every nerve to the utmost, and watch every
point of the game as a tiger watches a snake'? Not a bit of it! You
snooze in bed, and you send Gafferson--Gafferson!--the mud-head of the
earth! to meet your Tavender, and loaf about with him in London, and
bring him down by a slow train to your place in the evening. My God!
You've only got two clear days left to do the whole thing in--and
you don't even come up to town to get ready for them! You send
Gafferson--and he goes off to see a flower-show--Mother of Moses! think
of it! a FLOWER-show!--and your Tavender aud I are left to take a stroll
together, and talk over old times and arrange about new times, and so
on, to our hearts' content. Really, it's too easy! You make me tired!"

The nobleman offered a wan, appealing shadow of a smile. "I confess to a
certain degree of weariness myself," he said, humbly.

Thorpe looked at him in his old apathetic, leaden fashion for a little.
"I may tell you that if you HAD got hold of Tavender," he decided to
tell him, "he shouldn't have been of the faintest use to you. I know
what it was that he wrote to Gafferson,--I couldn't understand it when
he first told me, but afterwards I saw through it,--and it was merely a
maudlin misapprehension of his. He'd got three or four things all mixed
up together. You've never met your friend Tavender, I believe? You'd
enjoy him at Hadlow House. He smells of rum a hundred yards off. What
little brain he's got left is soaked in it. The first time I was ever
camping with him, I had to lick him for drinking the methylated spirits
we were using with our tin stove. Oh, you'd have liked him!"

"Evidently," said Lord Plowden, upon reflection, "it was all a most
unfortunate and--ah--most deplorable mistake." With inspiration, he made
bold to add: "The most amazing thing, though--to my mind--is that you
don't seem--what shall I say?--particularly enraged with me about it."

"Yes--that surprises me, too," Thorpe meditatively admitted. "I was
entitled to kill you--crush you to jelly. Any other man I would. But
you,--I don't know,--I do funny things with you."

"I wish you would give me a drink, now--as one of them," Plowden
ventured to suggest, with uneasy pleasantry.

Thorpe smiled a little as he rose, and heavily moved across the room.
He set out upon the big official table in the middle, that mockingly
pretentious reminder of a Board which never met, a decanter and two
glasses and some recumbent, round-bot