lately--appendi-what's-its-name, you know,
and things like that. You book your passage to Marseilles at once. So
long! You take my tip."

What Rupert took was a cab. He looked at himself in one of the little
horseshoe mirrors. He certainly did look ill; and he felt ill--tired,
bored, and nothing seemed worth while. He drove to a doctor friend, who
punched and prodded him and listened with tubes at his chest and back,
looked grave, and said: "Go to Strongitharm--he's absolutely at _the_
top. Twenty-guinea fee. But it's better to know where we are. You go to
Strongitharm."

Rupert went, and Strongitharm gave his opinion. He gave it with a voice
that trembled with sympathy, and he supplemented it with
brandy-and-soda, which he happened to have quite handy.

Then Rupert disappeared from London and from his friends--disappeared
suddenly and completely. He had plenty of money, and no relations near
enough to be inconveniently anxious. He went away and he left no
address, and he did not even write excuses to the people with whom he
should have danced and dined, nor to the editor whose style he should
have gone on imitating.

The buoyant friend rejoiced at the obvious and natural following of his
advice.

"He was looking a little bit below himself, you know, and I said: 'Go
round the world; there's nothing like it,' and, by Jove! he went. Now,
that's the kind of man I like--knows good advice when he gets it, and
acts on it right off."

So the buoyant one spread the rumour that ran its course and died, and
had to be galvanised into life once more to furnish an answer to Sybil's
questionings, when, returning from the Fortunate or other Isles, she
asked for news of her old friend. And the rumour did not satisfy her.
She had had time to think--there was plenty of time to think in those
Islands whose real name escapes me--and she knew very much more than she
had known on the evening when Rupert had broken her pet fan and asked
for a kiss which he had not taken. She found herself quite fervently
disbelieving in the grand tour theory--and the disbelief was so strong
that it distorted life and made everything else uninteresting. Sybil
took to novel-reading as other folks have in their time taken to drink.
She was young, and she could still lose herself in a book. One day she
lost herself most completely in a new novel from Mudie's, a book that
every one was talking about. She lost herself; and suddenly, in a
breathless joy that