ood old eyes; I
don't know if you get the idea. I suddenly seemed to look myself
squarely in the eyeball and say to myself, 'Freddie, old top, how do
we go? Are we not missing a good thing?' And, by Jove, thinking it
over, I found that I was absolutely correct-o! You've no notion how
dashed sympathetic she is, old man! I mean to say, I had this hump,
you know, owing to one thing and another, and was feeling that life
was more or less of a jolly old snare and delusion, and she bucked me
up and all that, and suddenly I found myself kissing her and all that
sort of rot, and she was kissing me and so on and so forth, and she's
got the most ripping eyes, and there was nobody about, and the long
and the short of it was, old boy, that I said, 'Let's get married!'
and she said, 'When?' and that was that, if you see what I mean. The
scheme now is to pop down to the City Hall and get a licence, which it
appears you have to have if you want to bring this sort of binge off
with any success and vim, and then what ho for the padre! Looking at
it from every angle, a bit of a good egg, what? Happiest man in the
world, and all that sort of thing."

At this point in his somewhat incoherent epic Freddie paused. It had
occurred to him that he had perhaps laid himself open to a charge of
monopolising the conversation.

"I say! You'll forgive my dwelling a bit on this thing, won't you?
Never found a girl who would look twice at me before, and it's rather
unsettled the old bean. Just occurred to me that I may have been
talking about my own affairs a bit. Your turn now, old thing. Sit
down, as the blighters in the novels used to say, and tell me the
story of your life. You've seen Jill, of course?"

"Yes," said Derek shortly.

"And it's all right, eh? Fine! We'll make a double wedding of it,
what? Not a bad idea, that! I mean to say, the man of God might make a
reduction for quantity and shade his fee a bit. Do the job half
price!"

Derek threw down the end of his cigarette, and crushed it with his
heel. A closer observer than Freddie would have detected long ere this
the fact that his demeanour was not that of a happy and successful
wooer.

"Jill and I are not going to be married," he said.

A look of blank astonishment came into Freddie's cheerful face. He
could hardly believe that he had heard correctly. It is true that, in
gloomier mood, he had hazarded the theory to Uncle Chris that Jill's
independence might lead her to refuse D