u let it?" pursues
Bingo, ignoring his junior's request.

Beauvayse yawns with ostentatious weariness of the subject.

"No; I haven't let it."

"Ought to go off like smoke, properly advertised. Somethin' like this: 'To
let, Roselawn Cottage, Cookham: a charmin' Thames-side bijou residence.
Small grounds and large cellar, a boathouse and a houseboat, stables, a
pigeon-cote, and a private post-box. Duodecimo oak dinin'-room, boudoir by
Rellis. Ideal nest for a honeymoon, real thing or imitation. Might have
become the real thing if owner hadn't been whisked off in time to South
Africa.' And a dashed good job for him. For you've had a decentish lot of
narrow escapes, Toby, my boy!" pursues the oracular Captain Bingo,
disregarding his junior's forbidding scowl, "and come out of a goodish few
tight places, and you've got out of 'em, if I may say so, more through
luck than wit; but that little entanglement I'm delicately alludin' to was
one of the closest things on record in the career of a Prodigal Son."

"Thanks. You're uncommonly complimentary to-day." Beauvayse pitches away
his cigar, knocks a feather of ash from his clean silk shirt, and folds
his arms resignedly on his broad flat chest.

"Upon my word, I didn't mean to be. Does it ever strike you," goes on
Captain Bingo doggedly, "that if that wire from the Chief asking for your
address hadn't found me at the Club, and if I hadn't run down and dug you
out at the--I won't repeat the name of the place, since you don't seem to
like it--you'd have been married and done for, old chap--any date you like
to name between then and the beginning of the war? And, to put things
mildly, there would have been the mischief to pay with your people."

"Yes," Beauvayse agrees rather dreamily; "there would have been an awful
lot of bother with my people."

"Not that I object to the stage myself," Captain Bingo says, waving a
large, tolerant hand; "and it seems getting to be rather the fashion to
recruit the female ranks of the Peerage from Musical Comedy, and a
prettier and cleverer little woman than Lessie ... What are you stoppin'
your ears for?"

"I'm not," says a muffled, surly voice. "It's a--twinge of toothache."

"All I've got to say is," declares Captain Bingo, "that marriage with
one's equal in point of breedin' is sometimes a blank draw, but marriage
with one's inferior is a howling error. And if you had done as I'd stake
my best hat you would have done, supposin' you'd