you've defrauded the tax-collector too long.
Sign!

ANTHONY. Let's see. Three fifties and a seventy-two twenty-three
twenty-say four hundred and twenty. That'll give him a month clear
at the Hills. Many thanks, you men. I'll send round the chaprassi
to-morrow.

CURTISS. You must engineer his taking the stuff, and of course you
mustn't--

ANTHONY. Of course. It would never do. He'd weep with gratitude over his
evening drink.

BLAYNE. That's just what he would do, damn him. Oh! I say, Anthony, you
pretend to know everything. Have you heard about Gandy?

ANTHONY. No. Divorce Court at last?

BLAYNE. Worse. He's engaged!

ANTHONY. How much? He can't be!

BLAYNE. He is. He's going to be married in a few weeks. Markyn told me
at the Judge's this evening. It's pukka.

ANTHONY. You don't say so? Holy Moses! There'll be a shine in the tents
of Kedar.

CURTISS. 'Regiment cut up rough, think you?

ANTHONY. 'Don't know anything about the Regiment.

MACKESY. It is bigamy, then?

ANTHONY. Maybe. Do you mean to say that you men have forgotten, or is
there more charity in the world than I thought?

DONE. You don't look pretty when you are trying to keep a secret. You
bloat. Explain.

ANTHONY. Mrs. Herriott!

BLAYNE. (After a long pause, to the room generally.) It's my notion that
we are a set of fools.

MACKESY. Nonsense. That business was knocked on the head last season.
Why, young Mallard--

ANTHONY. Mallard was a candlestick, paraded as such. Think awhile.
Recollect last season and the talk then. Mallard or no Mallard, did
Gandy ever talk to any other woman?

CURTISS. There's something in that. It was slightly noticeable now you
come to mention it. But she's at Naini Tat and he's at Simla.

ANTHONY. He had to go to Simla to look after a globe-trotter relative of
his--a person with a title. Uncle or aunt.

BLAYNE And there he got engaged. No law prevents a man growing tired of
a woman.

ANTHONY. Except that he mustn't do it till the woman is tired of him.
And the Herriott woman was not that.

CURTISS. She may be now. Two months of Naini Tal works wonders.

DONE. Curious thing how some women carry a Fate with them. There was a
Mrs. Deegie in the Central Provinces whose men invariably fell away and
got married. It became a regular proverb with us when I was down there.
I remember three men desperately devoted to her, and they all, one after
another, took wives.

CURTISS. That's odd. Now I should have