growth of those vegetables, he jumped over a flower-bed
and walked back into the building. The other
two came up along the slow course of the path talking
and talking. No one but God knows what they
said (for they certainly have forgotten), and if I
remembered it I would not repeat it. When they
parted at the head of the walk she put out her hand
again in the same well-bred way, although it trembled;
he seemed to restrain a gesture as he let it fall.
“If it is really always to be like this,”
he said, thickly, “it would not matter if we
were here for ever.”
“You tried to kill yourself four times for me,”
she said, unsteadily, “and I have been chained
up as a madwoman for you. I really think that
after that——”
“Yes, I know,” said Evan in a low voice,
looking down. “After that we belong to
each other. We are sort of sold to each other—until
the stars fall.” Then he looked up suddenly,
and said: “By the way, what is your name?”
“My name is Beatrice Drake,” she replied
with complete gravity. “You can see it
on my certificate of lunacy.”
Turnbull walked away, wildly trying to explain to
himself the presence of two personal acquaintances
so different as Vane and the girl. As he skirted
a low hedge of laurel, an enormously tall young man
leapt over it, stood in front of him, and almost fell
on his neck as if seeking to embrace him.
“Don’t you know me?” almost sobbed
the young man, who was in the highest spirits.
“Ain’t I written on your heart, old boy?
I say, what did you do with my yacht?”
“Take your arms off my neck,” said Turnbull,
irritably. “Are you mad?”
The young man sat down on the gravel path and went
into ecstasies of laughter. “No, that’s
just the fun of it—I’m not mad,”
he replied. “They’ve shut me up
in this place, and I’m not mad.”
And he went off again into mirth as innocent as wedding-bells.
Turnbull, whose powers of surprise were exhausted,
rolled his round grey eyes and said, “Mr. Wilkinson,
I think,” because he could not think of anything
else to say.
The tall man sitting on the gravel bowed with urbanity,
and said: “Quite at your service.
Not to be confused with the Wilkinsons of Cumberland;
and as I say, old boy, what have you done with my
yacht? You see, they’ve locked me up here—in
this garden—and a yacht would be a sort
of occupation for an unmarried man.”
“I am really horribly sorry,” began Turnbull,
in the last stage of bated bewilderment and exasperation,
“but really——”
“Oh, I can see you can’t have it on you
at the moment,” said Mr. Wilkinson with much
intellectual magnanimity.
“Well, the fact is——”
began Turnbull again, and then the phrase was frozen
on his mouth, for round the corner came the goatlike
face and gleaming eye-glasses of Dr. Quayle.
