But an unfortunate garrulity prompts
him to say more. "After the split, I should say, and before
the----"--and then he feels he is in a quagmire, and flounders to the
nearest land--"before your father went away to Australia." Then he
discerns his own feebleness, recognising the platitude of this last
remark. For nobody could shoot tigers in an Indian jungle after he had
gone off to Australia. Clearly the sooner he gets away the better.

A timely choking-fit interposes to preserve its victim from further
questioning. The patient in the next room is asleep or torpid, so he
omits farewells. Sally's mother comes out to say good-night, and Sally
goes down the staircase with him and his asthma, feeling that it is
horrible and barbarous to turn him out alone in the dense blackness.
Perhaps, however, the peculiar boy with the strange name will be there.
That would be better than nothing. Sally feels there is something
indomitable about that boy, and that fog nourishes and stimulates it.

But, alas!--there is no boy. And yet it certainly would be fourpence
if he came back. For, though it may be possible to see the street
gas-lamps without getting inside the glass, you can't see them from
the pavement. Nevertheless, the faith that "it" is clearing having been
once founded, lives on itself in the face of evidence, even as other
faiths have done before now. So the creed is briefly recited, and the
Major disappears with the word good-night still on his lips, and his
cough, gasp, or choke dies away in the fog as he vanishes.

Somebody is whistling "Arr-hyd-y-nos" as he comes from the other side
in the darkness--somebody who walks with a swinging step and a resonant
foot-beat, some one who cares nothing for fogs. Fenwick's voice is
defiant of it, exhilarated and exhilarating, as he ceases to be a cloud
and assumes an outline. Sally gives a kiss to frozen hair that crackles.

"What's the kitten after, out in the cold? How's the Major?"

"Which? _Our_ Major? He's a bit better, and the temperature's lower."
Sally believed this; a little thermometer thing was being wielded as
an implement of optimism, and had lent itself to delusions.

"Oh, how scrunchy you are, your hands are all ice! Mamma's been getting
in a stew about _you_, squire." On which Fenwick, with the slightest of
whistles, passes Sally quickly and goes four steps at a time up the
stairs, still illuminated by Sally's gas-waste. For she had left the
lights at full cock al