dred times. How nice it must have been for you meeting again. I
suppose you had all sorts of things to talk about?"

Ginger shook his head.

"Not such a frightful lot. We were never very thick. You see, this chap
Foster was by way of being a bit of a worm."

"What!"

"A tick," explained Ginger. "A rotter. He was pretty generally barred at
school. Personally, I never had any use for him at all."

Sally stiffened. She had liked Ginger up to that moment, and later on,
no doubt, she would resume her liking for him: but in the immediate
moment which followed these words she found herself regarding him with
stormy hostility. How dare he sit there saying things like that about
Gerald?

Ginger, who was lighting a cigarette without a care in the world,
proceeded to develop his theme.

"It's a rummy thing about school. Generally, if a fellow's good at
games--in the cricket team or the footer team and so forth--he
can hardly help being fairly popular. But this blighter Foster
somehow--nobody seemed very keen on him. Of course, he had a few of his
own pals, but most of the chaps rather gave him a miss. It may have been
because he was a bit sidey... had rather an edge on him, you know...
Personally, the reason I barred him was because he wasn't straight.
You didn't notice it if you weren't thrown a goodish bit with him, of
course, but he and I were in the same house, and..."

Sally managed to control her voice, though it shook a little.

"I ought to tell you," she said, and her tone would have warned him had
he been less occupied, "that Mr. Foster is a great friend of mine."

But Ginger was intent on the lighting of his cigarette, a delicate
operation with the breeze blowing in through the open window. His head
was bent, and he had formed his hands into a protective framework which
half hid his face.

"If you take my tip," he mumbled, "you'll drop him. He's a wrong 'un."

He spoke with the absent-minded drawl of preoccupation, and Sally could
keep the conflagration under no longer. She was aflame from head to
foot.

"It may interest you to know," she said, shooting the words out like
bullets from between clenched teeth, "that Gerald Foster is the man I am
engaged to marry."

Ginger's head came slowly up from his cupped hands. Amazement was in his
eyes, and a sort of horror. The cigarette hung limply from his mouth. He
did not speak, but sat looking at her, dazed. Then the match burnt his
fingers, and he dropped it