ich I have lived for so many
years and grant me your kind indulgence for a confession I have to
make. Besides being worried, I felt annoyed. Wellingsford was my little
world. I knew everybody in it. I had grown to regard myself as the
repository of all its gossip. The fraction of it that I retailed was a
matter of calculated discretion. I made a little hobby--it was a
foible, a vanity, what you will--of my omniscience. I knew months ahead
the dates of the arrivals of young Wellingsfordians in this world of
pain and plenitude. I knew of maidens who were wronged and youths who
were jilted; of wives who led their husbands a deuce of a dance, and of
wives who kept their husbands out of the bankruptcy court. When young
Trexham, the son of the Lord Lieutenant of the county, married a minor
light of musical comedy at a registrar's office, I was the first person
in the place to be told; and I flatter myself that I was instrumental
in inducing a pig-headed old idiot to receive an exceedingly charming
daughter-in-law. I loved to look upon Wellingsford as an open book. Can
you blame me for my resentment at coming across, so to speak, a couple
of pages glued together? The only logical inference from Betty's remark
was that Boyce had behaved abominably and even notoriously to a woman
in Wellingsford. To do him justice, I declare I had never heard his
name associated with any woman or girl in the place save Betty herself.
I felt that, in some crooked fashion, or the other, I had been done out
of my rights.

And there, placidly smoking his cigar and watching the wreaths of blue
smoke with the air of an idle seraph contemplating a wisp of cirrus in
Heaven's firmament, sat the man who could have given me the word of the
enigma.

He broke the silence by saying:

"Have you ever seriously considered the real problems of the Balkans?"

Now what on earth had the Balkans to do with the thoughts that must
have been rolling at the back of the man's mind? I was both
disappointed and relieved. I expected him to resume the personal talk,
and I dreaded lest he should entrust me with embarrassing confidences.
After three strong whiskies and sodas a man is apt to relax hold of his
discretion.... Anyhow, he jerked me back to my position of host. I made
some sort of polite reply. He smiled.

"You, my dear Meredyth, like the rest of the country, are half asleep.
In a few months' time you'll get the awakening of your life."

He began to discourse