hat good were men like that in these days! What good! The prisoner
looked up. Mr. Bosengate encountered in full the gaze of those large
brown eyes, with the white showing underneath. What a suffering,
wretched, pitiful face! A man had no business to give you a look
like that! The prisoner passed on down the stairs, and vanished. Mr.
Bosengate went out and across the market place to the garage of the
hotel where he had left his car. The sun shone fiercely and he thought:
'I must do some watering in the garden.' He brought the car out, and
was about to start the engine, when someone passing said: "Good evenin'.
Seedy-lookin' beggar that last prisoner, ain't he? We don't want men of
that stamp." It was his neighbour on the jury, the commercial traveller,
in a straw hat, with a little brown bag already in his hand and the
froth of an interrupted drink on his moustache. Answering curtly: "Good
evening!" and thinking: 'Nor of yours, my friend!' Mr. Bosengate started
the car with unnecessary clamour. But as if brought back to life by the
commercial traveller's remark, the prisoner's figure seemed to speed
along too, turning up at Mr. Bosengate his pitifully unhappy eyes. Want
of his wife!--queer excuse that for trying to put it out of his power
ever to see her again! Why! Half a loaf, even a slice, was better than
no bread. Not many of that neurotic type in the Army--thank Heaven! The
lugubrious figure vanished, and Mr. Bosengate pictured instead the form
of his own wife bending over her "Gloire de Dijon roses" in the rosery,
where she generally worked a little before tea now that they were short
of gardeners. He saw her, as often he had seen her, raise herself and
stand, head to one side, a gloved hand on her slender hip, gazing as it
were ironically from under drooped lids at buds which did not come out
fast enough. And the word 'Caline,' for he was something of a French
scholar, shot through his mind: 'Kathleen--Caline!' If he found her
there when he got in, he would steal up on the grass and--ah! but with
great care not to crease her dress or disturb her hair! 'If only she
weren't quite so self-contained,' he thought; 'It's like a cat you can't
get near, not really near!'

The car, returning faster than it had come down that morning, had
already passed the outskirt villas, and was breasting the hill to where,
among fields and the old trees, Charmleigh lay apart from commoner life.
Turning into his drive, Mr. Bosengate thoug