ly chivalry.

"What the Devil do you mean," he cried, "by chasing me all round the
garden?"

"Chasing you? All round the garden?"

"You heard me breaking my shins on that infernal flower-pot you put for
me, and out you shot with all your pack of old women and chased me round
the garden. What do you mean by it?"

"I didn't think you were in the garden."

"Any Fool could have told I was in the garden. Any Fool might have known
I was in the garden. If I wasn't in the garden, then where the Devil was
I? Eh? Where else could I be? Of course I was in the garden, and what
you wanted was to hunt me down and make a fool of me. And look at me!
Look, I say! Look at my hands!"

Lady Harman regarded the lord of her being and hesitated before she
answered. She knew what she had to say would enrage him, but she had
come to a point in their relationship when a husband's good temper is no
longer a supreme consideration. "You've had plenty of time to wash
them," she said.

"Yes," he shouted. "And instead I kept 'em to show you. I stayed out
here to see the last of that crew for fear I might run against 'em in
the house. Of all the infernal old women----"

His lips were providentially deprived of speech. He conveyed his
inability to express his estimate of Lady Beach-Mandarin by a gesture of
despair.

"If--if anyone calls and I am at home I have to receive them," said Lady
Harman, after a moment's deliberation.

"Receiving them's one thing. Making a Fool of yourself----"

His voice was rising.

"Isaac," said Lady Harman, leaning forward and then in a low penetrating
whisper, "_Snagsby!_"

(It was the name of the great butler.)

"_Damn_ Snagsby!" hissed Sir Isaac, but dropping his voice and drawing
near to her. What his voice lost in height it gained in intensity. "What
I say is this, Ella, you oughtn't to have brought that old woman out
into the garden at all----"

"She insisted on coming."

"You ought to have snubbed her. You ought to have done--anything. How
the Devil was I to get away, once she was through the verandah? There I
was! _Bagged!_"

"You could have come forward."

"What! And meet _her_!"

"_I_ had to meet her."

Sir Isaac felt that his rage was being frittered away upon details. "If
you hadn't gone fooling about looking at houses," he said, and now he
stood very close to her and spoke with a confidential intensity, "you
wouldn't have got that Holy Terror on our track, see? And now--here we
are!"