ht spent in a boat on Ham Lake with two beautiful girls, sisters,
natives of the Five Towns, where Fuge was born. Said the obituarist:
'Those two wonderful creatures who played so large a part in Simon
Fuge's life.'

This death was a shock to me. It took away my ennui for the rest of the
journey. I too had known Simon Fuge. That is to say, I had met him
once, at a soiree, and on that single occasion, as luck had it, he had
favoured the company with the very narration to which the Gazette
contributor referred. I remembered well the burning brilliance of his
blue-black eyes, his touching assurance that all of us were necessarily
interested in his adventures, and the extremely graphic and convincing
way in which he reconstituted for us the nocturnal scene on Ham
Lake--the two sisters, the boat, the rustle of trees, the lights on
shore, and his own difficulty in managing the oars, one of which he
lost for half-an-hour and found again. It was by such details as that
about the oar that, with a tint of humour, he added realism to the
romantic quality of his tales. He seemed to have no reticences
concerning himself. Decidedly he allowed things to be understood...!
Yes, his was a romantic figure, the figure of one to whom every day,
and every hour of the day, was coloured by the violence of his passion
for existence. His pictures had often an unearthly beauty, but for him
they were nothing but faithful renderings of what he saw.

My mind dwelt on those two beautiful sisters. Those two beautiful
sisters appealed to me more than anything else in the Gazette's
obituary. Surely--Simon Fuge had obviously been a man whose emotional
susceptibility and virile impulsiveness must have opened the door for
him to multifarious amours--but surely he had not made himself
indispensable to both sisters simultaneously. Surely even he had not so
far forgotten that Ham Lake was in the middle of a country called
England, and not the ornamental water in the Bois de Boulogne! And
yet.... The delicious possibility of ineffable indiscretions on the
part of Simon Fuge monopolized my mind till the train stopped at Knype,
and I descended. Nevertheless, I think I am a serious and fairly
insular Englishman. It is truly astonishing how a serious person can be
obsessed by trifles that, to speak mildly, do not merit sustained
attention.

I wondered where Ham Lake was. I knew merely that it lay somewhere in
the environs of the Five Towns. What put fuel on the