howls in answer.
"Was that how you fell into the----" He is obviously going to say "trap,"
but with exceeding clumsiness substitutes "state." And wonders at the
thing having been pulled off so quietly in these days, when confounded
newspapers won't let you call your soul your own.

"That's because I signed my name 'John Basil Edward Tobart,'" explains
Beauvayse; "and because the Registrar--a benevolent old cock in a large
white waistcoat, like somebody's father in a farcical comedy--wasn't
sufficiently up in the Peerage to be impressed."

"Weren't there witnesses of sorts?" hints Bingo.

"Of sorts. The housekeeper at the cottage and my man Saunders--the
discreet Saunders who's with me here. And a fortnight later came the
appointment," goes on the boy. "And--I was gladder than I cared to know at
getting away. She--Lessie--meant to play her part in the 'Chiffon Girl' up
to the end of the Summer Season, and then rest until ..." He does not
finish the sentence.

"I suppose she's fond of you--what?" hazards Captain Bingo.

"She cares a good deal, poor girl, and was frightfully cut up at my going,
and I provided for her thoroughly well, of course, though she has heaps of
money of her own. And when I went to stay with my people for a night
before sailing, I'd have broken the--the truth to my mother then, only
something in her face corked me tight. From the moment I took the plunge,
the consciousness of what a rotten ass I'd been had been growin' like a
snowball. But on the voyage out"--a change comes into the weary, level
voice in which Beauvayse has told his story--"I forgot to grouse, and by
the time we'd lifted the Southern Cross I wasn't so much regretting what
I'd done as wondering whether I should ever shoot myself because I'd done
it? Up in Rhodesia I forgot. The wonderful champagne air, and the rousing
hard work, the keen excitement and the tingling expectation of things that
were going to happen by-and-by, that have been happening about as since
October, were like pleasant drugs that keep you from thinking. I only
remembered now and then, when I saw Lessie's photograph hanging on the
wall of my quarters, and the portrait she had set in the back of my
sovereign-case, that she and me were husband and wife." He gives a
mirthless laugh. "It makes so little impression on a fellow's mind
somehow, to mooch into a Registrar's office with a woman and answer a
question or two put by a fat, middle-aged duffer who's smiling h