been left to loll in the
lap of the lovely Lessie----"

Beauvayse jumps up in a rage.

"Wrynche, how much longer do you think I can go on listening to this?
You're simply maundering, man, and my nerves won't stand it."

"Oh, very well! But you haven't the ghost of a right to lay claim to
nerves," Captain Bingo obstinately asseverates. "Now look at me."

"I'm hanged if I want to!" declares Beauvayse. "You're not a cheering
object." He drops back into the bamboo chair again.

"Flyblown, do I look?" inquires Bingo, with dispassionate interest.

"Well, yes, decidedly," Beauvayse agrees, without removing his eyes from
the whitewashed verandah-pillar at which they blankly stare.

"Streaky yellow in the whites of the eyes, and pouchy under 'em?" Captain
Bingo demands of his young friend with unmistakable relish. "'Yes' again?
And I grouse and maunder? Of course I do, my dear chap! How can I help
it? A married man who, for all he knows, may be a widower----"

"I wish to God I knew I was one!"

"My good fellow?"

"You heard what I said," Beauvayse flings over his shoulder.

Captain Bingo, his hands upon his straddling knees, regards his junior
with circular eyes staring out of a large, kind, rather foolish face of
utter consternation.

"That you wished to God you were a widower?"

"Well, I mean it."

XXXIV

"Good Lord!"

There is a gap of silence only broken when Captain Bingo says heavily:

"Then you did marry the Lavigne after all? When was it----"

"We'd pulled off the marriage at the local Registrar's a fortnight before
you came down with--_his_ wire."

"By the Living Tinker, then it _was_ a genuine honeymoon after all!" A
faint grin appears on Captain Wrynche's large perturbed face.

"Don't be epigrammatic, Wrynche." The dull weariness in the young voice
gives place to quick affront. "And keep the secret. Don't give me away."

"Did I ever give you, or any other man who ever trusted me, away? Tell me
that."

Captain Bingo gets up and covers the distance between the deck-chairs with
a single stride, and puts a big kind hand on the averted shoulder.

"Of course you never did." The boy reaches up and takes the hand, and
squeezes it with the shyness of the Englishman who responds to some
display of solicitude or affection on the part of a comrade. "Don't mind
my rotting like this. There are times when one must let off steam or
explode."

"I thought--and so did a few others, the Chief among '