"Why mustn't I?"

"It's wrong. You can't talk like that when we are both enjoying the hospitality--"

A wild laugh, almost a howl, disturbed the talk of the most adjacent of the perambulating relations. Colonel Horace Mant, checked in mid-sentence, looked up resentfully at the cause of the interruption.

"I wish somebody would tell me whether it's that American fellow, Emerson, or young Freddie who's supposed to be engaged to Miss Peters. Hanged if you ever see her and Freddie together, but she and Emerson are never to be found apart. If my respected father-in-law had any sense I should have thought he would have had sense enough to stop that."

"You forget, my dear Horace," said the bishop charitably; "Miss Peters and Mr. Emerson have known each other since they were children."

"They were never nearly such children as Emsworth is now,"

snorted the colonel. "If that girl isn't in love with Emerson I'll be--I'll eat my hat."

"No, no," said the bishop. "No, no! Surely not, Horace. What were you saying when you broke off?"

"I was saying that if a man wanted his relations never to speak to each other again for the rest of their lives the best thing he could do would be to herd them all together in a dashed barrack of a house a hundred miles from anywhere, and then go off and spend all his time prodding dashed flower beds with a spud--dash it!"

"Just so; just so. So you were. Go on, Horace; I find a curious comfort in your words."

On the terrace above them Aline was looking at George with startled eyes.

"George!"

"I'm sorry; but you shouldn't spring these jokes on me so suddenly. You said enjoying! Yes--reveling in it, aren't we!"

"It's a lovely old place," said Aline defensively.

"And when you've said that you've said everything. You can't live on scenery and architecture for the rest of your life. There's the human element to be thought of. And you're beginning--"

"There goes father," interrupted Aline. "How fast he is walking!

George, have you noticed a sort of difference in father these last few days?"

"I haven't. My specialty is keeping an eye on the rest of the Peters family."

"He seems better somehow. He seems to have almost stopped smoking--and I'm very glad, for those cigars were awfully bad for him. The doctor expressly told him he must stop them, but he wouldn't pay any attention to him. And he seems to take so much more exercise. My bedroom is next to his, you know, and every morning I can hear things going on through the wall--father dancing about and puffing a good deal. And one morning I met his valet going in with a pair of Indian clubs. I believe father is really taking himself in hand at last."

George Emerson exploded.

"And about time, too! How much longer are you to go on starving yourself to death just to give him the resolution to stick to his dieting? It maddens me to see you at dinner. And it's killing you. You're getting pale and thin. You can't go on like this."

A wistful look came over Aline's face.

"I do get a little hungry sometimes--late at night generally."

"You want somebody to take care of you and look after you. I'm the man. You may think you can fool me; but I can tell. You're weakening on this Freddie proposition. You're beginning to see that it won't do. One of these days you're going to come to me and say: 'George, you were right. I take the count. Me for the quiet sneak to the station, without anybody knowing, and the break for London, and the wedding at the registrar's.' Oh, I know! I couldn't have loved you all this time and not know.

You're weakening."

The trouble with these supermen is that they lack reticence. They do not know how to omit. They expand their chests and whoop. And a girl, even the mildest and sweetest of girls--even a girl like Aline Peters--cannot help resenting the note of triumph. But supermen despise tact. As far as one can gather, that is the chief difference between them and the ordinary man.

A little frown appeared on Aline's forehead and she set her mouth mutinously.

"I'm not weakening at all," she said, and her voice was--for her--quite acid. "You--you take too much for granted."

George was contemplating the landscape with a conqueror's eye.

"You are beginning to see that it is impossible--this Freddie foolishness."

"It is not foolishness," said Aline pettishly, tears of annoyance in her eyes. "And I wish you wouldn't call him Freddie."

"He asked me to. He asked me to!"

Aline stamped her foot.

"Well, never mind. Please don't do it."

"Very well, little girl," said George softly. "I wouldn't do anything to hurt you."

The fact that it never even occurred to George Emerson he was being offensively patronizing shows the stern stuff of which these supermen are made.

The Efficient Baxter bicycled broodingly to Market Blandings for tobacco. He brooded for several reasons. He had just seen Aline Peters and George Emerson in confidential talk on the upper terrace, and that was one thing which exercised his mind, for he suspected George Emerson. He suspected him nebulously as a snake in the gra.s.s; as an influence working against the orderly progress of events concerning the marriage that had been arranged and would shortly take place between Miss Peters and the Honorable Frederick Threepwood.

It would be too much to say that he had any idea that George was putting in such hard and consistent work in his serpentine role; indeed if he could have overheard the conversation just recorded it is probable that Rupert Baxter would have had heart failure; but he had observed the intimacy between the two as he observed most things in his immediate neighborhood, and he disapproved of it. It was all very well to say that George Emerson had known Aline Peters since she was a child. If that was so, then in the opinion of the Efficient Baxter he had known her quite long enough and ought to start making the acquaintance of somebody else.

He blamed the Honorable Freddie. If the Honorable Freddie had been a more ardent lover he would have spent his time with Aline, and George Emerson would have taken his proper place as one of the crowd at the back of the stage. But Freddie's view of the matter seemed to be that he had done all that could be expected of a chappie in getting engaged to the girl, and that now he might consider himself at liberty to drop her for a while.

So Baxter, as he bicycled to Market Blandings for tobacco, brooded on Freddie, Aline Peters and George Emerson. He also brooded on Mr. Peters and Ashe Marson. Finally he brooded in a general way, because he had had very little sleep the past week.

The spectacle of a young man doing his duty and enduring considerable discomforts while doing it is painful; but there is such uplift in it, it affords so excellent a moral picture, that I cannot omit a short description of the manner in which Rupert Baxter had spent the nights which had elapsed since his meeting with Ashe in the small hours in the hall.

In the gallery which ran above the hall there was a large chair, situated a few paces from the great staircase. On this, in an overcoat--for the nights were chilly--and rubber-soled shoes, the Efficient Baxter had sat, without missing a single night, from one in the morning until daybreak, waiting, waiting, waiting. It had been an ordeal to try the stoutest determination. Nature had never intended Baxter for a night bird. He loved his bed. He knew that doctors held that insufficient sleep made a man pale and sallow, and he had always aimed at the peach-bloom complexion which comes from a sensible eight hours between the sheets.

One of the King Georges of England--I forget which--once said that a certain number of hours' sleep each night--I cannot recall at the moment how many--made a man something, which for the time being has slipped my memory. Baxter agreed with him. It went against all his instincts to sit up in this fashion; but it was his duty and he did it.

It troubled him that, as night after night went by and Ashe, the suspect, did not walk into the trap so carefully laid for him, he found an increasing difficulty in keeping awake. The first two or three of his series of vigils he had pa.s.sed in an unimpeachable wakefulness, his chin resting on the rail of the gallery and his ears alert for the slightest sound; but he had not been able to maintain this standard of excellence.

On several occasions he had caught himself in the act of dropping off, and the last night he had actually wakened with a start to find it quite light. As his last recollection before that was of an inky darkness impenetrable to the eye, dismay gripped him with a sudden clutch and he ran swiftly down to the museum. His relief on finding that the scarab was still there had been tempered by thoughts of what might have been.

Baxter, then, as he bicycled to Market Blandings for tobacco, had good reason to brood. Having bought his tobacco and observed the life and thought of the town for half an hour--it was market day and the normal stagnation of the place was temporarily relieved and brightened by pigs that eluded their keepers, and a bull calf which caught a stout farmer at the psychological moment when he was tying his shoe lace and lifted him six feet--he made his way to the Emsworth Arms, the most respectable of the eleven inns the citizens of Market Blandings contrived in some miraculous way to support.

In English country towns, if the public houses do not actually outnumber the inhabitants, they all do an excellent trade. It is only when they are two to one that hard times. .h.i.t them and set the innkeepers to blaming the government.

It was not the busy bar, full to overflowing with honest British yeomen--many of them in a similar condition--that Baxter sought.

His goal was the genteel dining-room on the first floor, where a bald and shuffling waiter, own cousin to a tortoise, served luncheon to those desiring it. Lack of sleep had reduced Baxter to a condition where the presence and chatter of the house party were insupportable. It was his purpose to lunch at the Emsworth Arms and take a nap in an armchair afterward.

He had relied on having the room to himself, for Market Blandings did not lunch to a great extent; but to his annoyance and disappointment the room was already occupied by a man in brown tweeds.

Occupied is the correct word, for at first sight this man seemed to fill the room. Never since almost forgotten days when he used to frequent circuses and side shows, had Baxter seen a fellow human being so extraordinarily obese. He was a man about fifty years old, gray-haired, of a mauve complexion, and his general appearance suggested joviality.