the disaster.

"Then you mean...?"

"It's off!" said Freddie.

For a moment Uncle Chris stood motionless. Then, with a sudden jerk,
he seemed to stiffen his backbone. His face was bleak, but he pulled
at his moustache jauntily.

"_Morituri te salutant!_" he said. "Good-bye, Freddie, my boy."

He turned away, gallant and upright, the old soldier.

"Where are you going?" asked Freddie.

"Over the top!" said Uncle Chris.

"What do you mean?"

"I am going," said Uncle Chris steadily, "to find Mrs. Peagrim!"

"Good God!" cried Freddie. He followed him, protesting weakly, but the
other gave no sign that he had heard. Freddie saw him disappear into
the stage-box, and, turning, found Jill at his elbow.

"Where did Uncle Chris go?" asked Jill. "I want to speak to him."

"He's in the stage-box, with Mrs. Peagrim."

"With Mrs. Peagrim?"

"Proposing to her," said Freddie solemnly.

Jill stared.

"Proposing to Mrs. Peagrim? What do you mean?"

Freddie drew her aside, and began to explain.

IV

In the dimness of the stage-box, his eyes a little glassy and a dull
despair in his soul, Uncle Chris was wondering how to begin. In his
hot youth he had been rather a devil of a fellow in between dances, a
coo-er of soft phrases and a stealer of never very stoutly withheld
kisses. He remembered one time in Bangalore ... but that had nothing
to do with the case. The point was, how to begin with Mrs. Peagrim.
The fact that twenty-five years ago he had crushed in his arms beneath
the shadows of the deodars a girl whose name he had forgotten, though
he remembered that she had worn a dress of some pink stuff, was
immaterial and irrelevant. Was he to crush Mrs. Peagrim in his arms?
Not, thought Uncle Chris to himself, on a bet. He contented himself
for the moment with bending an intense gaze upon her and asking if she
was tired.

"A little," panted Mrs. Peagrim, who, though she danced often and
vigorously, was never in the best of condition, owing to her habit of
neutralizing the beneficent effects of exercise by surreptitious
candy-eating. "I'm a little out of breath."

Uncle Chris had observed this for himself, and it had not helped him
to face his task. Lovely woman loses something of her queenly dignity
when she puffs. Inwardly, he was thinking how exactly his hostess
resembled the third from the left of a troupe of performing sea-lions
which he had seen some years ago on one of his rare visits to a
vaudeville ho