and from the way he wriggled and screamed he evidently
believed it, though where the silly kid imagined I could procure a live
scorpion at a garden-party I don't know. Altogether, that peach is for
me an unfading and happy memory--"

The defeated Tarrington had by this time retreated out of ear-shot,
comforting himself as best he might with the reflection that a picnic
which included the presence of Clovis might prove a doubtfully
agreeable experience.

"I shall certainly go in for a Parliamentary career," said Clovis to
himself as he turned complacently to rejoin his aunt. "As a talker-out
of inconvenient bills I should be invaluable."

THE HOUNDS OF FATE

In the fading light of a close dull autumn afternoon Martin Stoner
plodded his way along muddy lanes and rut-seamed cart tracks that led
he knew not exactly whither. Somewhere in front of him, he fancied,
lay the sea, and towards the sea his footsteps seemed persistently
turning; why he was struggling wearily forward to that goal he could
scarcely have explained, unless he was possessed by the same instinct
that turns a hard-pressed stag cliffward in its last extremity. In his
case the hounds of Fate were certainly pressing him with unrelenting
insistence; hunger, fatigue, and despairing hopelessness had numbed his
brain, and he could scarcely summon sufficient energy to wonder what
underlying impulse was driving him onward. Stoner was one of those
unfortunate individuals who seem to have tried everything; a natural
slothfulness and improvidence had always intervened to blight any
chance of even moderate success, and now he was at the end of his
tether, and there was nothing more to try. Desperation had not
awakened in him any dormant reserve of energy; on the contrary, a
mental torpor grew up round the crisis of his fortunes. With the
clothes he stood up in, a halfpenny in his pocket, and no single friend
or acquaintance to turn to, with no prospect either of a bed for the
night or a meal for the morrow, Martin Stoner trudged stolidly forward,
between moist hedgerows and beneath dripping trees, his mind almost a
blank, except that he was subconsciously aware that somewhere in front
of him lay the sea. Another consciousness obtruded itself now and
then--the knowledge that he was miserably hungry. Presently he came to
a halt by an open gateway that led into a spacious and rather neglected
farm-garden; there was little sign of life about, and the f