ld
answer quite truthfully, "Like a house afire."

CHAPTER THE SECOND

THE PERSONALITY OF SIR ISAAC

Sec.1

It is to be remarked that two facts, usually esteemed as supremely
important in the life of a woman, do not seem to have affected Mr.
Brumley's state of mind nearly so much as quite trivial personal details
about Lady Harman. The first of these facts was the existence of the
lady's four children, and the second, Sir Isaac.

Mr. Brumley did not think very much of either of these two facts; if he
had they would have spoilt the portrait in his mind; and when he did
think of them it was chiefly to think how remarkably little they were
necessary to that picture's completeness.

He spent some little time however trying to recall exactly what it was
she had said about her children. He couldn't now succeed in reproducing
her words, if indeed it had been by anything so explicit as words that
she had conveyed to him that she didn't feel her children were
altogether hers. "Incidental results of the collapse of her girlhood,"
tried Mr. Brumley, "when she married Harman."

Expensive nurses, governesses--the best that money without prestige or
training could buy. And then probably a mother-in-law.

And as for Harman----?

There Mr. Brumley's mind desisted for sheer lack of material. Given this
lady and that board and his general impression of Harman's refreshment
and confectionery activity--the data were insufficient. A commonplace
man no doubt, a tradesman, energetic perhaps and certainly a little
brassy, successful by the chances of that economic revolution which
everywhere replaces the isolated shop by the syndicated enterprise,
irrationally conceited about it; a man perhaps ultimately to be
pitied--with this young goddess finding herself.... Mr. Brumley's mind
sat down comfortably to the more congenial theme of a young goddess
finding herself, and it was only very gradually in the course of several
days that the personality of Sir Isaac began to assume its proper
importance in the scheme of his imaginings.

Sec.2

In the afternoon as he went round the links with Horace Toomer he got
some definite lights upon Sir Isaac.

His mind was so full of Lady Harman that he couldn't but talk of her
visit. "I've a possible tenant for my cottage," he said as he and
Toomer, full of the sunny contentment of English gentlemen who had
played a proper game in a proper manner, strolled back towards the
clubhouse. "T