him straight. He hadn't, Fanny discovered, been so very awful; he
had flung away all that he had on one expensive woman and he had
lost his job. Brocklebank found him another in an insurance office
where Fanny's brother was a director. Then Fanny settled down to the
really serious business of settling Furnival. She was always asking
him down to Amberley when the place was quiet, by which she meant
when Philippa Tarrant wasn't there. She was always asking nice girls
down to meet him. She worked at it hard for a whole year, and then
she said that if it didn't come off that summer she would have to
give it up.

The obstacle to her scheme for Furny's settlement was his
imperishable repugnance to the legal tie. It had become, Fanny
declared, a regular obsession. All this she confided to Straker as
she lunched with him one day in his perfectly appointed club in
Dover Street. Furny was coming down to Amberley, she said, in July;
and she added, "It would do you good, Jimmy, to come, too."

She was gazing at him with a look that he had come to know, having
known Fanny for fifteen years. A tender, rather dreamy look it was,
but distinctly speculative. It was directed to the silver streaks in
Straker's hair on a line with his eyeglasses, and he knew that Fanny
was making a calculation and saying to herself that it must be quite
fifteen years or more.

Straker was getting on.

A week at Amberley would do him all the good in the world. She
rather hoped--though she couldn't altogether promise him--that a
certain lady in whom he was interested (he needn't try to look as if
he wasn't) would be there.

"_Not_ Philippa?" he asked wearily.

"No, Jimmy, not Philippa. You know whom I mean."

He did. He went down to Amberley in July, arriving early in a golden
and benignant afternoon. It was precisely two years since he had
been there with Philippa. It was very quiet this year, so quiet that
he had an hour alone with Fanny on the terrace before tea.
Brocklebank had taken the others off somewhere in his motor.

She broke it to him that the lady in whom he was interested wasn't
there. Straker smiled. He knew she wouldn't be. The others, Fanny
explained, were Laurence Furnival and his Idea.

"His Idea?"

"His Idea, Jimmy, of everything that's lovable."

There was a luminous pause in which Fanny let it sink into him.

"Then it's come off, has it?"

"I don't know, but I think it's coming."

"Dear Mrs. Brockles, how did you mana