d away a tear-drop. "He never
moved a muscle; Just shook hands in his kind, hearty way, and began to
tell the news of the town.... Never, by look or word or sign, helped to
rub in what a beetle-headed idiot I'd been." She gulped. "I could have put
my head down on the tablecloth and cried gallons"--she blew her nose
again--"knowing 'd lost him a rook at least. For, of course, that flabby
Slabberts creature counted for something in the game, or Brounckers
wouldn't have wanted him. And Captain--my Captain!..." She threw a
sparkling eye-dart tipped with remorseful brine at the spare, soldierly
figure and the lean, purposeful face. "If you were to say to me this
minute, 'Hannah Wrynche, jump off the end of that high rock-bluff there,
down on those uncommonly nasty-looking stones below,' I vow I'd do it!"

Saxham's blue eyes were kind. Here was a fellow hero-worshipper.

"I believe you would do it, and--that he believes it too."

She tapped him on the sleeve with the long cherry-wood stick of her white
green-lined umbrella.

"Thank you. But don't get to making a habit of saying charming things,
because the role of Bruin suits you. Your Society women-patients used to
enjoy being bullied, tremendously, I remember. We're made like that." Her
shrill laugh came again. "To _sauter a pieds joints_ on people who are
used to being deferred to, or made much of, is the best way to command
their cordial gratitude and sincere esteem, isn't it? Don't all you
successful professional men know that?"

"The days of my professional successes are past and gone," said Saxham,
"and my very name must be strange in the ears of the men and women who
were my patients. It is natural and reasonable that when a man falls out
of the race, he should be forgotten--at least, I hold it so."

"You have a patient not very far away who lauds you to the skies." Lady
Hannah indicated the slender pepper-and-salt clad figure of Julius
Fraithorn with the cherry-wood umbrella-stick. "You know his father, the
Bishop of H----? Such a dear little trotty old man, with the kind of rosy,
withered-apple face that suggests a dear little trotty old woman,
disguised in an episcopal apron and gaiters, and with funny little bits of
white fur glued on here and there for whiskers and eyebrows. We met him
with Mrs. Fraithorn at the Hotel Schwert at Appenbad one June. Do you know
Appenbad? Views divine: such miles of eye-flight over the Lake of
Constance and the Rhine Valley. To