onfess a failure. One would think that a man of average intelligence
could command stupidity at will. But it isn't so. I suppose it's a
special gift or else the difficulty consists in being relevant.
Discovering that I could find no really telling stupidity, I turned to
the next best thing; a platitude. I advanced, in a common-sense tone,
that, surely, in the matter of marriage a man had only himself to please.

Mrs. Fyne received this without the flutter of an eyelid. Fyne's
masculine breast, as might have been expected, was pierced by that old,
regulation shaft. He grunted most feelingly. I turned to him with false
simplicity. "Don't you agree with me?"

"The very thing I've been telling my wife," he exclaimed in his extra-
manly bass. "We have been discussing--"

A discussion in the Fyne menage! How portentous! Perhaps the very first
difference they had ever had: Mrs. Fyne unflinching and ready for any
responsibility, Fyne solemn and shrinking--the children in bed upstairs;
and outside the dark fields, the shadowy contours of the land on the
starry background of the universe, with the crude light of the open
window like a beacon for the truant who would never come back now; a
truant no longer but a downright fugitive. Yet a fugitive carrying off
spoils. It was the flight of a raider--or a traitor? This affair of the
purloined brother, as I had named it to myself, had a very puzzling
physiognomy. The girl must have been desperate, I thought, hearing the
grave voice of Fyne well enough but catching the sense of his words not
at all, except the very last words which were:

"Of course, it's extremely distressing."

I looked at him inquisitively. What was distressing him? The purloining
of the son of the poet-tyrant by the daughter of the financier-convict.
Or only, if I may say so, the wind of their flight disturbing the solemn
placidity of the Fynes' domestic atmosphere. My incertitude did not last
long, for he added:

"Mrs. Fyne urges me to go to London at once."

One could guess at, almost see, his profound distaste for the journey,
his distress at a difference of feeling with his wife. With his serious
view of the sublunary comedy Fyne suffered from not being able to agree
solemnly with her sentiment as he was accustomed to do, in recognition of
having had his way in one supreme instance; when he made her elope with
him--the most momentous step imaginable in a young lady's life. He had
been