Aintree shrugged his shoulders.

"Her father was dead, or he'd have stopped it. Nobody else felt it their business to interfere, and it wouldn't have made the slightest difference if they had. You know what the Davenants are like--or perhaps you don't. Nothing shakes them when they've made up their minds to do a thing."

"But didn't she know the man's reputation?" I persisted.

"I don't suppose so. Wylton had never been mixed up in any overt scandal, so the women wouldn't know; and it's always a tall order for a man to lay information against another man when a girl's engaged to marry him. She just walked into it with her eyes shut."

"And now she's divorcing him at last?"

"The other way about."

I felt sure I could not have heard him correctly.

"The other way about," he repeated deliberately. "Oh, she'd have got rid of him years ago if he'd given her the chance! Wylton was too clever; he knew the divorce law inside out; he was alive to all its little technicalities. He's sailed close to the wind a number of times, but never close enough to be in danger."

"And what's happening now?" I asked.

"She's forced his hand--gone to some trouble to compromise herself.

She couldn't divorce him, it was the only way, she's making him divorce her. Rather a burlesque of justice, isn't it? Elsie Wylton, the respondent in an undefended action! The daughter of Jasper Davenant--one of the finest, cleanest, bravest women I know. And the successful petitioner will be Arnold Wylton, who ought to have been thrashed out of half the houses and clubs in London. Who ought to have been cited as a co-respondent half a dozen times over if he hadn't been so clever in covering up his tracks. I wonder if he's got sufficient humour to appreciate the delicate irony of _his_ coming sanctimoniously into court to divorce _her_. It's a sickening business, we won't discuss it--but it will be the one topic of conversation in a few weeks' time."

We walked in silence for a few yards.

"Was the man any one of note?" I asked. "The co-respondent?"

"Fellow in the Indian Army," Aintree answered. "I don't suppose you know him. It was a bogus case; he just lent his name."

I sniffed incredulously.

"The world won't believe _that_," I said.

"Elsie's going to make it."

I shook my head.

"She can't. Would you?"

"Most certainly. So will you when you've met her. You knew the father well? She's her father's own daughter."

The gospel of Jasper Davenant was simple and sound. Never pull a horse, never forge a cheque, never get involved in the meshes of married women. Apart from that, nothing mattered: though to be his true disciple, you must never lose your head, never lose your temper, never be afraid of man or woman, brute or devil. He was the North American Indian of chivalrous romance, transplanted to Cumberland with little loss of essential characteristics.

"I look forward to meeting them both," I said as we parted at Buckingham Gate. "Seven o'clock? I'll try not to be late."

Walking on alone through Sloane Square, something set me thinking of my boast to Philip Roden. Within three hours I was apparently going to meet one woman whose name was mixed up with the most prominent _cause celebre_ of the year, and another who was a _cause celebre_ in herself--the redoubtable Miss Joyce Davenant of the Militant Suffrage Union. That my introduction should come from the peace-loving, nerve-ridden Aintree, was in accordance with the best ironical traditions of life. I was not surprised then: I should have still less reason to be surprised now. In the last six months he has placed me under obligations which I shall never be able to meet: in all probability he expects no repayment; the active side of his unhappy, fatalistic temperament is seen in his passionate desire to make life less barren and melancholy for others. Tom Wilding can testify to this at the bezique table: Elsie and Joyce and I can endorse the testimony in a hundred ways and half a hundred places.

As I turned into Pont Street a private car was drawn up by the kerb opposite my brother's house. I dawdled for a few steps while a pretty, brown-eyed, black-haired girl said good-bye to a friend at the door and drove away. It was no more than a glimpse that I caught, but the smiling, small-featured face attracted me. I wondered who she was, and who was the girl with auburn hair who persisted in standing on my brother's top step long after the car was out of sight, instead of retiring indoors and leaving me an unembarrassed entry.

I pretended not to see her as I mounted the steps, but the pretence was torn away when I heard her addressing me as "Uncle Simon."

"You must be Gladys," I said, wondering if I looked as sheepish as I felt. "How did you recognise me?"

"By your photograph," she said. "You haven't altered a bit."

On the whole I carried it off fairly well, though I was glad Arthur Roden was not present after my implied familiarity with my niece's existence. Of course I knew I had a niece, and that her birthday fell--like the Bastille--on July 14th. Usually I remembered the date and sent her some little trifle, and she would write me a friendly letter of thanks. If I had kept count of the number of birthdays, I should have known she was now nineteen, but then one never does keep count of these things. Frankly, I had imagined her to be about seven or eight, and her handwriting--by becoming steadily more unformed and sporadic the older she grew--did nothing to dispel the illusion.

Instead of curious little pieces of jewellery I might easily have sent her a doll....

"Where's the Judge?" I asked as she kissed me and led the way upstairs to her room.

"He's not home yet," she answered to my relief.

"And your mother?"

But my sister-in-law also was out, and I reconciled myself without difficulty to the prospect of taking tea alone with my niece. Possibly as a romantic reaction from her father, possibly with her mother Eve's morbid craving for forbidden fruit, Gladys had elevated me into a Tradition. The whole of her pretty, sun-splashed room seemed hung with absurd curios I had sent her from out-of-the-way parts of the world, while on a table by the window stood a framed photograph of myself in tweeds that only an undergraduate would have worn, and a tie loosely arranged in a vast sailor's knot after the unsightly fashion of the early 'nineties. My hair was unduly long, and at my feet lay a large dog; it must have been a property borrowed for the purpose, as I hate and have always hated dogs.

"A wasted, unsatisfactory life, Gladys," I said as my tour of inspection concluded itself in front of my own portrait. "I wish I'd known about you before. I'd have asked Brian to let me adopt you."

"Would you like to now?"

In the East a complimentary speech is not usually interpreted so literally or promptly.

"I'm afraid it's too late," I answered regretfully.

"Afraid?"

"Your father and mother...."

"Would you if I were left an orphan?"

"Of course I would, but you mustn't say things like that even in joke."

Gladys poured me out a cup of tea and extended a cream jug at a menacing angle.

"Not for worlds if it's China," I exclaimed.

"It is. Uncle Toby...." She seemed to hesitate over the name, but I prefer it to Simon and bowed encouragement, "I'm going to be an orphan in three days' time. At least, it's that or very sea-sick."

I begged for an explanation. It appeared that Pont Street was in domestic convulsion over the health of Mr. Justice Merivale. As Roden had hinted, a succession of militant outrages directed against his person and property, not to mention threatening letters and attempted violence, had seriously shaken his nerve. Under doctor's orders he was leaving England for a short sea cruise as soon as the Courts rose at Whitsun.

"He's only going to Marseilles and back," she explained. "Mother's going with him, and something's got to be done with me. I don't want to make a nuisance of myself, but I should simply die if they tried to take me through the Bay."

"Do you think they'd trust me?" I asked. From an early age my brother has regarded me as the Black Sheep of an otherwise irreproachable family of two.

"They'd jump at it!" Irreverently I tried to visualise Brian jumping.

"The Rodens wanted me to go to them, but it wouldn't be fair on Sylvia. She'd be tied to me the whole time."

"I can imagine worse fates."

"For her? or for me?"

"Either or both."