a Little
Lord Fauntleroy fringe. "You banged the door before I'd got out the word!"

"If I could believe that!" she sighed, and the ivory-backed hair-brushes
played rather a tremulous fantasia upon her idol's head, "perhaps I might
be induced to confide to you a piece of genuine Secret Intelligence."

"Concernin'----?"

"Concerning your wife, Hannah Wrynche."

"Well, what of her?"

She took him by the chin and began to part his hair. But her eyes were
misty, and her hand travelled unsteadily.

"This of her. She owned to you, months and months back, that in your place
she wouldn't have been one-millionth part as patient with a restless,
ambitious woman cursed with an especial capacity for getting herself and
other people into hot water." She made a little affected grimace that
masked a genuine smart. "Not hot water only--boiling lava
sometimes--fizzling vitriol----"

He said, looking kindly up at the small mobile face and quivering chin:

"Restlessness and ambition are in the blood, y' know, like gout and the
rest of it. You can't eradicate 'em, however much you try. It's like
shavin' a Danish carriage-dog to change his colour. You can't for nuts;
his spots are in his skin! See?"

"_Merci du compliment!_" Her jangling laugh rang out as if a stick had
been smartly rattled down the keys of a piano. But her eyes were wet. His
own eyes reverted to his reflection in the toilet-glass. Now his sudden
bellow made her drop the comb.

"My Aunt Maria! See what you've been and done! Made a Loop Railway down
the middle of my head, unless my liver's making me see things curly. Don't
swot at it any more; let that ass Grindlay earn his pay for once.... By
the Living Tinker! you're cryin'. Don't go and say I've been a brute!" he
pleaded.

"Darling!--dearest!--you haven't--you've never!... The boot's on the other
leg, though wild horses wouldn't get you to own as much!" His strong left
arm was round her slight waist, her wet cheek pressed against her Major's
bulldog jowl. Bingo cleared his throat in his ponderous, scraping way,
admitting:

"Well, perhaps I may have dropped a briny or so--of nights in bed at
Nixey's, or on duty at Staff Bombproof South, between ring-ups on the
telephone when the off-duty men were snorin', and one had nothin' on the
blessed earth to do but wonder whether one had a wife or not?"

"There were people ready to tell you--years before we saw
Gueldersdorp--that the one you'd got was as good as non