I consoled myself with Mr. Vavasour. There was no doubt he was in love with Dulcie, and I surmised that in the future, if she could not dominate him, his aunt by marriage might be able to do so. I can't say whether Dulcie cared much about him, but I told her firmly that she was very much in love, and she said, "Yes, yes, Aunt Anne."

That was what was so endearing about Dulcie.

She was so obliging; always ready to run upstairs for my spectacles, or to marry anybody.

One evening, when she was dining with me, she proceeded to draw out her Ronald's horoscope.

She was evidently extraordinarily well up in the subject.

"I will ask, Mrs. Cross," she said at last, after much knitting of white brows, "but I should say Ronald was certainly not going to marry at all at this moment with Mercury and Jupiter in opposition. But then I said the same about myself, and about your going on a long journey. I should have thought some great change was inevitable with your sun now sesquiquadrate to Ura.n.u.s in Cancer. But Mrs. Cross said I was absolutely mistaken about both. She was very emphatic."

"You don't mean to say you believe a single word of it," I said, amazed.

"Oh, yes, Aunt Anne, of course I do. Why, don't you remember you yourself advised me to study it. I'm _sure_ it's all true, only it's difficult to disentangle."

Jimmy came down next day, and a more crestfallen man I have never seen.

I was dividing my white pinks, and he collapsed on a bench, and looked at me.

"You've given in about Mr. Wilson," I said drily.

"I have. Gertrude came round to it quite suddenly last night."

"Bear up," I said "They will probably be very happy."

"I don't find I mind much now it's decided on. And between ourselves Gertrude and Joan did not hit it off too well. I used to get a bit rattled between the two of them. It will be more peaceful when Joan is married."

"Then I don't see why you look so woe-begone."

Jimmy shifted on his bench.

"Anne," he said solemnly, "you made the great mistake of your life when you refused me."

"You could not expect me to leave a brand new kitchen boiler for you. I told you that at the time."

"We should have suited each other," went on Jimmy, drearily, ignoring manlike, my reasons for celibacy. "We are both," he paused and then added with dignity, "contemplatives by nature. We should have sat down in two armchairs for life. I should never have been a magistrate, and a chairman of a cursed Parish Council. I should just have been happy."

"I _have_ been happy," I said, "I _am_ happy."

"You have had a beautiful life: one long siesta. That is so like you.

_You_ have fetched it off and I've missed it. Just as Gertrude has missed this match for Joan, and you have fetched it off for Dulcie. If I had married you you would never have wanted me to exert myself. That was why my higher nature turned to you like a sunflower to the sun. You ought to have taken me. After all, you are the only woman I have ever proposed to," said the twice married man.

"I thought as much," I said, pulling my white pinks apart.

"You might have known," he said darkly, and a glint of malice momentarily shone in his kindly eyes, "that trouble would some day overtake you for your wicked selfishness in refusing me."

I did not notice what he was saying so much as that alien expression in my old friend's face. I stared at him.

"I'm putty in Gertrude's hands," he continued solemnly, "as I should have been in yours. It's no kind of use saying I ought not to be putty.

I know I ought not, but putty I am. You don't know what marriage is like. No peace unless you give in entirely--no terms--no half-way house, no nothing except unconditional surrender."

I had never heard Jimmy speak like this before. I put in a layer of pinks, and then looked at him again.

There were tears in his eyes.

"My dear old soul," he burst out, "I can't help it, I _cannot_ help it.

She insisted on my coming down and telling you myself. She said it must come from me, as my own idea, and I'm not to mention her at all. The truth is--she has decided--and nothing will move her--that it will be best if Joan and Bobby Wilson lived quite near us for a time as they are both so young--in fact--" his voice became hoa.r.s.e--"in this cottage."

"_My_ cottage!" I said. "_Here!_"

He nodded.

For a moment I could neither see nor hear. My brain reeled. I clutched at something which turned out to be Jimmy's hand.

"My own little house," I gasped. "My garden, made with my own hands. The only place my rheumatism--" I choked.

"Don't take on so, Anne," but it was Jimmy who was crying, not I, "I'll find something else for you. Miss Jones is leaving Banff. You shall have her house rent free. I hate it all just as much as you. It makes me sick to think of chicken hutches on your lawn; but, but--you _shouldn't_ have outwitted Gertrude."

"She told me there was no movement, no journey of any kind in my horoscope," I groaned.

"She says she made a mistake, and that she sees now there is a long journey. Dulcie told her so some time ago, but she would not hear of it.

But now she has worked it out again, and she says Dulcie was right after all. You are plum in the thick of Uranian upheavals."

"And is Dulcie's marriage a mistake, too?"

"She said nothing about that. But, between ourselves, Anne, though I'm not an astrologer, I should not count on it too much, for I've been making a few enquiries about Vavasour, and I find he has been engaged four times already. It's a sort of habit with him to get engaged, and his mother never opposes him, but she has a sort of habit of gently getting him out of it--every time."

All this took place several years ago. I live in the suburbs of Banff now in Miss Jones's old house. As there is no garden that kind Jimmy has built me a little conservatory sticking like a blister to the unattached wall of my semi-detached villa. He sends me a hamper of vegetables every week, and Joan presents me with a couple of chickens now and then, _reared on my lawn_.

They come in handy when Dulcie and her Wilhelm are staying with me. Herr Muller has an appointment in Aberdeen now. They are dreadfully poor, and a little Muller arrives every year, but Dulcie is as happy as she is incompetent and impecunious. She adds to their small muddled away income by giving lessons in astrology. I have learned the rudiments of the science, in order when I stay with her to help her with her pupils. But I never stay long as I have rheumatism as severely in Aberdeen as in Banff.

Her Murderer

"The truth is, I shall have to murder her!" said Mark gloomily. "I see no way out of it."

"I could not be really happy with a husband whose hands were red with gore," I remarked. "I'm super-sensitive, I know. I can't help it. I was made so. If you murder her, I warn you I shall throw you over. And where would you be then?"

"Exactly where I am now, as far as marrying you is concerned. You may throw me over as much as you like. I shan't turn a hair."

He had not many hairs left to turn, and perhaps he remembered that fact, and that I held nothing sacred, for he hurried on in an aggrieved tone:

"You never give me credit for any imagination. I'm not going to spill her blood. I'm much too tidy. I've thought it all out. I shall take you and her on a picnic to the New Forest, and trot you both about till you're nearly famished. And then for luncheon I shall produce a tin of potted lobster. I shall choose it very carefully with a bulging tin.

Potted lobster is deadly when the tin bulges. And as the luncheon will be at my expense, she will eat more than usual. She will 'partake heartily,' as the newspapers will say afterwards; at least, as I hope they will have occasion to say. And then directly the meal is over the lobster will begin to do its duty, and swell inside her, and she'll begin struggling among the picnic things. I shan't be there. I shall have gone for a little stroll. You will support her in her last moments.

I don't mind helping with the funeral. I'd do that willingly."