"Pardon me." I told him of my visit to Malta and the charitable guardianship of my friend's convalescent wife.

"But that wasn't the real reason."

"It was the only reason."

"The only one you thought of at the time."

I was amazed at the certainty of his tone.

"My dear fellow," I said. "I am a more or less rational creature, a reason comes along and compels me to do a thing. If I were a woman, no doubt I should do a thing and find reasons for it afterwards."

"Don't you ever do a thing on impulse, instinctively? And analyse your motives afterwards to see what prompted you?"

"Oh, possibly. But not on this occasion."

"You're sure?"

"What are you driving at?" I asked.

"You'll find out in time."

"I should like to know now."

Aintree inhaled the smoke of his cigarette and answered with eyes half-closed.

"Most men of your age wake up one morning to find they've turned forty. They feel it would be good to renew their youth, they play with the idea of getting married."

"Is this to my address?" I asked.

"D'you feel it applies to your case?"

"I can solemnly assure you that such an idea never crossed my mind."

"Not consciously."

"Nor unconsciously."

"What do you know of the unconscious ideas in your own mind?"

"Hang it," I said, "what do _you_ know of the unconscious ideas in my--or any one else's mind?"

"I'm interested in them," he answered quietly. "Tell me if you ever feel my prophecy coming true."

"You shall be best man," I promised him. "Married! One doesn't marry at my age."

It was a glorious spring afternoon, and I suggested that he should accompany me part of my way to Pont Street.

"Tell me what you've been doing with yourself since you stayed with me five years ago," I said as we stepped into Pall Mall.

He seemed to shiver and retreat into his shell as soon as the conversation became focussed on himself.

"I've done nothing," he answered briefly, and relapsed into one of his wonted spells of silence.

In the blazing afternoon sunlight I returned him the compliment of a careful scrutiny. He had come to Morocco five years before as a boy of one-and-twenty just down from Oxford. A girl to whom he had been engaged had died of consumption a few months before, and he was straying into the Desert, broken, unnerved, and hopeless, to forget her. I must have seemed sympathetic, or he would not have unburdened himself of the whole pitiful little tragedy. At twenty-one you feel these things more keenly perhaps than in after life; there were moments when I feared he was going to follow her....

Five years may have healed the wound, but they left him listless, dispirited, and sore. He was more richly endowed with nerves than any man or woman I know, and all the energy of his being seemed requisitioned to keep them under control. Less through love of mystery than for fear of self-betrayal his face wore the expressionless mask of a sphynx. He was fair, thin, and pale, with large frightened eyes, sapphire blue in colour, and troubled with the vague, tired restlessness that you see in overwrought, sensitive women. The nose and mouth were delicate and almost ineffeminate, with lips tightly closed as though he feared to reveal emotion in opening them. You see women and children with mouths set in that thin, hard line when they know a wickering lip or catch in the breath will give the lie to their brave front. And there were nerves, nerves, nerves everywhere, never so much present as when the voice was lazily drawling, the hands steady, and the eyes dreamily half-closed. I wonder if anything ever escaped those watchful, restless eyes; his entire soul seemed stored up and shining out of them; and I wonder what was the process of deduction in his curious, quick, feminine brain. Before I left England I tried to evolve a formula that would fit him; "a woman's senses and intuition in a man's body" was the best I could devise, and I am prepared at once to admit the inadequacy of the label. For one thing his intuition transcended that of any woman I have ever known.

As he would not talk about himself, I started to wile away the time by telling him of my meeting with the Rodens, and their invitation to Hampshire.

"I was asked too," he told me. "I shan't go."

"But why not?"

"Unsociability, I suppose. I don't go out much."

"It's a bachelor's party, I understand."

"That's the best thing I've heard about it. Did they say who'd be there? If you're not careful you'll have politics to eat, politics to drink, and politics to smoke."

"Come and create a diversion," I suggested.

"I'll think about it. Is Phil going to be there? Oh, then it won't be a bachelor party. I could name one young woman who will be there for certain, only I mustn't make mischief. Did you find Roden much changed?"

I tried to sort out my impressions of Arthur.

"Harder than he used to be. I shouldn't care to be a militant prosecuted by him."

Aintree raised his eyebrows slightly.

"I don't think they mind him; they can look after themselves."

"I've never met one."

"Would you like to?"

"Who is she?"

"Joyce Davenant, the queen bee of the swarm. Dine with me to-night at the Ritz; seven o'clock, I'm afraid, but we are going to a first night."

"Is she a daughter of old Jasper Davenant? I used to shoot with him."

"The younger daughter. Do you know her sister, Mrs. Wylton? She's coming too. You'd better meet her," he went on with a touch of acidity in his tone, "you'll hear her name so much during the next few months that it will be something to say you've seen her in the flesh."

I only remembered Elsie Wylton as a young girl with her hair down her back. Of her husband, Arnold Wylton, I suppose every one has heard; he enjoys the reputation of being a man who literally cannot be flogged past a petticoat. How such a girl came to marry such a man no rational person has ever been able to explain; and it never sweetens the amenities of debate to talk vaguely of marriages being made in heaven.

I met Wylton twice, and on both occasions he was living in retirement abroad. I have no wish to meet him a third time.

"How did she ever come to marry a fellow like that?" I asked.