is
fancy!"

The Upper Housemaid was rash in thus giving her opinion. Larry's fancy
was far from bright, but he was of those unfortunates who, when
obsessed by a tune, must yield to its importunity, even though it
followed him to the steps of the scaffold.

It is not insinuated that Larry was now, metaphorically, or otherwise,
in such a case. He was, as he told himself, quite prepared to go
through with the job, but, he likewise told himself, it was a rotten
sort of business dressing for your wedding with not a soul, bar the
servants, to say good morning to, and even they looked as sour as
lemons and hadn't a smile among the lot of them. Larry drank some
coffee, and crumbled some toast, and brutally and wastefully broke
into a poached egg, turning what had been a triumph of snow, into a
yellow peril, and gave its attendant bacon to Aunt Freddy's old
Pomeranian, and found that he had finished his breakfast, and that it
was no more than ten o'clock. The rain was coming down in torrents; he
could not go out, not even to the stables. What on earth was he to do
from now till one o'clock? The blooming wedding was at two.

He thought of it as some one else's, and realised that he so thought
of it, and then just tripped himself up in the middle of the further
reflection that he wished it were.

"Probably getting married is always a bore," he said to himself,
consolingly. "'E's all right when you know 'im, but you've got to know
'im fust'! Why do these rotten old songs stick in my head like this?
Because I'm a fool, no doubt, and always was!"

He walked into the hall, and there surveyed his luggage, packed and
ready, and appallingly new.

"It'll give the show away, even if they let us off confetti," he
thought.

He wished he hadn't given in to this High Nuptial Mass business, and a
big wedding, and all the rest of it, but the Doctor and Tishy were
dead keen on it, and he had been sat on.

He and Tishy were going to London, and if this gale lasted, they would
have a devil of a crossing. He wondered if Tishy were a good sailor.
He wasn't, anyhow. He would warn her that he would be no more use to
her than a sick headache, which she would probably have, to start
with, and she wouldn't want another. The Mount Music people were
across the Channel by this time, ahead of the gale too. Luck for them!
Old Mrs. Twomey had told him they were gone, and she said they would
never come back again. Silly old ass, what did she know abou