"It isn't--off?"

"Not yet."

"I don't want to ask more than I ought," said Uvo, after a pause, "but I always imagine that, between people who're engaged, the least little thing----"

"It isn't a little thing."

And the accountant shook his downcast head.

"I only meant, my dear chap, if you'd had some disagreement----"

"We've never had the least little word!"

"Has she changed?" asked Uvo Delavoye.

"Not that I know of," replied Berridge; but he looked up as though it were a new idea; and there was more life in his voice.

"She'd tell you," said Uvo, "if I know her."

"Do people tell each other?" eagerly inquired our friend.

"They certainly ought, and I think Miss Hemming would."

"Ah! it's easy enough for them!" cried the miserable young man. "Women are not liars and traitors because they happen to change their minds.

n.o.body thinks the worse of them for that; it's their privilege, isn't it? They can break off as many engagements as they like; but if I did such a thing I should never hold up my head again!"

He buried his hot face in his hands, and Delavoye looked at me for the first time. It was a sympathetic look enough; and yet there was something in it, a lift of the eyebrow, a light in the eye, that reminded me of the one point on which we always differed.

"Better hide your head than spoil her life," said he briskly. "But how long have you felt like doing either? I used to look on you as an ideal pair."

"So we were," said poor Berridge, readily. "It's most peculiar!"

I saw a twitch at the corners of Uvo's mouth; but he was not the man for sly glances over a bowed head.

"How long have you been engaged?" he asked.

"Ever since last September."

"You were here then, if I remember?"

"Yes; it was just after my holiday."

"In fact you've been here all the time?"

"Up to these last few weeks."

Delavoye looked round his room as a cross-examining counsel surveys the court to mark a point. I felt it about time to intervene on the other side.

"But you looked perfectly happy," said I, "all the autumn?"

"So I was, G.o.d knows!"

"Everything was all right until you went away?"

"Everything."

"Then," said I, "it looks to me like the mere mental effect of influenza, and nothing else."

But that was not the sense of the glance I could not help shooting at Delavoye. And my explanation was no comfort to Guy Berridge; he had thought of it before; but then he had never felt better than the last few days in the country, yet never had he been in such despair.

"I can't go through with it," he groaned in abject unreserve. "It's making my life a h.e.l.l--a living lie. I don't know how to bear it--from one meeting to the next--I dread them so! Yet I've always a sort of hope that next time everything will suddenly become as it was before Christmas. Talk of forlorn hopes! Each time's worse than the last. I've come straight from her now. I don't know what you must think of me! It's not ten minutes since we said good-night." The big moustache trembled.

"I felt a Judas," he whispered--"an absolute Judas!"

"I believe it's all nerves," said Delavoye, but with so little conviction that I loudly echoed the belief.

"But I don't go in for nerves," protested Berridge; "none of us do, in our family. We don't believe in them. We think they're a modern excuse for anything you like to do or say; that's what we think about nerves.

I'm not going to start them just to make myself out better than I am.

It's my heart that's rotten, not my nerves."

"I admire your att.i.tude," said Delavoye, "but I don't agree with you.

It'll all come back to you in the end--everything you think you've lost--and then you'll feel as though you'd awakened from a bad dream."

"But sometimes I do wake up, as it is!" cried Berridge, catching at the idea. "Nearly every morning, when I'm dressing, things look different.

I feel my old self again--the luckiest fellow alive--engaged to the sweetest girl! She's always that, you know; don't imagine for one moment that I ever think less of Edith; she always was and would be a million times too good for me. If only she'd see it for herself, and chuck me up of her own accord! I've even tried to tell her what I feel; but she won't meet me half-way; the real truth never seems to enter her head.

How to tell her outright I don't know. It would have been easy enough last year, when her people wouldn't let us be properly engaged. But they gave in at Christmas when I had my rise in screw; and now she's got her ring, and given me this one--how on earth can I go and give it her back?"

"May I see?" asked Delavoye, holding out his hand; and I for one was grateful to him for the diversion of the few seconds we spent inspecting an old enamelled ring with a white peac.o.c.k on a crimson ground. Berridge asked us if we thought it a very peculiar ring, as they all did at Berylstow, and he babbled on about the circ.u.mstances of its purchase by his dear, sweet, open-handed Edith. It did him good to talk. A tinge of health returned to his cadaverous cheeks, and for a time his moustache looked less out of keeping and proportion.

But it was the mere reactionary surcease of prolonged pain, and the fit came on again in uglier guise before he left.

"It isn't so much that I don't want to marry her," declared the accountant with startling abruptness, "as the awful thoughts I have as to what may happen if I do. They're too awful to describe, even to you two fellows. Of course nothing could make you think worse of me than you must already, but you'd say I was mad if you could see inside my horrible mind. I don't think she'd be safe; honestly I don't! I feel as if I might do her some injury--or--or violence!"

He was swaying about the room with wild eyes staring from one to the other of us and twitching fingers feeling in his pockets. I got up myself and stood within reach of him, for now I felt certain that love or illness had turned his brain. But it was only a very small sc.r.a.p of paper that he fished out of his waistcoat pocket, and handed first to Delavoye and then to me.

"I cut it out of a review of such a peculiar poem in my evening paper,"

said Berridge. "I never read reviews, or poems, but those lines. .h.i.t me hard."

And I read:

"Yet each man kills the thing he loves, By each let this be heard, Some do it with a bitter look, Some with a flattering word, The coward does it with a kiss, The brave man with a sword!"

"But you don't feel like that!" said Delavoye, laughing at him; and the laughter rang as false as his earlier consolation; but this time I had not the presence of mind to supplement it.

Guy Berridge nodded violently as he held out his hand for the verse. I could see that his eyes had filled with tears. But Uvo rolled the sc.r.a.p of paper into a pellet, which he flung among the lumps of asbestos glowing in his grate, and took the outstretched hand in his. I never saw man so gentle with another. Hardly a word more pa.s.sed. But the poor devil squeezed my fingers before Uvo led him out to see him home. And it was many minutes before he returned.

"I have had a time of it!" said he, putting his feet to the gas fire.

"Not with that poor old thing, but his people, all three of them! I got him up straight to bed, and then they kept me when he thought I'd gone.

Of course they know there's something wrong, and of course they blame the girl; one knew they would. It seems they've never really approved of her; she's a shocking instance of all-round peculiarity. They little know the apple of their own blind eyes--eh, Gilly?"