he inn.

CHAPTER THE SECOND

LOVE AMONG THE WRECKAGE

I

When I came back I found that my share in the escape and death of my
uncle had made me for a time a notorious and even popular character.
For two weeks I was kept in London "facing the music," as he would have
said, and making things easy for my aunt, and I still marvel at the
consideration with which the world treated me. For now it was open and
manifest that I and my uncle were no more than specimens of a modern
species of brigand, wasting the savings of the public out of the sheer
wantonness of enterprise. I think that in a way, his death produced
a reaction in my favour and my flight, of which some particulars now
appeared stuck in the popular imagination. It seemed a more daring and
difficult feat than it was, and I couldn't very well write to the papers
to sustain my private estimate. There can be little doubt that men
infinitely prefer the appearance of dash and enterprise to simple
honesty. No one believed I was not an arch plotter in his financing. Yet
they favoured me. I even got permission from the trustee to occupy
my chalet for a fortnight while I cleared up the mass of papers,
calculations, notes of work, drawings and the like, that I left in
disorder when I started on that impulsive raid upon the Mordet quap
heaps.

I was there alone. I got work for Cothope with the Ilchesters, for whom
I now build these destroyers. They wanted him at once, and he was short
of money, so I let him go and managed very philosophically by myself.

But I found it hard to fix my attention on aeronautics, I had been away
from the work for a full half-year and more, a half-year crowded with
intense disconcerting things. For a time my brain refused these fine
problems of balance and adjustment altogether; it wanted to think about
my uncle's dropping jaw, my aunt's reluctant tears, about dead negroes
and pestilential swamps, about the evident realities of cruelty and
pain, about life and death. Moreover, it was weary with the frightful
pile of figures and documents at the Hardingham, a task to which this
raid to Lady Grove was simply an interlude. And there was Beatrice.

On the second morning, as I sat out upon the veranda recalling memories
and striving in vain to attend to some too succinct pencil notes of
Cothope's, Beatrice rode up suddenly from behind the pavilion, and
pulled rein and became still; Beatrice, a little flushed from riding and
sitting on a big b