n for afternoon tea or a
game of lawn-tennis. He was an excellent player; lawn-tennis was most
popular "at home," he said, in that same mysterious and non-committing
phrase he so often made use of. Only, he found the racquets and balls
(very best London make) rather clumsy and awkward; he wished he had
brought his own along with him when he came here. Philip noticed his
style of service was particularly good, and even wondered at times
he did not try to go in for the All England Championship. But Bertram
surprised him by answering, with a quiet smile, that though it was an
excellent amusement, he had too many other things to do with his time to
make a serious pursuit of it.

One day towards the end of June, the strange young man had gone round to
The Grange--that was the name of Frida's house--for his usual relaxation
after a very tiring and distressing day in London, "on important
business." The business, whatever it was, had evidently harrowed his
feelings not a little, for he was sensitively organised. Frida was on
the tennis-lawn. She met him with much lamentation over the unpleasant
fact that she had just lost a sister-in-law whom she had never cared
for.

"Well, but if you never cared for her," Bertram answered, looking hard
into her lustrous eyes, "it doesn't much matter."

"Oh, I shall have to go into mourning all the same," Frida continued
somewhat pettishly, "and waste all my nice new summer dresses. It's SUCH
a nuisance!"

"Why do it, then?" Bertram suggested, watching her face very narrowly.

"Well, I suppose because of what you would call a fetich," Frida
answered laughing. "I know it's ridiculous. But everybody expects it,
and I'm not strong-minded enough to go against the current of what
everybody expects of me."

"You will be by-and-by," Bertram answered, with confidence. "They're
queer things, these death-taboos. Sometimes people cover their heads
with filth or ashes; and sometimes they bedizen them with crape and
white streamers. In some countries, the survivors are bound to shed so
many tears, to measure, in memory of the departed; and if they can't
bring them up naturally in sufficient quantities, they have to be beaten
with rods, or pricked with thorns, or stung with nettles, till they've
filled to the last drop the regulation bottle. In Swaziland, too, when
the king dies, so the queen told me, every family of his subjects has
to lose one of its sons or daughters, in order that they may all t