Lady Oxted, in spite of her husband\'s general reflections upon her character, could not reasonably be called an ungenerous woman; and when, ten days after these last occurrences, it was her painful duty to visit the convalescent sofa of Geoffrey Langham, she said without circumlocution, or any attempt to shirk due responsibility, that she supposed it was she from whom he had caught the influenza. Geoffrey, on his side, did not regard this as anything but a certain conclusion, but added, with the irritable resignation which accompanies convalescence, that he did not suppose she had done it on purpose. The effect of this was to make Lady Oxted wonder whether she had really given it him at all.

"You speak as if it was quite certain," she said. "But when one comes to think of it, Harry came to see me the same day, in great depression, which predisposes you to catch it, and he hasn\'t, so to speak, blown his nose since."

"Very well, then; you did not give it me," said Geoffrey. "Please have it your own way. It was my own idea: I evolved influenza for myself.[Pg 194] Besides, Harry was deeply in love. You can\'t do two things at once."

"Hush-a-bye, baby," said Lady Oxted. "Geoffrey, I didn\'t come here to be contradict——"

"No, to contradict, it appears."

"Primarily, not even that, but to propose that you and I and Bob should go down to Oxted to-morrow, or rather to tell you that Bob and I are going, and propose that you should join us; we shall get well in half the time down there."

"Are you not well?" asked Geoffrey. "You look a picture."

"A picture of a boiled rag," said Lady Oxted, "treated, with extreme realism. Well, will you come?"

"Of course I will, with pleasure. I long to get out of this frouzy town. What does Miss Aylwin do?"

"She will go to the Arbuthnots while I am away, poor dear!"

"She might do worse. And Harry?"

"Harry will probably go to the Arbuthnots too, a good deal," remarked Lady Oxted.

She got up.

"I am glad you promised to come without any hesitation," she said, "because otherwise I should have had to press you, which is degrading. Harry\'s engagement has given me a lot to think about, and I want to express my thoughts to some very slow, ordinary person like you, in the same way as Molière used to read his plays to his[Pg 195] housekeeper. I have got a sort of idea in my head, and I wish to see how it impresses the completely average mind."

"I hope it is a nice idea," said Geoffrey. "But one can\'t tell with you. You have such an inconvenient sort of mind!"

"It isn\'t nice," said Lady Oxted; "in fact, it is just the opposite. However, you will hear more of it to-morrow evening. Here\'s Harry. I shall go. Dear me, I wonder whether Bob looked as idiotic as that when we were engaged? I don\'t think he can have, or I should have broken it off."

Harry\'s face in fact wore a smile of intensely inane radiance, but his desire to score off his aunt, as he now called her, caused it to fade off like the breath off a razor.

"No, dear aunt," he replied, "but you see he wasn\'t engaged to a person of—well, of the same class as Evie.—Ah! fifteen love, Geoff, old boy. That will rankle by-and-bye in the mind of our aunt."

Lady Oxted put her nose in the air, as if she had caught the whiff of a bad smell.

"Can you explain the idiocy of your smile when you entered?" she asked.

"Rather. I was just going to, when you began to be personal. Three Sundays ago, when Evie was down at Vail, she went out walking, after lunch, with Uncle Francis. Do you remember, dear aunt, and you snored loud and long under the trees on the lawn all that blessed afternoon?[Pg 196] Yes, I see you remember. Well, they met—O Lord! you can\'t beat this—they met Jim and the dairymaid walking out all properly in the wood, and Evie thought, until she came back and found me on the lawn, she seriously thought Jim was me. She was furious: I got her to confess that she was furious. Great Scott! she thought I was flirting with the dairymaid. I knew a maid worth two of her!"

Lady Oxted began to attend suddenly in the middle of this.

"And what did Mr. Francis say?" she asked. "Did he also think it was you?"

"I don\'t know. Evie didn\'t mention him, and then we began talking—well, we began talking about something else.—Poor old Geoff, how goes it? If you give me the flue, I\'ll poison your beef-tea, and you may lay it to that. It\'s all the Luck."

Lady Oxted sighed.

"Jack and Jill went up the hill," she remarked.

"Yes, you may laugh if you like," said Harry, "but I\'m beginning to believe in the Luck. I paid my penalty, and now I\'m getting the reward. Oh, a big one! Did anybody ever hear of such Luck?" he demanded.

"Laugh?" cried Lady Oxted. "Who talked of laughing? Of course, if Evie chooses to marry a man with unmistakable signs of incipient mania, and Mrs. Aylwin doesn\'t object, it\'s her own affair. But I wish I was her mother."

"Yes, that would be something," said Harry,[Pg 197] in a tone of extreme indulgence. "It would be charming for you, as you can\'t be her husband. Poor aunt!"

"Thirty love," said Geoffrey.

Lady Oxted gathered up her card case and parasol.

"You just wait, my boy, till I get you to Oxted," she said truculently.

"Is Geoff going to Oxted?" asked Harry, throwing himself extravagantly on the sofa by him. "Geoff, Geoff, would you leave me alone, alone in London, like Jessica\'s first prayer? I will follow you, if it be on foot and begging my bread. I can not live without you. See Wilson Barrett," he explained, sitting upright again, and smoothing his tumbled hair.

Lady Oxted shrugged her shoulders, and shook a despairing head.

"Poor Evie!" she said. "Poor, dear Evie!"

Harry sprang up and stood with his back to the door.

"Now why \'Poor Evie\'?" he asked. "Explain precisely why. You don\'t leave the room until you have explained."

"If you don\'t come away from that door and let me out," said Lady Oxted, "I shall ring the bell, Harry, continuously. This sort of bully-ragging is so good for a man with a splitting headache, and shattered by influenza! I always tell everybody how considerate you are."

"Geoff, have you got a headache?" asked Harry.

[Pg 198]

"No. Fight it out."

Lady Oxted cast one baleful glance at him, advanced to the bell, and made an awkward, unconvincing movement to indicate that she was pressing it. Harry burst into loud, rude laughter.

"Try again," he said. "You have to press the button in the centre of the bell, not a spot on the wall paper. More to your left."

"Forty love," said Geoffrey.

Lady Oxted turned away from the bell with dignity.

"I don\'t understand the difficulty some people feel about apologizing," she said. "I apologize fully for all I have said."

"Explain it," said Harry.

"There is no explanation known to me. I spoke at random; I have not the slightest idea what I meant. Let me out, Harry."

At this he granted her liberty, saw her to the door, and ran upstairs again.

"O Geoff!" he said. "She had on a big, broad-brimmed hat and little yellow shoes. I saw them."

"That all?" said Geoffrey. "Rather South-Sea islander for the park."

Harry sighed.

"Yes, I once used to think that sort of thing funny, too," he said. "Never mind; you can\'t know. However, there was the hat, and her face was underneath it."

"Now that is really extraordinary," said Geoffrey.

[Pg 199]

"The face? I should just think it was. It\'s the most extraordinary thing in the world. And it\'s mine, and mine is hers. Lord! whatever can she do with such an ugly mug?"

"Is that the end?" asked Geoffrey, without any show of impatience.

"No, you blamed idiot; that\'s only the beginning. She was walking, do you understand, with Mrs. Arbuthnot. So I thought, \'None of that now, woman!\' and I just said so flat. At least I didn\'t say so, but they understood what I meant, and so we sat down on two little green chairs, and I paid twopence for them. Dirt cheap!"

"You and Mrs. Arbuthnot and she. I quite follow."

"Of course; oh! I\'m not sure what happened to Mrs. Arbuthnot. She didn\'t go to heaven; at least I didn\'t see her there, so I suppose—oh, well, I suppose she stopped where she was. I dare say she\'s there now. So I said, \'Evie.\'"

"And she said \'Harry,\'" remarked Geoffrey.

Long brown fingers stole round his neck.

"Now, tell me the truth, like George Washington," said Harry, "were you listening?"

"No; I guessed. Take your hand away."

"Devilish smart of you, then! She did say \'Harry,\' and I won\'t deny it. My name, I tell you, you malingering skunk; she meant me! She called me Harry. O Lord!"

"Well, it\'s altogether the most remarkable thing I ever heard," said Geoffrey. "And as the[Pg 200] bell for lunch sounded ten minutes ago, I propose that you should tell me the rest afterward."

It was Geoffrey\'s first attempt at stairs since he had gone to bed, and he threw an arm round Harry\'s neck, and leaned his weight on him.

"And ten days ago," he said, "I met death and despair in the hall, and that was you. \'This is what comes of the Luck\' thought I. O Harry, if I wasn\'t so shaky I\'d fetch you such a whack in the ribs!"

And after the manner of the British youth, they quite understood each other.

The influenza party left London next day after lunch. Lord Oxted had brought a whole library of blue-books with him, out of which he hoped to establish an array of damaging facts against the Government, and his red pencil, as they sped out of London, had no sinecure. Mile after mile of the inconceivable meanness of house-backs fell behind them, and at last Lady Oxted consented to the partial opening of one of the carriage windows.

"There, that is a proper breath of air," she said. "Sniff it in, Geoffrey. But I will have no suburban microbes flying into my face. Oh, we are wrecks, we are wrecks, but we will stop at Oxted till we are refloated."

Lord Oxted frowned heavily, and scored the offending page.

"Is the man Colonial Secretary," he asked, "or is he the autocrat of all the Englands? And it never occurred to any of them, apparently, that[Pg 201] there might be something in those grand pianos. I should have thought that somebody might have guessed that this immense importation of huge cases implied something. But I am wrong; nobody guessed it. They said they could not be expected to see through stone walls. Stone walls, indeed! They couldn\'............