He uncovered the crushed fingers; raising, pressed
them to his lips.
He groaned. “Now you know me at last.”
She patted those brown hands; did not speak.
“You know the awful temper I’ve got,”
he went on. “Uncontrollable—
angry even with you—foul brute—”
“But I annoyed you, Georgie.”
He flung out an accusatory hand against himself.
“How? By being sweet and loving! Why,
what a brute I must be!”
She told him: “You shan’t call yourself
names. In fact, you mustn’t.
Because that is calling me names too. We belong,
Georgie.”
The pretty sentiment tickled him. Gloom flew
from his brow before sunshine that took its place.
He laughed. “You’re a dear, dear old
thing.”
She gave a whimsical look at him. “I ought
to have said at once what I am going to say now:
Did you hurt him much?”
“I bashed him!” George said, revelling
in it. “I fairly bashed him!”
She snuggled against this tremendous fellow.
It was a park-keeper who, from that opium drug of
sweet silence with which lovers love to dull their
senses, recalled them to the urgency for action.
The park-keeper led David by one hand, Angela by the
other, whence he had found them wandering. Disappointment
that their owner was a protected lady instead of a
nicely-shaped nursemaid whom by this introduction
he might add to his recreations, delivered him of stern
reproof at the carelessness which had let these children
go astray.
“I would very much like to know,” he concluded,
“what their ma would say.”
“My plump gentleman,” said George pleasantly,
“meet me at this trysting-place at noon to-morrow,
and your desire shall be gratified.”
The park-keeper eyed him; thought better of the bitter
words he had contemplated; contented himself with:
“Funny, ain’t yer?”
“Screaming,” said George. “One
long roar of mirth. Hundreds turned away nightly.
Early doors threepence extra. Bring the wife.”
The park-keeper withdrew with a morose air.
And now my George and his Mary turned upon the immediate
future. Conning the map of ways and means and
roads of action, a desolate and almost horrifying
country presented itself. No path that might be
followed offered pleasant prospects. All led past
that ogre’s castle at 14 Palace Gardens; at
the head of each stood the ogress shape of Mrs. Chater,
gnashing for blood and bones over the disaster to her
first-born. She must be faced.
George flared a torch to light the gloom: “But
why should you go near her, dearest? Let me do
it. I’ll take the children back. I’ll
see her. I’ll get your boxes.”
Even the sweetest women trudge through life handicapped
by the preposterous burden of wishing to do what their
sad little minds hold right. It is a load which,
too firmly strapped, makes them dull companions on
the highway.
