a sense, yes," Olivier admitted. "But I don't believe 
 in iconoclasm. The people understand the old symbols, 
 and one is better advised to use them, than to attempt the 
 invention of an entirely new set. That is what evolution 
 means to me, a gradual change and development." 
 
 "Oh, yes, I'm coming to think you're right," Dickie 
 agreed. "I gave up the chance of a political career six years 
 ago, because I refused to admit any virtue in the doctrine 
 of expediency. I'm not sure now that I might not have 
 done something by using the old material in my own way." 
 
 The grind of the brakes warned them that they were 
 
308 THESE LYNNEKERS 
 
 very near Medborough, and the Bishop stood up and took 
 down his top-hat from the rack. 
 
 "I wish you would come and see me," he said, as the train 
 ran into the station. "You have interested me greatly. Did 
 you say you would be at Halton for some months ?" 
 
 "Three months, probably," Dickie said. 
 
 The Bishop held out his hand. "Well, will you come and 
 lunch with me one day? I'll write to you," he said. "I'm 
 not quite sure of my appointments at the moment. And, 
 let me see, I don't know your Christian name. . . ." 
 
 On the platform, respectfully awaiting recognition, stood 
 two porters and Eleanor. 
 
 "Dick! Did the Bishop invite you to lunch?" Eleanor 
 asked after the briefest of greetings. 
 
 "Did you know him before ?" was her next question, and 
 then, "Why were you travelling 'first' ?" 
 
 Dickie realised then that even so long a period as five 
 years was not necessarily a period of growth, and that he 
 had much to explain to them all at the Rectory about him- 
 self. He had had so little time during those short week-end 
 visits of his. 
 
 in 
 
 Eleanor had driven in with Archer, the Rectory factotum, 
 in the Stanhope. Archer and the cob were new to Dickie, 
 but he had always known the Stanhope. The Rector had 
 had it built for him in Medborough the year after he was 
 married, and although the dark green cloth of the uphol- 
 stery was disgracefully shabby, the body was still reliable 
 and it had had new wheels fitted only ten years before. 
 Dickie drove, and Archer occupied the reversible back seat, 
 set to face away from the horse. None of that family had 
 ever seen that seat arranged to face forward in the proper 
 Stanhope fashion, the Rector had always maintained that 
 it threw the balance too far back. 
 
 Eleanor gave her brother no confidences during the four- 
 
JULY, 1903 309 
 
 mile drive. At the outset she had indicated Archer as a 
 check to intimate conversation. He was not a Halton man, 
 but he had married a girl from the village and inferentially 
 was not to be trusted with any Lynneker news, particularly 
 of the kind that had not already been communicated to her 
 brother by letter. 
 
 Their conversation chiefly concerned the eminently safe 
 topic of Dr. Olivier. Dickie was -reserved in his account 
 of the subject discussed in the train, he knew that Eleanor 
 clung hopefully to the theory of Eternal Punishment and 
 found much consolation in the belief that those people who 
 persistently annoyed her would undoubtedly envy her 
 through eternity, but he asked many questions about the 
 Bishop's popularity in his diocese. 
 
 "He is popular/' Eleanor decided with her habitual frown. 
 She seemed never to give an opinion now without hinting 
 some important qualification that could not be disclosed. 
 "And so is Lady Constance," she added. Olivier had mar- 
 ried the daughter of a peer. 
 
 "But . . ." prompted Dickie. 
 
 Eleanor glanced at Archer's unconcerned back and shook 
 her head warningly. "Every one appears to like him," she 
 said in a carrying voice; and Dickie inferred that Dr. 
 Olivier's views with regard to the "saving grace" were not 
 unknown at Halton. 
 
 "Seems a good sort," he remarked. "No side about him." 
 
 "What an odd thing to say of a Bishop," Eleanor com- 
 mented. 
 
 At thirty-five she had solved her own personal problem. 
 While her father lived, she admitted a necessary diversion ; 
 she must do for him all that her mother had failed to do. 
 When he died she would mourn for him, count his death 
 as the great tragedy of her life, and devote herself with 
 an undisturbed singleness of purpose to what she believed 
 to be the service of God. Already the villagers feared her 
 as they had never feared the Rector, although he, too, had 
 been liable to prejudice, in his judgments on their moral 
 short-comings. And the curate whose services had become 
 
310 THESE LYNNEKERS 
 
 essential as Mr. Lynneker grew older, breathed a clerical 
 anathema when he saw Eleanor coming up the brick path 
 to his cottage door. The poor man had enough worries 
 with three children between the ages of ten and fifteen 
 and an income of 140 a year counting his wife's little 
 patrimony to provide for everything. Miss Lynneker ap- 
 peared to think he was wasting his time because he devoted 
 the best part of his morning to the education of his two 
 boys; but he was determined that she should not compel 
 him to send Ernest to the National School, and Frank, 
 who was too old for that, must be prepared for some voca- 
 tion. Mr. Watson hoped that his Rector's influence might 
 get Frank into the City & County Bank when he was seven- 
 teen. He was a willing boy but rather stupid at figures. 
 Eleanor's theory of serving God gave her little opportunity 
 for winning the love of her fellows. She sought Divine, 
 not human approval. The criticisms and reactions of three 
 brothers and a sister had distracted her until she was thirty. 
 After that she had seen her way clearly. 
 
 "Even bishops were once naughty little boys at school," 
 remarked Dickie cheerfully, and disregarded his sister's 
 frown of displeasure. She had always frowned on him 
 since that avowal of agnosticism in the Rectory drawing- 
 room, but he never deliberately annoyed her. He was 
 sorry for "poor old Eleanor, she had never had a chance" ; 
 but since he had been so long away, he was a little apt to 
 forget how immeasurably her outlook differed from his 
 own. 
 
 And just now he was looking out with a fresh eagerness 
 for his fi^st sight of Halton spire. They were nearly at the 
 crest of the road across the common, and he wanted to 
 get a new impression that might blend with his sight of 
 Notre Dame and Westminster and the Tower, and give 
 him a key to the meaning of Halton in the scheme of life. 
 But when, at last, he saw the point of the spire pricking 
 up behind the elms, it made him think of the days when 
 he rode home along that road from the City & County. 
 He remembered his hot desire for knowledge and wondered 
 
 
JULY, 1903 311 
 
 if he had not sought the wrong kind. If he had had a differ- 
 ent education, he might have gone in for scientific research. 
 That would have given him an unending path along which 
 to prosecute the long enquiry, although, like any other 
 specialisation, the study of biology or molecular physics 
 would but illuminate one of many side issues, even if he 
 achieved some great discovery. He could never hope to do 
 more than that, of course; to add some tiny contribution 
 to knowledge was all that the greatest mind could hope to 
 accomplish in a lifetime ; the deeper the enquiry, the further 
 one departed from the possibility of any synthesis such as 
 that which so completely satisfied his sister. But some in- 
 stinct of his mind revolted from the thought of an intense 
 specialisation that would rob him of his power of choice. 
 His five years in Austin Friars had shown him that great 
 success in any one activity was not to be achieved without 
 training and concentration ; and experimental science would 
 make greater demands upon his powers of absorption than 
 the comparatively wide interests of the money-market. 
 Moreover, he was at present intrigued by this mystery of 
 Halton's place as a symbol in the larger scheme. He must 
 satisfy himself with some explanation of that before he 
 decided upon his future. Recently he had had an idea of 
 making a reasonable fortune within the next ten years and 
 then devoting it to some scheme of education. He had 
 heard that Oakstone had been reorganised under its new 
 head-master, and he meant to go over and see what was 
 being done there. He was home just in time for speech- 
 day. . . . 
 
 They had come down the hill into the village before his 
 vague thought arrived at the intention to go to Oakstone, 
 the next day ; and the wide-armed church stood now in full 
 elevation, grave, steadfast and kindly, as he had always 
 remembered it. 
 
 Eleanor had relapsed into silence after his unseemly re- 
 minder that bishops were of the same flesh and blood as 
 other men, but she had evidently been drawing her own 
 inferences from Dickie's speech, for when she spoke, her 
 
 
THESE LYNNEKERS 
 
 tone had the effect of sinking to a final conclusion rather 
 than of seeking information. 
 
 "I suppose you never go to church in London," she said. 
 
 "I do, often," Dickie replied. "St. Paul's and the Abbey, 
 and St. Alban's, occasionally." 
 
 "St. Alban's !" Eleanor repeated. "Isn't that very 'high' ?" 
 
 Halton certainly had no plain message for Dickie that 
 afternoon. 
 
 IV 
 
 He found that his father had greatly altered during the 
 last twelve months. The old man was in his seventy-sixth 
 year, but the marks of the change were not those of senility. 
 He had always been thin, but now the hollows in his temples 
 and cheeks were so deep, that the shape of the skull peered 
 through the disguise of the flesh. Yet his eyes and carriage 
 were not those of one whose faculties were being slowly 
 obscured by decay; a stranger might have judged him to 
 be a man of sixty-five, prematurely aged by some vital 
 disease. 
 
 "I say, pater, how thin you are," Dickie exclaimed anx- 
 iously when he and his father had kissed. For a moment 
 Dickie's strong young hand had rested on a shoulder from 
 which the deltoid appeared to have completely vanished, 
 leaving only some mechanical structure of inexplicable mov- 
 able bones. 
 
 "I don't attend City dinners," the Rector said with a little 
 laugh, his voice was as sound as ever and then he went 
 on quickly: "So you're really honouring us with a long 
 visit on this occasion, eh, Dick? And there's another sur- 
 prise. I suppose Eleanor told you that Adela is coming 
 home at the end of next month?" 
 
 "Is she? By Jove! Oh, good! No, Eleanor didn't tell 
 me," exclaimed Dickie in jerks, as he greeted his mother, 
 who held him as if she found some deep consolation in the 
 strength of his body. 
 
JULY, 1903 313 
 
 "How solid you are, dear," she said, patting him fondly. 
 
 "It's eight years since she ran away," put in Eleanor. 
 They had moved into the hall and the dying sound of 
 wheels on the gravel indicated that Archer was out of ear- 
 shot driving the Stanhope round to the stables. 
 
 "Edward was married in July, '95," murmured Mrs. Lyn- 
 neker automatically. 
 
 "What about the children?" Dickie asked. 
 
 "She is bringing the two youngest with her," Mrs. Lyn- 
 neker said. "The other three are staying out there with their 
 grandmother. Old Mrs. Oliver is still alive, you know." 
 
 The Rector had strayed back to the porch and was re- 
 garding Dickie's luggage. "Archer had better come and 
 carry all this upstairs," he said. "There's enough for a 
 voyage round the world." 
 
 Dickie laughed. His father had always criticised the 
 quantity of luggage required by the younger generation. 
 
 "I'll take it up all right, pater," he said. "Can't manage 
 on the haversack you used to do with." 
 
 The Rector did not answer. He wore a look of sudden 
 abstraction as if he had lost the sense of his surroundings. 
 
 "There's some lunch waiting for you and Eleanor," Mrs. 
 Lynneker said, grasping the solid consolation of her son's 
 arm. "We've had ours." 
 
 "I say, mother, is father ill ?" asked Dickie, as he allowed 
 himself to be led into the dining-room. 
 
 A faint tinge of added colour came into Mrs. Lynneker's 
 cheeks and she looked round for Eleanor, who had left 
 them and gone upstairs. 
 
 "He's so frightfully thin," Dickie persisted. 
 
 "He hasn't been well," his mother said hurriedly. "It's 
 his old gastric trouble, he thinks," and she turned her back 
 on him, went over to the other side of the room and rang 
 the bell. 
 
 No more was said then, for the Rector had come in from 
 the porch and was standing at the dining-room door. 
 
 "Aren't you coming in to watch me eat, father?" Dickie 
 said. 
 
314 THESE LYNNEKERS 
 
 "I must write a letter first; I'll come in presently," his 
 father returned. 
 
 "He never likes to sit doing nothing while other people 
 are eating," explained Mrs. Lynneker as if she were de- 
 scribing the habits of a stranger. 
 
 The Rector turned and walked across the hall to his study. 
 He shut the door after him with a hesitation that made 
 Dickie wonder if the old man had believed himself dis- 
 missed. 
 
 "Really he doesn't, dear, not now," his mother was say- 
 ing anxiously, and when Eleanor came down, a moment 
 later, she was instantly appealed to for confirmation. 
 
 "It's his old gastric trouble," Eleanor said. "I'll go and 
 see if there's anything I can get for him." 
 
 Dickie noticed that she entered the study without knock- 
 ing. None of them, not even his mother, had ever done 
 that in the old days. 
 
 "Oughtn't he to take advice about it?" he asked when he 
 and his sister were having lunch. 
 
 "He has," Eleanor said coldly. "I think you can trust 
 us, Dick, to look after him." She looked defiantly at her 
 mother as if she dared her to speak. 
 
 Mrs. Lynneker sat very still and compressed her lips. 
 She wore a look of weak determination and that faint 
 colour shone again in her cheeks, as if she had been de- 
 tected upon some questionable purpose. 
 
 She, too, was thinner, but her loss of flesh was evidently 
 due solely to the shrivelling of age. She stooped a little, 
 now, in her walk, and her shoulders were rounded. At 
 sixty-six she looked in many ways older than her husband. 
 He appeared to be fighting a visible enemy; she was suc- 
 cumbing infinitely slowly, without apprehension. 
 
 Indeed, at tea-time, the Rector was almost sprightly. He 
 drank only part of a cup of very weak tea, into which he 
 sopped a few crumbs of thin bread and butter, but he 
 talked eagerly of his boy's prospects. If it had not been 
 for that startling emaciation, no one would have noticed 
 any change in him. Not once during the meal did Dickie 
 
JULY, 1903 315 
 
 catch another sight of that air of abstracted foreboding his 
 father had worn for a moment as he stood staring at the 
 luggage in the porch. 
 
 "I've come home for a long rest in order to make a de- 
 cision, you see," Dickie explained in answer to one of his 
 father's questions. He thought this would be a good op- 
 portunity to put his problem before them, once and for all, 
 while they were together and had their attention focussed 
 upon him. He expected no help from them, but he wished 
 his father and mother to understand his dilemma. 
 
 "Lessing has offered me a kind of partnership," he went 
 on, "and I don't want to accept it until I see my way quite 
 clearly." 
 
 "Does he impose difficult conditions?" the Rector asked, 
 and the other two looked at the champion of their fortunes 
 with the same air of puzzled wonder that they and the rest 
 of the family had worn in that room eight years earlier, 
 when the graceful Martyn had so charmingly suggested that 
 this youngest of the Lynnekers need stop short at nothing 
 less than the Premiership. 
 
 Dickie stumbled over his reply. "No, he doesn't, exactly ; 
 it's just the conditions imposed by by everything," he said. 
 He saw himself again as the eager boy of twenty, and re- 
 membering all his old desires and solidity of purpose, he 
 had an uneasy feeling that the youth had a finer sense of 
 values than the man. 
 
 "But what conditions . . ." Mrs. Lynneker began, and 
 then gave place to her husband, who asked, "Wouldn't a 
 partnership with Mr. Lessing give you an assured income ?" 
 
 "Oh, yes, of course, there's money in it," Dickie said, 
 frowning. 
 
 The Rector moved uneasily in his chair. "It isn't the 
 chief ambition of life, certainly," he admitted. "At the 
 same time ... it is ... a means. . . ." He stooped over 
 his tea-cup and fished up a fragment of soaked bread and 
 butter with his spoon. 
 
 "I've got enough to live on, you know," Dickie said, and 
 
S16 THESE LYNNEKERS 
 
 they all looked at him with something in their faces between 
 relief and amazement. 
 
 It was Eleanor who put the essential question for them. 
 
 "What do you call enough to live on, Dick?" she asked. 
 
 "About five hundred a year/' Dickie said, trying to take 
 their estimate of a competence which would have appeared 
 so insignificant in Austin Friars. 
 
 "But, dear, how . . . ?" gasped Mrs. Lynneker. 
 
 "Lessing has been awfully good to me ; always putting me 
 on to things and giving me commissions on deals and so 
 on," Dickie explained. "It's easy enough to make money 
 when you're in with a man like Lessing. As a matter of 
 fact, I could have made a lot more if I'd bothered about it." 
 
 "More than this living is worth nowadays!" commented 
 Mr. Lynneker in an undertone. 
 
 His wife, drooping over the tea-tray, seemed to brood on 
 the fundamental injustice of the distribution of wealth. 
 "But, dear, what do you suppose you'd get if you accepted 
 this partnership?" was the outcome of her meditations. 
 
 "Couldn't say, exactly," Dickie replied. "We haven't 
 come down to a question of figures; I don't suppose we 
 should in any case. Lessing never knows from day to day 
 what he's worth ; it depends on the day's prices, you under- 
 stand." 
 
 "But you must know . . . about . . ." his mother in- 
 sisted. 
 
 "Well, it wouldn't be less than three or four thousand a 
 year anyway," Dickie said, mentioning a safe minimum, 
 "but it's chiefly a question of what was doing and what 
 opportunities he gave me. He says that I'll never make a 
 first-rate business man, not keen enough, but he -wants 
 me because he says I'm safe. He trusts me to represent 
 him in all his more substantial business affairs, you know. 
 I've got rather a good memory for figures and important 
 facts. You'd be surprised what a lot of room there is for a 
 particular kind of scholarship in business." 
 
 "Wouldn't you like to earn three or four thousand a year, 
 dear?" his mother asked in a slightly awed voice. It was 
 
JULY, 1903 317 
 
 so long since the conception of such a magnificent income 
 had been material for her day-dreams. 
 
 "Don't know quite what I should do with it," Dickie said. 
 "I've thought of making a lot of money quickly and start- 
 ing an education scheme. I'm going over to Oakstone to- 
 morrow for the speech-day; I want to see what they're 
 doing there, now, under Moseley. It's altered a bit since 
 my time, I believe." 
 
 Eleanor got up, took away her father's cup and patted 
 the cushion at the back of his chair. He accepted her fuss- 
 ing with a slight irritation, but he did not actually forbid 
 it. "It's quite all right, dear, quite all right," he said, and 
 leaned back so that she could not interfere further. 
 
 She stood for a minute behind him, with her thin, rather 
 graceful hands resting on the back of his chair. 
 
 "Not religious education, I suppose?" she said, looking 
 down at her brother. 
 
 "Not particularly," Dickie admitted, and for a time the 
 conversation was diverted by a parenthesis of the Rector's, 
 devoted to the evils that must arise from the lack of re- 
 ligious education in the National School which he had been 
 unable to keep out of Halton. 
 
 Mrs. Lynneker brought them back to a sense of the 
 immediate problem by saying cheerfully, "Well, at all events, 
 we've got three months to talk about it. We ought to be 
 able to decide something in that time." 
 
 "That's what I thought," agreed Dickie. 
 
 "You could do so much on three or four thousand a 
 year," his mother urged, by way of leaving a fruitful 
 suggestion in his mind ; and although the obvious quotation 
 must have been at the tip of Eleanor's tongue, she did not 
 speak. The reference would not have hurt her brother, 
 who displayed no signs of "loving money" in any way 
 whatever; and she was certainly not anxious to champion 
 the views of an atheist. But, in her own words, Dickie 
 was "the most upsetting person" she knew. She could not 
 even convincingly picture him condemned to eternal pun- 
 ishment. 
 
318 THESE LYNNEKERS 
 
 "Well, well, we shall see," the Rector said as he got up 
 to go to his study. 
 
 His walk was certainly more feeble than it had been a 
 year ago, but he impatiently refused Eleanor's assistance. 
 Nevertheless she followed him out of the room. 
 
 Dickie looked questioningly at his mother. 
 
 "Are you quite sure it's only gastric ?" he asked. 
 
 Mrs. Lynneker set her lips in their old weakly deter- 
 mined line. 
 
 "You mustn't ask me anything more about it," she said. 
 She looked as if she were on the verge of tears. 
 
 And then Eleanor came back, a little hurriedly, as if 
 she had been afraid to leave those two alone. 
 
 Dickie knew that his mother wished to make full confi- 
 dence and that Eleanor was no less anxious for the secret, 
 whatever it was, to be kept from him. Eleanor had cer- 
 tainly altered (or was it developed?) very rapidly in five 
 years. He had been too absorbed to note the growing dif- 
 ference in her during those week-end visits of his. And it 
 seemed now that he had been inexcusably thoughtless in 
 his attitude towards Halton since he had been away. Hal- 
 ton had always appeared so enduring, he had grown into 
 the habit of assuming that it would go on, unaltered, until 
 he had time to attend to it. Since he had been able to solve 
 the old financial anxieties for his father and mother, he had 
 pictured them growing older, but not dangerously older, in 
 comfort. 
 
 He was shocked to find that he had probably come home 
 too late. He had waived his right to interfere, and Eleanor, 
 at least, was unwilling to reinstate him. He was not dis- 
 mayed by her opposition ; he intended to make Eleanor her- 
 self tell him the truth about his father that evening if he 
 chose the easier course of making an assignation with his 
 mother, she would certainly confess, but she would prob- 
 
JULY, 1903 319 
 
 ably blame herself later and be painfully reproached by her 
 daughter. What discomforted him was the fact that his 
 father himself was playing on the other side ; as if he, too, 
 felt that Dickie had gone out of the life of Halton and was 
 henceforth to be regarded as a privileged friend who must 
 be spared any such painful news as might spoil the pleasure 
 of his visit. 
 
 Walking up and down the front lawn before supper, 
 under the immediate surveillance of that grey, calm church, 
 Dickie felt that he had much ground to recover before he 
 could hope to read the secret of Halton. . . . 
 
 The disclosure of the true facts concerning his father's 
 illness, however, was precipitated by an incident at the 
 supper-table. 
 
 The Rector's meal was made up of a basin of rather thin 
 "Revelenta," into which he soaked a few crumbs of bread. 
 He hesitated over it from the first. 
 
 "She makes this stuff too thick," he said. 
 
 Eleanor immediately got up and examined the preparation, 
 stirring it attentively and testing the consistency of it. 
 
 "I think not, dear," she decided firmly. "You really must 
 get more nourishment." 
 
 Her father seemed to acquiesce from sheer inertia, or 
 because he preferred not to raise any discussion before his 
 son. 
 
 And then, before the basin of "Revelenta" was half fin- 
 ished, he put his napkin to his mouth, got up quickly from 
 the table and left the room. Dickie heard him go out of the 
 front door and presently return to his own study. 
 
 Eleanor, after an obvious moment of vacillation, also left 
 the table and went to her father. 
 
 "Does that stuff make him sick?" asked Dickie bluntly. 
 
 His mother shook her head. She kept her eyes down and 
 would not look at him. 
 
 "What is the trouble, then?" Dickie insisted. 
 
 Mrs. Lynneker was full of distress. "You ought to 
 know," she said. 
 
320 THESE LYNNEKERS 
 
 "I must know," Dickie returned. "I must ask Eleanor." 
 
 "She'll never tell you," Mrs. Lynneker said. 
 
 "She will," Dickie replied calmly. "Why shouldn't she?" 
 
 Mrs. Lynneker drooped despondently over her plate. 
 "She manages everything now," she said. "I daresay it's 
 better that she should. She's very capable in some ways. 
 But I'm not sure that your father likes to be interfered with 
 so much. He has always hated anything like a fuss." She 
 stopped abruptly at the sound of the study door. 
 
 Eleanor came back alone. 
 
 "Father says that he'll come in after supper," she an- 
 nounced with an assumption of calmness. "Emma made the 
 Revelenta too thick to-night. I must tell her about it." 
 
 She sat down and looked defiantly back at her brother- 
 who was steadily staring at her across the table. 
 
 "I want to know, Eleanor," he said quietly. His face 
 wore a look of obstinacy that was familiar enough to a few 
 financiers in the City of London. "When you see that cub 
 of Lessing's settle himself down to it, you may just as well 
 start another hand," one of the lesser lights of company 
 promoting had said on a certain occasion, he was certainly 
 sore at the time, and he would have decided that the "cub" 
 had settled himself down to extort the truth now from his 
 sister. 
 
 "There is nothing to know," she said, and tried first to 
 hold her brother's stare and then to release herself from it. 
 Her thin, graceful hands were passionately clenched together 
 in her lap. 
 
 "Is there a growth ?" asked Dickie. 
 
 "What is it to do with you ?" she said bitterly. 
 
 "Is there a growth ?" repeated Dickie. There was some- 
 thing brutal in the flat repetition of his question. It seemed 
 as if he were capable of continuing for all time that single, 
 remorseless enquiry without change of phrase or tone. 
 
 The tears sprang to Eleanor's eyes as if she were, indeed, 
 suffering great physical torture. "I won't tell you. ... I 
 won't tell you," she gasped. 
 
 "You have told me," Dickie said, and he slightly pushed 
 
JULY, 1903 321 
 
 back his chair and, as it were, released her. " Where is it? 
 Isn't an operation possible?" he asked. 
 
 Eleanor sat quite still. The strain had been relaxed, but 
 she had been wrung and twisted and could find no allevia- 
 tion for her pain. Her head fell a little forward and her 
 breath panted as if she had been running. 
 
 "You take everything and give nothing," she said at last 
 in a low voice. "You come down, a stranger, and try to 
 steal everything from us. You're obstinate and cruel and 
 you abuse your strength for your own purposes." Then 
 she looked up with a new access of courage and went on : 
 "Mother can tell you if she likes; / won't never! Never. 
 And I won't let you interfere with him you think you can 
 take him from me, too, but you can't. He's dependent on 
 me. He wants me." Her tears choked her, but as she 
 went out of the room, she turned and said : "He didn't 
 want you to know. He asked me and mother not to say 
 anything to you." 
 
 "It must have been an awful strain for you two," Dickie 
 said tenderly when his sister had gone, and he got up and 
 kissed his mother affectionately. 
 
 She clung to him with weak passion. "I don't mind so 
 much, now you know," she said. "Eleanor is so hard." 
 
 VI 
 
 "Shall we go into the other room?" Dickie suggested. 
 
 He was aware of an anxiety to get away from the asso- 
 ciations of the supper-table. Eleanor's unexpected hysteria 
 had deepened the emotion that surrounded the realisation 
 of his father's fatal illness; and all the pathetic evidences 
 of little material things were full of sadness. The basin of 
 half-finished "Revelenta," the spoon laid down so hastily 
 that it had fallen on the cloth ; Eleanor's untidy plate, were 
 all symbols of intense human disturbance, marking the sharp 
 intrusion of tragedy. 
 
 "Have you finished, dear?" his mother asked. "You had 
 
THESE LYNNEKERS 
 
 such a makeshift dinner." She looked regretfully at an 
 untouched jelly, finding her pathos in the thought that it 
 had been made especially for him. 
 
 He nodded, holding out his hand to help her to her feet, 
 and as they went across the hall and down the long passage 
 to the drawing-room, he put his arm about her as if she 
 needed his physical support. He was conscious of his 
 strength and independence as of a barrier between him and 
 some indefinable thing that he was ardently seeking. 
 
 "Your being here is such a comfort to me," his mother 
 said, when she had sat down on the old sofa in the same 
 seat from which she had made confession to him of her 
 debt to the Loan Company. "You've always been a com- 
 fort to me," she added. "None of the others could under- 
 stand." 
 
 Dickie sat by her and took her hand in his. "I want 
 you to tell me all about the pater," he said. The old term 
 seemed inevitable in those circumstances. 
 
 "It began months ago," his mother replied. "He found 
 he could not eat things like potato, it wouldn't go down, 
 and he had to get up as he did to-night and get rid of it. 
 And you know what he is, he wouldn't tell any one. . . ." 
 
 "Not even Eleanor?" put in Dickie. 
 
 "He didn't tell either of us till he was obliged to. We 
 couldn't help noticing that something serious was wrong, 
 of course, and Eleanor was always asking him what it was. 
 He told me first about two months ago, weeks after he'd 
 seen Dr. Price in Medborough, he'd never said a word 
 about having seen him till then, and then he told me it was 
 quite hopeless, only a question of time, and that nothing 
 whatever could be done. Dr. Price had told him that he 
 might live a year, or even longer if he would consent to be 
 fed artificially." 
 
 "He won't submit to that, I suppose ?" Dickie asked. 
 
 "He says not, but don't you think he ought ?" His mother 
 returned a little querulously. 
 
 Dick's lips were screwed into a thoughtful pout. Why, 
 
JULY, 1903 323 
 
 after all, he asked himself, should his father's torture be 
 unnecessarily prolonged ? 
 
 "Couldn't you say something about it?" Mrs. Lynneker 
 persisted. 
 
 The lamp had not been brought in; the July dusk was 
 warm with the smell of the roses that climbed all over the 
 front of the house. And the familiar scent carried Dickie 
 back through all the old associations ; the sound of the or- 
 gan's rumbling and the attention that was necessary to 
 catch the air if one would be sure whether that was posi- 
 tively the hymn after the sermon he could see his mother's 
 listening face and the look of triumph that came to her 
 when she could catch up the tune and soundlessly frame 
 the words of the hymn with her lips; then the hush that 
 preceded the voluntary, and later the sound of Eleanor and 
 Adela talking as they came up the gravel path; and the 
 sight of his father in cassock and mortar-board, carrying 
 his surplice over his arm, and hurrying a little as he always 
 did when he was in his canonicals. It seemed so impossible 
 that that long routine could ever be finally broken. How 
 long had his father been Rector of Halton? Thirty-six or 
 seven years. . . . 
 
 "Don't you think he ought, dear?" his mother repeated 
 after a long pause. 
 
 "I don't know why he should," Dickie replied absently. 
 
 "It seems so ... so ..." Mrs. Lynneker began and 
 could not find words to express her own longing to live, in 
 terms of an abstract rectitude. 
 
 "He keeps on doing his best in the normal way," Dickie 
 explained. "I can understand how he'd hate to have his 
 body interfered with being fed through a beastly tube, 
 just for the sake of a few weeks more agony." 
 
 "I know, he has always been like that," Mrs. Lynneker 
 said in a tone that seemed to accuse her husband of an old, 
 resented peculiarity. 
 
 "I think I should be like that, too," Dickie concluded. 
 
 "He hates one to notice it," Mrs. Lynneker added, follow- 
 ing her own line of thought. 
 
THESE LYNNEKERS 
 
 And then their talk was interrupted by the climax of the 
 tenor bell, sounding a solitary, penetrating call to the ring- 
 ers. 
 
 "Oh, they can't be going to practise to-night," Mrs. Lyn- 
 neker gasped in horror. "Do you think it's because you've 
 come home?" 
 
 "Much more likely because it's their last chance before 
 harvest," Dickie thought. 
 
 A minute or two later the Rector came in with a fine 
 assumption of cheerfulness. "All in the dark?" he said. 
 "I'll ring for the lamp. They're going to celebrate Dick's 
 return, I think." 
 
 Eleanor, pale and composed, had joined them before the 
 ringing clamour of the full peal filled the drawing-room with 
 a reverberation that made conversation impossible. 
 
 "At least, let us have the windows shut," pleaded Mrs. 
 Lynneker with her hands to her ears. 
 
 The Rector was leaning back in his arm-chair with a 
 faint smile of enjoyment on his face. Possibly the sound of 
 the bells carried him into the living past, as the smell of 
 roses had carried Dickie. 
 
 VII 
 
 Mr. Lynneker had almost given up smoking during the 
 last two months, but he still pottered about the house, some- 
 times for more than an hour after prayers. That even- 
 ing, however, he reverted to his old habit. 
 
 "You haven't begun to smoke, yet, Dick ?" he asked. 
 
 "No, not yet," Dickie said, smiling. 
 
 "Quite right; it's a lazy habit," his father returned, 
 paused a moment and then added : "But you won't be going 
 to bed for half an hour, I presume?" 
 
 "I hardly ever go before twelve," Dickie said. "I brought 
 a few books down. . . ." 
 
 "Ah! well, I think I shall have one cigarette to-night," 
 Mr. Lynneker announced, and disregarding Eleanor's pro- 
 
JULY, 1903 325 
 
 test, he went on : "I've come down to cigarettes, a pipe 
 is a little too strong for me nowadays. I shall find you 
 in the dining-room, eh? It will be a little chilly out- 
 side. . . ." 
 
 "I suppose mother told you everything," Eleanor said 
 coldly, when her father had gone out of the room. 
 
 "All she knew," Dickie said. "I'm going to see Price 
 to-morrow." 
 
 "It's no use," Eleanor returned. "It's no use at all, your 
 interfering." 
 
 "Dear old girl, I'm not going to interfere," expostulated 
 Dickie. 
 
 "I know you think we ought to have let you know," 
 Eleanor continued, overlooking his interruption, "and that 
 you'll say we ought to have taken other advice, and so on. 
 I daresay you believe that it would never have happened if 
 you'd been at home." She paused and looked at him and 
 there was a shade of doubt in her expression, as if behind 
 all her defiance, she was fearful of the reproach that she 
 might have done more. 
 
 "I certainly want to know what Price has to say about 
 it," Dickie admitted. 
 
 "Dr. Price can't tell you anything that I don't know," 
 Eleanor said. "He'll tell you that it might have been pos- 
 sible to operate. Perhaps it was, then; but we didn't know, 
 then. Father didn't tell us anything at the time, and we 
 couldn't have made him undergo an operation, even if we 
 had known." 
 
 "You needn't be so defensive," Dickie put in. 
 
 "You always know so much better than any one else," 
 Eleanor retorted. 
 
 Dickie took no notice of that. He was trying to under- 
 stand Eleanor's grievance, not to champion his own atti- 
 tude; and he failed to realise that his indifference to her 
 attacks upon him was aggravating her sense of injury. 
 
 "It's almost certainly too late to operate now," he said. 
 
 "And you blame me for not having guessed sooner, so that 
 I might have got your help and insisted upon an operation 
 
326 THESE LYNNEKERS 
 
 three or four months ago." The thin suggestion of a ques- 
 tion still underlay the bitterness of her voice. 
 
 "How can I tell you that before I have heard what Price 
 says ?" asked Dickie. 
 
 She turned away from him as if she could no longer 
 endure the effort of opposition. "Hadn't you better go?" 
 she said. "He's waiting for you in the dining-room. /'// 
 put out the lamp. I always lock up now, but perhaps you'd 
 like to do it while you're at home." She spoke quickly, 
 wilfully exposing all her grievance against him, but as 
 Dickie was leaving the room, she suddenly flared out again. 
 
 "Perhaps you'd better see Dr. Price," she said. "After 
 all, you've earned the right. You've helped us with 
 money." 
 
 As Dickie waited for his father in the dining-room, 
 he wondered what could be done to soften his sister's 
 jealousy, and whether it might not be better for him to go 
 away if his father were likely to be upset by Eleanor's bit- 
 terness. But then, what of his mother? She, too, had a 
 claim on the comfort of his presence. "Comfort" was her 
 own word, and he knew that it was apt. 
 
 And when his father came, he made it quite clear that 
 he, too, desired his boy's presence in the house during the 
 next three months. He evidently had something to say that 
 he found it difficult to approach and he led up to it by that 
 statement. 
 
 "It will be a great relief to me having you here, Dick," 
 he said. He leaned a little forward in his chair and auto- 
 matically passed his hands backwards and forwards over his 
 thin knees. He had laid his still unlighted cigarette on the 
 table, but as he stared contemplatively down at the empty 
 grate, it seemed as if in imagination he was still smoking 
 the little light pipe cut out of a single piece of myall wood 
 that he had always affected. Occasionally his lips moved 
 as if he were blowing out smoke. 
 
 "Your mother and I were both so glad you could come 
 for a long holiday," he went on, trying to approach that 
 difficult statement of his without emotion. "And there are 
 
JULY, 1903 327 
 
 one or two little business affairs I should like to consult 
 you about. At my age one has to think of these things. I 
 have made you my trustee. You're better up in business 
 matters than Edward or Latimer." 
 
 'Those Bank shares are at a good premium again," Dickie 
 remarked in order to fill the pause. He had advised his 
 father to buy more stock in the City & County when prices 
 were down at the beginning of the Boer war, and had lent 
 him over 2,000 for that purpose. 
 
 The Rector nodded. "I have left the interest on all that 
 stock to your mother and Eleanor for life," he said. "The 
 capital will revert to you, eventually, of course. . . . It's 
 been a great relief to me, Dick, to know that your mother 
 and sister were provided for. . . . And there is quite a 
 little sum on deposit at the Bank now. We have hardly 
 been living up to our income for the past three years. I 
 should like to give you a cheque for 100 for immediate 
 expenses. . . ." He was very near the difficult topic now 
 and his attention was riveted more firmly than ever on the 
 fireplace. "It will be a great convenience for you to have 
 ready money at at that time. . . ." 
 
 "There's no need for that," Dickie mumbled. He was 
 embarrassed by his uncertainty as to whether his father 
 desired his illness to be openly referred to between them. 
 "I shall open an account with the City & County while I'm 
 down here, and, of course, I shall be quite able to provide 
 for the mater and Eleanor." 
 
 The Rector's hands paused for a moment in their slow, 
 steady movement and he gripped them together as he went 
 on, taking no notice of his son's assurances. "Price thinks 
 it will only be a matter of weeks now. I can't talk of these 
 things to your mother and Eleanor, but I want you to 
 know." And then he used his phrase for the third time. 
 "It will be a great relief when it's all over," he said with 
 the ghost of a little laugh, and his hands fell again to their 
 automatic rubbing of his thin knees. 
 
 "I wish I had been . . ." Dickie began almost in a 
 whisper, and could find no phrase for his regret. His father 
 
328 THESE LYNNEKERS 
 
 sought relief as his mother sought comfort, and relief could 
 only come by way of release. 
 
 Moreover, Dickie knew that the old man had no wish 
 to talk of his illness. He had always had an unusual 
 delicacy in speaking of the functions of his body, and now 
 he would nurse this last disturbance privately, secretively ; 
 he would strive until the end to maintain the fiction that he 
 was suffering from no unusual interference with the com- 
 mon routine of physical life. The single method by which 
 the son could convey either sympathy or understanding was 
 by silence; his father would appreciate that. And, indeed, 
 he seemed to mark the quiet interval, as if he gave his con- 
 gregation a few moments of quiet prayer after the blessing. 
 When he spoke again his voice took on a more conventional 
 tone and emphasised the change of topic. The difficult 
 announcement had been made and that was the end of it. 
 Dick understood. 
 
 VIII 
 
 "I used to think at one time that you might make a 
 figure in political life," he said, "but perhaps it's better not. 
 A man in a high position must often be compelled to act 
 against his conscience. I can almost find it in me to hope 
 now that you won't be too successful." 
 
 "Yes. If only one could get a clear direction," Dickie 
 said. 
 
 "That will come, that will come," his father assured him, 
 and if they thought of the agent in different terms, their 
 intention gave them common ground. "Haven't you any 
 solid plans at present?" the Rector asked. 
 
 "No, I haven't. That was why I came down here," 
 Dickie said. He understood that his father wanted him to 
 talk, and he made an effort to satisfy him. "Business life 
 is pretty beastly in some ways," he went on, "and at the 
 time one doesn't notice it. One is too keyed up. And then 
 there are always two sides to it, if you look deep enough. 
 
JULY, 1903 329 
 
 You remember that affair down here with the Loan Com- 
 pany at Medborough ? Of course, you do. Well, that kind 
 of theory keeps cropping up all the time." 
 
 "Go on, my boy, go on," the Rector prompted him, and 
 stretched out his hand and took up the long neglected 
 cigarette. Now that his announcement had been received 
 without a fuss, he could compose himself to listen to his 
 son's stories. Except for occasional fits of deep abstrac- 
 tion that he seemed unable to guard against, the Rector's 
 mind had been unusually clear lately. 
 
 "Oh, it wasn't anything particular," Dickie said. "Just 
 another thing very like the Smith business. I am thinking 
 of a fellow called Jennings, the ordinary type of small 
 company promoter, rather cock-sure, and cunning in a way, 
 a chap who was letting in all sorts of small investors. And, 
 well, we pushed him up and broke him. I took it on at the 
 beginning chiefly with the idea that we were doing rather 
 a good thing for the small investor, generally; but it's true 
 that he was in our way, rather." 
 
 "Scoundrel !" commented the Rector softly. He had had 
 experience from the point of view of the small investor. 
 Crockford's information supplies an excellent register for 
 the forwarding of prospectuses. 
 
 "Yes, he was, of course," Dickie admitted, "but I found 
 that he had about ten people dependent on him. He came 
 to me and pitched no end of a story and I went up to his 
 house at Highbury one night and found that it was perfectly 
 true. He had a wife and five children and a mother and 
 two sisters, and was being jolly decent to them all." 
 
 The Rector looked up sympathetically and clicked his 
 tongue. "What did you do, Dick?" he asked. 
 
 "Well, I put it to Jennings next day that he'd broken 
 up a few jolly little homes like his own at one time and 
 another, and he argued it out a bit at first, and then gave 
 in and said he had never thought of it like that before and 
 that it would be a lesson to him and all that kind of stuff; 
 and I gave him a credit and let him in on a good thing, 
 
330 THESE LYNNEKERS 
 
 and six months afterwards he was back at his old game 
 again." 
 
 "Dear, dear, what became of him ?" asked the Rector. 
 
 "He went a bit too near the bone, and had to clear out," 
 Dickie said. "His family just manage to keep things going. 
 Lessing has been very decent to them. He's like that. But 
 the point is, you see, pater, that you can't help these things. 
 It's all very well to say that you can choose some business 
 in which you are doing as little harm as possible to any- 
 body else, but that's only shirking the responsibility. Chaps 
 like Jennings go on downing somebody or being downed 
 themselves just the same, and you might just as well be 
 doing it yourself for all the good you are." 
 
 The Rector threw away the last third of his cigarette 
 and stared thoughtfully into the empty grate. His hands 
 were still now, clasped together between his knees. 
 
 "You'll find a way, Dick," he remarked after a long 
 pause. 
 
 "It's only the personal problem I want to solve, you 
 know," Dickie explained, following out his own line of 
 thought. "I've no use for the high-falutin' reform business. 
 It's all right if you think you've got a mission, of course ; 
 but I know I haven't." He ruffled his hair with his old 
 boyish gesture as he concluded : "I just want to find my 
 line, whatever it may be. I'm not sure my old idea of be- 
 ing an astronomer wasn't as good as anything. Gives one 
 a chance of just plugging away. . . ." 
 
 "You'll find your line," his father repeated softly, and 
 had a vision of his old dreams, a little changed. 
 
 "You're going over there to-morrow?" he said. 
 
 "To Oakstone? Yes," Dickie answered. "I thought I 
 should like to go into Medborough to see Price first, if you 
 don't mind." 
 
 "Did Eleanor ask you to do that ?" his father asked, look- 
 ing up quickly. 
 
 "On the contrary, she asked me not to." 
 
 "It will serve no purpose," the Rector said with some- 
 thing of his old irritation. "I had gastric fever when I was 
 
JULY, 1903 331 
 
 in my first curacy; I've always thought it might return in 
 some form or another." 
 
 "It was only for my own satisfaction," Dickie explained. 
 
 The Rector got to his feet with an obvious effort. "Well, 
 well," he said, "you must do as you think best. Now, my 
 boy, are you going upstairs?" 
 
 Dickie wondered if it were possible that his father did 
 not know what was the cause of the trouble. If he believed 
 that his affection was gastric and not due to a malignant 
 growth, it seemed better to allow him to continue in igno- 
 rance. There was something less evil, less threatening in 
 the idea of that old illness returned in another form. 
 
 IX 
 
 And Dr. Price was a trifle vague in his diagnosis when 
 questioned by Dickie the next morning. 
 
 "It isn't absolutely certain," Price said, "that it's a case 
 of cancer. We recognise a malignant stricture of the 
 oesophagus not due to the pressure of an outside growth, 
 and yet not susceptible to enlargement by a bougie." 
 
 "In that case he might be kept alive for years, possibly, 
 by artificial feeding?" suggested Dickie. 
 
 "I suggested gastrotomy to your father when he saw 
 me," Price returned, "but he absolutely refused to consider 
 the idea of an operation. And in any case it would be of 
 doubtful value. He is seventy-six, I believe." 
 
 "Nearly," Dickie agreed. 
 
 "By the way," he added, "does my father know your 
 diagnosis? Last night he spoke of gastric trouble." 
 
 "The malignant stricture I mentioned might quite well 
 be the consequence of an old ulceration due to some form 
 of gastritis," Price said. 
 
 "On the other hand, it may be cancer ?" 
 
 "I think it more probable." 
 
 "But you didn't tell him that?" 
 
 "No, I believe not," Dr. Price said. 
 
332 THESE LYNNEKERS 
 
 Dickie went on to Oakstone, feeling a little relieved. 
 The fiction of the old gastric trouble had some foundation 
 after all and it seemed curiously a more amenable thing 
 than that other horrible enemy. 
 
XIV 
 
 THE NEW OAKSTONE 
 
 THE change in Oakstone was so far reaching that the 
 influence of it was visible at the North Western sta- 
 tion at Medborough, fifteen miles away. The "Oakstone" 
 train was being advertised by flurried porters to the complete 
 neglect of Peterborough which was the train's important 
 destination. It was true that Dickie, who had not revisited 
 the school since he had left it eleven years before, had never 
 seen that side of speech-day which began at Medborough ; 
 but he knew that this crowd on the platform was greater 
 than any he had seen collected in the Oakstone schoolroom ; 
 and these people only represented the London contingent who 
 had come across from the Great Northern station, a group 
 slightly inflated, perhaps, by the fathers, mothers and sis- 
 ters of Medborough itself. And not only was the crowd 
 greater than it used to be, it was also of a different quality. 
 The parents seemed to average a higher level of impor- 
 tance than those Dickie remembered. He recognised Evan 
 Williams, who was sure of a seat in the Cabinet when the 
 Liberals came into power, and A. B. Ellis, the novelist, both 
 public men and both associated with that inclination to- 
 wards new ideas and standards which was just beginning 
 to discover a definite outline. Ellis, particularly, was al- 
 ways being bracketed with Bernard Shaw and H. G. Wells 
 as an exponent of what was presently to become a new lit- 
 erature. In the old days the quality of the speech-day 
 visitors had been recognisably conservative. 
 
 Dickie had heard something of Moseley's drastic changes 
 
 333 
 
334 THESE LYNNEKERS 
 
 during the eight years of his head-mastership, but the in- 
 formation had always been given disparagingly, with a hint 
 of regret that the good old tradition of the school should be 
 sacrificed. Behind any report of increasing numbers and 
 the development of the "Modern" side, had lingered the 
 suggestion that Oakstone was losing "tone." Edward had 
 said as much explicitly the last time Dickie had seen 
 him, some three years ago. 
 
 "I don't go there now/' Edward had added. "It isn't the 
 same school since Moseley has been there. He's modernis- 
 ing the whole place science laboratories and workships 
 and that sort of thing, you know." 
 
 Dickie had exhibited a fleeting interest at the time, and 
 then had forgotten all about it, until he had evolved out 
 of his own experience the ghost of a scheme for a new 
 method in education. When that scheme occurred to him, 
 he remembered that "something was being done" at Oak- 
 stone. 
 
 Even on the Medborough platform he had a glimpse of 
 the radical quality of Moseley's changes. . . . 
 
 What that change stood for, he found it difficult to say 
 with any precision while he was in the midst of all the 
 new circumstance that surrounded the school. For every- 
 thing about the place had been affected, even the station, a 
 mile out of the town, had become more alert. The two large 
 waggonettes and the other conveyances that had come to 
 meet the train were new, in the old days one omnibus and 
 a few dilapidated "flies" were all that the town could 
 inadequately provide for the visitors, the majority of whom 
 trailed in a thin procession over that dull mile of untidy, 
 partly urbanised road into Oakstone. 
 
 And the town itself was evidently on the way to regener- 
 ation. Once it had hidden the school under its skirts as an 
 offspring of which it was a little ashamed. Now the child 
 was nearly full-grown and the mother leaned upon it. The 
 old town had come to exist for the sake of the school, to 
 thrive upon it, and after all the centuries of its own slow 
 existence, to grow. On the hill were new spaces round 
 
THE NEW OAKSTONE 335 
 
 the school-buildings, and the new schoolhouse, and the new 
 range of laboratories and workships that had formerly been 
 the old schoolhouse. Up there was a nucleus that had once 
 been an unconsidered extension; and on the farther side 
 of the nucleus was the rest of the school, recently built, or 
 building, collecting the other "houses" that in Dickie's day 
 had been hidden away, dingy and inconvenient, in various 
 parts of the town; surrounded now by playing fields that 
 he had known as market gardens or pasturage. 
 
 So much alteration might have implied almost miraculous 
 powers on the part of Mr. Moseley, if his appointment 
 had not been made a few months after the death of old 
 Lord Bingley, the chairman of the trustees. That change 
 in the over-lordship of the funds had revealed the fact 
 of a large surplus of wealth, theoretically announced in 
 detail from year to year, but actually concealed by the mere 
 prestige attaching to the Earl's name. The nephew who 
 succeeded was a man of affairs, and if Moseley had not 
 been full of energy and initiative the whole reserve of 
 funds would probably have fallen into the ever-open maw 
 of the Charity Commissioners. The old board of trustees 
 had displayed an amazing ignorance of their accounts and 
 would have been quite willing to hand them over to the 
 larger authority. They had trusted implicitly to Lord 
 Bingley, who had trusted his solicitor, who simply had not 
 bothered. And it had been nobody's business to investi- 
 gate. But there was the money to be spent on the School, 
 and Moseley was the right man to direct the spending. He 
 had found a capable lieutenant in young Lord Bingley. 
 
 Yet in Oakstone, as in Paris, London and Halton, Dickie 
 found still the old note of protest against the too rapid 
 insurgence of all this young growth. The sixteenth century 
 town hall stood unaltered, an island memorial of the past 
 among the rebuilding shops of the market-place. And the 
 long, thin neck of the over-crocketted church spire seemed 
 to strain a little impatiently upward in order to claim atten- 
 tion *os \ts age and influence among all this bright, clean 
 spread of modern architecture. (A. B. Ellis, who was 
 
336 THESE LYNNEKERS 
 
 fond of a whimsical touch in his metaphor, had likened 
 the spire to the neck of a giraffe in a pen. "The boast 
 of these prehistoric survivals," he had added reflectively, 
 "has a curious attraction. We must keep a few of them 
 to remind us of what we once were.") 
 
 ii 
 
 The marks of the change were not so clearly defined in 
 the big hall that on such occasions as these was contrived 
 from the two junior class-rooms. The school-buildings were 
 not quite recent in date. They marked a transition period 
 that had promised reform and failed to accomplish it, in 
 the days immediately preceding the appointment of Dr. 
 Barnard. There had been a movement, then; but so far 
 as Oakstone was concerned, the movement had only been 
 an uneasy rocking that had gradually tottered to rest on 
 the old base. 
 
 The influence of the town hall and the church was still 
 visible in the Oakstone scheme of education. Moseley 
 might have ambitions and might be working steadily to 
 express them, but he was wise enough to move slowly, 
 clear-headed enough not to run too far ahead of his 
 generation. He had either to consider the necessity for 
 compromise, or risk the loss of his material. In that 
 generation, his most difficult task was to educate the parents 
 of his boys. 
 
 An example of his method might be found in the fact 
 that the Greek play was still an item on the speech-day 
 programme. The sixth did a scene from Aristophanes 
 instead of from ^Eschylus, and the performance was cut 
 down from half-an-hour to ten minutes. But all the donnish 
 and clerical fathers, and they were a distinguishable ele- 
 ment in the crowd, were appeased by this salute to tradi- 
 tion. They could defend themselves against the criticism 
 of friends who scoffed at the "new-fangled" ideas of Oak- 
 stone, by instancing that Greek play, even though it were 
 
THE NEW OAKSTONE 337 
 
 as remote from its surroundings as the old town hall 
 among the recent litter of the market-place. 
 
 As Dickie walked into the familiar rooms that had been 
 the scene of his earlier struggles with the Latin primer, 
 some one came up behind him and touched his arm. 
 
 "Young Mr. Lynneker, isn't it?" a voice asked, and 
 Dickie turned to discover Mr. Bailey, retired ironmonger 
 and ex-mayor of Medborough. He still wore a flat-crowned 
 felt hat of the same pattern that Dickie distinctly associated 
 with that first morning of his clerkship. Mr. Bailey had 
 put him in his place, on that occasion. 
 
 "Come to have a look at the old school, eh ?" Bailey asked 
 when they had shaken hands. "Altered a bit since your 
 day, ain't it? Well, where you goin' to sit? I'm all alone. 
 You heard, no doubt, as my wife died six years back? 
 
 "My boy's here, now. Won a prize for mechanics," 
 he continued when they had found places. "Got a taste 
 for engineering playin' with the tools in my old shop. I 
 sold the business in '98. Ah ! yes, you hadn't left home 
 then. Claude, you remember him, perhaps" (Dickie re- 
 membered him as a stringy boy of eleven or twelve with 
 outstanding pink ears, but did not particularise this mental 
 vision), "well, he didn't get on at the Kings School. From 
 the Reverend Hammond's reports of him, you might 
 a-thought the boy was little better nor an idiot. And 
 Claude, he was crazy to go into the railway shops, but I 
 meant him to have a proper education, somehow. I'd made 
 a bit of money, and I meant as he should profit by it . . ." 
 
 The Hall was filling rapidly and Dickie, bending an 
 apparently attentive ear to the ironmonger's story, allowed 
 his interest to wander while the complicated narrative of 
 Mr. Bailey's introduction to Oakstone was unfolded. 
 
 "He's done first-rate here," Mr. Bailey concluded rather 
 abruptly, and lowering his voice as Mr. Moseley stood up 
 at the front of the dais. "Prize for mechanics," he whis- 
 pered penetratingly through the hush that announced the 
 opening speech. 
 
 v Splendid," Dickie murmured. 
 
338 THESE LYNNEKERS 
 
 The programme of the prize-giving did not differ greatly 
 from those he remembered, but the performance had been 
 sharpened up. If a boy had won more than one prize, he 
 took them all at once if he could carry them and was not 
 dragged up half-a-dozen separate times. And when he 
 considered it, Dickie saw that even this abbreviation of 
 the tedious proceedings had a secondary intention. The 
 boy, and not the subject, was the principal consideration. 
 It was no longer "sixth-form prize, Collins primus"; and 
 later Dr. Barnard with a whimsical twist of his mouth say- 
 ing, "Latin verse prize; I'm afraid we must trouble the 
 inimitable Collins primus once more" ; but Mr. Moseley, 
 brief and sharp, "Collins primus takes . . ." and then 
 the tale of his achievement, and Collins was placed and 
 finished with. There was some recognisable order of 
 precedence from the sixth downwards, an order not of sub- 
 jects but of scholars; and incidentally it was to be ob- 
 served that the order was known to the prize-winners 
 themselves. Each appeared from the immediate proximity 
 of the dais when his name was called, and descended on 
 the other side, free, then, to join his people and watch the 
 further proceedings without interruption. Moseley cer- 
 tainly had a talent for organisation. The actual perform- 
 ance of the ceremony for a school of nearly 300 boys took 
 little more than half the time occupied in Barnard's day 
 for a school of 170. 
 
 After Claude Bailey with his peaked, listening face and 
 obtrusively articulated limbs had passed attentively across 
 the platform, and the third edition of Clerk Maxwell's 
 "Treatise on Electricity and Magnetism" had been de- 
 posited with his father, Dickie was able to obtain a little 
 more generalised information from the hitherto absorbed 
 ironmonger. Claude had retired once more into some ob- 
 scurity of boys, but Mr. Bailey had a few shrewd remarks 
 to make about Oakstone as a school. 
 
 "What I can make of it," was his summary, "is that Mr. 
 Moseley don't believe in packing all boys with the same 
 stuffing. Claude, now, was no good at history and geog- 
 
THE NEW OAKSTONE 339 
 
 raphy and that kind o' thing, but he's got a taste for mucking 
 about with tools and somehow Mr. Moseley has worked 
 on that, and Claude has picked up his figuring and a lot 
 of other things incidental, as it were. He never cared for 
 French and German, for instance, till he found as there 
 was books about electricity in them languages as he'd got 
 to read if he was to get on. All seems to work together 
 with Claude, you see ; he don't mind what trouble he takes 
 so long as it's got something to do with engines." 
 
 "Specialising," commented Dickie. 
 
 "And a good thing, too, in these days," Mr. Bailey re- 
 plied. "You can't begin too early, with all this competi- 
 tion." 
 
 "But there must be a large proportion of boys who 
 haven't any particular bent at this age," Dickie objected. 
 
 "Oh! like enough," Mr. Bailey said, obviously thank- 
 ful that Claude was not of their number. 
 
 Dickie wondered whether Moseley would have made him 
 an astronomer. It seemed to him that that occupation, 
 too, might lead in these days to an intense specialisation. 
 In the twentieth century one discovered, not new planets, 
 but some delicate improvement in, say, the spectrohelio- 
 graph. 
 
 He sighed and turned his attention to the dais. Ellis 
 and Evan Williams were up there, and the Conservative 
 member who had succeeded to Medborough when Lord Wil- 
 liam March had unexpectedly come into the peerage; and 
 other evidently distinguished people who were unknown 
 to Dickie. 
 
 "Who is the woman in grey?" he asked his companion. 
 
 "Lady Constance, the Bishop's wife," Mr. Bailey said; 
 "the young lady with her is Miss Sibyl Groome, her niece, 
 you know, the daughter of the Honourable Philip Groome, 
 Lady Constance's brother. He's an invalid, smashed up 
 hunting, they say, and goes about in a bath-chair, mostly. 
 They're stayin' at the Palace." 
 
 Mr. Bailey displayed a proper pride in the accuracy 
 
840 THESE LYNNEKERS 
 
 of his information, and picked out a few more local celebri- 
 ties for the purposes of biography. 
 
 Dickie was looking round for a way of escape from the 
 further proliferations of the ceremony. He was tired of 
 this indirect method. He wanted to talk to Moseley. Un- 
 fortunately Mr. Bailey had tucked them into the middle 
 of a row. For a time he amused himself with a speculation 
 as to whether the neat-faced, blonde little man sitting near 
 Lady Constance could be the admirable Hudson who was 
 so well-informed on the subject of Daedalus, and had been, 
 according to report, the cleverest boy that Oakstone, under 
 Barnard, had ever turned out. Dickie decided that it 
 must be Hudson, and determined to accost him later and 
 ask what fame his cleverness had won for him. 
 
 His eye dwelt for a moment with a touch of shy hesi- 
 tation on the figure of Lady Constance's niece. Her face 
 seemed vaguely familiar to him. 
 
 in 
 
 Mr. Bailey announced that he was not going to the Head- 
 master's for lunch, but meant to take Claude to "The Lamb" 
 and reward his industry by a substantial feed ; and Dickie, 
 having seen his late companion make his diligent way out 
 of the Hall with a volume of Clerk Maxwell under each 
 arm, sauntered up to the dais just in time to catch "young 
 Hudson" the old habit of address was suppressed just 
 in time. 
 
 Hudson, it appeared, was still being brilliant. Dickie's 
 direct questions elicited the facts that he had been "lucky 
 enough" to get a fellowship at Balliol, and "was doing a 
 new translation of Plotinus." Dickie inferred that at 
 twenty-six Hudson could regard his future with com- 
 fortable assurance. The large possibilities of Oxford held 
 no dignity or emolument to which he might not aspire. 
 
 "What do you think of Moseley?" Dickie asked, when 
 he had satisfied his curiosity under the first head. 
 
THE NEW OAKSTONE 341 
 
 "You would hardly expect me to be very appreciative," 
 Hudson said with the neat smile, which so well expressed 
 the precision of his well-informed mind. "You have fol- 
 lowed the line of this development, no doubt." 
 
 "No, I can't say that I have," Dickie admitted. "What 
 is it?" 
 
 "Speaking broadly," Hudson indicated the emptying 
 school-rooms with a white, slender hand, "this is an at- 
 tempt to compete with the secondary, technical education of 
 the Council schools. Once the principle of free education 
 was firmly established, technical education was certain to 
 follow. You remember what Fitch said, that the 'habit of 
 the English people regards education as a body of ex- 
 pedients to be discovered empirically' ; well, our experiments 
 landed us in the position of having to compete with the 
 boys from the National Schools, particularly in such pro- 
 fessions as engineering in its various branches. Hunc illae 
 machinae!" He gave his neat smile again to point the 
 mild jest. "You see, my dear Lynneker," he continued, 
 "the new Oakstone is nothing more nor less than an attempt 
 at democratisation. It means that the ruling classes are 
 taking off their coats and trying to compete with the me- 
 chanic an attempt which I believe is foredoomed to 
 failure." 
 
 "I think you're speaking too broadly, Hudson," Dickie 
 said, shaking his head. 
 
 "We were discussing the line of development," Hudson 
 reminded him. 
 
 "Even so," Dickie returned, "you've missed what seems 
 to me an essential I mean the special education of boys 
 who have a particular bent. The old Oakstone was all 
 right for you ; it was all wrong for me. And why shouldn't 
 I and my sort have the chance that Moseley's got to 
 offer us?" 
 
 Hudson waived that aside. "You can't pick out a par- 
 ticular application like that and consider it apart from the 
 development as a whole," he said. "Any small advantage 
 
THESE LYNNEKERS 
 
 such as the one you instance can't be weighed in against 
 the whole argument." 
 
 Dickie fumbled for an adequate reply and found none. 
 He had realised that he would get nothing but dialectic 
 from Hudson, dialectic influenced by a point of view that, 
 having once been stated, must and would be upheld by 
 the logical and verbal ingenuities of which this youthful 
 don was already a master. 
 
 "You're too good for me at debate, always were," Dickie 
 said, rather ruefully. "I'll give in." He seached his mind 
 for a subject of escape and some association prompted him 
 to ask if Hudson knew what had become of Nigger Joyce, 
 the doyen of the Remove. 
 
 Hudson's neat smile was faintly supercilious as he said, 
 "Haven't you heard of Herbert Joyce, the new romantic 
 novelist? He's to be a 'power in literature' pace the re- 
 viewers." 
 
 "Good Lord! Is that chap old Nigger?" exclaimed 
 Dickie. 
 
 "Another Dumas, perhaps," Hudson suggested. 
 
 "And we used to think that he was practically an idiot," 
 commented Dickie. "I wonder what Moseley would have 
 made of him?" 
 
 "An engineer, probably," sneered Hudson. 
 
 IV 
 
 Dickie appropriated the seat of a defaulting Countess 
 at lunch. 
 
 "I'm not Lady Cardwell," he explained, as he sat down 
 next to A. B. Ellis. "She isn't here, I find, and I wanted 
 to hear what you had to say about the new Oakstone." 
 
 "You remember it as it was?" Ellis asked with a keen, 
 rather suspicious look, as if he feared a reporter. 
 
 "Rather," Dickie said. "I was here under Barnard." 
 
 "Quite a different place, then?" 
 
 "Just the old model, you know. Very compulsory Greek 
 
THE NEW OAKSTONE 343 
 
 and Latin, well rammed down with a wad to keep 'em 
 tight." 
 
 "What did you do when you left?" 
 
 "Bank first, and then an office in the City." 
 
 "Didn't find your education much use, there, I sup- 
 pose?" 
 
 "None whatever. But I want to know what you . . ." 
 
 Apparently Ellis, also, preferred to ask questions. "All 
 in good time," he said. "We've a prolonged luncheon be- 
 fore us. What kind of office in the City did you go to 
 from your Bank ?" 
 
 But Dickie, if he were willing enough to mention his em- 
 ployer to such acquaintances as Dr. Olivier, reserved that 
 information on general occasions. He had found that 
 Lessing's name always provoked a particular heightening 
 of interest in himself, interest of a kind that he had, in 
 his own phrase, "no sort of use for." 
 
 "Financial agent," he said, shortly. 
 
 "Oh! all right," Ellis returned. "You sat down with 
 the declared intention of pumping me." 
 
 "Not about your private affairs," Dickie submitted. 
 
 "I haven't any," Ellis said. "But I usually keep my 
 opinions to myself until they're ready for copyrighting." 
 
 "I hadn't guessed that you were quite so professional," 
 was Dickie's comment. 
 
 Ellis smiled and rubbed the back of his head with a 
 suggestion of boyish glee. 
 
 "Look here, Barnard taught you something," he said. 
 "Or was it your financial agent?" 
 
 "I should like to hear what you think of this method 
 of Moseley's," retaliated Dickie. 
 
 "My dear chap," Ellis returned, putting a hand on Dickie's 
 arm, "you'll find it all in my book, 'The Young Idea.' 
 Really, you know, you mustn't expect an author to repeat 
 himself. If you'll give me your name, I'll send you a copy 
 of the book when I get back. I've nothing to add to it in 
 connexion with to-day's ceremony, except the fact that 
 I'm sending my eldest boy to Moseley next term." He 
 
344 THESE LYNNEKERS 
 
 paused a moment and added thoughtfully, "It is, at least, 
 a beginning." 
 
 "I certainly am rather an ass," admitted Dickie, as he 
 took a card from his pocket book and scribbled the address 
 of the Rectory under his name. 
 
 The visitors' lunch was being served in the boys' dining- 
 room at the School House, and as Ellis took the card he 
 glanced up at the school "boards" over the mantel-piece. 
 
 "I see Lynneker E. H. and Lynneker L. A., he com- 
 mented. 
 
 "I don't appear on the Honours List," Dickie said. "The 
 other two are my elder brothers." 
 
 "And they . . ." Ellis prompted him. 
 
 "Both in the church." 
 
 "You the only black sheep?" 
 
 Dickie's shrug of the shoulders might have been in- 
 terpreted as disclaiming so much distinction. 
 
 "Nevertheless a little discoloured, theologically?" Ellis 
 suggested. 
 
 For a time they talked discursively. Ellis was an imagi- 
 native thinker with a natural gift for phrase (a sufficient 
 explanation of his success as a novelist), and he had a way 
 of throwing the subjects he discussed into an illumination 
 that seemed at the moment definite and final. Dickie, fol- 
 lowing a pace behind, was interested and impressed. He 
 had not, hitherto, met any one so articulate and so pre- 
 pared. And yet, even before the lunch was finished, he 
 found himself being repelled as strongly as he was at- 
 tracted. 
 
 Ellis had suddenly dropped his voice to the intimation 
 of a near confidence. 
 
 "D'you know who that girl is?" he asked. "At the 
 next table; in white; with an eloquent hat. She was on 
 the platform at the prize-giving." 
 
 "I was told that she was a niece of the Bishop's wife," 
 Dickie- replied. He was conscious of a queer resentment 
 as if he were again being impudently questioned about his 
 private affairs. 
 
THE NEW OAKSTONE 345 
 
 Ellis was twirling the stem of a wine-glass. "Let me 
 see, she'd be Philip Groome's daughter, then, wouldn't she ?" 
 he said. 'There were only three Groomes in that genera- 
 tion ; the present Lord Wansford, and Lady Constance and 
 Philip; and Wansford, I know, hasn't any daughters." 
 
 "Very likely," Dickie said curtly. "A Medborough man 
 who was sitting next to me just now told me that she was 
 Lady Constance's niece. That's all I know." 
 
 Ellis glanced at the woman sitting at. his left hand, and 
 then leaned towards Dickie. 
 
 "Very attractive, that suggestion of ripe innocence ; don't 
 you think?" Ellis said. "That girl's quite unusually pretty, 
 of course, but it's that look of poise, of hesitation on an 
 edge, that's so fascinating. Much more attractive to me, 
 for instance, than Gautier's Mile, de Maupin with her 
 rakish mind and innocent body. That girl's body, now, is 
 in effect, mature with the natural instincts she has inherited 
 from uncountable ancestors; while her mind is ready to 
 receive the impression that any man cares to put upon it." 
 
 Dickie found that his face was burning with furious 
 indignation. There had been something in Ellis's expres- 
 sion and tone that had discovered the naked lust of his 
 thought. And to Dickie, it was as if all his own inhibited 
 thoughts and desires had suddenly burst their long re- 
 straint. In the past five years he had mixed with men 
 who habitually found their humour in the indecent, and 
 when their jokes had had their origin in genuine wit, he 
 had laughed with the crowd and without shamefacedness. 
 He had recognised the part sexuality played in the life of 
 men without criticism and without applying any test to 
 his own feelings. In his waking hours he never dwelt on 
 the dreams that emanated from the secret hiding places 
 of his inhibited desires. He had always found an outlet 
 in mental application, in all kinds of work and in his 
 splendid capacities for physical exertion. In London his 
 single panacea for what he called "stuffiness" had been the 
 gymnasium. 
 
 But now, some black magic of Ellis's personality had 
 
346 THESE LYNNEKERS 
 
 suddenly released all those suppressed images to dance 
 about Dickie's brain, distorted and crippled by their long 
 confinement. And all their obscene contortions were re- 
 flected, as it seemed to him, in the person of the brilliant 
 novelist who had so unexpectedly called them forth. Dickie 
 felt as if his most sacred thought had been brutally out- 
 raged. 
 
 "I loathe that kind of muck," he said, quite distinctly. 
 
 Ellis flushed slightly and then pursed his mouth into a 
 whistle. 
 
 "Oh! shucks!" he remarked to the spaces across the 
 table. 
 
 "I beg your pardon, I didn't quite catch . . ." said the 
 bland voice of young Canon Lister, who was sitting imme- 
 diately opposite; and who, now, leaned forward with an 
 expression of the most intelligent interest. 
 
 "I used an American expression, sir," Ellis explained, 
 "to convey a sense of ingenuous amazement. It is the kind 
 of word one uses when one has been talking to some in- 
 ferentially charming lady through a curtain, and she sud- 
 denly puts her face through and you find she's got a 
 beard." 
 
 "Ah! indeed, yes," smiled Canon Lister, trying to look 
 as if he perfectly appreciated the point. "Some of these 
 American expressions are so forcible." 
 
 Dickie made a movement as if he would push the young 
 Canon out of the conversation. "Look here," he said, turn- 
 ing half round in his chair so that he could face Ellis. 
 "I apologise for that. You got me on the raw, in some 
 way, and I didn't know till that moment that there was a 
 raw there." 
 
 Ellis's face conveyed a whimsical amusement. "Most 
 interesting," he remarked. "Sure you haven't met the lady 
 before?" 
 
 Dickie scowled. "It wasn't that," he said. He felt im- 
 pelled to deny that the thought of Miss Sibyl Groome had 
 any connexion with the strange images which had leapt so 
 amazingly from their confinement. "It was nothing what- 
 
THE NEW OAKSTONE 347 
 
 ever to do with that," he repeated. "It was your atti- 
 tude towards what you were saying. It made me feel sick 
 for a moment; and I've knocked about in the City and 
 Paris and New York for five years and I'm not a bit 
 squeamish, as a rule." 
 
 "You're not making it any better," commented Ellis 
 quietly. 
 
 "You think I'm a prig." 
 
 "I was certainly surprised." 
 
 "And offended, of course?" 
 
 "You were abominably plain spoken." 
 
 The company at the table was rising, and there was a 
 distracting clatter of voices and the noise of chairs grating 
 on wooden boards. 
 
 "Well, send me that book, anyhow," Dickie said. "You've 
 interested me tremendously." 
 
 "I'll send it all right," Ellis replied with a nod. "We 
 must meet and have a talk when you come back to town 
 we'll see if we can't find a cure for that abnormality 
 of yours." 
 
 They were, indeed, destined to meet often in the future, 
 but Dickie never found conviction that the abnormality was 
 his. . . . 
 
 After Ellis had gone, Dickie looked round with a sud- 
 den sense that he had forgotten and missed something 
 he had been waiting for. 
 
 The only persons left in the dining-room were Mr. and 
 Mrs. Moseley and Evan Williams. 
 
 That conversation seriously interfered with Dickie's en- 
 quiry into the educational method of Oakstone. 
 
 At first he resented the interruption and fought against 
 it. He was not accustomed to the domination of an out- 
 side thought, and was very distinctly annoyed with him- 
 self when he found that his mind refused to entertain any 
 
348 THESE LYNNEKERS 
 
 further interest in the subject he had come to investigate. 
 By way of subduing this strange rebellion he deliberately 
 imposed himself on Mr. Moseley when he got up to the 
 cricket-field. Evan Williams had gone back to town imme- 
 diately after the luncheon; but the head-master's atten- 
 tion was being claimed by an endless succession of cross- 
 examining parents. 
 
 Dickie's manner of irruption amounted to rudeness and 
 the anxious little Vicar of Pelsworthy who had Moseley 's 
 ear at the moment might have resented the intrusion if 
 he had not inferred a little too respectfully that the in- 
 truder must be a celebrity. He was unfortunate enough, 
 too, to miss the name, and spent the remainder of the after- 
 noon fruitlessly enquiring of acquaintances and strangers, 
 "Do you happen to know who the big young man in a 
 dark grey flannel suit is? His face is quite familiar to 
 me, but . . ." 
 
 "It's too bad to take up your time this afternoon, sir," 
 Dickie said to Moseley, with an effect of issuing a royal 
 command, "but I'm tremendously interested in your method. 
 I was here under Barnard, you know." 
 
 Moseley, he was a short, stoutish man, laughed pleas- 
 antly. "If you can keep the parents off," he said, "I'll do 
 what I can." 
 
 The Vicar of Pelsworthy excused himself at once, and 
 went off to confirm his inference. 
 
 "Come over to the other side of the field," Moseley said 
 to Dickie. 
 
 But the only impression left on Dickie by the conversa- 
 tion that followed was summed up in Ellis's remark, "It is, 
 at least, a beginning." Something, certainly, was being 
 done at Oakstone. The English public school tradition was 
 being thrown overboard a little at a time, but the jettison 
 had to be conducted warily. 
 
 "I can't afford, yet, to refuse boys," Moseley admitted. 
 "In ten years' time, perhaps, I may." 
 
 And although the principle indicated by Mr. Bailey of 
 educating a boy up to and by means of his natural bent 
 
THE NEW OAKSTONE 349 
 
 was clearly recognised, there was certainly room for a great 
 advance in the method of ascertaining the evidences of 
 any tendency that was not immediately manifest. 
 
 "I shall have over three hundred boys here, next term," 
 Moseley remarked thoughtfully, "and it is impossible for 
 me to watch them all individually." 
 
 "And your staff?" put in Dickie. 
 
 "Is nearly as difficult a problem as the parents," Moseley 
 said; "and they are very difficult, indeed. They will plan 
 their boys' futures from the moment the boy is born, and 
 in many cases they are absolutely immovable. If George 
 is meant for the church, we have to teach the duffer Latin 
 and Greek, although he'll probably break away before he 
 leaves the University and chuck all he's learnt little 
 enough, probably to the winds. It's such a waste of time ; 
 ours as well as the boy's. 
 
 "And the staff ? Yes, it's not easy to let them out of the 
 public school and university tradition. I get young men, 
 when I can, but most of 'em seem unable to regard school 
 teaching as anything but mental discipline for the boys. 
 The theory worked more or less in their own case, you see ; 
 and such a tiny percentage go in for school mastering be- 
 cause they want to teach. It's taken up faute de mieux by 
 the majority." 
 
 "Have you read Ellis's book ?" asked Dickie. 
 
 " 'The Young Idea,' oh ! yes. Splendid stuff in a way ; 
 but most of it unpractical from our point of view. It 
 frames an ideal, but he's so impatient." 
 
 Dickie stood staring out across the burnt green of the 
 sunny field, over the group of white figures that drew to 
 a nucleus about the wickets, and towards the vivid garden 
 of colour that clustered round the new pavilion. All the 
 theory of education that an hour or two ago had appeared 
 engaging and essential had become suddenly dull and fatigu- 
 ing. Instead of figuring as a fascinating enterprise, it had 
 taken on the air of all that dusty, necessary work at which 
 he had so conscientiously laboured in the Medborough Bank 
 or the dark offices in Austin Friars. He could understand 
 
350 THESE LYNNEKERS 
 
 that this high employment, beginning to take shape here 
 at Oakstone, was not work for him, but he could not under- 
 stand why he had lost interest in an hour. Had Ellis 
 poisoned his mind, or was he going to be ill? The latter 
 seemed an absurd hypothesis. He had not been ill since 
 he and Latimer had enjoyed the measles together, as little 
 boys. He realised with a faint shock of astonishment that 
 he had missed the purport of Moseley's last remark. 
 
 "I beg your pardon," Dickie apologised. "I was thinking 
 of of Ellis, I believe. He's a queer chap. I was talking 
 to him at lunch. I've never met him before." 
 
 Moseley nodded. "I'm afraid I must be getting back, 
 now," he said. "I hope you've got all the information you 
 wanted. To-day I am, naturally, a trifle harassed." 
 
 "I shall be down at Halton for three months," Dickie 
 returned. "I should like to come over and see you, some- 
 time. I am, really, tremendously interested." 
 
 "Capital," Moseley said, genially. "I shall be delighted. 
 I shall be here, alone, at the end of the holidays. I'll show 
 you round the shops, if you can come then. Now! So 
 sorry, but Lady Constance is going back by the 3.40 ; some 
 function at the Palace, I believe. And I want to have a 
 word with her about her boy. Good-bye." 
 
 He shook hands warmly with Dickie and trundled off 
 to make the circuit of the field towards the pavilion. 
 
 Dickie reflected that he, also, might as well go by the 
 3.40. He would get all the information he wanted by visit- 
 ing Oakstone in September. Until then he might put educa- 
 tion out of his mind. There was nothing for him to do, 
 here. And then he impatiently turned away from the 
 pavilion and the gate into the road that led to the station, 
 and made his way to the shadow of the elms in the far 
 corner of the field. He had the shade all to himself. The 
 little white figures about the wickets were almost hidden 
 by the fall of the ground. 
 
 He was remembering how in the old days, when he 
 was in Wickford's form, he had diligently swatted up his 
 Caesar, finely resolute to keep his mind away from any 
 
THE NEW OAKSTONE 351 
 
 contemplation of tempting problems in algebra. Was he 
 more capable of concentration in those days, he wondered ; 
 or why was it, unless he were incredibly going to be ill, 
 that he felt unable, now, to fix his attention upon Oak- 
 stone and its method, and keep out the intruding figure 
 of Ellis? Even there, alone in the shadow of the elms, 
 Dickie insisted upon describing the invader as * 'Ellis." 
 
 One thing, at least, he could do. He could stay under 
 the elms until it was too late to catch the 3.40. 
 
 VI 
 
 He was home just in time for the half -past seven supper. 
 He could congratulate himself, then, on the re-attainment 
 of his normal sanity. He had met another old boy who 
 had been in the first eleven the year Dickie got his colours, 
 and the two of them had borrowed a bat, a ball, and half- 
 a-dozen willing small boys, and had gone to the deserted 
 upper field and had an hour's practice at the net. The 
 eager, hot little out-fielders had been delighted by the power 
 of Dickie's drives. 
 
 "Why weren't you playing for the old boys, sir?" they 
 asked him. 
 
 Now, that he was home again, except for a slight feel- 
 ing of flatness, Dickie found himself entirely recovered 
 from the strange interference with his mental balance that 
 had so suddenly upset him at the luncheon table. All those 
 distorted images had been safely shut back into their old 
 quarters. He knew quite well, now, what was the matter 
 with him. He had been idle for three whole days, slacking 
 about and getting soft. If he were to stay at Halton for 
 three months, and his father's condition had finally 
 clinched that resolve, he must take up some definite work. 
 He might learn Russian, and read up his mathematics in 
 relation to astronomical calculations. He had, that summer, 
 met a man named Levinson, who was an assistant at the 
 Royal Observatory, and had been down to Greenwich on 
 
352 THESE LYNNEKERS 
 
 three or four occasions. He decided to write to Levinson 
 and ask his advice. . . . 
 
 The other three were already seated when he came into 
 the dining-room. 
 
 "There's a note for you, dear, from the Palace!" his 
 mother said, almost before he had sat down. "It came at 
 five o'clock by the second post." 
 
 The "second post" was a new addition to the Halton 
 service, and Mrs. Lynneker still spoke of it with a touch 
 of pride. 
 
 Dickie frowned and pushed the note aside. "Oh! yes, 
 I met Dr. Olivier in the train coming down," he said. "I 
 expect it's an invitation to lunch." 
 
 "Aren't you going to open it?" his mother asked in amaze- 
 ment, and the Rector looked up, with puzzled scrutiny 
 from his tentative sipping of the thin "Revelenta." (Emma 
 had gone to the other extreme this evening.) Dickie was 
 more than ever now a source of wonder and doubt to his 
 father and mother. Neither Latimer nor Edward had ever 
 received such an invitation ; and it was twenty years since 
 the Rector and his wife had last been honoured by this 
 peculiar mark of episcopal favour. 
 
 "Dick takes it all for granted," his father said with a 
 rather grim smile that did not conceal the pride he felt in 
 his boy's capabilities. 
 
 "Oh ! it wasn't that, pater," Dickie said. "Only I'm not 
 sure . . ." he hesitated before he concluded lamely, "if I'm 
 particularly keen on going." 
 
 His mother could understand that. She was unable to 
 conceive the fact that her son would not be horribly shy 
 on such an occasion. 
 
 "Well, it may be to say that the Bishop is too busy, or 
 something," she encouraged him, and experienced a feeling 
 of vicarious relief. 
 
 Dickie tore open the letter with the prong of a fork. 
 The note was written on a masculine paper, but the hand- 
 writing of all but the signature was certainly feminine and 
 pervaded by the faintest odour of scent. 
 
THE NEW OAKSTONE 355 
 
 "Dear Mr. Lynneker," the invitation ran, "will you for- 
 give a very busy man for such short notice and come to 
 lunch here at one-thirty, to-morrow (Friday) ? If you can- 
 not manage it, it will be my own fault. Please do not 
 trouble to answer this, but just come if you are able to." 
 
 No doubt, the letter had been dictated at the same time 
 as many others, and the Bishop had begun to sign his 
 name as "Medborough" (there was no Latin for it) and 
 had then crossed out the "M" and subscribed himself "sin- 
 cerely yours, A. Olivier." 
 
 "I suppose he keeps a woman secretary?" remarked 
 Dickie with apparent irrelevancy. 
 
 "No, Mr. Johns is the Bishop's secretary," Eleanor said, 
 "but he's away on his holiday, I think." 
 
 She held out her hand for the letter and then scrutinised 
 it intently. "It isn't Lady Constance's writing," she af- 
 firmed. "She writes rather a big hand." 
 
 "Shall you go, dear?" Mrs. Lynneker put in anxiously, 
 bored by these futile speculations. 
 
 "I suppose so," Dickie said carelessly. "Lady Constance 
 was on the platform to-day. Bailey, the ironmonger, you 
 know, was sitting next to me, and pointed her out. He 
 said her brother, Philip Groome, was staying at the Palace." 
 
 "He's an invalid, I believe," put in the Rector. 
 
 "So Bailey said," Dickie agreed. "That gawky son of 
 his got a prize for mechanics. One would never have 
 thought . . ." 
 
 "What shall you wear, dear?" his mother interrupted 
 him. 
 
 "My stock tweed, I suppose," Dickie said. He leaned 
 forward and picked up the Bishop's note from the table, 
 hesitated as if he intended to tear it across, and then 
 crammed it into his jacket pocket. 
 
 "I've made up my mind to learn Russian, while I'm at 
 home," he said. 
 
CHAPTER XV 
 SIBYL 
 
 DICKIE arrived at the Palace twenty minutes too soon. 
 He had come in to Medborough by train, and then had 
 forgotten that he would be too early until he had actually 
 rung at the Bishop's front door. 
 
 Sibyl Groome was alone in the drawing-room when he 
 was announced. She looked up at him with a vague hos- 
 tility as if she resented his intrusion. 
 
 "Lady Constance will be down directly," she said and 
 glanced at the French clock perched up over the Gothic 
 fire-place. 
 
 "I'm afraid I'm rather early," Dickie said, returning her 
 look of hostility. 
 
 "Won't you sit down?" was all her comment on his 
 apology. She had not risen when he came in, and when 
 he sat down without further remark, she returned to the 
 book she had been reading and was still marking with an 
 intent finger. 
 
 Dickie lounged in his chair by the window and made no 
 attempt to open a conversation. The drawing-room was 
 on the first floor and he looked out at the wet green of 
 the Palace lawn, smooth and clean as the cloth of a billiard 
 table. 
 
 All about him, here, were the marks of age and tradi- 
 tion. The two five-light, mullioned windows with the 
 lozenges of their perpendicular tracery filled in with coats 
 of arms in stained glass ; the black oak panelling that com- 
 pletely encased the long narrowness of the low room; the 
 
 354 
 
SIBYL 355 
 
 ecclesiastical richness of the Gothic fire-place, over which 
 the ornate French clock sat with a ridiculous air of feminine 
 frills and lace, the dark hollows of the coffered ceiling, 
 were none of them less than three hundred and fifty years 
 old, contemporary, probably, with the laying of that delicate 
 lawn. 
 
 But, here, he felt no appeal against the insurgence of 
 the twentieth century. This room was adapting itself, ap- 
 parently without effort, to the invasions of modernity. And 
 it seemed probable that Lady Constance or her husband 
 had had no hesitation in jumbling what had been, probably, 
 the furniture of their Kensington house into this sixteenth 
 century place. 
 
 Dickie's attention, wandering from point to point as he 
 made his inventory, was gradually drawn to the centre of 
 the room, to the incongruously comfortable arm chair in 
 which Sibyl Groome was, or had been, reading. She still 
 held her book, but she was now frankly staring at her 
 visitor. 
 
 Dickie's eyes met hers with the leap of an anticipated 
 decision. It was as if two adversaries after strategic cir- 
 clings and feints of evasion had suddenly clinched. 
 
 "Are you criticising the furniture?" she asked. 
 
 Dickie was aware of a strong desire to demonstrate his 
 complete independence of Miss Groome's opinions or per- 
 sonality; and he did not smile as he said, 
 
 " 'Criticising' is hardly the word, I think. In fact, I 
 was wondering why modern furniture didn't seem out of 
 place, here." 
 
 "I think it does," Miss Groome returned with a gentle 
 vehemence. "Utterly out of place. It's only temporary, of 
 course, the furniture, I mean. This room, particularly, is 
 going to be furnished in keeping with the style." 
 
 "It'll be jolly uncomfortable, you know," Dickie com- 
 mented. 
 
 "I don't see why," Miss Groome said on a cold note of 
 challenge. 
 
 "No padding or anything of that kind," Dickie sug- 
 
356 THESE LYNNEKERS 
 
 gested. "They didn't go in for comfort in the sixteenth 
 century." 
 
 "Of course, if you are one of those people who would 
 sacrifice everything for comfort . . ." she said. 
 
 "But what do you sacrifice, actually?" he asked. 
 
 "Oh! well Art." She brought out her remonstrance 
 with the air of one committing herself irrevocably to a 
 new faith. 
 
 "It isn't art to copy old models," he returned quietly. 
 
 Miss Groome seemed to brace herself. She sat up 
 stiffly, dropped her book, and clasped her hands together 
 with an effect of preparing to be very indignant. And 
 indeed, her dark eyes looked very hostile as she said, 
 
 "It would be better art than this, anyhow. You must 
 admit that." 
 
 "I don't," Dickie returned, with an annoyingly confident 
 air of knowing exactly what he wanted to say. "This 
 room, as it is, expresses something of the personality of 
 it's Lady Constance, I suppose ; or, at least, of the present 
 day. Any one could furnish this place from old models. 
 You'd only have to give an order to any dealer. Just say 
 'middle sixteenth century, with no hint of renaissance any- 
 where,' and the thing's done. It would be like sending your 
 maid to match a piece of old material, that's all. There's 
 no originality in it; no personal feeling. Everybody can 
 do that. It's merely a question of how much money you're 
 prepared to spend." 
 
 Miss Groome shrugged her shoulders. "Of course, if you 
 did it that way," she said contemptuously. "Aunt Connie 
 means to do it a little at a time. Pick up things in cottages 
 and that sort of thing." 
 
 "Even then, she'd only be doing it on a theory, following 
 a canon," Dickie submitted. "She wouldn't be expressing 
 her own taste." 
 
 "I don't see how you can possibly know that," Miss 
 Groome began warmly; and then Lady Constance came 
 in, tall and graceful, and yet with an air of drooping with 
 a faint deference to any opinion. 
 
SIBYL 357 
 
 "Am I late?" she said, as Dickie stood up and bowed. 
 She glanced at the coquettish clock as if she doubted the 
 dependability of a thing so feminine and deceitful. 
 
 "No, I was too early," Dickie explained. "I came in by 
 train and forgot." 
 
 Lady Constance smiled. "One does," she said, as if she 
 found this explanation pleasantly satisfying. "I continually 
 forget. I must admit that only yesterday . . ." She 
 leaned a little forward, comfortably launched upon an anec- 
 dote that would fill the expectant interval without the neces- 
 sity for asking banal questions. Her niece interrupted 
 her. 
 
 "He . . . Mr. ... I don't know his name," she began 
 impetuously. 
 
 Lady Constance was hopefully inspired to say "Lynne- 
 ker" and looked to Dickie for approval. 
 
 "Mr. Lynneker has been saying that it would be bad 
 art to furnish this room in its proper period," Miss Groome 
 went on indignantly. "He seems to be one of those people 
 who imagine that any sort of originality is better than 
 having beautiful things." 
 
 "Do you ?" commented Lady Constance, and smiled again 
 at Dickie as if she would tenderly encourage any opinion 
 he cared to offer. 
 
 "No, I said that this room did in some way represent 
 you, that was all," Dickie explained. "And that I preferred 
 that it should do that, rather than be a sort of show example 
 in the business of collecting congruous pieces of old fur- 
 niture." 
 
 "Does it represent me, do you think?" Lady Constance 
 asked. "But how could you know that? You hadn't ever 
 seen me, had you?" 
 
 "I saw you yesterday on the platform at Oakstone," 
 Dickie said, "but I expect I meant that the room did repre- 
 sent something more or less individual, you know; not just 
 a concession to some particular dogma." 
 
 But already he could see that he had been wiser than he 
 knew. The eclectic furnishings of that mediaeval apartment 
 
358 THESE LYNNEKERS 
 
 held something of their owner's tender femininity. Like 
 her, they were gentle, soft, conceding. Even that gesticu- 
 lating, coquettish clock was nothing more than a concession 
 to feminine needs. The room wore that clock as Lady 
 Constance might have worn an osprey's feather in her hat. 
 
 "Oh! were you at Oakstone, yesterday?" Lady Con- 
 stance said. "I don't remember seeing you. I think Mr. 
 Moseley is such a dear, comfortable person, and so tre- 
 mendously right about education. My eldest boy is in the 
 upper fourth, and the two others will go there as soon as 
 they are old enough." 
 
 Miss Groome, however, was not to be diverted from her 
 purpose of finally crushing Dickie. 
 
 "Oh ! never mind Oakstone, Connie, dear," she said im- 
 patiently. "Do say Mr. Lynneker is absolutely wrong about 
 not having this room refurnished. You know you're quite 
 determined to do it properly as soon as you've got time 
 to go about and pick up things." 
 
 "Mediaeval furniture would be very uncomfortable to 
 live with," Dickie put in, disregarding the look of annoyance 
 that Miss Groome shot at him. 
 
 "So hard, yes," agreed Lady Constance. "You remem- 
 ber, Sibyl, that I've always thought it might be rather 
 hard." 
 
 "We'll ask uncle Clement," Miss Groome decided. 
 
 ii 
 
 Indeed, she resolutely carried her campaign down to 
 the dining-room, where they found Philip Groome already 
 seated. In the short interval during which the Bishop had 
 joined in the discussion upstairs, he had evidenced a laisser- 
 faire attitude that his niece had found, as she had dis- 
 tinctly stated, perfectly disgusting. 
 
 She appealed to her father for support directly she saw 
 him, misstating her case against Dickie with the same 
 
SIBYL 359 
 
 reckless ingenuity she had shown at each inclusion of a 
 new party to the discussion. 
 
 Groome looked at his daughter with quiet admiration 
 that held some touch of cynical approval, and then turned 
 the stare of his dark, rather feminine eyes upon the object 
 of his daughter's attack. 
 
 "If you have to be a victim to some obsession," he re- 
 marked, "it's far safer to stick to the antique. The victim 
 of originality is the worst kind of bore." 
 
 Dickie nodded with a casual air of not being greatly 
 interested. Miss Groome's persistence was beginning to 
 annoy him. "Any kind of bore is the worst kind at the 
 moment," he said. 
 
 Groome appeared to relish that. "Oh! if it's only a 
 game," he said, "I'm willing to take a hand. Which is 
 the weakest side?" 
 
 "Mine," Sibyl replied. "I'm one against three. Aunt 
 Connie has deserted and uncle is just playing for safety." 
 
 "Keeps him in practice for diocesan purposes," com- 
 mented Groome. 
 
 The Bishop's amused smile showed that he was accus- 
 tomed to the acidity of his brother-in-law's wit. 
 
 "Better than being too original, Phil," he put in. 
 
 But Sibyl hauled back the slipping conversation before 
 it was beyond reach. 
 
 "Do try to give me a sensible opinion, dear," she said 
 to her father. "Really, I want to know what you do truly 
 think. Do you prefer the drawing-room to be just littered 
 about with any old scraps of furniture as it is, now ; or 
 would you prefer to see it done in one style to match the 
 panelling and the windows and all that?" 
 
 "Honestly, I don't care, my dear Sibyl," was Groome's 
 answer. "And I don't believe you do. But I should like 
 to know what our friend here has done to put your 
 back up." 
 
 "What has that to do with it ?" Sibyl asked. "Mr. Lyn- 
 neker hasn't put my back up in the very least. Of course, 
 if you don't care, you're out of it altogether. It's just a 
 
360 THESE LYNNEKERS 
 
 question of whether one does care for beautiful things 
 or not." 
 
 "No; it's a question of what one thinks is beautiful," 
 Dickie put in. 
 
 "Well, surely, there can't be any doubt which is more 
 beautiful in this case?" Sibyl retorted. 
 
 "The alternatives being, as I understand them," Olivier 
 said, "your aunt's character and sixteenth century benches." 
 
 "Oh! here," Groome interposed. "Where does Connie 
 come in? This is one of those new puzzles. Is it more 
 beautiful to die smiling, or the Dome of St. Paul's ?" 
 
 Lady Constance graciously explained her own inclusion 
 in the contrast. "Mr. Lynneker was nice enough to say 
 that the drawing-room . . . 'expressed' me, was his word, I 
 think," she added. 
 
 And then the Bishop, with a thought, perhaps, of a 
 possible report of this conversation at Halton, so far satis- 
 fied his niece as to attempt a serious criticism of modern 
 art in furniture, with references to the Gothic in architec- 
 ture, which he praised with obviously sincere feeling. 
 
 "You did deserve your bishopric, -Clem," Groome re- 
 marked when his brother-in-law had finished. "I believe 
 you could straddle all the stools in the world without 
 falling." 
 
 "The thing is to be sure your stools are reliable stools," 
 Olivier retorted. 
 
 After that the conversation wavered indecisively about 
 art in furniture until lunch was nearly finished. Unhappily, 
 from Sibyl's point of view, no one had succeeded in finally 
 crushing Dickie. Nor had she found quite the opportunity 
 she was seeking to retaliate for that suggestion of his ; the 
 "unforgivably rude" she found other and more pungent 
 descriptions of himself implication that her persistence 
 was nothing but a bore. 
 
 Dickie, in the intervals of his attention to the Oliviers 
 and Philip Groome, found time to congratulate himself on 
 the fact that a nearer view of Lady Constance's niece had 
 not revived the disturbing emotions which some unexplored 
 
SIBYL 361 
 
 and hitherto almost unrecognised part of himself had so 
 alarmingly presented at Oakstone. He found a solace, now, 
 in assuring himself that Sibyl Groome was quite an ordinary 
 person. If she had preserved for him that oddly attractive 
 air of remote familiarity which had intrigued him when he 
 first saw her, he might not have committed himself with 
 such reckless confidence to the possibility of her nearer 
 acquaintance. 
 
 in 
 
 It was the Bishop who, obviously tired of a conversa- 
 tion that had ceased to have any point or interest, turned 
 to Dickie and resolutely opened a new subject. 
 
 "By the way, Lynneker," he said, "I suppose you don't 
 know of any decent houses to be let furnished anywhere 
 about here? My brother-in-law finds that this place suits 
 him, and he wants to try it for six months or so." 
 
 Dickie considered a moment and decided that he was 
 perfectly safe before he said, "There is a house in Halton. 
 It isn't very large, three sitting-rooms and six or seven bed- 
 rooms, I think. It belongs to the chap who is technically 
 our squire, but he hasn't lived in it for years. I know he 
 lets it sometimes. Folliett acts for him, I believe." 
 
 "We might go and look at it, Phil?" suggested the 
 Bishop, looking solicitously at his brother-in-law. "Halton's 
 only five miles." 
 
 Groome waved his delicate, rather shrunken hand. "Let 
 Connie and Sibyl go," he said. "Women do understand 
 a little about houses." 
 
 "I suppose there's a garden," he added, turning to Dickie. 
 
 "Oh ! the garden is really decent," Dickie said. "Acres of 
 it. It's probably been let down a bit, and about half of 
 it has always been quite wild, almost a park, you know; 
 but the M. F. H. had it until last spring" (Eleanor's let- 
 ters never contained anything but local news of this type), 
 "so I daresay he kept it going." 
 
THESE LYNNEKERS 
 
 The Bishop recalled a memory of a tedious length of 
 high wall on the outskirts of Halton village. 
 
 "That's the place," Dickie corroborated. "It's known 
 as Halton House." 
 
 Lady Constance thought that she and Sibyl might drive 
 over the next morning. "Perhaps you could meet us there," 
 she said, looking at Dickie as if she were graciously im- 
 ploring his help in some great undertaking. 
 
 "Oh! yes, rather," Dickie said, helpfully, and suddenly 
 discovered that for no particular reason he was looking 
 at Sibyl Groome. 
 
 "You needn't be afraid that I shall start the furniture 
 argument again," she said with a little girlish air of hauteur. 
 "That's quite finished, and I am quite unconvinced." 
 
 Dickie reflected that she was, after all, only a child ; and 
 that she had probably been denied all the usual chances 
 of her position by being kept in attendance on an invalid 
 father. He wondered if he had not been foolishly preju- 
 diced in his thought of her. She was so manifestly harm- 
 less; just a lovely, harmless thing, that had tried to push 
 him away with soft, feeble hands. 
 
 "Really I know that you were perfectly right," he ad- 
 mitted. "But it was a topic, and there is something to be 
 said on the other side." 
 
 "You mean that you weren't sincere?" she asked on a 
 note of disgust. 
 
 "Were you?" he said. 
 
 She blushed vividly. "Yes," she retorted, with a stare 
 that defied him to challenge her statement. 
 
 Olivier was whimsically stroking his chin. "We won't, 
 I think, start that subject again," he said. "Nevertheless, 
 I seem to remember, now, that a day. or two ago you were 
 imploring your aunt to leave that room as it is." 
 
 "I hadn't properly thought about it, then, uncle," Sibyl 
 returned. "Or I may have said so to please aunt Connie; 
 I knew she would hate the bother of doing it properly. 
 But I'm perfectly sincere about the principle." 
 
 "Hang your infernal principles, Sibyl," her father put 
 
SIBYL 363 
 
 in peevishly. "Will you have a look at this place for me 
 to-morrow ?" 
 
 "Well, of course, dear," she said gently. "We've settled 
 that." 
 
 IV 
 
 A man-servant came with a wheeled chair to fetch Philip 
 Groome when lunch was finished. 
 
 "Are you going upstairs, Phil?" Olivier asked. "I'll join 
 you in half-an-hour. Lynneker, I hope, is coming to my 
 study for a little talk. After that . . ." 
 
 "Really, a Bishop has not much leisure, Lynneker," he 
 said when he and Dickie were alone; "and just now my 
 secretary is away. Sibyl has been writing letters for me. 
 Well, I want to continue the conversation we began in the 
 train. Do you smoke? No? I admit a weakness for the 
 humble pipe, only permissible in these solitudes, of course. 
 Now, would you think me impertinent if I asked you what 
 you intend to do with your life?" 
 
 Dickie was prepared to be perfectly frank. He appreci- 
 ated Olivier 's charm and the manifest sincerity that under- 
 lay his determination to steer a safe course through the 
 shoals of theological and political dissensions and intrigue. 
 They came back to that inevitably from their discussion of 
 Dickie's future; the question of what the Bishop called 
 "common prudence," underlay the whole problem they 
 were considering. 
 
 "You rather imply a criticism of me as an opportunist," 
 Olivier said with his genial, intimate smile, in answer to an 
 objection of Dickie's ; "and of course, if I pleaded that 
 the end justified a little laxity in method, you would de- 
 nounce me as Jesuitical." 
 
 Dickie shook his head impatiently. "No, no, I shouldn't," 
 he returned, "I hate those beastly labels. People seem to 
 think that if they can find an epithet that will stick, the 
 thing they've labelled is fixed and done with. Obviously it 
 
364 THESE LYNNEKERS 
 
 isn't. It is only defined from a certain point of view, and 
 generally the epithet describes the mind of the labeller 
 better than the thing he's labelled. But I do feel that this 
 question of a method must be a personal problem. If 
 you feel convinced that you are right in hinting your ap- 
 proval of eternal damnation to my father in order to keep 
 your diocese in hand, then I think you're justified. I 
 couldn't do it. Not for any ethical reason, I think; but 
 because it bothers me. Of course, I do equivocate ; I must, 
 in ordinary life, but I couldn't make a profession of it, as 
 I should have to do if I went into politics." 
 
 Olivier winced a little. "I suppose if one had the cour- 
 age and self-reliance," he began, and then abruptly drew 
 down the curtain of his ordinary manner. Martyrdom 
 was not his line, and if there had been moments in his 
 life when he had faced the thought of the harder way to 
 salvation, he had satisfied himself that his gifts had fitted 
 him for another purpose. 
 
 "I'm sorry, Lynneker," he said, "but I'm afraid our half 
 hour has already grown into three-quarters. I shall only 
 just have time to take you up to the other room. But we 
 must meet again. You have interested me. If only you 
 could have reconciled your beliefs and come into the 
 church . . ." 
 
 "I might have become a bishop?" concluded Dickie. 
 
 Olivier laughed genially. "Nothing short of Pope would 
 satisfy you," he said, but his manner became more formal 
 as he went on. "Ah ! and by the way, Lynneker, I should 
 really be grateful if you would look over that house at 
 Halton with a more practical eye than perhaps my wife 
 and Sibyl will bring to it. The question of dampness and 
 drains, for example. My brother-in-law can't stand 
 damp. . . ." 
 
 They discussed Dickie at the Palace that evening. 
 "He has that thing they call 'personality,' " the Bishop 
 said, "and an uncommonly able mind, too, I should say." 
 
SIBYL 365 
 
 "He looks so strong," put in Lady Constance. "I'm 
 sure I should trust him anywhere." 
 
 "But isn't he rather a prig, don't you think?" asked 
 Sibyl. 
 
 Her aunt thought not; but the Bishop hesitated, clutch- 
 ing at an explanation of his own success. "Hm ! I wonder," 
 he said. 
 
 And then Philip Groome's soft, cynical voice came out 
 of the gloom of the corner where he sat in his invalid 
 chair. 
 
 "It's so consoling to label any man 'a prig' who has the 
 courage of his convictions," he said. "Hasn't it ever 
 struck you, Clem, that Christ was a prig?" 
 
 "My dear Phil, you go too far," expostulated Olivier. 
 
 "It's a vice, I admit," Groome said. "Even such small 
 honesties as I am liable to, now and again, spoil the de- 
 lights of living. Let's be jolly and not too inquisitive." 
 
 Olivier fidgeted uneasily. Two attacks in one day were 
 enough to vex the most convinced mind. What was it that 
 boy had intended when he had upheld so gravely that to 
 enter the church in order to win a bishopric was an ambi- 
 tion that made no appeal to Jiim? Now he thought of it, 
 Olivier decided that his visitor had overstepped the limits 
 of polite comment. He looked over to the dark corner 
 where his brother-in-law sat, and saw his pale, thin face 
 with its long, straight nose and dark beard, shining against 
 the shadowed panelling outside the little bright circle of 
 the shaded lamps. And it seemed to the Bishop that the 
 face was like the face of a reproachful Christ. 
 
 "Really, do you know, I think this house at Halton prom- 
 ises rather well, Phil," he said cheerfully. 
 
 Philip Groome leaned back into his former obscurity 
 and the exorcised vision vanished. "I shall be uncom- 
 monly glad if it will do," he said. "I like this place, and 
 I'm interested in our candid young friend, Lynneker. He 
 has courage." 
 
 "Utterly unlike either of his brothers," commented Oli- 
 vier. Already his mind was at peace again. For him, con- 
 
366 THESE LYNNEKERS 
 
 stituted as he was, with all his versatile abilities, a bishopric 
 opened the widest field of work; and he had never been a 
 shirker. 
 
 VI 
 
 Dickie walked home from Medborough. He had found 
 that his thought ran more fluently if less consecutively when 
 he was physically active, and just now he was investigating 
 a problem which he knew was more likely to find solution 
 by some sudden inspiration than by any logical process. 
 Nevertheless he cleared the ground of his approach by re- 
 calling his old premisses and deductions. 
 
 He knew quite definitely that what he sought was not 
 an absolute, but a personal, rule of life. Even then he 
 recognised that his own work in the world would have no 
 far-reaching influence. He had none of the characteristics 
 of the reformer; no ambition to separate himself from 
 the immediacies of life, in order to regard them with critical 
 detachment. 
 
 His recent conversation had confirmed him in that atti- 
 tude. He had caught a glimpse of some old yearning that 
 had once divided Olivier's mind, and that had been suc- 
 cessfully swamped by his preferment probably by that 
 earlier appointment to the vicarage of the Kensington 
 church. Dickie's training in the world's Exchanges had 
 taught him to watch men's faces for subtle indications of 
 emotion or purpose; and in that, as in so many other em- 
 ployments, he had exhibited what was, in effect, the quali- 
 fying patience that must keep pace with the natural apti- 
 tude of the perfect workman. (When he sought any defi- 
 nition of his own capacities, he found more satisfaction in 
 the name of an efficient workman than in any other.) 
 
 And realising the alternative, he still did not blame 
 Olivier for following the easier road to power. For Dickie 
 had begun to guess that many a man who is constrained 
 by some vision to seek martyrdom, is unfitted spiritually 
 
SIBYL 367 
 
 or mentally to fulfil the high ambition; and that such a 
 man's failure may be anything but splendid. And Olivier, 
 he thought, had probably found a more useful outlet, so 
 far as the world was concerned, by accepting high ecclesi- 
 astical office than by offering himself as, say, a missionary. 
 Indeed, he might have gained in his own character. There 
 is a discipline too hard for some men, a discipline that 
 breaks and weakens all but the fiercest spirits. Olivier 
 had probably been justified in his choice. He, possibly, had 
 a weakness that might have betrayed him under too great 
 a strain. 
 
 But Dickie, himself, had never been tempted by any 
 such vision of an absolute. Only he had rejected those 
 paths to influence which seemed to him unworthy. And 
 if he had, at last, accepted Lessing's offer rather as a means 
 to general knowledge than because he approved the methods 
 of the money market, he still believed that he had come 
 nearer to life through finance than he could ever have come 
 through politics. 
 
 Nevertheless, he knew that now as never before, some 
 instinct was turning his face away from Austin 
 Friars. . . . 
 
 He stopped when he came to the private gate through 
 the Grinling woods, and remembered how he had once 
 received there the confession of his brother's love for Helen 
 Leake. And then with a little shock of surprise it occurred 
 to him that he had passed by the gate of Thrapley Rectory 
 without a single thought of Edward or his wife. 
 
 "I wonder if I am less wide awake than I used to be?" 
 he thought. The Lynnekers, as a family, had a trick of 
 annoying lapses into small fits of abstraction. They were, 
 perhaps, a trifle inclined to encourage those lapses as sug- 
 gestive of a preoccupation with higher matters than those 
 that might be under discussion. Dickie's habit of mind 
 had always been toward concentration, but he had the 
 gift of being able to think competently without losing his 
 awareness of present circumstances. 
 
 He frowned and shook his head impatiently. He had a 
 
368 THESE LYNNEKERS 
 
 sense of being interfered with and constrained. He felt like 
 Gulliver, confined by a multitude of Lilliputian threads. He 
 wanted to rise up in his strength, and could find no pur- 
 chase to aid him towards re-establishment on the clear 
 ground of independence. 
 
 Had Ellis bewitched him yesterday? 
 
 At lunch, as he had sat in the stone-panelled refectory 
 that was now the Palace dining-room, odd thoughts and 
 interruptions had interfered between him and the con- 
 versation about the luncheon table. In the Bishop's study 
 it had required a conscious effort to keep his mind upon a 
 subject that should have been of more than ordinary in- 
 terest to him. And now, in the cool retreat of this tall 
 wood, apart from the distractions of humanity, he was still 
 unable to control his mind. He was conscious of a hurrying 
 impatience, and of some attraction in the sound of the 
 phrase "to-morrow," that was new to him. He had always 
 been able to find employment in the day. 
 
 "I must face this," he said to himself. And as if he 
 would find some stimulus in the fact of placing himself in 
 a position that demanded some relaxation of carelessness, 
 he climbed the locked gate and entered the private grounds 
 of the absent-minded Thrapley squire, whose estates 
 stretched to the common that was the last boundary of Hal- 
 ton parish. By crossing that corner of the park, he could 
 cut off the long detour necessitated by the looping road, but 
 he would trespass over the most sacred part of the pheasant 
 preserves. He saw his adventure as a boy's game. He 
 had no fear of any unpleasant consequences, but he postu- 
 lated an imaginary necessity to avoid the eye of a keeper. 
 
 He left the grass road a few yards from the gate and set 
 out to make a short cut through the very heart of the 
 wood. 
 
 And he forgot his game before he had gone two hun- 
 dred yards. He had determined to face his problem and 
 suddenly the problem rose up clear and visible and con- 
 fronted him. In some unprecedented way the girl Sibyl 
 Groome had come between him and his sight of life. 
 
SIBYL 369 
 
 He had only seen her three times and she had come before 
 him each time in a different guise. 
 
 On the Oakstone platform, she had come with a sugges- 
 tion of some age-long familiarity, and yet as something 
 immensely remote and unattainable. The speech-day dais 
 had lifted her above any possibility of equal intercourse, 
 and it had seemed to him that the dais had supported her 
 alone. Seen in retrospect, the common movement of all 
 the other figures had had no convincing air of reality. 
 The traffic of an ordinary speech-day was something that 
 left no distinctive trace of its passing. 
 
 But at the luncheon table in the School House dining- 
 room, Ellis quite definitely, Ellis had been responsible 
 for some effect of the change had put her on a level with 
 all women as something to be regarded not only as ap- 
 proachable but even easy of conquest. She was still remote 
 from Dickie, separated from him by the fact that she adver- 
 tised wares which he had spent ten years in avoiding. His 
 passion at the suggestion of some possible intimacy be- 
 tween him and her had been evoked by the destruction of 
 his former image rather than by any fear of entangle- 
 ment. But in that moment he and she had been face to 
 face upon level ground. 
 
 And, now, to-day, he had seen her as a human being 
 apart from any thought of her sex. He had seen her as 
 a young girl who for some reason that he could not guess 
 had met him with a veiled hostility, had patently resented 
 his opinion with regard to the futile furnishings of Lady 
 Constance's drawing-room; and had sought, with what ap- 
 peared an inexplicable bitterness, to find some means of 
 snubbing him. He saw her attempts as a little foolish, 
 as the weak reprisal of an affronted child, seeking impos- 
 sibly to revenge the smart of a new bruise. But then, for 
 the first time, her personality had interested him. . . . 
 
 He had found again his power of consecutive thought. 
 There was no longer any interference because he had turned 
 all his mind to the thing that had been demanding and had 
 been refused his attention. Nevertheless, he was horribly 
 
370 THESE LYNNEKERS 
 
 perplexed. He no longer denied entrance to this disturb- 
 ing phenomenon, but he did not pretend to understand it. 
 
 He had forgotten his intention to make the secret pas- 
 sage of Sir Frederic Hope's preserves, and came out sud- 
 denly into open ground, facing a range of pheasant pens 
 and wooden sheds. As he emerged from the shelter of the 
 wood, a man in leather gaiters came out of one of the 
 sheds, and looked across at Dickie with an air of quick, 
 furtive suspicion. 
 
 "Hi! You! Where yer going?" the man shouted after 
 a moment of alert suspense. 
 
 VII 
 
 Dickie walked deliberately across the open space to meet 
 him. 
 
 "Here, you're trespassing, you know," the keeper said, 
 but he did not move from the door of the shed as Dickie 
 approached. 
 
 Dickie nodded carelessly. "I've no doubt Sir Frederic 
 will overlook it this time," he replied. 
 
 "Of course, sir, if you're a friend of Sir Frederic's/' 
 the keeper began, and the signs of impatient anger he had 
 shown were again crossed by a look of slightly shame- 
 faced suspicion. 
 
 "I'm not," Dickie said. "My name is Lynneker. I'm go- 
 ing to Halton." 
 
 The keeper scowled, but still stood squarely across the 
 entrance to the shed, the door of which opened outwards 
 and was flung back against the shingled wall. "Well, you've 
 no right here. You know that well enough," he said. "Best 
 thing you can do is to be off, double quick." 
 
 "Can I get out through the spinney on that side ?" asked 
 Dickie, pointing in the direction of Halton. He gave no 
 sign of being offended by the man's rudeness. 
 
 "No, you can't," the keeper returned, and then added 
 quickly, "anyway, you've no rights to." 
 
SIBYL 371 
 
 'That's my nearest way, I suppose," Dickie remarked 
 casually. 
 
 The keeper made a movement that seemed to express 
 an anxiety to be rid of the trespasser at any cost. 
 
 "I suppose you don't want to get me into trouble, sir/' 
 he said with more respect. "Sir Frederic's very particular. 
 You've got to trespass, now, whichever way you go, any- 
 how ; and that's the shortest way out." 
 
 Dickie turned as if to continue his short cut, and then 
 paused and said, "Oughtn't you to see me off the estate?" 
 
 The keeper was obviously embarrassed. "Afraid to go 
 alone?" he muttered. 
 
 "Do I go straight through there ?" Dickie asked, pointing 
 to a gap in the wood towards Halton. 
 
 "There's a path and a ladder stile," the keeper said, 
 sulkily. "You can't miss 'em." He stood for a moment, 
 watching his undesired visitor make his way towards the 
 gap, but when Dickie looked back from the edge of the 
 spinney, the keeper was no longer to be seen and the door 
 of the shed was pulled to. 
 
 Dickie threw up his head, sighed and dug his hands into 
 his jacket pockets. He knew the cause of the keeper's em- 
 barrassment, the reason for his anxiety to be rid of the 
 trespasser with the least possible bother and delay. The 
 skirts of the woman who was hiding in the gloom of the 
 little shed had been quite visible over the keeper's 
 shoulder. . . . 
 
 It was the thought of all this furtive slinking and greedy 
 animalism that puzzled and offended Dickie. He knew the 
 marks of it well enough. He had seen them in City bars, 
 had heard men talking without reserve and watched the 
 lust swim into their stealthy eyes. That keeper had been 
 shivering with anxiety to be rid of the intruder, at once 
 ashamed and angry. He had been like a dog, become 
 hesitatingly vicious in his desire to enjoy some fragment 
 of stolen meat. He had looked much as Ellis had looked, 
 for one quick instant, in the Oakstone dining-room. . . . 
 
 Dickie was willing to admit that he did not understand 
 
372 THESE LYNNEKERS 
 
 this thing; even to admit that it was, perhaps, the one im- 
 portant thing in life that he had never attempted to under- 
 stand. But he did not know that this failure of his was 
 beginning to influence his mind and body. In one sense his 
 failure had been accidental. Like many boys he had been 
 ashamed of the first indications of puberty. He had been 
 taught indirectly and by the vaguest hints and prohibitions 
 that the traffic of sex was a shameful thing. But whereas 
 in the overwhelming majority of such cases a boy's very 
 weakness may prove to be his safeguard, Dickie had been, 
 in effect, too strong. Only on the rarest occasions, such as 
 that night when he dragged Martyn down to the river for a 
 midnight bathe, had he permitted any sort of desire to 
 come to the surface of his imaginings; and never at any 
 time but in the open air. Always, the confinement of a 
 house had had the effect of presenting love in the shape 
 of something to be despised and desperately fought against, 
 something secret and unclean. 
 
 Why, he asked himself as he came out to the edge of 
 the common and saw the spire of Halton pricking up be- 
 hind the Rectory elms, why could not a man love a woman 
 as a friend? Already he had come as far as that. He 
 was, as ever, honest with himself, and he knew, now, and 
 faced the fact, that some quality in the personality of 
 Sibyl Groome had attracted him in a way that had no 
 precedent in his experience. He wanted to understand why 
 she had been so hostile to him that afternoon; to under- 
 stand her combination of childishness and wonderful experi- 
 ence. Her very simplicity had been full of mystery, the 
 simplicity of a child, condescending to the interruptions of 
 an adult separated by an impassable bar of knowledge 
 from any intuition of the overpowering realities of imme- 
 diate life. Dickie was sure that in her heart she had 
 despised him because he could not understand. And be- 
 hind these superficial manifestations of her personality was 
 something exquisitely remote and unattainable. On the 
 Oakstone platform she had seemed to embody a symbol 
 of the eternal spirit, focussed for a moment in an aspect 
 
SIBYL 373 
 
 of beauty. He had seen her as goddess, woman and child ; 
 but in each presentation she had been beyond his attain- 
 ment and comprehension. 
 
 Before he reached home he had decided that if the 
 Groomes took Halton House, he would do his utmost to 
 penetrate that reserve of hers. The adventure might help 
 him to find some more attractive suggestion in the allure- 
 ments of sex, than that discovered by the greedy eyes of 
 Ellis, of the men in City bars, or of the impatient keeper. 
 
 Dickie had no more thought for his own safety than any 
 other explorer whose chance of achievement must come by 
 way of personal risk. 
 
 VIII 
 
 He had left the Palace at half-past three, and it was past 
 five when he entered the Rectory garden. His father, 
 mother and Eleanor were having tea, or sitting over the 
 tea-table, under the sycamore on the front lawn. 
 
 His mother waved to him excitedly as he came up the 
 path from the side gate. "We thought you'd be sure to 
 come by the 3-35," she said, as soon as he was within 
 hearing. 
 
 "I walked back," Dickie explained. 
 
 "I'll get you some fresh tea," Eleanor said. 
 
 "No, don't bother. If there's any milk, that'll do," Dickie 
 returned. "I took it very easily." 
 
 His mother began an automatic, solicitous insistence, but 
 his smile stopped her. She found it so difficult to realise 
 that he meant what he said, and that if he had wanted tea, 
 he would have fetched it for himself. 
 
 "Well, how did it go off?" she asked. 
 
 "I was a bit early," Dickie said. "We discussed the 
 aesthetics of furniture, chiefly, during lunch ; and then I 
 had three-quarters of an hour with the Bishop in his 
 study." 
 
 The Rector leaning forward in his chair with his thin 
 
374 THESE LYNNEKERS 
 
 hands clasped over the handle of the stick that he found 
 necessary now, even to walk the few yards from the front 
 door to the sycamore on the lawn, was watching his boy 
 with the old admiration that had welled up in him when that 
 fierce round of applause broke out in the old schoolroom 
 at Oakstone. 
 
 "What did you talk about to Olivier, Dick?" he asked. 
 
 "Well, we were a trifle ethical," Dickie said. "He seemed 
 interested in the choice of a profession for me, and we 
 discussed honesty of purpose, inside the church and out 
 of it." 
 
 "Did he think you ought to leave the City ?" put in Mrs. 
 Lynneker, with a hint of anxiety. If the Bishop had 
 advised that step, she believed that it would be her duty to 
 confirm so high an authority. 
 
 "Oh ! he didn't offer me any advice, you know," Dickie 
 returned, and his voice and expression suggested that he 
 would not have been prepared to accept advice if it had 
 been offered. "He did say just as I was going that it was 
 a pity I hadn't gone into the church." 
 
 "Ah!" commented the Rector, with considerable feeling, 
 and Mrs. Lynneker sighed thoughtfully. 
 
 "What did you say?" Eleanor asked. 
 
 "Well, I rather hinted that even a bishopric didn't appeal 
 to me much." 
 
 "Wasn't that rather rude?" Eleanor's question had the 
 flavour of a rebuke. 
 
 "Yes, I suppose it was," Dickie admitted. "He didn't 
 seem to mind. He said he supposed nothing short of the 
 papacy would satisfy me." 
 
 The Rector nodded his head with a grim smile. "You're 
 not thinking of going over, Dick," he remarked. 
 
 Eleanor set her mouth into a thin line. She was sternly 
 suppressing her desire to unmask her brother's infidelity. 
 Neither of her parents seemed able to realise that he was 
 actually an atheist. "He's a humbug," she said to herself. 
 She was torn between the longing to speak out her contempt 
 
SIBYL 375 
 
 for his hypocrisy, and her wish to protect her father and 
 keep his regard. 
 
 "Becoming a Roman Catholic?" Dickie said. "Rather 
 not. Too much respect for my own freedom of thought." 
 
 "Hear, hear," the Rector murmured. 
 
 Eleanor wondered how he could be so blind. 
 
 "By the way, it's just possible that the Groomes may 
 take Halton House," Dickie said to create a diversion. 
 
 He was aware of his sister's frowning disapproval, and 
 had no wish to provoke her anger. "Lady Constance and 
 Miss Groome are coming over to look at it to-morrow," he 
 went on. "I promised the Bishop I would meet them there, 
 and find out if the place was damp." 
 
 "That's Lord Wansford's brother, eh?" asked the Rector. 
 For a moment he was stirred to look out from the diminish- 
 ing circle of his personal interests. The Groomes were a 
 great family, judged by any standard other than that of 
 active endeavour in an art, profession or calling. 
 
 Mrs. Lynneker sat up a shade more stiffly, as if she were 
 already receiving distinguished guests. 
 
 "He's an invalid, isn't he?" Eleanor asked. 
 
 Dickie nodded. "Hurt his spine in the hunting field," 
 he explained. "Clever chap, rather, I should think." 
 
 His mother was watching him with a new alertness. 
 
 "Is Miss Groome pretty ?" she asked. 
 
 "Yes! I should think you'd say so," Dickie said. He 
 was conscious of embarrassment, a feeling to which he was 
 almost a stranger. "I saw her yesterday, you know, at 
 Oakstone." 
 
 "You never told us," his mother exclaimed reproach- 
 fully. 
 
 "Didn't I ? I daresay not. Why should I ?" he asked. 
 
 His mother was looking at him with an expression that 
 was in some way furtive and a little sly. 
 
 He jumped up quickly. 
 
 "I'm going to put in an hour or two's work before 
 supper," he announced abruptly. 
 
 Why should his mother want him to marry Sibyl Groomei 
 
376 THESE LYNNEKERS 
 
 or any one else? Why should not a man and a woman 
 be friends? It seemed to him, just then, quite a horrible 
 thing that his mother should have looked at him like that. 
 
 IX 
 
 The inspection of Halton House next morning provided 
 no opportunity for displaying Dickie's calm intention to 
 seek an understanding of Miss Sibyl Groome's personality. 
 If he sought friendship, she, it seemed, sought, and with 
 an equal deliberation, hostility; and her method on this 
 occasion appeared more likely to achieve that object, than 
 the rather childish, transparent petulance she had shown 
 at the Palace. 
 
 She made no attempt to snub him by any verbal retort, 
 but she politely and resolutely ignored his opinions. When 
 he asserted that the house was not damp, she listened and 
 made no reply ; and a minute or two later turned to Lady 
 Constance and asked her with an earnest solicitude that 
 spoke of a genuine anxiety for her father's health, how 
 they could make quite sure that the house was really dry. 
 
 "You see, dear, it's the height of summer now," she 
 argued, "but the house does lie under the hill, rather, 
 doesn't it? And with all those huge trees in the garden. 
 . . . I'm so afraid that in the autumn . . ." 
 
 Lady Constance looked distinctly worried. 
 
 "Have you ever been here in the winter?" she asked 
 Dickie. 
 
 "Once or twice, but that was years ago/' he admitted. "I 
 don't remember noticing anything particular. But I think 
 the point is that one can judge by the walls and floors and 
 so on. I haven't seen a stain on the papers anywhere, and 
 the woodwork is all perfectly sound. Damp always leaves 
 marks behind, doesn't it?" 
 
 "Of course," agreed Lady Constance, with obvious re- 
 lief. 
 
 Sibyl's only comment was the expression of her inten- 
 
SIBYL 377 
 
 tion to cross-examine Stanger, the caretaker's husband, 
 who had not as yet come in from his farm work. "You 
 can't depend on what Mrs. Stanger says," she affirmed. 
 "Evidently she wants to let the place. I suppose they get 
 a commission or something." 
 
 Dickie exhibited no outward signs of annoyance, but he 
 looked at Sibyl with a visible perplexity. 
 
 "You don't trust the evidence?" he asked. 
 
 "My father's so awfully sensitive," she said, implying 
 that this was not a case for common tests. 
 
 "Oh! well, Halton is a dry place, gravel subsoil, you 
 know," Dickie said, turning to Lady Constance. "I remem- 
 ber when I was a kid being very keen to get some clay to 
 make a little pond in our garden, and I couldn't find any 
 in the parish." 
 
 "Personally, I feel quite happy about it," Lady Constance 
 agreed, smiling at Dickie as if he alone were responsible for 
 the geological advantages of Halton. "Don't you think, 
 Sibyl, that we might decide . . ." 
 
 "Yes, I'll ask that man Stanger when he comes in," Sibyl 
 said. 
 
 She was equally firm about the testing of the drains, over- 
 looking Dickie's suggestion that the village builder was a 
 particularly careful and capable man, and proposing to her 
 aunt that a Medborough expert must certainly be called in. 
 
 Lady Constance cheerfully agreed to that suggestion. 
 Her manner implied that it was Sibyl's turn for encourage- 
 ment, and that no one could find any fault with this need 
 for consulting the highest authority. 
 
 "Perhaps that would be better," she said to Dickie. 
 "Mead, you know, the man in Long Causeway, is a capital 
 person. He did the Palace before we went in." 
 
 "Quite satisfactorily?" Dickie asked. 
 
 "I suppose so," Lady Constance said. "I haven't heard 
 of any trouble with the drains." 
 
 "Oh, yes, I should think Mead would be all right," Dickie 
 agreed carelessly. "Wouldn't you like to see the gardens ?" 
 
 Lady Constance said that she would, but Sibyl drifted off 
 
378 THESE LYNNEKERS 
 
 into the back premises to find Stanger, and they went with- 
 out her. 
 
 Sibyl did not look at him as she bowed a mechanical 
 good-bye that might have been addressed to the big chest- 
 nut tree on the lawn before the house. She was already 
 seated in the landau and her attention was being given to 
 an insistence upon the impossibility of settling anything 
 until her father had been consulted. Lady Constance, who 
 had just been conferring the highest honours upon Dickie 
 for so brilliantly discovering the ideal house and garden, 
 was charmingly perplexed. Her simple brown eyes ex- 
 pressed her single desire to do anything she could to please 
 everybody. 
 
 "But surely, dear/' she said gently. "I can't imagine 
 anything that he'd like better." 
 
 "You never know with father," Sibyl said. "I think he 
 ought to see it for himself." 
 
 "But don't you like it, Sibyl ?" her aunt asked. 
 
 Sibyl looked back at the bright, sun-flecked face of the 
 white stone house and then, with a careless glance at 
 Dickie, standing bare-headed by the door of the carriage, 
 she said: 
 
 "It's so self-assertive, so ... so obviously perfect, that 
 I feel certain there must be something wrong with it." 
 
 When they had gone, Dickie sauntered back through the 
 grounds of Halton House, across the higher of the two 
 lawns cut out of the slope of the hill, past the short range 
 of the conservatories, and then by way of the orchard 
 paddock below the kitchen gardens down to the lane ; over 
 the brook and up through the forty-acre field, sown with 
 wheat that summer, to the line of great elms that stood 
 just within the wall of the Rectory back garden. From 
 that wall, not more than three feet high inside, at the place 
 where the hillock that supported the queen of the elms, 
 
SIBYL 379 
 
 swelled against the stonework, he could see the whole 
 stretch of the Halton House grounds climbing the rise on 
 the other side of the little valley, the lawns and flower 
 beds just visible here and there between the trees, as an 
 advertisement to the stranger that this was indeed a 
 garden and not a wood. Only the kitchen garden raking 
 up the slope and neatly enclosed within its ten- foot-high 
 brick wall, was bare of forest trees. 
 
 Dickie had often before stood under that big elm, and 
 looked across at those grounds. The place and the view 
 were more especially associated in his mind with that stage 
 in his brother's courtship of Helen Leake, at which Edward 
 was suffering the torture of what he had construed as a 
 final refusal of his advances. Dickie remembered his own 
 impatience during that period. He had seen the affair 
 then as utterly futile and stupid. He had been sure that 
 nothing but his brother's lack of initiative had been re- 
 sponsible for Helen's apparent coolness. 
 
 This morning Dickie was less certain of the validity of 
 that judgment. It came to him as an entirely new thought 
 that it was impossible to win the liking of a woman by any 
 exhibition of one's abilities or desires. If she didn't like 
 you, she didn't, and that was the end of it. He had never 
 in all his life consciously set out to attract the liking of 
 any one, man or woman. Many people had liked him; 
 such diverse individuals, for instance, as Lessing, or Martyn, 
 or dear old Bradshaw, who was now a highly successful 
 "society entertainer." But it appeared to Dickie as an 
 impossible undertaking to win friendship by any deliberate 
 effort. How could one possibly set about such an unlikely 
 task? 
 
 His mother had often used a phrase that held the sug- 
 gestion of embodying a method. She had, for example, 
 spoken of Edward's "paying attention" to Helen. But 
 Dickie could not see himself paying attention in that sense 
 to Miss Groome. He had a picture in his mind of curates 
 bobbing about with cakes at a tea-party; of insinuating 
 smiles and shy compliments ; of particularities in dress ; "get- 
 
380 THESE LYNNEKERS 
 
 ting oneself up to kill," was a familiar expression in that 
 connection. The thought of such methods as these made 
 him feel sick. To be a "lady's man" was surely the most 
 objectionable of ambitions. No decent man ever had such 
 an ambition. 
 
 But no alternative presented itself to him. He could not 
 ape and fawn and smile. He had no arts of attraction. If 
 Miss Groome disliked him, and that inference seemed in- 
 disputable, he had no power to change her feelings. He 
 could only be himself; and even if he had the power to 
 assume what was it they called it ? a "charm of manner," 
 that was not his by nature, he would simply be trying to 
 obtain the thing sought, under false pretences. And it 
 was certain, in any case, that he could never keep it up. 
 
 She had given him a hint that morning. She had implied 
 that the cause of her dislike was his self-assertiveness. 
 He found no truth in that charge. He had been called "a 
 cock-sure young beggar" in the city, but that epithet had 
 always seemed to him misapplied. He associated the "cock- 
 sure" with the boast of knowledge. He himself never ex- 
 pressed certain opinions unless the grounds for his asser- 
 tions were above suspicion. 
 
 A sudden, unusual spasm of annoyance shot through him ; 
 and he savagely kicked at the stone wall of the Rectory 
 garden. Damn it, did women admire diffidence and cring- 
 ing? If so, he was out of the running. Surely, no one 
 could call him self-assertive. He did not bounce or bully 
 people. What he did do, how he appeared to other people, 
 he had no idea. He had never considered those things, 
 never had any tendency to introspection. And the only 
 remedy for any such difficult perplexity as this which was 
 now besetting him, the remedy of work, appeared for once 
 distasteful. 
 
 He decided it might be well to avoid meeting Miss 
 Groome again, and then reflected that he was doing ex- 
 actly what Edward had done when he had gloomily deter- 
 mined to become a missionary. Perhaps Edward had been 
 justified, after all. There was no initiative to take in ap- 
 
SIBYL 381 
 
 preaching a woman who for some incomprehensible reason 
 had taken a dislike to you. . . . 
 
 He'd be hanged if he was self-assertive. . . . 
 
 When he went into the house at a quarter to one he 
 found his mother alone in the dining-room. 
 
 "Well?" she said, looking up at him with cheerful en- 
 quiry. "Did they like it? Do you think they'll take it?" 
 
 "Lady Constance was quite ecstatic about it," he said. 
 
 "Wasn't Miss Groome?" his mother asked. 
 
 "She said that it was 'so obviously perfect that she was 
 sure there must be something wrong with it,' whatever 
 that may mean," Dickie replied. 
 
 His mother had been writing letters and she took off her 
 spectacles as she said : "She's quite young, isn't she ?" Her 
 faded blue eyes were watching her son's face with a shy 
 intentness. 
 
 "About twenty, I should think," he returned carelessly, 
 and went on quickly: "Mater, would you call me self- 
 assertive ?" 
 
 She looked at him with a smile. "I should say you had 
 a very good idea of your own opinion," she said, teasing 
 him. 
 
 "Does that mean the same thing?" he asked, seriously. 
 
 "You are a little overpowering at times, dear," she said. 
 "I shouldn't call it exactly being self-assertive. But when 
 you mean to do a thing, nobody has the least influence with 
 you. Your father used to complain about it sometimes 
 when you were a boy." 
 
 Dickie sat down in the dilapidated leather-covered arm- 
 chair, a relic of the original suite that had come to the 
 Rectory when his father and mother were first married. 
 He looked down at the frayed arm, completely worn 
 through now by the claws of a long succession of cats. 
 
 "It's no use beating a cat if you want to teach it," he 
 remarked with great irrelevance. 
 
 "We must have that chair re-covered," his mother said, 
 frowning. 
 
382 THESE LYNNEKERS 
 
 "Now, a dog or a man you can impose yourself upon," 
 Dickie went on. 
 
 Mrs. Lynneker was obviously at fault. "You were never 
 fond of cats, were you ?" she tried, hesitatingly. 
 
 Dickie laughed. "Oh, I don't know," he said. "They're 
 all right." 
 
 His mother's face wore a look of thoughtful perplexity. 
 "Has this anything to do with your being self-assertive, 
 dear ?" she asked. 
 
 "Well, only in as much as it seems to me that women 
 and cats won't stand that quality in a man," Dickie said. 
 
 Mrs. Lynneker's eyes suddenly twinkled. "They only 
 pretend they won't," she said. "But what made you . . ." 
 
 And then Dickie realised for the second time in half an 
 hour that he was being very like his brother Edward. In 
 just such a manner as this had Edward been wont to trap 
 the engaging question. 
 
 "Oh, Lord!" he said, getting up. "I'm slacking about 
 and getting introspective, that's all, mater." 
 
 "I should have said self-confident rather than self-asser- 
 tive," she continued, disregarding his evasion. "And I 
 think, dear, that nearly all women admire self-confidence 
 in a man." 
 
 But Dickie had no wish to imitate Edward any further 
 that morning. 
 
 "I say, isn't it nearly dinner time ?" he asked. 
 
 XI 
 
 A grim determination to revive his memory of the model 
 that was apparently being thrust upon him, whether for 
 imitation or avoidance, sent Dickie over to Thrapley for 
 morning service the next day. 
 
 Edward had got his canonry before Olivier was ap- 
 pointed, but neither Mrs. Lynneker nor Eleanor was sure 
 whether or not he was in residence just then, Dickie did 
 
SIBYL 383 
 
 not permit that uncertainty to influence his plans. The fact 
 of "being in residence" had no effect upon Edward's 
 place of abode. Thrapley was less than two miles from 
 the Cathedral, and he could take his appointed services 
 there with no greater inconvenience than was entailed by 
 the necessity to borrow a curate from his father-in-law for 
 Sunday matins. 
 
 "I should like to hear Edward in the Cathedral," Dickie 
 said, and carefully avoided meeting his mother's eye. 
 
 He was, as yet, rather amused than otherwise at his own 
 imitation of the methods he had so despised ten years be- 
 fore. He recognised with a sort of tolerant contempt for 
 himself that he was impatient to see Sibyl Groome again, 
 but he believed that he was in no danger of being over- 
 come by her attraction for him. And when he arrived at 
 the Thrapley Rectory, next morning, to find a neat 
 brougham standing at the front door, he only smiled at the 
 quick sense of anticipation afforded him by this advertise- 
 ment of the fact that Edward would be taking service in 
 the Cathedral and not in his own church. 
 
 Dickie was shown by the maid into the Rector's study, 
 where Edward in his cassock was apparently reading his 
 office for the day. He greeted Dickie with a slightly ner- 
 vous effusiveness, as if he would have been more affec- 
 tionate if he had not been greatly preoccupied at that mo- 
 ment by the thought of the grave duties before him. 
 
 "We heard you were at home," he said. "We were com- 
 ing over to see you to-morrow. How are you? You're 
 looking very fit." But after one glance at his brother's 
 face, he focussed his attention with evident disapproval 
 upon Dickie's brown tweed suit. 
 
 "I'm all right," Dickie returned. "Does Helen go in to 
 the Cathedral with you?" 
 
 "She's just getting ready," Edward said with a quick, 
 impatient glance at the clock on the mantelpiece. "We 
 ought to be going now." 
 
 "Can't you find room for me?" Dickie asked, and then, 
 noticing his brother's evident hesitation, he went on : "Oh, 
 
384 THESE LYNNEKERS 
 
 I can go on the box, you know. I should like to hear you 
 take the Cathedral service." 
 
 Edward blinked uncomfortably and set his mouth into an 
 expression of nervous disapproval. 
 
 "Or I can walk, for that matter," Dickie suggested. He 
 guessed now that his clothes and not the capacity of the 
 brougham was the objection against him; but he wanted 
 Edward honestly to admit the fact. 
 
 And Edward, secure in the dignity of his calling, might 
 have so far overcome his reluctance to face the irritating 
 argument he expected to evoke, had not the sound of his 
 wife's footsteps on the stairs provided him with a safe 
 opportunity of dodging the unpleasantness. 
 
 "Ah ! here's Helen," he said. 
 
 Dickie inferred that his sister-in-law was physically vig- 
 orous as ever, but. certainly heavier. Some big women are 
 light on their feet, Helen was undeniably clumsy, and her 
 descent of the stairs created a mild tumult in the house. 
 And, even so, his inference fell short of the fact. He was 
 a little shocked by the difference he found in hen 
 
 "Dick!" she exclaimed on a note of enthusiasm. "They 
 didn't tell me you were here. How splendid! Are you 
 coming in to service with us ? Ted's in residence just now, 
 you know." 
 
 "Well, I don't think Ted wants me," Dickie said with ( a 
 grin. "My tweeds offend his sense of decency, I'm afraid. 
 I suppose it would be rather awful to go to the Cathedral 
 like this !" 
 
 She surprised him by taking that objection with perfect 
 seriousness. "Oh, I see," she said. "I hadn't noticed. I 
 don't think it would matter for once, would it, Ted?" 
 
 "In any case, it's time we went," Edward replied impa- 
 tiently. "We shall almost certainly be late as it is." 
 
 "I'll go on the box," Dickie suggested. "People will 
 think that you're generously giving a lift to a tramp." 
 
 "I can't think why . . ." Edward began. 
 
 "My dear chap," Dickie interrupted him, "because I 
 
SIBYL 385 
 
 haven't got either a tail coat or a pot hat in the world. I 
 don't wear 'em." 
 
 Helen had begun to smile again. "Well, never mind," 
 she said. "We'll tuck you away inside where you won't be 
 seen." She looked approvingly at her brother-in-law, as 
 she added, "though you won't be easy to hide." 
 
 Edward sighed desperately. "I shall certainly be late," 
 he said. He looked at his wife with an expression that in 
 some way combined reproof and appeal. He apparently 
 lacked the determination finally to lose his temper and go 
 on alone. 
 
 "Come along, for goodness' sake," Helen said. "We've 
 never been late yet, but we always expect to be." 
 
 XII 
 
 Dickie enjoyed the Cathedral service. 
 
 In the great resonant space of the nave, only the appeal 
 of the organ, religious, perhaps, but certainly not sec- 
 tarian, had sufficient power to compete with the sense of 
 something eternal in those solemn heights of arcade, tri- 
 forium and clerestory, ranging triumphantly up towards 
 the high obscurity of the painted ceiling. Edward's musical 
 voice was too weak to reach the depths of that magnificent 
 fabric; and, indeed, the whole service had an effect of 
 being little and distant, the chanting of a small human 
 ceremony, regular and clear, heard far away. It seemed a 
 symbol of individual man's weak control of the forces in- 
 corporated in these immense masses of solemn stone, or 
 revealed in the occasional slow thunder that shuddered 
 through the nave when the organ dropped to the tonic 
 of its ultimate, reverberating bass. 
 
 There, in the minister, the tiny personification of mankind, 
 presented by the living bodies of priest or worshipper, was 
 dwarfed by its comparison with the play of his idealism 
 figured in the vast reverence of stone, or recalled by a 
 thought of the imagination that had been able to fill that 
 
386 THESE LYNNEKERS 
 
 immense place of worship with adequate music. The little 
 white face of the distant minister leading the service, the 
 mechanically correlated movements of the congregation 
 kneeling, standing or sitting at his injunction, the thin 
 sweetness of the singing choir, were but the ephemeral 
 manifestations of that passing generation of humanity. In 
 the mass mankind was negligible, a mere comment on his 
 own work. But before a generation passed, it left some 
 record of its thought and ideals, even if the record were 
 nothing more than the preservation of so great a work of 
 art as this Cathedral, or the perfecting of a musical instru- 
 ment. And if it were art that endured, then art was but 
 the expression of a universal aspiration that could reach 
 out beyond the limitations of the tiny, physical body and 
 cast a new ideal in the matrix of the universe. 
 
 And somehow, somewhere, always that ideal endured. 
 
 Nevertheless Dickie, responding to his surroundings and 
 conscious again of another symbol added to those he had 
 already recognised, was still unable to state his recognition 
 in words, or to frame his thought of it in such a form as 
 should give him any guide to the choice of his future career. 
 
 XIII 
 
 He and Helen went out by the north porch and found 
 the brougham waiting by the priests' door, but Edward 
 had not yet left the Cathedral. 
 
 "Shall we get in?" Helen asked. 
 
 "No, let's wait here," Dickie said. He had turned his 
 back on the Cathedral and was peering up without any 
 sort of concealment at the windows of the Palace opposite. 
 The wall of the Palace grounds was eight feet high, and 
 the trees in the garden were tall and thick, but two lights 
 of one of the drawing-room windows were just visible. 
 The Bishop had been in the Cathedral, dim and remote on 
 his throne down the dark perspective of the choir stalls, 
 but Dickie had seen nothing of Lady Constance or Sibyl. 
 
SIBYL 387 
 
 "Just as you like," Helen returned with a touch of im- 
 patience. "The Bishop was in the Cathedral," she added. 
 "I expect he'll be coming out in a minute. Probably Ted 
 is waiting for him." 
 
 "Yes, I saw him," Dickie admitted, still staring. 
 
 "Shall we walk round and let Ted pick us up at the 
 Archway ?" Helen went on after a moment's pause. 
 
 A light came to Dickie and he turned and faced her "Oh ! 
 I see," he said. "You're a little afraid of their finding me 
 here in tweeds, eh? It didn't strike me that you would 
 feel like that. Edward, now . . ." 
 
 "One must," Helen began, but before she could explain 
 the reasonableness of convention, the anticipated horror 
 was upon them. The Bishop, glorious in full canonicals, 
 came out of the priests' door, followed by his wife and 
 niece. Edward, in his cassock, was immediately behind 
 them, but ranged himself with Lady Constance as they all 
 came up the path under the North Transept. 
 
 Helen's blush could have been due to nothing but shame. 
 She looked, indeed, as if she were strongly inclined to bolt 
 into the brougham and hide herself. And as the party ap- 
 proached, Edward's face also expressed, with even greater 
 clearness, his dismay at the awful contretemps. 
 
 Dickie felt a sudden sympathy for them, a desire to 
 relieve their very obvious distress, but it was Olivier, who, 
 unconscious of their embarrassment, immediately saved the 
 situation. 
 
 He bowed with a kind smile to Helen, and then laid his 
 hand familiarly on Dickie's shoulder. "Tremendously 
 obliged to you, Lynneker," he said. "I think that place will 
 suit my brother-in-law admirably." 
 
 "We have quite decided to take it for three months," 
 Lady Constance added, graciously beaming her congratula- 
 tions. "From the middle of August. There are the drains 
 and so on to be tested, you know." 
 
 Sibyl Groome was apparently addressing some disre- 
 garded remark to the startled canon. 
 
 For a minute or two the Oliviers and Dickie discussed 
 
388 THESE LYNNEKERS 
 
 Halton House, and then the Bishop, by way of ending the 
 interview, remarked : "Come over again next Sunday 
 morning, Lynneker. I'm preaching on a text that will 
 interest you: 'It is expedient that one man should die for 
 the people/ Come in to lunch afterwards and criticise 
 me." 
 
 "It's a good subject," Dickie said. "Thanks, yes, I will 
 certainly come." 
 
 He looked at Sibyl and for one instant she looked back at 
 him. Her expression was less hostile this morning, he 
 thought. He did not feel at all as he supposed Edward 
 used to feel when he was mutely supplicating Helen for the 
 least sign of encouragement. . . . 
 
 The return journey to Thrapley was almost convivial. 
 
 Edward having endeavoured to the best of his ability to 
 indicate his displeasure at rinding his secularly dressed 
 brother full in the path of an ecclesiastical procession, was 
 now confident that Dickie could not have seen his ex- 
 pression of disapproval. 
 
 "I didn't know you had met the Bishop," he said, with 
 an elaborate air of not being at all surprised by the fact. 
 
 "Dick is such a surprising person," Helen put in. She 
 made no attempt to deceive herself, and only hoped that her 
 astonishing brother-in-law had not been offended. 
 
 "Met him in the train coming down," Dickie explained. 
 
 Edward was doing his best to make himself agreeable. 
 
 "Didn't you know him before?" he asked. 
 
 "No ; we just struck up an acquaintance," Dickie said. 
 
 "You seem to be on pretty familiar terms," Edward per- 
 sisted. 
 
 "Oh! I went there to lunch on Friday," Dickie said. 
 "And Lady Constance and Miss Groome were over at Hal- 
 ton yesterday. Her brother, Groome, you know, is going 
 to take Halton House for three months. I went and looked 
 over the place with them. They're rather decent people, 
 aren't they? The Bishop and I have got an argument on. 
 He told me he was going to preach at me next- Sunday 
 morning." 
 
SIBYL 389 
 
 "You'd better come over to us on Saturday and spend 
 the night," Helen said ; and then she met Dickie's eye and 
 blushed. 
 
 "Oh, well, Dick, we may as well be honest," she went on, 
 drawing herself up. "You'd be the same if you lived down 
 here. I don't think the Bishop likes us much for some 
 reason or another. . . ." 
 
 "You've no sort of grounds for thinking that," Edward 
 interrupted her. 
 
 "Well, we do think so, don't we?" she protested. 
 
 Edward frowned his disapproval of the line she was 
 taking. "We may not be particular favourites of his," he 
 said, "but I don't see that we have any reason to suppose 
 that he dislikes us." 
 
 "In any case, we have to propitiate him, Dick," Helen 
 concluded. "You do see that, don't you?" 
 
 "It's the very point he and I have been arguing," Dickie 
 said, "the question of expedience. Olivier ought to agree 
 with you, anyway. He says that one is justified." 
 
 "And don't you?" Helen asked. 
 
 "I daresay that he may be justified," Dickie returned, 
 "but I don't think / should be, because I don't feel that way 
 about it." 
 
 "I suppose you never have tried to propitiate any one, 
 have you?" Helen said. 
 
 "Not in the way we meant, perhaps," Dickie admitted. 
 
 "Of course, you can afford to be eccentric," Edward put 
 in. "You're not dependent on any one but yourself for 
 preferment." He was doing his utmost to be agreeable, 
 but this young brother of his was certainly a peculiarly 
 annoying person. Now that he had recovered from his 
 surprise, Edward was annoyed by the fact that Dickie 
 should be on such easy terms with the Bishop. To the 
 Rector of Thrapley it seemed in some way he could not 
 precisely define, that Dickie was exempt by some accident 
 of fortune from all the restraints and essential limitations 
 that perpetually harassed himself. It would be impossible 
 for any one in his position to take up that attitude towards 
 
390 THESE LYNNEKERS 
 
 the Bishop of Medborough. And if that attitude were in- 
 imitable, it was best to regard it as being unadmirable. 
 "Rather cheek, isn't it, for you to argue with Dr. Olivier ?" 
 Edward said, with a happy recovery of the elder brother air 
 that he had been in danger of losing. 
 
 "Oh! it wasn't on a matter of scholarship, you know," 
 Dickie explained. "You don't claim infallibility in the Eng- 
 lish Church, do you?" 
 
 Edward smiled condescendingly. "You haven't altered 
 much in the last ten years," he said. "You're certainly the 
 most ingenuous person I've ever met." He had found 
 sudden consolation in the thought that the Bishop was 
 probably interested in Dickie as in some curious phenome- 
 non. 
 
 Helen was fidgeting with her prayer-book. 
 
 XIV 
 
 It required no unusual perspicacity on Dickie's part to 
 guess that his brother's marriage had not been a success. 
 And he did not attribute the failure, as his mother might 
 have done, to the fact that Edward and Helen had had no 
 children. In that menage, children would have aggravated 
 the occasions of disagreement. Helen annoyed her hus- 
 band. Her appearance was a constant source of criticism. 
 She was careless in her dress, and her rapidly increasing 
 stoutness was, Edward thought, largely her own fault. She 
 did not take care. She ought to diet herself. But her chief 
 cause of offence was that while she did not understand him, 
 she imagined that she understood him extremely well, and 
 was liable, now and again, to commit the unforgivable sin 
 of proving it in small ways that did not affect his certainty 
 of her radical failure to do him justice. Children would 
 not have brought them together, but they might have given 
 Helen another outlet. 
 
 And Dickie, even during the course of lunch, proved that 
 he would be Helen's ally, not his brother's. Dickie and 
 
SIBYL 391 
 
 Helen had common ground. Their discussion of Adela's 
 return proved that. 
 
 Dickie had said that he was tremendously eager to see 
 Adela again, and Helen with, as Edward thought, her 
 usual inability to understand the subtleties of their social 
 position, had enthusiastically agreed. 
 
 "That chap Oliver isn't coming, too, is he?" Edward 
 asked. 
 
 "No, I'm afraid not," Dickie said. "I hear that he has 
 done very well out there. I daresay he will be coming over 
 later on, but we haven't offered him much inducement, 
 as far as I can make out." 
 
 "Well, naturally," Edward commented. 
 
 "You're so infernally provincial, Ted," remarked Dickie. 
 
 "That, even if true, is quite beside the point," his brother 
 returned. "The plain fact is that we couldn't introduce 
 this fellow Oliver to the people we know, and his presence 
 would be a horrible embarrassment." 
 
 "We do have to consider these things, Dick," Helen put 
 in with an absurdly apologetic air. 
 
 "It's too obvious to need statement," Edward said in a 
 tone which implied that any one but his fool of a brother 
 could see that. 
 
 The annoying Dickie refused, as usual, to be snubbed. 
 
 "Well, that's why I wouldn't go in for any of these po- 
 lite callings like the church or politics," he said. "They 
 handicap you so fearfully. Don't you find it annoying, Ted, 
 to have a particular circle of friends forced upon you by 
 the accident of your position?" 
 
 "I happen to prefer that particular circle," sneered Ed- 
 ward. 
 
 "Oh, well, that's lucky, anyway," Dickie said with a grin, 
 and before his brother could find an answer to that am- 
 biguity, he changed the conversation by saying: "When 
 are you coming over to Halton ? I think that the pater and 
 mater feel that you have been neglecting them, rather." 
 
 "We were coming to-morrow," Helen said, as if she 
 would propitiate him. 
 
392 THESE LYNNEKERS 
 
 "Well, why don't you?" Dickie suggested. 
 
 "You find it difficult to imagine that my time is pretty 
 well filled up, I suppose?" Edward enquired. 
 
 "I daresay it is," Dickie agreed, "but the pater isn't a bit 
 well, you know, and he's nearly seventy-six." There was a 
 note of earnestness in his voice that caught his brother's 
 attention. 
 
 "You don't mean that he's seriously ill, do you?" he 
 asked. 
 
 Dickie hesitated. "He looks pretty bad," he said. "And 
 at that age, of course . . ." 
 
 "Why didn't Eleanor let us know ?" Edward asked peev- 
 ishly. "You can't expect us to know these things by in- 
 stinct. Of course, we'll come over to-morrow. . . ." 
 
 "Only don't let the pater see that you think he's seriously 
 ill," Dickie said. "You know how he hates to be fussed 
 over." 
 
 "I'm not quite a fool," Edward affirmed. 
 
 xv 
 
 That conversation with Helen and Edward and the 
 chance meeting with the Oliviers and Sibyl had cut across 
 the mood induced in Dickie by his sense of something per- 
 manent in the Cathedral. It seemed, as Edward had sug- 
 gested, so undeniable that the choice of a profession en- 
 tailed many restrictions of personal freedom. It was 
 perfectly true that a Canon of Medborough would lose his 
 sphere of usefulness if he permitted himself the eccen- 
 tricity of introducing his workman brother-in-law to the 
 Precincts. And the alternative of cutting himself off from 
 those surroundings, of accepting, say, an East End curacy, 
 offered no profitable means of escape. Edward was no 
 more fitted for that work than was Dr. Olivier for the 
 offices of a missionary to the Dyaks of Borneo. In his 
 own way Edward was no doubt efficient as a dignitary of 
 Medborough Cathedral and Rector of Thrapley; and if he 
 
SIBYL 393 
 
 was not conscious of being limited by his circumstances, 
 whose business was it to point any other mode of life as in 
 any way higher or better than that he had chosen ? No, it all 
 came back to the personal problem. Dickie had no kind of 
 wish to alter the convictions of Edward or of Dr. Olivier, 
 but he could not fail to recognise that their ambitions dif- 
 fered from his own, rdiffered in kind, there need be no 
 question of degree. 
 
 But now superimposed upon the difficulty of choosing 
 some profession that would leave him comparatively free 
 to think and act as he would was another problem that this 
 Sunday afternoon began seriously to intrigue him. If 
 he began with the hypothetical quality of his assumption 
 very clear and insistent, if by any strange miracle Sibyl 
 Groome were to overcome her hostility to himself, might he 
 not be driven into facing a whole world of impeding con- 
 ventions ? 
 
 His one concession to Sunday attire had been the carry- 
 ing of a walking-stick, and he cut viciously at a clump of 
 nettles by the roadside as he took a step further in his great 
 hypothesis. If he were connected with the Palace and the 
 Wansford family by marriage what then? He could see 
 only one answer. He must go his own way. 
 
XVI 
 
 THE HERMIT 
 
 DICKIE found employment during the week that inter- 
 vened between him and the following Sunday. His 
 friend, Levinson, of the Greenwich Observatory, had very 
 promptly answered the letter asking for advice, and had 
 sent him some practical material, "computer's stuff," he 
 called it, that "could very well bear a second check." 
 
 "You will not be wasting your time over it," the letter 
 continued, "as we are rather short-handed just now ; more- 
 over, this particular stuff is a trifle suspect and I shall be 
 rather glad of an outside opinion. Computers do go a bit 
 stale in the dog-days. You will take great care of it, of 
 course. We have a duplicate, here, but it's terrible stuff 
 to copy." 
 
 To the uninitiate it was, indeed, intimidating from any 
 point of view. The Rector shook his head over it with a 
 kind of pleased despair. "Wonderful, wonderful," he said 
 to Dickie. "Beyond me altogether." He was evidently 
 proud that his son should have the ability to comprehend 
 that awful conglomeration of signs, letters and figures. 
 
 "I'm not at all sure that it isn't beyond me" Dickie said 
 hopefully. "My friend suggests that an induction has gone 
 astray and hopes I shall be able to find it." He was im- 
 mensely exhilarated by the prospect of tackling an intricate 
 mechanical problem, that was susceptible of a logical solu- 
 tion. 
 
 394 
 
THE HERMIT 395 
 
 ii 
 
 He had few distractions during the month of August. 
 
 His second luncheon at the Palace, however interesting 
 in other aspects, marked no change in his relations with 
 Sibyl Groome. She took little part in the conversation, and 
 her incidental contributions were not aimed at Dickie, al- 
 though he gave her many opportunities to attack him on 
 subjects which must have been of far more interest to her 
 than that of the Palace furniture. 
 
 Olivier had preached an excellent sermon and was artist 
 enough to be aware of satisfaction in his statement. His 
 plea for expedience had been founded upon the ethic of 
 sacrifice, and he had applied the demand for renunciation in 
 a way that appeared to cover his opponent's argument for 
 freedom. His illustration of the Saviour's superhuman sac- 
 rifice of His freedom had furnished him with an exceedingly 
 powerful analogy. 
 
 And at lunch he pushed the argument right home. 
 
 "Sacrifice, Lynneker," he submitted, "must entail a per- 
 sonal loss. Your bugbear is something we've agreed to call 
 'expedience/ and it's a bugbear to you because it entails 
 the sacrifice of your personal freedom. To another man, 
 the sacrifice would be the ease of professing orthodoxy. 
 And you are not willing to give up the happiness you feel 
 in your independence of thought and action, although you 
 may be ready to admit that that is the very thing which it 
 would pain you to surrender. Isn't that a fair statement?" 
 
 "It's sound enough if you're prepared to base your whole 
 ethic on the necessity for sacrifice," Dickie said. 
 
 "Without sacrifice you cannot serve mankind," Olivier 
 returned. "Will you admit that, or are you prepared to 
 take up the cudgels for all that is implied by Nietzschean- 
 ism?" 
 
 "No, I'm not prepared to do that," Dickie said. "And if 
 I were we should only drift into a perfectly useless argu- 
 
396 THESE LYNNEKERS 
 
 ment. I don't want to argue, you know, sir; I want to 
 understand/' 
 
 "That's just where he holds you, Clem," put in Philip 
 Groome, who was listening with keen interest to the con- 
 versation. "That's where he differs from any opponent 
 you've ever tackled." 
 
 The Bishop looked gravely at Dickie. "I suppose that's 
 true," he remarked. "You are a trifle inhuman sometimes, 
 Lynneker." 
 
 "That sounds pretty beastly," Dickie commented with a 
 grin. 
 
 "Have you no ambitions ?" Olivier asked. "Is there noth- 
 ing you more particularly desire beyond this ability to 
 maintain your personal freedom?" 
 
 Dickie was aware that he wanted to look at Sibyl and 
 dared not. "Oh! as to that, one's freedom is restricted all 
 the time in a hundred ways," he said. "One's prevented by 
 all kinds of reasonable conventions from doing no end of 
 things one would like to do." 
 
 "Which is no answer to my question," remarked Olivier. 
 
 "Well, yes, there is one thing I desire at the present 
 moment," Dickie said. "I am devoting all my attention to 
 tracing a rather subtle induction in some astronomical cal- 
 culations a friend sent me to experiment with. I'm fright-, 
 fully ambitious to find it." 
 
 The Bishop laughed delightedly, but his brother-in-law 
 had a question to ask. 
 
 "Yes, but look here," he said. "What are you going to 
 get out of that achievement; fame, or occupation, or your 
 friend's gratitude and approval, or what ?" 
 
 "I'm going to get the best of that infernal calculation," 
 Dickie replied. 
 
 Olivier shook his head. "If you were a single-hearted 
 specialist, Lynneker, I could place you on that remark," 
 he said, "but as it is, I must repeat that you are a little 
 inhuman." 
 
 Dickie found that Sibyl was looking at him with an ex- 
 
THE HERMIT 397 
 
 pression of faint relief, as if she had already "traced the in- 
 duction" that had been perplexing her. 
 
 "Meanwhile our argument seems to have gone over- 
 board," he said. 
 
 "Not a bit of it," Olivier replied genially. "I am an- 
 swered. If you're an exception to the rule of humanity, 
 you can't be expected to sacrifice yourself, but the rule 
 remains good for me and the rest of mankind. " 
 
 "Clem sacrificed himself by accepting a bishopric," re- 
 marked Groome thoughtfully, addressing no one in particu- 
 lar. 
 
 "Certainly, certainly," Olivier said. "It is an arduous 
 and thankless position." 
 
 Groome ignored that and addressed himself to Dickie. 
 
 "If your astronomical calculations are not too absorbing, 
 Lynneker," he said, "I hope you'll be able to spare me a 
 little of your company when we come to Halton. I find you 
 very refreshing, if I may say so." 
 
 "You know, father, you're rather inhuman, too, some- 
 times," Sibyl said. 
 
 in 
 
 By the end of the second week in August, it was becom- 
 ing very evident to three of the four occupants of Halton 
 Rectory that Mr. Lynneker ought to remain in bed. He 
 was unable now to take anything but clear liquids, and 
 often sickened at the sight of the beef-tea with which 
 Eleanor diligently surfeited him. His strength had ebbed 
 noticeably during the past fortnight, and it was certain that 
 his splendid resolution to pretend that there was little 
 wrong with him could not much longer avail to postpone 
 his relegation to the sick-room. 
 
 Nevertheless he had steadily denied the necessity. 
 
 "He ought not to get up," Mrs. Lynneker insisted, with a 
 tragic air, when she was alone with her two children after 
 supper, one Thursday evening. 
 
398 THESE LYNNEKERS 
 
 "He fell down yesterday," Eleanor commented. For 
 once she was in agreement with the others, for she believed 
 that when her father was confined to his bed, all the care 
 of him would be hers. 
 
 "Hurt himself?" enquired Dickie, with a look of pain. 
 
 "Very little," Eleanor said. "Fortunately I was near by 
 at the time." 
 
 "Quite easy to understand why, of course. . . ." Dickie 
 remarked allusively. 
 
 "I should have thought he'd have been so much more 
 comfortable in bed," Mrs. Lynneker said. 
 
 "Yes, he would," Eleanor agreed. 
 
 "Giving up his arms, you know," Dickie suggested. 
 
 "But really, it isn't safe now for him to be about," Mrs. 
 Lynneker pleaded. "Couldn't you say something to him 
 about it, dear?" 
 
 "I'm sure that wouldn't do the least good," Eleanor said. 
 "I've suggested it to father several times; it only makes 
 him irritable." 
 
 Dickie got to his feet. "I'll go up to him now," he said. 
 
 "He may be asleep," Eleanor interposed. 
 
 "He's never asleep when I go to bed," her mother said. 
 "Don't you think, Eleanor, that it might be a good thing for 
 Dick to speak to him?" 
 
 "No, I don't," returned Eleanor, and then, as if she had 
 reflected that only by these means might she be able to 
 attain her object, she added grimly: "But Dick can try if 
 he likes. It will probably upset father and keep him awake 
 all night!" 
 
 Dickie had more confidence in his own diplomacy. 
 
 IV 
 
 The Rector had been sleeping for some months now in 
 the room that had been occupied by Martyn when he had 
 come to stay at Halton for Edward's wedding. That room 
 had always been assigned to the Rector for a dressing-room, 
 
THE HERMIT 399 
 
 although it was as big as any other bedroom in the house ; 
 but the window faced east, the only window in the Rec- 
 tory that had that aspect, and the room had always been 
 accounted cold in consequence. 
 
 When Dickie entered, a little benzoline lamp was burning 
 on a table within reach of the bed, and an open Bible lay 
 on the coverlet. But the Rector was not reading. His 
 spectacles lay across the open pages of the Testament. He 
 was lying on his back, his knees drawn up and his hands 
 clasped together over his midriff. 
 
 Dickie brought a chair to the side of the bed and sat 
 down. 
 
 "Do you get much pain, father?" he asked. 
 The Rector did not reply at once, and when he spoke he 
 disregarded the question. 
 
 "Your mother and Eleanor think it would be better if I 
 stayed in bed," he said. 
 
 "I know," Dickie returned. "We have been talking about 
 it. I came up now to ask you what you would like to do." 
 "It would be better in many ways if . . ." the Rector 
 began and then drew his breath sharply and shut his eyes. 
 "Always just at this time," he said after a long pause. 
 "Partly hunger, you know," Dickie said in a low voice. 
 "I don't seem able to digest milk now," his father whis- 
 pered. "Wait a moment, Dick, there's something I ... 
 want to say." 
 
 For some minutes Dickie sat quite still, abstracting his 
 attention from the thought of his father's pain. It seemed 
 better not to watch him, not to interfere in the tense, con- 
 tained struggle that could not be lightened by another's help. 
 And presently the Rector gave a deep sigh, straightened his 
 knees slightly, and lifted himself higher on his pillow. 
 "A little water, Dick," he said. 
 
 Dickie fetched him water from the washstand. On the 
 table by the bed was nothing but a tumbler of milk and a 
 cup of beef-tea. 
 
 The Rector sipped a few drops of water and then settled 
 himself back upon his pillow. 
 
400 THESE LYNNEKERS 
 
 "Leave it on the table," he said, indicating the glass that 
 Dickie still held. Then he went on in a firmer voice : "It's 
 these horrible functions of ours, Dick, that are so much 
 trouble. I couldn't let Eleanor or your mother help me." 
 
 Dickie understood the allusion. "I will do all that," he 
 said. 
 
 "If it wouldn't bother you too much," his father returned. 
 "Well, rather not," Dickie assured him. 
 "I can still get out of bed," the Rector continued, "but 
 in a few days I shall be almost helpless." He paused a 
 moment and added : "It's a great relief to me to have you 
 here, Dick. You'll stay until the end ? I can only hope that 
 it won't be long." 
 
 "I shall stay," Dickie said. 
 
 "I can't be bothered with injections," the Rector began 
 again after another pause. "I don't see that I'm called upon 
 to prolong the inevitable, eh, Dick?" 
 
 "Certainly not," Dickie agreed. "Unless it would alleviate 
 the pain, of course." 
 
 "I'd sooner get it over," his father murmured. 
 "You wouldn't care to have morphia now and again?" 
 Dickie asked. 
 
 The Rector shook his head. "I'd sooner fight it out," he 
 whispered. He had closed his eyes again and there was an 
 expression of faint relief on his face. Dickie sat very still, 
 afraid to disturb what might be a rare interval of peace 
 and freedom from pain. Presently he got up very quietly, 
 but at that his father instantly opened his eyes. 
 
 "I wanted you to know, Dick," he said. "The others are 
 inclined to bother me a little. If you could make it quite 
 clear to them that there's nothing to be done. . . ." 
 "I will," Dickie affirmed. 
 
 "And you'll help me with that horrible business ?" 
 "Rather." 
 
 "It's only the early morning and last thing at night. I 
 can take so little now. And, Dick . . ." he laid his hand 
 on the Testament open at the thirteenth chapter of St. 
 
THE HERMIT 401 
 
 John's gospel and smiled faintly as he said : "Hereafter I 
 will not talk much with you." 
 
 "I understand," Dickie said. He leant over the bed and 
 kissed his father's forehead. 
 
 The Rector put up his hand and grasped his boy's arm. 
 
 "Tremendous," he murmured. His fingers clasped that 
 splendid solidity as if he found support in Dickie's strength. 
 Then he relaxed his hold, and having said good-bye to the 
 comforting world of flesh, settled himself down to the im- 
 mense struggle of leaving it. 
 
 But so tenacious of life were these Lynnekers that nearly 
 a month of endurance was still interposed between him and 
 release. And if that night the Rector appeared to have 
 entered upon the last phase of his withdrawal from the 
 interests of living, he was yet to demonstrate on more than 
 one occasion that the world claimed an attention that he 
 could not or would not render to the common routine of his 
 immediate contact with the world. 
 
 Fate had treated him consistently. For thirty years it 
 had encouraged him to build up a defence between himself 
 and his family; and now had given him the opportunity 
 to close his elaborately constructed shell at will with the 
 seal of silence. 
 
 In the darkness of his own detached personality he 
 could exclude all interference save the drag of long physical 
 pain. He was freed, at last, from the irk of responsibility. 
 Dick could be trusted to shoulder all the care of his mother 
 and sister; and the burden would not handicap him. He 
 had the strength that comes to those who look outwards 
 upon the world; his mind was not fretted and tired by the 
 struggle with life. He could give out of his abundance 
 and desire no return. He might fail to enjoy the intenser 
 joys of the poet, those thrilling ecstasies- that the Rector 
 himself had known ; that Edward and probably Latimer also 
 
402 THESE LYNNEKERS 
 
 touched at great moments ; but Dick, who never seemed to 
 seek for happiness, would surely find it. He would not 
 know the misery of aspirations he had not the strength and 
 consistency to fulfil. His steady ability and self-reliance 
 were weapons that gave him invulnerability. 
 
 His mother had something of the same qualities. She 
 was far weaker than her son, she could be wounded by 
 personal worries, but the wound healed and left no mark. 
 The Rector's soul was twisted by the great scars of wounds 
 that had never satisfactorily healed. 
 
 He was aware of the disfigurement now that he had re- 
 treated into the shell of his living silence. But he no 
 longer felt the pressure of a tormenting desire to be other 
 than he was. He had come out of action into reflection and, 
 save at very rare moments, he was content to endure his 
 physical pain and give his mind the liberty that had, at last, 
 been accorded to him. 
 
 One such moment came to him when Adela came home, 
 but neither Eleanor nor his wife could stir him to any 
 manifestation of feeling. 
 
 Eleanor's sympathy had come too late. When it was 
 first hesitatingly offered nearly ten years ago, his shell had 
 already hardened. She had never been able to tempt him 
 into any exposure of the private weakness he had so sedu- 
 lously armoured. 
 
 And he was glad to be alone. No physical pain was 
 beyond endurance; and now his mind was suddenly, won- 
 derfully, free from the life-long irk of responsibility either 
 to himself or to others. All the travail that remained was 
 of the kind he had mastered in life. He retained to the 
 end his peculiar modesties and delicacies with regard to 
 his body. 
 
 VI 
 
 Eleanor was still further embittered by defeat. The 
 conquest she had hoped for had proved a downfall. 
 
 'There are certain things he wants me always to do for 
 
THE HERMIT 403 
 
 him," Dickie explained to her, and she realised the finality 
 of that statement. Not only the world, but fate was against 
 her. She had but one source of comfort. God was chast- 
 ening her for some wise purpose of His own. She was 
 one of those whom He loved. 
 
 "But I must give him his food," she protested neverthe- 
 less. 
 
 "Oh! yes," Dickie said, "but it's no good to force it on 
 him. It only gives him unnecessary pain." 
 
 "But we must do everything in our power to keep him 
 alive," she said. 
 
 "I daresay, but you won't keep him alive that way," 
 Dickie returned. "Personally, you know, Eleanor, I think 
 it's just useless cruelty to keep him alive, but as a matter 
 of fact, pain and irritation will kill him before hunger." 
 
 Some sense of truth within her told Eleanor that her 
 brother was right, but her habitual obstinacy of thought pre- 
 vented her from any acknowledgment. 
 
 "Dr. Price said the white of an egg beaten up in cham- 
 pagne might give him a little relief," she said. "I got the 
 champagne to-day." 
 
 "Try it, by all means," Dickie advised her. "Only don't 
 force it on him. Don't annoy him." 
 
 "It all seems so dreadful," Mrs. Lynneker put in, with a 
 weak suggestion of fretfulness. In her heart she a little 
 resented the elaborate deliberation of her husband's dying. 
 It had cost her a great mental effort to face the indubitable 
 fact that death was inevitable not particularly because it 
 was her husband's death that threatened, but inasmuch as 
 her sanguine temperament could not bear to face such an 
 awful and resolute conclusion. And now it seemed to her 
 at times unendurable that many days, or even weeks, must 
 be spent in company with a presence from which there was 
 no least hope of escape. 
 
 "Do do you think it can be very long, now?" she asked 
 Dickie. 
 
 "I suppose it might be some weeks," he told her. 
 
 That very day the Rector had been moving about the 
 
404 THESE LYNNEKERS 
 
 house, feebly, it is true, and with the mark of fatal illness 
 upon him, but still entering into their life. And already the 
 realisation that he would move among them no more had 
 had its effect. He had submitted to his sentence when he 
 consented to remain in bed, and he was no longer one of 
 them. For Mrs. Lynneker, at least, he was rapidly becom- 
 ing no more than a memory. 
 
 VII 
 
 Adela arrived a week later. She brought her two chil- 
 dren with her, a little girl, May, of three years old, and a 
 boy of eighteen months, generally known as Nollie, he 
 had been christened Oliver Oliver by some imaginative 
 freak of his father's. "We'll give him a name that people 
 can remember" had been his excuse. 
 
 Dickie drove into Medborough to meet them, and failed to 
 recognise Adela when he first saw her on the platform. 
 The slender, alert, pretty girl of eight years before had 
 grown into a rather thickset, anxious woman of thirty-one 
 who looked more than her age. Her features were coarser 
 and her complexion had become sallow. But when he 
 came to talk to her, Dickie discovered that her eyes were 
 still those of the bright, eager sister he remembered. The 
 young Adela looked out still from those unchanged eyes as 
 if through a mask. Her personality also appeared changed. 
 She had different points of view, different interests. She 
 was not moved by the sight of old familiar things; she 
 nodded carelessly when Dickie indicated the first lift of 
 that thrilling spire behind the Rectory elms. 
 
 "Everything goes on just the same, I suppose?" she said, 
 and that criticism of Halton, and, indeed, of England, was 
 implicit in much of her story of life in Toronto. 
 
 Dickie, disappointed and a little resentful, was not able 
 to understand that the unchanged soul of the little girl 
 Adela was thrusting out through new forms of expression. 
 But her medium was changed as her body had changed. She 
 
THE HERMIT 405 
 
 had lived for eight years in a country that had given her 
 no rest from the pressure of life. She had fulfilled all the 
 needs of an exigent husband who had been resolutely fight- 
 ing his way to independence and power. And she had borne 
 five keen, rich-blooded children, four boys and a girl, the 
 eldest of whom, at seven years old, was seriously consider- 
 ing the problem of his mother's education. He had dis- 
 covered that she knew simply nothing of such essential 
 subjects as the American Civil War. 
 
 Little wonder that she found Halton stagnant. 
 
 Even her father's illness failed to touch her very nearly. 
 All she had was given to her husband, her five children 
 and that new urgent country of her adoption. 
 
 "Do you mean that he is actually dying, Dick?" she in- 
 sisted when he had gently led up to the climax of which 
 she had been insufficiently forewarned by Eleanor's last 
 letter. 
 
 "It's only a matter of a week or two," Dickie acknowl- 
 edged and explained the reasons for certainty. 
 
 "Well, it does seem very dreadful to die that way," 
 Adela said. "Does he suffer much? But, of course, he is 
 nearly eighty, isn't he?" Her voice hovered curiously be- 
 tween the long practice of youth and the imitative habit of 
 the past eight years. Now and again her accent and speech 
 were frankly American. The quiet, intent little girl who sat 
 so exemplarily on the back seat, turned to face forward on 
 this occasion as a measure of safety, spoke pure American. 
 
 "Say, momma," she began whenever she wished to draw 
 attention to some striking difference presented to her by 
 this first uninterrupted sight of English country. Even 
 Nollie, wide-eyed and observant on his mother's knee, 
 bleated mommie, instead of mummie. 
 
 There was little chance for Adela to plunge back into the 
 emotions of girlhood. 
 
 Mrs. Lynneker embraced the rather care-worn woman 
 who had been her daughter, with the respect due to a con- 
 temporary; and appeared a little shy of the self-contained 
 child who greeted her formally as "grandmum," and who, 
 
406 THESE LYNNEKERS 
 
 having offered a cool mouth to be kissed, remarked on the 
 cuteness of the back seat of the "wagon." "I just couldn't 
 fall out anyway," she said. No doubt it was the one sure 
 thing on which she felt her mother's family could so far be 
 safely congratulated. 
 
 "How she has altered," Eleanor commented when she 
 returned to her mother and brother after seeing Adela and 
 her two children safe in the best spare room. "She looks 
 so old." 
 
 Mrs. Lynneker, who had given less in her thirty-seven 
 years of married life than Adela had given in eight, thought 
 the climate must have had something to do with it. 
 
 "Her eyes still look as young as ever," Dickie said. 
 
 "Of course, five children in six years . . ." Eleanor be- 
 gan with a frown of disapproval, but her mother interrupted 
 her daughter with the reminder that she herself had also 
 had five children in almost as short a time. 
 
 "She must be thankful to be home again for a time," 
 Eleanor said by way of changing the conversation. 
 
 "I don't know ; she doesn't seem to be," Dickie returned. 
 "Oliver is doing very well over there now it seems. I think 
 she has begun to miss the inspiration and urgency of her 
 home life already." 
 
 "She's sure to miss the other three children," Mrs. Lyn- 
 neker thought. 
 
 "She'll find Halton rather quiet by contrast," Dickie con- 
 tinued. 
 
 But when Adela came down alone to tea in the drawing- 
 room she was suddenly full of questions that hinted a tend- 
 ency to reminiscence, and once she touched a genuine emo- 
 tion. 
 
 "Eleanor, did you finish those chair-covers?" she asked, 
 and looked at the covers in question with a faint blush. 
 
 "Well, I did mean to finish them," she added when 
 Eleanor had coldly returned an affirmative, and then went 
 on : "My goodness, how it brings all that time back. Were 
 you all frightfully upset? I don't see how I could have 
 helped it." 
 
THE HERMIT 407 
 
 "We've quite forgotten all that time now, dear," her 
 mother said with an air of reassurance. 
 
 "Oh, my I" Adela said with a lapse that must have been 
 induced by the thought she had sent to her home in 
 Toronto. "Why, I'll never forget that time as long as I 
 live." 
 
 The halting place was to her as a knot that had tied the 
 contrasted threads of her two lives. The blind, reflective 
 finger of memory could pass smoothly along the different 
 strands of either thread, but must always pause to feel the 
 strange contortion of that sudden twisted interweaving. 
 
 Mrs. Lynneker found an outlet for her automatic asso- 
 ciation of events by making a reference to Edward and 
 Helen. 
 
 "And what is Mrs. Latimer like?" Adela asked. 
 
 "I think she and Latimer got on very well together, al- 
 though she is so much older than he is," her mother said. 
 "And they've two sweet children." 
 
 "I suppose I shall see them," Adela commentd. "They're 
 rather swells, aren't they?" 
 
 "She had money," Mrs. Lynneker explained. 
 
 "And what about Dickie ?" Adela went on, and she looked 
 at him with a sudden flash that revealed all the girl he re- 
 membered. "Isn't he even engaged? And who is living at 
 Halton House now? He had his eye on that wall all the 
 way as we came past and peered in at the front gate as if 
 he was rubbering at the freaks in a dime museum." 
 
 "Adela ! what do you mean ?" gasped Eleanor. Her ques- 
 tion referred not to her sister's allusion to Dickie, but to 
 the intention of that last astounding phrase. 
 
 "Why, I thought there must be some attraction there," 
 Adela said, and saw that her mother was blinking and 
 shaking her head just as she used to do when she warned 
 them against some topic that might displease the Rector. 
 
 Dickie saw, too, and grinned a little sheepishly. "It's all 
 right, old girl," he said. "The mater is very anxious to 
 pretend there's something in that suggestion of yours, but 
 there isn't. Some people called Groome have got Halton 
 
408 THESE LYNNEKERS 
 
 House for a month or two. He's rather an interesting 
 chap. . . ." 
 
 "Lord Wansford's brother," interpolated Mrs. Lynneker. 
 4 'His sister, Lady Constance, married Dr. Olivier, our new 
 Bishop, you know, dear." 
 
 "And who is she?" asked Adela gaily. 
 
 "Philip Groome's daughter," Dickie said. 
 
 "Oh!" commented Adela with great emphasis. "Fancy, 
 little boy Dickie being in love !" 
 
 "I'm not going to stand any cheek from you, little girl," 
 he returned. 
 
 For a moment they looked at one another with all the old 
 comradeship shining in their young eyes, and then Adela 
 sighed and said : 
 
 "Is it really eight years since I went away ?" 
 
 She had recovered her touch of the old thread, but a 
 minute later her thought was back in Canada again. "I must 
 go and see to those children," she said ; and the little Adela, 
 Dickie had seen so clearly an instant before, suddenly van- 
 ished, and he , saw an unknown woman who was already 
 verging, prematurely, on middle-age. 
 
 VIII 
 
 The Rector asked for her, next day. They had said 
 nothing to him of her arrival, but he must have heard the 
 unusual traffic that stirred the house, and the sound of 
 little May's pert American voice on the stairs. 
 
 "Adela has come," he said to Dickie when the exhausting 
 effort of the morning function had been made. 
 
 "Came yesterday afternoon," Dickie replied. 
 
 The old man lay for a moment lax and spent before he 
 answered. "I must see her," he said. His voice was still 
 clear and round, but it seemed to rise from some hollow, 
 reverberating place, like the sound of a voice heard in an 
 unfurnished room. 
 
 "Now?" Dickie asked, and his father nodded and opened 
 
THE HERMIT 409 
 
 his eyes for a moment with a glance that suggested an 
 uneasy regard for the decency of his surroundings. 
 
 Dickie understood. "I'll have the room done," he said, 
 "and then bring her." 
 
 And when she came, the hermit, who lived day and night 
 within the retreat that still remained to him, made a great 
 effort, it may be of reparation, and looked out again at the 
 bright, hard world. 
 
 Adela was manifestly startled by his appearance. The 
 configuration of the skull, jaw, cheek bones and eye sock- 
 ets, was horribly defined now, and the image of death 
 solemnly proclaimed its shape under the poor disguise of the 
 drawn yellow skin solemnly still, for the grin of final 
 conquest was hidden. 
 
 The Rector opened his eyes and put out his hand; and 
 when Adela had taken it, gently pulled her down to him 
 and kissed her cheek. 
 
 "Little Adela," he said, in his low, hollow voice. 
 
 "Yes, father," she murmured. She was confused and 
 embarrassed. She had learnt to buffet life in Canada, but 
 this slow, inevitable dying frightened her. Surely, no one 
 in the new world had ever died like this. 
 
 "Are you happy, Adela?" 
 
 The question gave her an outlet. She had been harassed 
 by the impossibility of proffering conventional assurances 
 that he would soon be well again, the only consolation she 
 knew. 
 
 "Oh, yes, very," she said. 
 
 The hermit peered out still further from his retreat. 
 "Tell me," he said. 
 
 She told him, first, something of her husband's success. 
 How he and his brother Harry had commanded high wages 
 from the very beginning, and how they had saved and in- 
 creased their small contractor's business, putting into it 
 every dollar they could spare. But when she paused, the 
 old man showed her that his thought of her happiness was 
 not concerned with business. 
 
 "You've been happy with your husband ?" he asked. 
 
410 THESE LYNNEKERS 
 
 "With Frank? Oh, yes," she assured him. "He has been 
 so splendid, always. And we've five children, you know." 
 
 He turned his head a little and looked at her. "Your eyes 
 look happy," he said. "I'm very glad, very relieved." 
 
 He moved his hand towards her again and when she had 
 kissed him, he crept back into the solitudes of his retreat. 
 
 Dickie made a sign to her and she followed him out of the 
 room. 
 
 On the landing outside she caught her breath, and her 
 tears came in a gush. "Oh ! Dick, it's so terrible," she 
 gasped. "Will it be long now, do you think ?" 
 
 "He has hardly altered in the last few days," Dickie said. 
 "He has been living on water, practically, for a week, and 
 not much of that. It's wonderful how he hangs on. His 
 vitality is simply extraordinary. It's quite possible that he 
 may go on like this for days yet." 
 
 "But ... but he's just a skeleton," Adela protested. 
 
 "I know," Dickie said grimly, and hesitated as if he 
 weighed the advisability of imparting the peculiar knowl- 
 edge he had gained as his father's attendant. "But there's 
 so little waste," he went on, rejecting that temptation. 
 "The only energy he expends is mental. I can't help think- 
 ing that his brain is going all the time. He's perfectly 
 clear-headed, always, you know, perfectly sensible, but he 
 won't talk. He hasn't said as much in a week as he said to 
 you this morning." 
 
 Adela's tears had stopped now and she looked up at her 
 brother with a faint smile. "You are so practical, Dickie," 
 she said. 
 
 "Well, that's a virtue you ought to admire," he returned. 
 "Frank and you have to be fairly practical, don't you ?" 
 
 "Oh! my, yes," Mrs. Oliver said. 
 
XVII 
 THE MISSING INDUCTION 
 
 THE Groomes had been at Halton House for more than 
 a week when Adela arrived; and her comment on 
 Dickie's hopeful peering up at the long high wall and 
 through the bars of the big iron gates at the foot of the 
 hill had been fully justified. She had seen her eldest boy 
 exhibit just the same wistful eagerness, if the object of his 
 pursuit had been other than the one she had immediately 
 inferred as likely to attract her brother. 
 
 On that particular afternoon, indeed, Dickie had been 
 looking for a sign. In something less than a week he had 
 come as far as the expectation of some such private favour, 
 although on that occasion no sign had been given to him. 
 
 II 
 
 Sibyl had descended from hostility to tolerance two days 
 after she and her father had come to Halton. 
 
 Dickie had accepted Philip Groome's friendly invitation 
 in the spirit of its offer and had "just cut across the back 
 way," as he explained, without waiting to attend his 
 mother on the formal call she purposed to make after a 
 decent interval of delay. 
 
 He found Groome on the broad gravel path that made a 
 little raised terrace in front of the house. He was sitting 
 in a wheeled chair, by the aid of which he could manoeuvre 
 himself about over tolerably level ground. 
 
 411 
 
412 THESE LYNNEKERS 
 
 ''Hallo, Lynneker; glad to see you," he called out, as 
 Dickie came up from the garden door which furnished a 
 more formal termination to the short cut than the route 
 across the paddock and through the whole width of the 
 grounds behind the house. 
 
 He made his explanation by way of excuse ; but if Philip 
 Groome had had no daughter, no excuse would have been 
 necessary. 
 
 "Don't begin like that/' Groome said. "I asked you to 
 come and I shall take it as a favour if you'll come whenever 
 you can spare the time. Every day, if you like, and any 
 time that suits you. When I'm tired of you, I'll let you 
 know. That's one of my privileges as an invalid. When 
 you're greeted by the formula that I'm not up to receiving 
 visitors, you can draw your own conclusions. As an honest 
 man yourself you can appreciate honesty in me. And 
 apropos of that, I shall, of course, be glad to see your father 
 and mother if they come, but I can't be bothered to go to 
 church. It's not because I can't go, but because I won't. 
 Clem accepts the fact that he has married into an agnostic 
 family, and your people must take him as surety for my 
 good intentions." 
 
 "My mother won't worry you about that," Dickie said, 
 "and my father is . . ." he paused before he added, "too 
 intent on his own affairs just now to bother any one. You 
 won't see him." 
 
 "Scholar?" enquired Groome. "Early Fathers, and that 
 sort of thing?" 
 
 "No." Dickie sighed, and sat down on a garden seat 
 with his back to the front gates and his face to the open 
 French window of the drawing-room. "No, he's dying," he 
 said. "It can't be more than a few weeks now. He has 
 known all about it for months, I think; but he sort of 
 made his acknowledgment last night. Took to his bed and 
 admitted practically that he'll never get up again." 
 
 "Seems rather fine to you, eh ?" Groome asked. 
 
 "Yes," Dickie said quietly, ignoring the suggestion of 
 cynicism in Philip Groome's tone. "There has been some- 
 
THE MISSING INDUCTION 413 
 
 thing fine about his endurance all through. No kind of 
 pose or appeal for sympathy, just the courage to tackle the 
 whole thing, pain with nothing but death at the end of it, 
 without whining and without any sort of help from any 
 one." 
 
 Groome smiled. "The point of view of the normal, 
 healthy person," he said. "We professional invalids under- 
 stand these things better. We know that we're cut off, and 
 that we won't get sympathy if we ask for it. Also we know 
 that your sympathy isn't worth having. We are in our own 
 little world, and we expect consideration from you, that 
 is necessary to make life tolerable. But not sympathy, if 
 by that you mean any kind of real understanding. What 
 you've just said about your father proves that you don't 
 understand." 
 
 "Hm ! There's something in that, no doubt," Dickie com- 
 mented, "but all the same, I think I do understand my 
 father, and he recognises it. We don't talk, now, but I 
 know he knows." 
 
 "There are exceptions," Groome admitted in a softer 
 voice. "Sibyl's an instance. She's a child, full of moods, 
 impetuous to a degree, and capable as you heard the other 
 day of calling me 'inhuman,' but she understands. She 
 doesn't criticise or applaud, if you know what I mean. I 
 had a notion you were like that, too, until you told me 
 about your father." 
 
 "You put my back up a bit," Dickie said, "so I suppose 
 I was guilty of criticism as well as applause." 
 
 "I like your honesty," Groome returned, smiling. "That's 
 what helps you to cut us all up, Clem and me and the rest 
 of us. We can't be honest, you know. It isn't because we 
 don't want to be, some of us, at least, or because we 
 don't try, but we simply haven't the faculty. We hardly 
 ever know, as a matter of fact, whether we are being 
 honest or not." 
 
 Dickie, lounging on the garden seat, with his hands in 
 his coat pockets, and his hat on the back of his head, was 
 quite sure that he was far from being honest at that mo- 
 
414 THESE LYNNEKERS 
 
 ment. Was he not deliberately concealing his purpose in 
 paying this visit, and in establishing himself on the level 
 of a friend who could be expected at any time without the 
 necessity for proffering apology or excuse? Nevertheless, 
 he entertained no intention of explaining himself. He 
 watched the drawing-room window and waited patiently for 
 the appearance of the person he had come to see. 
 
 "Honesty is one of the things that it doesn't do to think 
 about," he said. "Directly you begin to question your own 
 motives, you're dead safe to convict yourself." 
 
 "I wonder if you really mean half the things you say," 
 commented a voice behind him. 
 
 Dickie started and blushed. He had been so sure she 
 would come out by the French window, and he had been 
 picturing her as he had last seen her at the Palace at Med- 
 borough. It was a shock to him when he turned and saw her 
 in big suede gauntlets and a blue overall with her hands 
 full of flowers. She was suddenly presented as another 
 person. He had always seen her as something of a finished 
 product, trained and efficient in the ways of society. Now, 
 he saw her as a schoolgirl of nineteen, and with all the 
 immature questions and doubts of a schoolgirl. 
 
 "You seem to have got a down of some sort on me, Miss 
 Groome," he said boyishly. "I always seem to rub you up 
 the wrong way." 
 
 She pouted her lower lip suspiciously. "You do lay 
 down the law so," she said. 
 
 "Clever young man, you know," her father put in. 
 
 "Oh! yes, I daresay," Sibyl returned carelessly. "Are 
 we going to have tea out here?" 
 
 Her father thought they might as well have it there as 
 anywhere else. 
 
 "I'll tell them," Sibyl said. "I'll come back when I've 
 put these flowers in water." 
 
 "Like this place ?" Dickie asked when she had gone. 
 
 "Only one objection to it," Groome returned. "There's 
 too much hill. I can't get up those infernal steps in this 
 chair, you know." 
 
THE MISSING INDUCTION 415 
 
 Dickie looked up at the two flights of steps that led to 
 the upper garden. "I could get you up," he said, "but 
 you can avoid them, if you go round by the back lawn." 
 
 "Hill's too steep for me even that side," Groome said, 
 and then added : "But I can see you'll be down here fairly 
 often, so I shan't hesitate to make use of you." 
 
 "I'll come whenever I can," Dickie returned, "but I've 
 got some work on hand that's taking up a lot of my time, 
 and I have to look after the pater, a certain amount." 
 
 Philip Groome smiled. "You, too, have your moments of 
 deliberate dishonesty," he remarked. 
 
 "Been five years in the City, you know," Dickie said. 
 
 For a moment the two men looked at one another with a 
 perfect understanding of the thing that had not been spoken 
 between them, and then Groome said: 
 
 "Did you make any money?" 
 
 "Not very much," Dickie admitted. 
 
 "But you're going back, I suppose, to make more?" 
 
 "No, I shan't go back," Dickie said. "That game doesn't 
 interest me any longer." 
 
 "The alternative being . . . ?" 
 
 "Well, that I don't quite know," Dickie confessed. "I 
 think I may be able to get a job at the Observatory; as a 
 computer, in the first instance, until I've taken my F.R.A.S. 
 and B.Sc." 
 
 "Well paid job?" Groome asked. 
 
 "Oh ! no, I shouldn't get more than a hundred and fifty 
 or two hundred a year," Dickie said. "But I've got about 
 five hundred a year of my own." 
 
 "All very well for a bachelor of inexpensive tastes," 
 commented Groome. 
 
 "Well, that's what I am," Dickie said. 
 
 He had seen a look of relief in Groome's face when that 
 statement of income had been made. He was ineligible, and 
 the fact had pleased the invalid father who looked for no 
 sympathy from any one but his daughter. But he had also 
 been afraid, and Dickie found a source of joy in that 
 recognition. It seemed to suggest the possibility that Sibyl's 
 
416 THESE LYNNEKERS 
 
 persistent snubbing of himself was not an expression of 
 her real feeling, and that her father had regarded Dickie as 
 a threat to his comfort. 
 
 in 
 
 She certainly showed herself more tolerant than Dickie 
 had yet seen her when she returned, this time by the ex- 
 pected way of the drawing-room window. She had dis- 
 carded her overall and discovered a simple frock of green 
 linen that maintained the new girlishness he had found in 
 her that afternoon. But while they were having tea he 
 realised that the difference of effect was not due to 'her 
 dress but to her hair. The elaborate sculptured coiffure had 
 given place to what the expert might have regarded as an 
 amateur makeshift which, if it concealed the shape of her 
 head, revealed the quality of the beautiful material that had 
 gone to the building of the coronet she had always pre- 
 viously worn. 
 
 "Are you criticising the way I do my hair?" she asked 
 at the moment of his discovery. 
 
 "I was noticing the difference it made in the look of 
 you," he admitted. 
 
 "A difference for the worse, of course?" she said, but 
 her tone encouraged him to say what was in his mind. 
 
 "It's not a question of worse or better," he said. "But 
 you look younger with it done that way." 
 
 "I feel younger," she returned. 
 
 "I suppose Connie's maid was responsible for the other 
 erection ?" her father suggested. 
 
 She nodded. "I felt so delightfully grown up all the 
 time we were there," she said, addressing her father. 
 
 "Didn't make you any better tempered," he returned. 
 
 "That was one of the things that was so nice about it," 
 she said. "I didn't mind how bad tempered I was. I felt 
 it didn't matter. Whenever I was the least inclined to be 
 sorry, I used to look at my hair in the glass, and tell my- 
 
THE MISSING INDUCTION 417 
 
 self that I was quite grown up, and could do anything I 
 liked. Now I'm back in the schoolroom, and I feel that I 
 must be a good little girl again. This," she thrust her fingers 
 suddenly into the loose waves of hair above her ears, "this 
 reminds me all the time that it's my duty to do what peo- 
 ple tell me." 
 
 "And you don't like it ?" Dickie asked. 
 
 "To-day I do," she said. "It's such jolly weather and I 
 feel good." 
 
 "I shall keep you away from Connie's maid in future," 
 her father remarked. 
 
 She sat still for a moment as if she were seriously con- 
 sidering that, and then jumped to her feet and said : 
 
 "Suppose we push you all round the garden, dear." 
 
 IV 
 
 But it was not until the following Sunday that she came 
 out to meet Dickie with a sudden confidence that rear- 
 ranged their relations and brought him to the verge of that 
 intimacy which might ask for such a private favour as the 
 giving of a sign. 
 
 She had not gone to church in the morning, but when 
 Dickie was down at Halton House in the afternoon, she 
 began to cross-examine him as to the difference between 
 town and country services. 
 
 "You'd better come and see for yourself," he suggested, 
 and Sibyl looked at her father as if she asked his permis- 
 sion. 
 
 "She's been brought up as an agnostic," Groome ex- 
 plained. "Connie's the only one of our family who has 
 taken up religion. She'd take up anything. But Sibyl has 
 romantic leanings. She's been to Farm Street and the 
 Carmelites, now and again ; and the Cathedral appealed to 
 her. She'd go oftener only she thinks I don't like it." 
 
 "Well, you're generally rather nasty afterwards," she 
 said. 
 
418 THESE LYNNEKERS 
 
 "Merely because I've missed you while you've been away," 
 her father returned. "I was much nastier to you when 
 you took the whole day off and went to that prize-giving at 
 Oakstone. Oh! I know it was Connie's fault; and you 
 were uncommonly nasty to me when you came back." 
 
 "We do quarrel, awfully, sometimes," Sibyl said in an 
 aside to Dickie. 
 
 "There are moments when Sibyl and I hate each other," 
 Groome explained. "It's natural that we should. We see 
 too much of one another, and we are both bad-tempered. 
 Moreover, as you have perhaps forgotten, Sibyl was hav- 
 ing her hair dressed by a French maid at that time." 
 
 "Well, then, I can go to church?" she said. 
 
 "Lynneker will be delighted to see you home," Groome 
 replied. "Better ask him to stay to dinner, or will it have 
 to be supper ? You won't be home till eight, I suppose ?" 
 
 "We'll have dinner as usual and call it supper, dear," 
 Sibyl said. "And then Mr. Lynneker won't have to dress. 
 You wouldn't like to go to church in evening dress, would 
 you?" she asked Dickie. 
 
 "I don't think I should," he admitted. 
 
 The service was not, they agreed, a great success. They 
 approached a confidence with that opening before they 
 were out of the churchyard. Mr. Watson, the curate, had 
 no ear for music and never attempted to intone the re- 
 sponses, and as Sibyl put it, "it was all distinctly unin- 
 spiring." 
 
 Dickie cordially agreed. He had sat with his mother and 
 Eleanor in the Rectory pew on the north side of the nave, 
 in front of the whole congregation, and unable to catch the 
 least glimpse of Sibyl, all alone in the expanses of the Hal- 
 ton House pew in the south aisle. 
 
 And their common experience of boredom seemed to have 
 influenced Sibyl to treat him with a new intimacy. When he 
 
THE MISSING INDUCTION 419 
 
 suggested that they should go up the "alley" that ran 
 alongside the Rectory garden and back through the corn- 
 field, she assented with the air of joining him in an exciting 
 adventure. 
 
 "Oh ! yes, let's," she said. "I don't know that way." 
 
 "That big, cold church and that dull, cold service made 
 me feel so miserable," she went on, after they had climbed 
 the stile and were walking up the narrow path between 
 the paling that confined the Rectory shrubbery and the hedge 
 of the glebe farm. "And it was so lonely in that big, cold 
 pew." She looked up at him with a pretty droop of her 
 mouth, the pretended discontent of a child. Her grimace 
 was an invitation to some response in kind, but Dickie was 
 afraid to accept it. He had not the gift of banter, even 
 with men. 
 
 "I know," he said. "It's been rotten since the pater's been 
 ill. That chap, Watson, the curate, can't intone." 
 
 "Oh!" exclaimed Sibyl, and continued after a moment's 
 consideration: "I didn't understand. We don't know any 
 one in the village yet. So that was the curate, was it?" 
 
 "Did you think it was the pater?" Dickie asked. 
 
 "Well, how could I tell?" she returned. "However, I 
 won't go again until your father's better." 
 
 "He'll never be any better," Dickie said. 
 
 They had come out of the half darkness of the tree- 
 sheltered alley into the open width of the cornfield, and she 
 could see his face clearly in the early twilight. 
 
 "Is he a permanent invalid like my father?" she asked 
 with a charming little air of commiseration. 
 
 "No, he's dying," Dickie said. "We've known it for 
 some time now. There's no sort of hope for him." 
 
 She made an impulsive gesture with her hand as if she 
 would comfort him with a touch. 
 
 "Are you frightfully miserable about it?" she asked ten- 
 derly. 
 
 "Not in a way," he said, "but you carry the thought of it 
 about with you." 
 
 "Oh ! I know," she agreed. 
 
420 THESE LYNNEKERS 
 
 "You feel that with your father?" 
 
 "Yes; he might live for ages," she explained, "and he 
 might die practically any time. And I do feel a beast 
 sometimes for leaving him, because he might die when I 
 wasn't there. But, really, he'd often sooner be alone." 
 
 "They get like that, invalids, I mean, after a certain 
 point," Dickie said. "Your father was explaining it the 
 other day. The pater never speaks now, even to me, and 
 I'm his nurse in a sort of way. There's hardly anything 
 one can do for him." 
 
 He looked down at her and she met his eyes with the 
 frank interest of friendship. 
 
 "You've been helping me so splendidly with my invalid," 
 she said. "He has been so much better tempered since we've 
 been here. I wish I could help you with yours." 
 
 "You do," Dickie mumbled. 
 
 "Do I really? How?" she asked eagerly. 
 
 "I don't quite know how ; you do," he said. 
 
 They had come to the gate of the field and they stood 
 there for a minute or two, wonderfully alone together in 
 the peace of the August evening. 
 
 "I wanted to tell you," she began hesitatingly, after a 
 pause, "I thought I didn't like you at all when I first met 
 you. I I thought you were stupid. But before that, at 
 Oakstone, you know, I'd made up my mind that you were 
 the sort of person I particularly disliked. Do you mind my 
 saying this ?" ' 
 
 "Where did you see me at Oakstone ?" he asked. 
 
 "I saw you in the hall first, and then afterwards talking 
 to a rather horrid-looking little man at lunch." 
 
 "Ellis, the novelist." 
 
 "Was it? I've heard of him. Well, it was rather odd, 
 wasn't it, that I should have noticed you particularly, al- 
 though I often do notice people like that, and try to de- 
 cide whether I should like them or not. Don't you?" 
 
 Dickie shook his head. "No, not like that," he said. 
 "But why have you changed your mind about me? You 
 have, haven't you?" 
 
THE MISSING INDUCTION 
 
 "Well, I suppose I found out that I was wrong to a cer- 
 tain extent," she confessed, still with the same unconscious 
 air of discussing an abstract question. "But the first two or 
 three times I met you properly to talk to, I thought I'd been 
 quite right in putting you down as rather stupid and awfully 
 self-opinionated. Don't you think you are a little self- 
 opinionated ?" 
 
 "Other people have said so, too," Dickie admitted. 
 
 "You walk over people so," she remonstrated. 
 
 "Yes, I've had to," Dickie said. "My brothers and all 
 my family are so frightfully the other way." 
 
 "Oh ! yes, Canon Lynneker is your brother, isn't he ?" 
 she commented thoughtfully. 
 
 "Do you want me to be more like him?" Dickie asked. 
 
 The light was rapidly failing now and he leaned a little 
 towards her as he spoke. He wanted to be in touch with 
 her through every contact of the senses. He was afraid 
 of losing sight of that new expression of confidence which 
 had lighted her face that evening and reawakened in him 
 his original certainty of some old experience between them. 
 The half-darkness had transfigured her. She was no longer 
 the beautiful woman he had admired at Oakstone or Med- 
 borough, an aesthetically charming triumph of physical con- 
 tours, but the incarnation of some primitive response to 
 all the desire of his life. For that moment, at least, she 
 was a realised ideal, sexless, but utterly beautiful ; the 
 satisfaction of every ambition. And he wanted, with an 
 immense concentration of his will, to please and to hold 
 her. 
 
 She held his stare without a flicker of self-consciousness. 
 
 "Would you try to be like your brother to please me?" 
 she asked. 
 
 "No," Dickie said resolutely. 
 
 She drew in her breath with a little sharp sigh, and turned 
 her face away from him. 
 
 "You will make me so afraid of you," she said. 
 
 He leaned his arms on the top bar of the gate and stared 
 out, suddenly moody, over the slope of the opposite hill. 
 
THESE LYNNEKERS 
 
 "I don't see why," he said. 
 
 "You're so hard," she returned. 
 
 "How could I be like my brother?" he asked. 
 
 "I should hate you to be like him," she said vehemently, 
 "but you might have said you'd try, to please me. I thought 
 we were going to be friends." 
 
 "Well, can't we?" he asked. 
 
 "I don't see why you should want to be," she said. "I 
 don't see why you should want to be friends with any one. 
 You're so sure of yourself." 
 
 "Does that make you dislike me?" 
 
 "Sometimes." 
 
 "I don't see how I can help it," he submitted. 
 
 "Well, then, how can we be friends?" 
 
 "Why not?" 
 
 "You said just now that I helped you when you were 
 nursing your father, but I don't help you at all ; no one can. 
 And we can't be friends if you have got everything you 
 want; don't you see what I mean?" 
 
 Dimly he did see. She was asking for a sign of their 
 equality. She could not be content unless she could find 
 some lack in him, and she looked for a submission to 
 her help. 
 
 "I haven't got everything I want," he said. "I want 
 your friendship, tremendously, and you won't give it to 
 me. I've wanted it ever since I saw you on the platform 
 at Oakstone." 
 
 "You must beg for it, then," she said. 
 
 "I am begging, now," he replied. 
 
 "Humbly?" 
 
 "Very humbly." 
 
 "Why do you want it?" 
 
 "I don't know why," he confessed; "but I do, tremen- 
 dously." 
 
 She laughed, a little laugh of self-congratulation, and 
 held out her hand to him. "We can be friends over our 
 invalids, in any case, can't we?" she said. "It's nice to 
 
THE MISSING INDUCTION 423 
 
 feel that we're in the same boat, there. And, I say, whatever 
 is the time? My invalid will be in an awful temper." 
 
 "It's barely half-past eight," Dickie said. He had taken 
 her hand and was still holding it. 
 
 "We must run," she urged him. 
 
 They ran down the lane hand in hand. 
 
 "We are being friends, I think," she said shyly as they 
 entered the garden. 
 
 "Rather," Dickie agreed. 
 
 VI 
 
 But the next day, although she was still without the 
 services of a maid, she returned unexpectedly to her air 
 of social efficiency; snubbing Dickie politely with precisely 
 the same manner she had worn at their first meeting. 
 
 And after that vision he had had of her last night, the 
 effect upon him was curiously stimulating. In the garden, 
 that afternoon, he realised for the first time something 
 of the naked desire that Ellis had exhibited at the school 
 luncheon table. And the realisation no longer shocked him. 
 Her antagonism had roused in him the lust for conquest. 
 He wanted to be cruel; he wanted to put his arms about 
 her and crush her pride and resistance. 
 
 If the opportunity had been denied him, that desire might 
 have increased and conquered him, but her father unex- 
 pectedly gave them the chance to be alone. 
 
 Philip Groome had made no complaint of their lateness 
 on the previous evening, accepting Sibyl's not too truthful 
 excuses with quiet reassurances of his ability both to enter- 
 tain himself during her absence and to wait an extra half- 
 hour for dinner. 
 
 "For some reason I am disinclined to quarrel with you 
 to-night, Sibyl," he had said. "The delightful freedom of 
 our relations permits every kind of exception to our ordi- 
 nary rules." And he had given neither of them the least 
 cause to feel conscious of having neglected him. 
 
THESE LYNNEKERS 
 
 This afternoon he was less complacent. 
 
 "I'm afraid it must bore you to come here so often, 
 Lynneker," he said, as they were having tea. "I appreciate 
 your goodness in wasting time trying to amuse me, but 
 I don't want you to make it an effort." 
 
 "Which means that I'm boring yon'' Dickie replied. 
 
 "I daresay," Groome said, and then added cryptically, 
 "You'll be all right again, no doubt, when the crisis is 
 over." 
 
 Dickie did not follow that ; he believed the reference was 
 to his father's illness. "It can't be very long, now," he 
 said. 
 
 "Indeed?" Groome commented, and looked at his daugh- 
 ter with a wry smile. 
 
 "He has taken nothing but water the last two days," 
 Dickie explained. 
 
 Groome's bitterness vanished at once. "Of course," he 
 said, as if he were addressing himself rather than his 
 companion. "In our little world, you see, Lynneker," he 
 went on, "we have no thought even for the exigencies of 
 our brother invalids. In fact, they are our chief rivals." 
 
 "No rivalry in this case," Dickie said. "My father de- 
 mands no attention except two visits of five minutes each 
 from me, every day." 
 
 Groome waved his thin, white hand with a gesture of 
 dismissal. "You are answered by your own dulness of 
 apprehension, this afternoon," he said. "It isn't your in- 
 fernal coddling we want, it's your thoughts ; and you've 
 misunderstood me at least twice in the last minute. Take 
 him away, Sibyl, there's a good daughter. I can do with- 
 out either of you, just now. You both bore me." 
 
 Sibyl got up at once. "I'll come with you as far as 
 the paddock," she said. 
 
 "I'm definitely dismissed, eh?" Dickie asked. 
 
 "Only until you've recovered your wits," Groome returned 
 with a friendly smile. . . . 
 
 "He's really kinder to you than you deserve," Sibyl said 
 
THE MISSING INDUCTION 425 
 
 to Dickie when they were out of hearing of the terrace. 
 She spoke sharply, as with the authority of a nurse. 
 
 "Your fault," Dickie said gloomily. 
 
 "Mine? Why?" she asked in the same tone of offended 
 patronage. 
 
 He glanced at her hair. "It isn't only when you look 
 superior that you feel like that, I suppose?" he sug- 
 gested. 
 
 "I don't know what you mean," she said, knowing per- 
 fectly well. 
 
 "I thought we were going to be friends," he returned. 
 
 "I don't know that that's possible," was the answer, and 
 then, in reply to his inevitable "Why not?" she went on, 
 "I must think of father, first. I can't give up my thoughts 
 to you. He wants them. He has been missing me since 
 last night. That was why he was so peevish this after- 
 noon." 
 
 Dickie realised the admission that was implicit in her 
 statement, and, if he wanted much more than a mere 
 understanding that in certain circumstances a friendship 
 was possible between them, he was for the moment con- 
 tent to accept her explanation. 
 
 "Yes, that's all right, of course," he said. "I under- 
 stand that. But I think you might credit me with a little 
 more power of comprehension, even if I was a bit pre- 
 occupied this afternoon." 
 
 "Preoccupied!" she commented with a tiny sniff of con- 
 tempt. 
 
 "Yes, preoccupied," Dickie asserted firmly. "But I see, 
 now, perfectly well what your father meant about a 'crisis.' 
 I admit I didn't follow him at the time." 
 
 "Well," she prompted him, preferring to evade that 
 issue. 
 
 "Well, I don't think you need use quite such feminine, 
 roundabout methods with me," Dickie went on. "I'm quite 
 capable of appreciating the situation, and there's no need 
 for you to put on that awful air of the society young woman 
 
426 THESE LYNNEKERS 
 
 and try to snub me. You didn't really bring it off, you 
 know." 
 
 She turned and looked at him, then, with something of 
 appeal in her face. "Well, if I don't, you'll be friendly, 
 as you're being, now," she said. 
 
 "Couldn't you afford that without taking too much 
 from your father?" he asked. 
 
 She wrinkled her forehead in a girlish frown. "If you'd 
 stop at that," she said, "but you won't. You'll be wanting 
 all my thoughts before I know where I am." 
 
 "I suppose that's what he f s afraid of," Dickie added. 
 
 "Of course," she said. 
 
 For a few moments they stood still and looked at one 
 another with frank perplexity; then Dickie said, 
 
 "But nothing will alter the fact that we are friends, 
 will it?" 
 
 "I suppose not," she agreed. 
 
 "And pretending we aren't won't help, will it?" he 
 went on. 
 
 She shook her head despairingly. 
 
 "I don't see what's to be done about it," she confessed. 
 
 They had come to the entrance of the kitchen garden 
 when they stopped to debate this immense difficulty, and 
 Dickie felt that it could not be solved in so open and public 
 a place. 
 
 "I think I'll go out by the top-gate," he said. "Will you 
 come with me as far as that? I shall go for a walk. It 
 helps me to think." 
 
 She assented without speaking and they climbed in 
 silence up through the long stretch of almost uncultivated 
 garden that was known as "the wilderness." Indeed, they 
 did not speak again until they had reached the path through 
 the wide shrubbery that led to the little green door in the 
 high wall that so efficiently shut off the garden from the 
 road. Up there, they might have been alone in some 
 deep wood. 
 
 "Well, what's to be done?" Dickie asked at last. 
 
THE MISSING INDUCTION 427 
 
 "I'm afraid we shall have to stop being friends," she 
 acknowledged wistfully. 
 
 "If we can." 
 
 "We mustn't think about each other," she said. 
 
 "But if it weren't for your father, we should be friends, 
 shouldn't we?" Dickie persisted. 
 
 "Yes. I like you, now," she said, simply. 
 
 "Very much ?" 
 
 "Yes." She paused a moment before she added, "I 
 think I was afraid of liking you from the very begin- 
 ning." 
 
 "I wasn't afraid. I did," Dickie said. 
 
 "Like me?" she asked. 
 
 "Love you," he said. 
 
 They stood facing each other a yard apart, but he made 
 no movement to touch her. The colour had flamed to 
 her cheeks as he uttered the new word, but she still looked 
 up into his eyes with a beautiful, serene confidence and 
 understanding, and he found himself compelled to go on 
 speaking lest their sympathy should break and give way 
 to embarrassment. 
 
 "I've never cared for any one at all like this before," he 
 said. "I never thought I should." 
 
 "I always thought I should, but I never have, before, 
 either," she returned. 
 
 "But you do, now?" 
 
 "What?" she asked. 
 
 "Love me," he said. 
 
 She nodded and her eyes were full of tears. "I didn't 
 know till last night," she said steadily. And then suddenly 
 she came close to him and put her face up to his. They 
 were both trembling as he put his arms round her and 
 kissed her on the lips; and her tears overflowed and ran 
 down her cheeks. 
 
 Then, in a moment, her mood changed, and she released 
 herself with a touch of petulance. 
 
 "Oh! but it isn't any good to go on like this," she said 
 as if she blamed herself rather than him for all the devastat- 
 
428 THESE LYNNEKERS 
 
 ing things that had been said and done. "I ought not to 
 have let you say that. It's no good, you know it isn't. I 
 can't give up father for you. I don't want to. It hurts 
 me horribly, now, to feel that I haven't been faithful to 
 him." 
 
 "But that's so different," Dickie began. 
 
 "It isn't," she said. "You're nothing to me, really. I 
 don't want to see you again. You mustn't come down here 
 any more." 
 
 "I shall," Dickie replied. He did not look at her as he 
 spoke, and his voice was so low that she could hardly hear 
 him, but some expression of immense resolution about his 
 whole pose seemed to shake her confidence. 
 
 "Well, not to-morrow, anyway," she said with a sud- 
 den change from the absolute to the relative that would 
 have been ridiculous if she hadn't been so deeply affected 
 and so earnest. 
 
 "On Thursday afternoon I'm going in to Medborough to 
 meet my sister from Canada," he submitted. 
 
 "Oh! you'd better not come again, at all," she returned 
 with another accession of confidence. "And, certainly, 
 you must not come to-morrow. I must have time to think 
 it all over. I'm not sure whether I like you or not. You 
 must give me time." 
 
 "But then I shan't see you again until Friday," he 
 argued. 
 
 "No, perhaps not then," she said. 
 
 "Oh ! I simply must," pleaded Dickie. 
 
 She appeared, then, to be a little sorry for him. "What 
 time shall you be going in to Medborough on Thursday?" 
 she asked. 
 
 "About half past two," he told her. 
 
 "Well, you must give me until then to think it all over," 
 she said; "and if I decide that you may come down on 
 Friday, I'll wave to you as you pass." 
 
 "I shall probably be coming back about four," he sug- 
 gested, "if you miss me as I go in." 
 
 "Very well; good-bye," she said. 
 
THE MISSING INDUCTION 429 
 
 She did not look at him again, but turned quickly and 
 ran across the rough lawn, making a straight line back 
 for the house. He watched her till she was hidden from 
 him by a great clump of laurel, waiting, in the vain hope 
 that she might, perhaps, wave him a last encouragement. 
 
 VII 
 
 And on Thursday no sign was given to him, nor could 
 he deceive himself with the hope that he might have missed 
 seeing her. There was only one place on the wall from 
 which she could have signalled, the place where at the 
 drop of the hill the road had been driven through a cutting, 
 and the ground inside the garden rose to within four 
 feet of the coping. Dickie had played hide-and-seek in 
 those gardens when he was a boy, and knew all their pos- 
 sibilities; and, in any case, as Adela's comment on his 
 distraction implied, he had run no risks. If she had waved 
 to him, he must have seen her. 
 
 The contemplation of what he should do next seriously 
 interfered between him and his work on Friday morn- 
 ing. He had mastered the theory of the calculations Levin- 
 son had sent him, and had completed the mechanical if ardu- 
 ous work of checking the workings and results. But, al- 
 though he was not less suspicious than his friend of the 
 answer returned by the perfectly accurate manipulation 
 of the actual figures, he had been unable so far to find the 
 flaw in the logic of any induction by which the data for 
 calculation were arrived at. And to trace that error he 
 must preserve a clear and undisturbed mind. 
 
 He wondered for a time if he had not again reached 
 the boundary of his old limitation ; if the problem now be- 
 fore him was not just beyond the scope of his ability; but 
 his continued sense of being on the verge of a solution 
 seemed to deny that possibility. In the old days when he 
 had reached his limit he was aware only of a sense of baf- 
 flement, of struggling against unassailable barriers. 
 
430 THESE LYNNEKERS 
 
 'Til go down there this afternoon," he decided. "I shall 
 never get this done until . . . until something's settled." 
 
 And, indeed, his visit to Halton House that afternoon 
 did produce a temporary settlement of some kind, if it 
 was other than the one he had expected and hoped for. 
 
 Philip Groome's wheeled chair was not on the gravel path 
 before the house when Dickie entered the garden, with a 
 touch of unusual ceremony, by the front gates. The house 
 and the lawn looked, he thought, suddenly blank and de- 
 serted ; he had become so accustomed to certain indications 
 of the Groome's life there; and to-day, even the French 
 window of the drawing-room was shut. 
 
 He rang the bell with an uncomfortable feeling of ner- 
 vousness that was new to him. He had never before been so 
 aware of intruding himself where he might not be wanted. 
 
 The man, Philip Groome's own attendant, who opened 
 the door, confirmed his worst apprehensions. 
 
 "Mr. Groome has not been so well, sir, the last two days," 
 the man said. "He told me to say, if you called, that he 
 was sorry he might not be able to see you again just at 
 present." 
 
 "And Miss Groome . . ." Dickie began. 
 
 "Is with her father, sir," was the uncompromising an- 
 swer. 
 
 Dickie went out again by way of the front gates. 
 
 He had received the dismissal that Philip Groome had 
 forewarned him might one day be given. "When you're 
 greeted by the formula that I'm not up to receiving visitors, 
 you can draw your own conclusions," Groome had 
 said. . . . 
 
 For half-an-hour or so Dickie experienced all the emo- 
 tions that he had observed years ago in his elder brother. 
 He was full of rash plans : to force an entrance by calling 
 every day ; to hang about the village in the hope of meeting 
 Sibyl; to write an immensely argumentative letter to her. 
 Or, with horrible reactions that did full justice to the 
 Lynneker strain that had so far been hardly perceptible 
 
THE MISSING INDUCTION 431 
 
 in him, to resign himself to misery, to emigrate, to do any- 
 thing hopelessly emotional and useless. 
 
 The little ebullition of the Lynneker strain bubbled furi- 
 ously for half an hour, and then boiled itself harmlessly 
 away. 
 
 He had turned to the left when he came out of the Halton 
 House grounds, and he found himself in the Grinling woods, 
 when his own personality rose up and finally reasserted it- 
 self. He saw then, with a clearness that he had not so 
 far been able to bring to his mathematical problem, a reason- 
 able and characteristic line of action. 
 
 He would make no further attempt to see Sibyl, but he 
 would give himself time, he decided. He would return, 
 as he believed he undoubtedly could return, to the solution 
 of his personal problems, to Levinson's calculations, to 
 his consideration of the Oakstone education scheme, and 
 to the thought of his future, when this terrible aching 
 process of his father's illness was resolved by its only 
 possible termination. 
 
 He wrote to Moseley the same evening and asked him if 
 he were prepared to fulfil that promised engagement to 
 exhibit the Oakstone shops and expound the theory of Oak- 
 stone's future development. 
 
 In his own mind Dickie fixed no particular limit to this 
 period of waiting he had prescribed for himself, but he 
 knew that he would not leave Halton before he had seen 
 Sibyl again. 
 
 And deep down in some inspiring depths of his con- 
 sciousness he knew that he could trust her indefinitely. 
 They were friends and lovers. It was incredible that either 
 of them could love elsewhere, even though they might 
 never meet again. 
 
 It was that knowledge that permitted him to devote him- 
 self to the search for that false induction. . . . 
 
 He found it, oddly enough, a week later, while he was 
 talking to Moseley, in the engineering shop at Oakstone. 
 Perhaps it might be said more accurately that the solution 
 found Dickie. It was as if the answer he sought had been 
 
432 THESE LYNNEKERS 
 
 clamouring for an outlet through the intricate contortions 
 of his objective consciousness, and broke out suddenly into 
 the daylight while his attention was being entirely devoted 
 to another subject. 
 
 Moseley noticed the light that so unexpectedly broke over 
 his companion's expression, and being unable to account 
 for it by any brilliancy of his own exposition, said, 
 
 "You look as if you had unexpectedly remembered some- 
 thing, Lynneker, but I can't flatter myself that it has any- 
 thing to do with what I've been saying." 
 
 "Not remembered found," Dickie explained, and he was 
 so full of his discovery that he had to make a demonstra- 
 tion on the spot. 
 
 Moseley was a fair mathematician and gathered the es- 
 sentials of the process. 
 
 "What are you doing now?" he asked Dickie later in 
 the day. 
 
 "Nothing at present," Dickie said. 
 
 "You are so absolutely the man I want here for a mathe- 
 matical master," Moseley returned. "Is it at all con- 
 ceivable . . ." 
 
 And just at that time the proposition seemed by no means 
 an unattractive one to Dickie. . . . 
 
 He received another offer within five days to weigh 
 against it. 
 
 The delighted Levinson had reported Dickie's achievement 
 to the Astronomer Royal, and when he wrote was able to 
 say quite definitely that a berth as assistant was open to 
 Dickie at any time, with a salary beginning at 400 a year. 
 Meanwhile Mr. Levinson besought his friend Lynneker's 
 help with a further batch of calculations. 
 
 Dickie saw that it was time he decided that pressing 
 question of his future; but one necessary factor for the 
 making of a decision was still uncertain. He had received, 
 as yet, no word from Sibyl or her father. They had shut 
 themselves up within the ample enclosure of their house 
 and garden and were as far separated from the village life 
 of Halton as if they had been in another country. 
 
THE MISSING INDUCTION 433 
 
 VIII 
 
 Mrs. Lynneker suffered increasing distress on Dickie's 
 behalf as the days went by. He had always been a prodigy, 
 doing unaccountable and unexpected things without ask- 
 ing for comment or commendation, but at the outset of 
 his love affair he had begun to exhibit symptoms which 
 she had welcomed as evidence of what seemed to her an 
 entirely desirable normality. And then he had shut her 
 out from any delightful confidence; while, now, so far as 
 she could judge, the affair was completely over and she 
 had no sort of clue as to whether the initiative had been 
 his or Miss Groome's. If he had been "refused," his 
 mother thought that he should at least betray some sign 
 of the forlorn lover. 
 
 She had talked it all over at great length with Adela, 
 and suggested that her daughter should "ask him about 
 it." Mrs. Lynneker confessed that she hesitated to say 
 anything herself. "He is so independent," she said, "but 
 you were always such great friends." 
 
 "He seems to be just as Dickeyish as ever," was Adela's 
 contribution; but her attempt to pump her brother was 
 quite unsuccessful. 
 
 "He only grinned and said that we had imagined the 
 whole thing," she reported. 
 
 "We ought to call, you know, dear," her mother said, 
 putting the affair from another point of view; "either you 
 or Eleanor, and I. I suppose it ought to be Eleanor," she 
 noted in a regretful parenthesis, and then continued, "but 
 I don't like to go without saying anything about it to 
 Dick." 
 
 "Well, you might ask him about that," Adela suggested. 
 
 "Yes, really, I think I ought" Mrs. Lynneker replied 
 hopefully; and the same afternoon she found an oppor- 
 tunity and summoned all her resolutions to the task. 
 
 Dickie was alone under the apple tree on the back lawn, 
 
434 THESE LYNNEKERS 
 
 and she held him by carrying out a chair and planting it 
 beside him. 
 
 "I have so wanted to have a little talk with you, dear," 
 she said nervously, committing herself as irrevocably as 
 she could for fear she should be tempted to equivocate. 
 
 "All serene, mater," Dickie agreed and smiled his en- 
 couragement. 
 
 "It's about our calling on the Groomes," she said. 
 
 "It wouldn't be the least use," Dickie replied promptly. 
 Edward, in the true Lynneker spirit, would have leapt at 
 the chance of sending his mother as an emissary, or per- 
 haps as a scout. 
 
 "Is it ... is it ... all ... off, dear ?" his mother ven- 
 tured timorously. 
 
 Dickie did not pretend to misunderstand her. "No," 
 he said. "I'm only waiting." 
 
 "For what ?" Mrs. Lynneker asked. 
 
 "For things generally to rearrange themselves," he said, 
 vaguely. 
 
 She puzzled over that for a moment and guessed some- 
 thing of his intention. "But, Dick," she persisted, "is there 
 any sort of understanding between you and her ?" 
 
 "Yes." 
 
 "But you told Adela we had imagined it all," she re- 
 monstrated. 
 
 Dickie frowned. "That wasn't true," he said. 
 
 "But why . . ." she began. 
 
 "Because I don't want to talk about it, even to you, 
 mater," Dickie said. "I've got a horror of the way Edward 
 used to go on. He was never in love, you know ; he never 
 coulc 1 be." 
 
 "D. ;k !" his mother protested in horror. "You don't 
 mean that he and Helen are not happy?" 
 
 "I daresay they're happy enough in their way," he said. 
 "They get on well enough, I suppose, just as most mar- 
 ried people do, like Latimer, I suppose, and Martyn, and 
 . . ." he looked at her steadily as he concluded his parallel, 
 "and as you and the pater did." 
 
THE MISSING INDUCTION 435 
 
 She winced slightly and pressed her lips into a thin 
 line, but she made no attempt at denial. 
 
 "It's our fault, you know," Dickie continued, "we Lyn- 
 nekers/I mean. We've got some decent qualities, but we're 
 vain, and weak and sentimental. We don't make good hus- 
 bands. We expect such a lot from our wives and they 
 see through us and we aren't worth it." 
 
 "But you aren't like that, dear," she interrupted him. 
 
 "No, I'm not," he said without hesitation. "And so 
 you mustn't expect me to be like Edward, now, mater. I'm 
 not going to make an emotional spectacle of myself in 
 order to get pity or admiration. I don't know that there 
 will ever be an engagement between Miss Groome and me. 
 But even if there was, I don't want it all sentimentalised 
 and . . . and pawed about, if you know what I mean. 
 I'm being a beast, I know, but you must understand." 
 
 He paused a moment, trying to collect his impressions 
 into one clear statement and then said, "I hate the business 
 of marriage. I would never be married in a church. I 
 would much sooner have no ceremony of any kind. No 
 third person has any concern in our vows. If they're the 
 proper kind of vows, they don't need to be witnessed." 
 
 "But, Dick . . ." Mrs. Lynneker exclaimed in great dis- 
 tress. 
 
 "Oh! Can't you understand, mater?" he implored her. 
 
 She did not. She never could. In his whole family, 
 every man and woman who bore the name of Lynneker, 
 there was not one who could have understood him. 
 
 "Is there any . . . any obstacle . . ." Mrs. Lynneker be- 
 gan apprehensively. 
 
 "The greatest possible," he returned. "My own filing 
 about it." oi 
 
 The resolution of all his vague shrinkings and distastes 
 had come to him as he had been speaking; thrust up from 
 his subconsciousness, even as the answer to his mathe- 
 matical problem had also been suddenly presented, clear 
 and undeniable. He saw in one unanticipated, unsought 
 flash of vision, that love alone, in all its aspects, was clear 
 
436 THESE LYNNEKERS 
 
 and beautiful until it was soiled by the regard of some 
 one from without. His own mother's curiosity could soil 
 it. There was not conceivably any third person who could 
 come so near understanding as to touch that sacred func- 
 tion in thought, without altering the relation of the two per- 
 sons who alone were concerned in it. No outsider could 
 ever enter their absolute. 
 
 And with that illumination came a sense that Sibyl, too, 
 must have come to the same realisation, and that he would 
 see her again within a few hours. He felt suddenly strong 
 and uplifted, full of certainty that his long waiting would 
 soon be determined. 
 
 He left his mother drooping and perplexed under the 
 apple tree, and went up to the wall under the elm, to stare 
 out, as he had stared many times during the past three 
 weeks, at the sloping grounds of Halton House. He could 
 see no sign of life, either in the kitchen garden that was 
 hung out so nakedly on the fall of the hill, nor in the 
 glimpses of lawn and flower-bed, that shone between the 
 trees around the house. But he decided that he would 
 wait no longer, that that evening he would adventure into 
 those gardens without invitation. He was warm with a 
 new certainty that Sibyl would be there, expecting him, 
 eager to welcome him. 
 
XVIII 
 THE TWO SACRAMENTS 
 
 HE made no excuse to his mother and sisters for not 
 joining them in the drawing-room after supper. It 
 was just eight o'clock when he left the house, and he had 
 two hours before him. He need not be back in time for 
 the abbreviated family prayers, now taken by his mother, 
 but he must fulfil his engagement with his father not later 
 than ten o'clock. He had noticed a change in the patient 
 that morning. He had only been capable of the feeblest 
 possible effort when his son had lifted him to a sitting 
 posture. 
 
 There could be no reason for hurrying, the Groomes 
 would not have finished dinner yet, but Dickie cut across 
 the stubble of the cornfield instead of following the path 
 down to the lane. He was conscious of a driving sense of 
 expectation ; he felt as if he had already delayed too long. 
 
 The lingering whiteness of sunset had almost faded out 
 of the north-west, leaving only a paler arc of sky on the 
 horizon behind the common; and the harvest moon, in its 
 first quarter, setting towards the south, was but a lover's 
 moon whose light was no more than a guide to the cover 
 of still deeper shadows. 
 
 Indeed, when he had come under the shade of the big 
 trees in the Halton House garden, he realised that even 
 were Sibyl out there in the weak moonlight, he might never 
 find her in that big, rambling place. His intuition had 
 failed him in this; he had no certainty of where he should 
 
 437 
 
438 THESE LYNNEKERS 
 
 meet her. Dimly he had pictured their meeting in the gar- 
 den, but there were a hundred possible rendezvous. 
 
 He was full of doubts and hesitations now that he was 
 so near her; diffident and nervous as he had never been in 
 all his life before. Even the thought of meeting her father 
 intimidated him. He was not ashamed, but he was held 
 by his discovery of that afternoon. Above everything he 
 desired that he should see no one but Sibyl that night. 
 
 Nevertheless his impatience urged him continually nearer 
 to the house. He was beset by his apprehension of being 
 too late. And he came, at last, stealthily as a thief down 
 the two flights of stone steps and to the edge of the lawn 
 in front of the drawing-room. 
 
 The French window stood wide open and a panel of light 
 lay across the gravel of the terrace path. Within the room 
 he could see Sibyl sitting on a Chesterfield, with her face 
 towards the garden. She was leaning forward, her elbows 
 on her knees and her chin supported in her hands. The 
 corners of her mouth drooped in an expression of forlorn 
 despair. 
 
 He could see no one else in the room and her attitude 
 and expression seemed in some way to proclaim the fact 
 that she was alone and knew herself unwatched. She had 
 surrendered herself so completely to the depression of her 
 spirit. 
 
 She saw him at once when he came quietly forward into 
 the panel of light that lay across the path, and she lifted 
 her head a little and stared out at him. She gave no sign 
 of alarm or surprise. She stared at him as she might have 
 stared at some deliberately provoked illusion. But the ex- 
 pression of misery slowly faded from her face as though 
 the conviction of his presence gradually mingled with the 
 fabric of her dreams. 
 
 "I am real," Dickie said, standing on the sill of the 
 French window. 
 
 She got to her feet, then, with the matter-of-fact air of 
 one who having made a decision has no further doubt as 
 to her future action. 
 
THE TWO SACRAMENTS 439 
 
 "I thought you were never coming," she said in a low 
 voice, and put up her hand to warn him that he, too, must 
 be very quiet. 
 
 "We can't talk here," she went on in a whisper. "Go up 
 the garden to the top gate I'll come to you, there, in 
 a few minutes." 
 
 He held out his hand to her, but she shook her head with 
 a little frown ; and then nodded imperatively and framed the 
 word "Go" with her lips. 
 
 He looked at her doubtfully for a moment, . and then 
 turned back into the weak moonlight. 
 
 He did not go up to the top gate. He waited for her 
 under the trees at the head of the first flight of steps. He 
 was afraid to go too far away from the house. He had 
 not been able to guess her intention ; he wondered whether 
 she had dismissed him by a trick because she dared not 
 face his pleading. Perhaps she had thought that he might 
 insist on seeing her father. 
 
 He was full of a great impatience. It seemed to him that 
 he was on the verge of some wonderful realisation of him- 
 self and of life, that might yet be for ever hidden from 
 him. He believed that if he did not see Sibyl that evening, 
 she would be finally lost to him. He had lost his con- 
 fidence in her and in himself. The night and the garden 
 gave him no sense of tangible, ductible realities. He was 
 weak with the feebleness of the dreamer furiously opposing 
 and defeated by gossamer. Only Sibyl was real to him 
 and while he despairingly desired her presence, he felt 
 powerless to find her or to command her if she could be 
 found. 
 
 And over all, the consciousness that he had no time to 
 spare continually fretted him. Nothing must prevent him 
 from being back at the Rectory by ten o'clock. That ap- 
 pointment with his father was an essential, sacred thing; 
 he felt that not even this meeting with Sibyl must inter- 
 fere with that. He took out his watch but it was too 
 dark to see the time under the trees, and as he made a 
 furtive movement down the steps towards a clear patch of 
 
440 THESE LYNNEKERS 
 
 moonlight, he heard the grave deliberate toll of the church 
 clock striking nine. The sound of it came to him as the 
 sound of a warning, as a solemn voice that had answered 
 his question and cautioned him that no more than an hour 
 of his time remained. 
 
 He was at the foot of the steps when he saw Sibyl come 
 suddenly out into the panel of lamplight that was splayed 
 across the gravel of the terrace path. 
 
 And when she had come to him, without reproof for 
 disobeying her command, and had silently put her hand 
 in his, his sense of urgency and doubt vanished, fading out 
 of his mind as the last vibration of the church bell throbbed 
 mournfully into silence. . . . 
 
 She did not speak until they were at the top of the second 
 flight of steps and out of earshot of the house. 
 
 "I want to tell you, dear," she said, then. "Listen to 
 me before you say anything. You've got to agree, you 
 know, before we can decide anything. Let's go up to the 
 top of the garden. I shall feel safer there, and it's where 
 we parted last time. So much has happened since then." 
 
 He pressed her hand. "I won't interrupt," he said. 
 "Go on." 
 
 "You see," she began, "I've had the most awful time with 
 father since I saw you, how long ago is it ?" 
 
 "Rather more than a fortnight," he said. 
 
 "It seems years," she commented, and went on: "He 
 knew, of course, directly I got back to him about you 
 and me, and he began to talk to me about it at once. He 
 said that he wouldn't attempt to stop my marrying you 
 if I wanted to, but at the same time he made it absolutely 
 impossible. He didn't explain at all, you know his way, 
 but he just made me feel that I was throwing him over. 
 He pretended in a way not to mind, but . . . well, how 
 could I desert him like that? 
 
 "And the next day we talked it all over in a much 
 more friendly way. It's my thought for him he wants. 
 He has always said that. You know, dear, don't you, 
 how he talks of being so alone? And I couldn't do any- 
 
THE TWO SACRAMENTS 441 
 
 thing, I thought, except make up my mind to forget all 
 about you. I don't see that I could have decided to do 
 anything else, then? So we agreed about it, and I prom- 
 ised, and kept out of your way when you went in to Med- 
 borough that day, and father told Hanson that he wouldn't 
 see you if you called. And I did try most frightfully hard 
 to forget all about you. But, oh! Dickie, of course, I 
 couldn't; and it kept on getting worse and worse every 
 day. Sometimes I would be all right for quite a long time 
 and then I wouldn't; and every time I thought of you, 
 father knew, and even if he didn't say anything, I knew 
 that he was hurt. 
 
 "Well, it finished this afternoon, really. He gave me 
 two alternatives. He said either I must give him up or 
 you. He said we would go to the Riviera for the winter 
 if I gave you up, and that I must decide one way or the 
 other before to-morrow. That was just before dinner, 
 only we didn't have any. He was taken up to his own 
 room and I couldn't eat anything. I just sat in the draw- 
 ing-room and longed for you. I was sure you would come, 
 and then when you did come, I didn't believe it was you, 
 at first. But that settled it." She squeezed his hand very 
 tightly as she continued, "I went straight up and told him. 
 I simply said that it wasn't a question of alternatives at 
 all, that I could no more help thinking of you than I could 
 help breathing." 
 
 They had come, now, to the overgrown garden at the 
 top of the hill, and as she made her last confession, he 
 could just see her face as a vague light against the dark- 
 ness. "What can I do, Dickie?" she pleaded. "You have 
 always been so certain about everything; be certain now." 
 
 He drew her close to him and bent down till his cheek 
 lay against hers. 
 
 "There isn't anything to be certain about," he said. "You 
 can't help yourself. You've just said that you haven't any 
 choice. If your father only wanted your attendance, or 
 wanted you as a nurse, it would be another thing, wouldn't 
 it? But he wants your thoughts and you can't give them 
 
442 THESE LYNNEKERS 
 
 to him. I am sorry for him, but he has got to give you 
 up. I expect he has done it already. He must know well 
 enough that he has lost you." 
 
 "But isn't it my duty ... ?" she whispered. 
 
 "That doesn't mean anything," Dickie said. "You're not 
 thinking of us and him; you're thinking of some idea of 
 duty that doesn't apply to us three. He wants too much 
 from you ; if he wanted less you might feel that you ought 
 to give it to him. But he wants something you can't 
 give." 
 
 He knew that his thought had not been expressed, but he 
 knew, also, that she understood. The figures of his own 
 father and of Philip Groome were there with them as a 
 tragic presentiment of inevitable failure. Neither could 
 give himself by thrusting out into life, and neither could 
 draw life down and back into his own solitude. 
 
 "He is alone," Dickie concluded. "You can't ever go 
 back and be with him in the way you used to be. In a 
 way, I think, you've just been born." 
 
 "You're always so sure," she said, and nestled a little 
 closer to him as if she found comfort and rest in his stead- 
 fastness. "But you are right," she went on, "about this, I 
 mean, I know you're right. We can't help ourselves, 
 can we?" 
 
 "We can't; we can't," he answered her passionately. His 
 time was running out and he wanted to waste no more of 
 it in vain arguments and considerations. In a few minutes, 
 now, he must leave her and fulfil the duty he had under- 
 taken. Nothing could keep him from that plain task; 
 but he found no satisfaction in any ethical reflection on 
 moral responsibilities. He had learnt that lesson long ago 
 when he was in the Bank of Medborough, and had attempted 
 to uphold the principle of justice which George Smith of 
 the Loan Company had so obviously violated. And he had 
 discovered that he was not able to arbitrate on these ques- 
 tions of "right" and "wrong" ; that no one was able to lay 
 down a universal rule of conduct. All he could do was to 
 satisfy his own sense of what was right for himself; and 
 
THE TWO SACRAMENTS 443 
 
 refuse to express, or even to feel, judgment and criticism 
 of other people. 
 
 "I never tried to fight against my love for you, dear, after 
 that first day at Oakstone," he went on. "I hadn't ever 
 cared before for any one like this. I've never had any 
 sort of love affair. And, now, I want . . ." 
 
 She clung to him eagerly. "What do you want, dar- 
 ling?" she asked, and then added inconsequently, "I feel 
 such a little thing." - 
 
 He drew her down to her knees and knelt before her 
 in the darkness. "I want our love to be all our own. I 
 don't want it talked about and stared at. If we get mar- 
 ried, it must be as quietly as possible and it must be 
 afterwards, if you know what I mean, dear? That legal 
 business isn't for us at all; it's only a kind of registration. 
 Our love hasn't anything to do with any one else. We 
 must make our vows to each other without witnesses. Do 
 you know what I mean, dear? Don't you feel like that, 
 too?" 
 
 He felt her heart throbbing violently against his ; and they 
 clung to each other like two frightened children. There, 
 in the stillness and the darkness, the world had vanished 
 and they were alone; and afraid; and yet passionately de- 
 sirous to draw closer together. 
 
 "Oh! Dickie, I do love you so," she whispered, as she 
 put her lips to his. 
 
 ii 
 
 The church clock struck ten as he ran back across the 
 cornfield, but the sound of the deep bell, ringing out in the 
 night, held, now, no note of warning, rather, it seemed, 
 in its slow, deliberate way, to solemnise the fulfilment of 
 a vow. 
 
 They were all up when he went in and his mother looked 
 up at him with an expression that was half-apprehensive, 
 half -eager. 
 
444 THESE LYNNEKERS 
 
 "We didn't like to go to bed until you came in," Adela 
 said. "We weren't sure ... we think he must be very 
 near the end. . . ." 
 
 "Are you going up to him?" Eleanor asked harshly, and 
 before he could reply she added, "Where have you been ?" 
 
 "Of course, I'm going up to him," Dickie said, "now; 
 at once. It's only just ten. It struck as I came across the 
 field. I never go up before ten." 
 
 "Have you been down at the Groomes', then?" Eleanor 
 persisted. 
 
 "Yes," Dickie said, impatiently. "But what makes you 
 think he is ... worse, to-night? I thought this morn- 
 ing . . ." 
 
 "He's hardly breathing," Adela said. 
 
 "Have you seen him, then?" Dickie asked. 
 
 "We've all been up to him," Eleanor said. "We couldn't 
 think what had become of you." 
 
 Mrs. Lynneker standing timidly behind her two daughters 
 looked anxiously to Dickie for help. 
 
 "Do you think, dear, we ought to send for Mr. Wat- 
 son?" she asked. 
 
 "Whatever for?" Dickie said. 
 
 "Oughtn't he to have the Sacrament ?" his mother pleaded 
 apologetically. 
 
 Dickie shrugged his shoulders. "Even if he wanted to 
 have it, he couldn't swallow either the bread or the wine," 
 he said. "And you remember, when he took it a month 
 ago, he said that that would probably be the last time." 
 
 "It seems so dreadful," Mrs. Lynneker began and sighed 
 miserably; but her expression was one of weariness and 
 anxiety rather than sorrow. "You don't think we ought 
 to send for Edward?" she concluded. 
 
 "It does seem rather awful that we can't do anything," 
 Adela agreed. 
 
 "Some one must sit up with him," Eleanor added. 
 
 "I'll sit up with him," Dickie said. 
 
 The three women followed him as he went upstairs, 
 but they did not go into the room with him. 
 
THE TWO SACRAMENTS 445 
 
 A lamp was burning on the table by the bed, and Dickie 
 went over and stared down intently at the passing emblem 
 of humanity that still confined the spirit of his father. 
 
 "Shall I help you now, father?" he askd. 
 
 For one moment the Rector's eyelids flickered, and very 
 feebly he shook his head. 
 
 Dickie troubled him no further, but went out to the 
 little group of figures huddled together on the landing. 
 
 "I think it may be all over to-night," he whispered. "He 
 is still conscious, but he doesn't want to be moved." 
 
 "Shall you stay with him?" Adela asked, under her 
 breath. 
 
 Dickie nodded and added, "I'll call you if there is any 
 need." 
 
 "He might want . . . just at the last ... to see us, 
 perhaps ?" his mother suggested, timidly. 
 
 "If he does, I'll fetch you," Dickie said. 
 
 "I shan't go to bed," Eleanor announced. 
 
 "I don't see that it will help, sitting up," Adela com- 
 mented. "I could slip into my dressing-gown in no time 
 if I were wanted." 
 
 "Well, you may as well go upstairs, now," Dickie sug- 
 gested. "It won't help to go on whispering out here on 
 the landing. I've got to come up, too, to fetch some 
 work." 
 
 He kissed them all good-night, but when he had fetched 
 Levinson's new calculations, a block of paper and a book 
 of logarithms from his own room, he found his mother 
 at her door, waiting for him. She did not speak, but she 
 put out her arms to him and kissed him again with a kind 
 of gentle fervour. He understood that he was still being 
 "an immense comfort" to her. . . . 
 
 He had been through a wonderful emotional experience 
 that evening and he was now set down for several hours 
 in conditions that might well have stirred him to strange 
 reflections and visions, but the habit of work he had ac- 
 quired was too strong to be overcome even by those calls 
 upon his imagination. Within five minutes he had settled 
 
446 THESE LYNNEKERS 
 
 himself at the table and was deep in his calculations. Once 
 or twice he was disturbed by the moths that came and 
 fluttered round his lamp and after one or two such inter- 
 ruptions, he got up and almost closed the uncurtained case- 
 ment window. Every now and again he would go over 
 to the bed and stare at the grey face on the pillow and 
 listen to the faint, almost imperceptible respiration that 
 still slowly and reluctantly maintained the thin pulse of 
 life in that incredibly emaciated body. Occasionally he 
 would pause when he had conclusively ticked some stage 
 of his calculations, and look up with a sudden softening 
 of his expression and attitude, that had a suggestion of 
 thanksgiving for the new tenderness that had come into 
 his life. But always he returned after a few seconds to 
 the work that lay before him. 
 
 The fluttering of leaves as he flicked over the pages 
 of his log-books ; the intermittent muttering of his pencil as 
 he decisively cast his calculations into symbols; or the 
 abrupt spasmodic creaking of chair or table as he changed 
 his position, were the only sounds that challenged the 
 perfect stillness of the night. The grey figure on the bed 
 never moved its position, nor opened its eyes. 
 
 It was a little after five when Dickie finished the work 
 he had brought down, and looking up he saw that the 
 window was no longer a range of three opaque oblongs that 
 reflected the lighted interior of the room. A greyness was 
 coming in the East; a black silhouette of leaves and 
 branches was just visible against the distant lift of the 
 sky. 
 
 He got up and threw two of the casements wide open 
 and was aware that a sweet, cool air was moving out- 
 side and began to blow into the room. There was a faint 
 rustling and whispering among the trees, the little conse- 
 quential stir and chatter of the things that were waking 
 to the dawn. 
 
 He rested his elbows on the high sill of the window and 
 leaned his head and shoulders out into the fresh, sharp 
 air. His mind was suddenly relieved from the strain of 
 
THE TWO SACRAMENTS 447 
 
 attention to his figures. He felt amazingly clear-headed 
 and vigorous, and yet, for once, the slave rather than the 
 master of his thoughts. 
 
 And as the sky brightened in the east until the out- 
 line of the great elm at the top of the garden began to 
 bulk as a definite shadow against the fading darkness, and 
 one by one the familiar objects of the day grew again 
 out of the obscurity of the night, he had a vision of life 
 and continuity and some half -hidden meaning that lay be- 
 hind his questioning of the image of Halton Church; of 
 the great Gothic monuments in London and in Europe; 
 of the long succession of his own family through the 
 generations that had left, here and there, a record of 
 their passing on English life ; and of that stoic figure of his 
 father who was even then come to a determination of his 
 earthly destiny. 
 
 At that moment, all these symbols seemed to him as one, 
 presenting the thought of something that endured through- 
 out all the changing, evolving form of life. The stable 
 proclamation of Halton Tower was akin in some way to 
 the courage of his father's dying, and akin to the boast of 
 a family maintaining its modest traditions through eight 
 centuries of English history. Those different shapes and 
 meanings of endurance all spoke of an inalterable spirit 
 that persisted through every phase of its temporary cele- 
 brations. He, himself, had come to the beginning of a 
 century that was great with the promise of development. 
 But that promise, however splendidly fulfilled whether by 
 its social or merely mechanical progress, could reach but 
 one more phase in the long movement. And no stage must 
 be judged as an absolute, or even relatively better or worse 
 than the stage that preceded or followed it. Behind all 
 progress and all life was this permanent spirit of en- 
 durance, of resistance, of power: endurance to maintain 
 the truth of independence to all material pains and changes ; 
 resistance to demonstrate the transience of the image; 
 power to prove that while the symbol may be changed, the 
 
448 THESE LYNNEKERS 
 
 spirit shall endure inalterable to find ever new forms of 
 expression. 
 
 That was Dickie's personal solution. He did not seek to 
 enquire whither the spirit tended, nor even whether there 
 were, perhaps, some ultimate goal towards which he might 
 ideally aspire. . . . 
 
 The morning chorus of happy birds had risen to ecstatic 
 twitterings among the branches of the limes outside the 
 window; the great elm had taken to itself anew its own 
 solidity and colour; and in the east the rim of the flaming 
 sun had come to quench the last glimmer of the fainting 
 stars. 
 
 He turned back with a sigh of relief to extinguish the 
 wan flame of the unnecessary lamp, and it seemed to him 
 that a thin draught of cold air blew past him and escaped 
 into the warmth of dawn. 
 
 He bent over the bed and then fell on his knees beside 
 it, listening now for the beat of a heart that had ceased, 
 even as in the same posture he had thrilled a few hours 
 before to the throb of a heart that beat so close to his 
 own. 
 
 The spirit of the Rector had passed so silently that his 
 son had heard no sound of its last effort to win to 
 freedom. 
 
XIX 
 THE LYNNEKER FAMILY 
 
 THE dining-room table was never very steady when it 
 was extended to its greatest length by the addition 
 of two extra leaves; and Mrs. Lynneker's satisfaction in 
 contemplating the largeness of the party sitting down to 
 supper, was rather spoilt by her apprehension of a catas- 
 trophe. Dickie, sitting unhappily just at the most untrust- 
 worthy junction, had an alarming habit of suddenly plant- 
 ing his elbows on the cloth, and whenever he did that, 
 his mother's attention was horribly distracted from the 
 pleasantly soothing conversation she was holding with Mar- 
 tyn. Dickie was so uncompromisingly solid. The other 
 three men looked slender and fragile by the side of him, 
 even Latimer who seemed likely to prove an exception to 
 the rule that none of the Lynneker men ever grew fat 
 already he was developing what Martyn had called an im- 
 pressive local embonpoint. Aunt Mary, who was shrivelling 
 with age, although her eyes still shone with the old fire of 
 conviction, looked as if she would have gone into Dickie's 
 pocket. Only Mrs. Latimer, dark and .full-bodied, could 
 challenge any physical comparison with this youngest Lyn- 
 neker of his generation. And she had, also, something of 
 Dickie's plain habit of speech. Old Mrs. Lynneker, who 
 had constantly to keep watch on her inclination to address 
 her daughter-in-law as Mrs. Blackwell, was intimidated by 
 that self-reliant, confident woman. Helen's solidity was so 
 much less aggressive. Mrs. Lynneker was very fond of 
 Helen. . . . 
 
 449 
 
450 THESE LYNNEKERS 
 
 Martyn, keenly aware of his aunt's anxiety, drew his 
 cousin's attention to it, at last. 
 
 "Aunt Catherine is getting a little nervous, Dick," he 
 said, "of your tremendous assaults upon the table." 
 
 "Oh! it's all right, mater," Dickie assured her. "It's a 
 bit rickety, but it can't go. I had a look at it this after- 
 noon before the leaves were put in." He gripped the table 
 by the edge and gave it a confident shake. 
 
 Mrs. Lynneker's hand went up nervously to her mouth. 
 "Oh ! the epergne, darling ; you'll certainly have it over," 
 she implored him. 
 
 "All serene, mater; I'll be careful," he said. 
 
 "You forget how strong you are, Dick," Aunt Mary's 
 thin, sweet voice came from the other end of the table 
 with the effect of a little chiming clock. 
 
 Mrs. Latimer smiled rather superciliously. "It is the 
 weak people who break things," she said. 
 
 "Oh ! I don't know ; do you think so, Julia ?" her husband 
 put in with an air that was slightly apologetic. "We've 
 always looked upon Dick as a blunderer." 
 
 "He seems to have blundered to some purpose," Julia 
 commented dryly. 
 
 "What'll this post of yours at the Observatory lead to ?" 
 asked Edward from the top of the table. 
 
 "Nothing particular," mumbled Dickie. 
 
 "You might become Astronomer Royal, Dick," Martyn 
 suggested. 
 
 "I might," Dickie agreed carelessly; "but I certainly 
 shan't, you know. That isn't my job, at all." 
 
 Latimer raised his eyebrows. "Why ever not?" he 
 asked. 
 
 "I don't want to be a public functionary," Dickie re- 
 turned. 
 
 "Dick has no ambitions," put in Eleanor. 
 
 "Oh ! I have," he expostulated. "I'd like to do something 
 useful; formulate some practical theory of the nebulae, 
 or something like that. It'll take me ten years' grind, of 
 course, to get familiar with the detail of astronomical 
 
THE LYNNEKER FAMILY 451 
 
 work. Levinson says he's going to put me on to observa- 
 tion as soon as he can, in connexion with the big star map 
 they're making." 
 
 "Eventually you'll go down to fame, I suppose?" asked 
 Latimer. 
 
 "It's the means rather than the end that interests me," 
 Dickie said. 
 
 "That's pure side," Latimer urged. 
 
 "Is it?" Dickie asked, looking at his brother with a 
 complacent grin. "Well, you always thought I was too 
 cock-sure. I say, haven't we all finished?" 
 
 Old Mrs. Lynneker sighed as she rose from the table. 
 This wonderful son of hers was no less a mystery than 
 he had ever been. She touched his arm fondly as she went 
 out. "I know you're going to be famous one of these 
 days," she whispered. 
 
 "And I hear we are to congratulate you upon another 
 engagement, Dick," Martyn said when the four men were 
 alone. 
 
 "Thanks," Dickie said quietly. 
 
 "Is the marriage going to be soon?" Martyn asked. 
 
 "Very soon," Dickie returned, "and very inconspicuous." 
 
 His two brothers were watching him with an evident 
 shade of jealousy. 
 
 "I suppose you know Lord Wansford?" Latimer asked. 
 
 Dickie shook his head. "I'm not marrying the family," 
 he remarked. 
 
 Edwarcl blinked a nervous deprecation of his brother's 
 rudeness. "Do they disapprove?" he asked. 
 
 "I haven't consulted them," Dickie returned. 
 
 "At all events some of Miss Groome's family don't dis- 
 approve," Martyn said. "I hear that the Bishop is coming 
 over to take the funeral to-morrow." 
 
 "Good Lord, Martyn," Dickie expostulated. "I hope you 
 don't think he is going to do that on my account; or that 
 his approval or disapproval of me would make any differ- 
 ence. I think Olivier's a decent chap enough to come for 
 the pater's sake." 
 
452 THESE LYNNEKERS 
 
 Martyn looked up with his steady, charming smile. 
 "Quite, Dick; quite," he said. "Nevertheless I take it that 
 Olivier does not disapprove your engagement to his niece." 
 
 "Doesn't seem to," mumbled Dickie. 
 
 "His manners don't improve with age, do they?" com- 
 mented Latimer. 
 
 Edward clicked his tongue and tossed his head. "He is 
 the most extraordinary chap," he said. 
 
 Dickie regarded his two clerical brothers with a thought- 
 ful stare. "I daresay you're right," he said, "only, why 
 for Heaven's sake can't you leave me alone ? I don't criti- 
 cise you for being ordinary." 
 
 The blood was coming into Edward's face, but Latimer 
 made a praiseworthy effort to keep his temper. 
 
 "That's simply a verbal quibble," he said. "Although, of 
 course, if you regard the common conventions of politeness 
 as rot, we are ordinary to that extent. We happen to be- 
 lieve in behaving decently." 
 
 "Yes, I know," agreed Dickie. 
 
 "And you think your opinion is of more value than any- 
 body else's?" 
 
 Dickie turned to Martyn. "Why does everybody accuse 
 me of being so self-opinionated ?" he asked with a whimsical 
 smile. "I don't criticise people. I don't want to alter them. 
 But just because I speak as I feel about things, every one 
 accuses me of wanting to shove my opinion down their 
 throats." 
 
 Edward's impatience was warming to the flash point, 
 but Martyn's smooth, equable voice prevented the explo- 
 sion. "I rather fancy, my dear Dick," he said, "that it's 
 because we are just a little envious of certain qualities in 
 you. More especially we Lynnekers, as a family. We are 
 apt, you know, to take the line of least resistance; and it 
 annoys us to see you succeeding so admirably by, I feel 
 inclined to say by the more honest, certainly by more 
 courageous means." 
 
 "Oh ! well, it doesn't matter, does it ?" Dickie returned. 
 
 "You can't even acknowledge a compliment decently," 
 
THE LYNNEKER FAMILY 453 
 
 snapped Edward. It annoyed him that Martyn, taking 
 his own line of least resistance, should have been weak 
 enough to defer to Dickie. 
 
 "I say, we haven't altered much in the last eight years," 
 Dickie remarked by way of changing the conversation. "We 
 were going on exactly like this the night before you were 
 married, Ted. Do you remember being frightfully riled 
 with me and upsetting the salt?" 
 
 Martyn's suave, musical laugh completed the reconcilia- 
 tion. "I remember perfectly," he said. 
 
 Edward smiled his forgiveness. "You always had a 
 habit of getting me on the raw," he said magnanimously. 
 "You do blunder into one's sensibilities so recklessly. Really, 
 you know, Dick, I do think you might have a little more 
 regard for other people's feelings." 
 
 There was some look on Latimer's face that reminded 
 Dickie of that old quarrel about the equation. Latimer's 
 position had amply confirmed him in his reading of the 
 printed answer; of the accepted code that had provided 
 him with such a comfortable niche in the established order 
 of society. "Admit you're wrong," his expression said, 
 now ; and he was surely justified in believing that no last- 
 ing benefit could come from any attempt to work out his 
 own answer to the complicated equation of life. He found 
 a satisfying solution displayed in the world's code, and 
 whether it were theoretically right or wrong, he meant to 
 make his own working agree with it. 
 
 II 
 
 During the bustle and entertainment of supper no refer- 
 ence had been made to the influence that had thus brought 
 the family together again under the old roof. The two 
 Culver girls, who had gone to live at Bath since the Canon's 
 death, were absent, and Mrs. Latimer was a new, and in 
 
454 THESE LYNNEKERS 
 
 some way an unaccepted, addition to the old circle; with 
 those exceptions, and one other, it was the same group that 
 had met to celebrate Edward's wedding. But when they 
 were all collected together in the drawing-room, some con- 
 sciousness of the real difference between this meeting and 
 all others in the same room began to stir in the minds of 
 those who remembered so keenly the place and its associa- 
 tions. 
 
 The Rector's chair had instinctively been avoided by 
 them all, until Mrs. Latimer, unaware of any reason why 
 the most comfortable chair in the room should remain 
 unoccupied, deliberately crossed over from the sofa and 
 sat down in it. 
 
 Edward, standing on the hearth-rug, fidgeted uncom- 
 fortably, and looked at Latimer with a weak, deprecatory 
 smile, but both of them were too ashamed of appearing 
 sentimental to offer any protest. Eleanor, with her hands 
 tightly clenched together in her lap, appeared to be bearing 
 this new trial in the bitterly Christian spirit that had so 
 far supported her through all oppressions and insults. Mrs. 
 Lynneker, with her lips set, was staring down at the floor 
 with an expression of patient resignation. Whatever re- 
 gret she felt was no doubt more easily to be borne than 
 the risk of a sharp retort from her bold, intimidating 
 daughter-in-law. Dickie and Adela, alone, appeared to be 
 quite unaffected. 
 
 "Well," Edward remarked at last, looking at his watch, 
 "Helen and I have to drive home, you know, mater. Hadn't 
 we better have prayers?" 
 
 Old Mrs. Lynneker thankfully accepted the suggestion. 
 "Shall we have a hymn?" she asked. 
 
 Edward nodded gravely. "I think so," he said, and 
 looked questioningly at his mother as if he expected her 
 to make some particular suggestion. 
 
 She understood his thought, and framed the words, 
 "Abide with Me," with her lips, as if she were afraid to 
 trust herself to mention the Rector's favourite hymn. 
 
THE LYNNEKER FAMILY 455 
 
 Edward nodded again. "You play it, mater," he said, as 
 Eleanor made a movement towards the piano. 
 
 He rang the bell for the two maids while *his mother 
 took down the big hymn book, put on her spectacles and 
 settled herself on the music stool. 
 
 But when the maids had come in, and they were all 
 waiting for him, he seemed to find a difficulty in giving 
 out the hymn in the usual form. He hesitated through a 
 long silence of expectation before he made his announce- 
 ment in the briefest possible words. "Twenty-seven," he 
 said in an embarrassed aside to the two maids. 
 
 For the first two or three lines they all sang together 
 with a brave determination to show a fine self-control be- 
 fore the servants; and then the harmony grew weaker 
 as one singer after the other fell out. 
 
 Edward had half turned his back to the room. Latimer 
 was bending over his mother at the piano as if he found 
 great difficulty in reading the very large print of the hymn- 
 book from which she was playing with an occasional pa- 
 thetic inaccuracy. Eleanor stared before her with a set, 
 determined face, stoically enduring the pain of this last 
 act of self-sacrifice she had been called upon to make. 
 Aunt Mary and Helen were crying silently and unob- 
 trusively; and Adela appeared to be lost in some melan- 
 choly but not actively unpleasant reverie. Martyn's sense 
 of fitness, no doubt, kept him silent. And so, at last, only 
 Mrs. Latimer was left to maintain the hymn in her full, 
 unsympathetic contralto. She was a stranger it was im- 
 possible to believe that her two children would have any- 
 thing in common with the Lynnekers. 
 
 Dickie, erect and thoughtful, was wondering whether it 
 would have made any difference in his father's life if all 
 this sympathy and emotion had been lavished upon him 
 while he was still able to appreciate it. If his wife and 
 children had tried to understand him better, he might have 
 entered more freely into their lives. He had been proud 
 of them all ; and yet he had built himself deeper and deeper 
 into his reserves until, at last, his spirit had crept away 
 
456 THESE LYNNEKERS 
 
 into some final solitude without a word of farewell or 
 regret. . . . 
 
 But, in any case, Dickie would not have joined in the 
 hymn. 
 
 He had never been able to sing in tune. 
 
 THE END 
 
IB DP* w THE LAST P 
 TOW 
 
I L. 
 
 393837 
 
 UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA LIBRARY