ing
gravity became faintly tinged by an attenuated gleam of something inward
which resembled sly satisfaction. Of the divine frivolity of laughter
he was only capable over a chessboard. Certain positions of the game
struck him as humorous, which nothing else on earth could do..."

"He used to beat you," I asserted with confidence.

"Yes. He used to beat me," Marlow owned up hastily.

So he and Fyne played two games after tea. The children romped together
outside, gravely, unplayfully, as one would expect from Fyne's children,
and Mrs Fyne would be gone to the bottom of the garden with the
girl-friend of the week. She always walked off directly after tea with
her arm round the girl-friend's waist. Marlow said that there was only
one girl-friend with whom he had conversed at all. It had happened
quite unexpectedly, long after he had given up all hope of getting into
touch with these reserved girl-friends.

One day he saw a woman walking about on the edge of a high quarry, which
rose a sheer hundred feet, at least, from the road winding up the hill
out of which it had been excavated. He shouted warningly to her from
below where he happened to be passing. She was really in considerable
danger. At the sound of his voice she started back and retreated out of
his sight amongst some young Scotch firs growing near the very brink of
the precipice.

"I sat down on a bank of grass," Marlow went on. "She had given me a
turn. The hem of her skirt seemed to float over that awful sheer drop,
she was so close to the edge. An absurd thing to do. A perfectly mad
trick--for no conceivable object! I was reflecting on the foolhardiness
of the average girl and remembering some other instances of the kind,
when she came into view walking down the steep curve of the road. She
had Mrs Fyne's walking-stick and was escorted by the Fyne dog. Her
dead-white face struck me with astonishment, so that I forgot to raise
my hat. I just sat and stared. The dog, a vivacious and amiable animal
which for some inscrutable reason had bestowed his friendship on my
unworthy self, rushed up the bank demonstratively and insinuated himself
under my arm.

"The girl-friend (it was one of them) went past some way as though she
had not seen me, then stopped and called the dog to her several times;
but he only nestled closer to my side, and when I tried to push him away
developed that remarkable power of internal resistance by which a dog
makes