more than enough to pay his mess-bills and feed his horses.  Not in England certainly....  Was he to ask Lucille to leave her luxurious home in a splendid mansion and live in a subaltern’s four-roomed hut in the plains in India? (Even if he could scrape into the Indian army so as to live on his pay—­more or less.) Grumper, her guardian, and executor of the late Bishop’s will, might have very different views for her.  Why, she might even be his heiress—­he was very fond of her, the daughter of his lifelong friend and kinsman.  Fancy a pauper making up to a very rich girl—­if it came to her being that, which he devoutly hoped it would not.  It would remove her so hopelessly beyond his reach.  By the time he could make a position, and an income visible to the naked eye, he would be grey-haired.  Money was not made in the army.  Rather was it becoming no place for a poor gentleman but the paradise of rich bounders, brainy little squits of swotters, and commission-without-training nondescripts—­thanks to the growing insecurity of things among the army class and gentry generally.  If she were really penniless he might—­as a Captain—­ask her to share his poverty—­but was it likely shed be a spinster ten years hence—­even if he were a Captain so soon?  Promotion is not violently rapid in the Cavalry....  And yet he simply hated the bare thought of life without Lucille.  Better to be a gardener at Monksmead, and see her every day, than be the Colonel of a Cavalry Corps and know her to be married to somebody else....  Yes—­he would come home one of these times from Sandburst or his Regiment and find her engaged to some other fellow.  And what then?  Well—­nothing—­only life would be of no further interest.  It was bound to happen.  Everybody turned to look at her.  Even women gave generous praise of her beauty, grace, and sweetness.  Men raved about her, and every male creature who came near her was obviously dpris in five minutes.  The curate, plump “Holy Bill,” was well known to be fading away, slowly and beautifully, but quite surely, on her account.  Grumper’s old pal, General Harringport, had confided to Dam himself in the smoking-room, one very late night, that since he was fifty years too old for hope of success in that direction he’d go solitary to his lonely grave (here a very wee hiccup), damn his eyes, so he would, unwed, unloved, uneverything.  Very trag(h)ic, but such was life, the General had declared, the one alleviation being the fact that he might die any night now, and ought to have done so a decade ago.

Why, even the little useless snob and tuft-hunter, the Haddock, that tailor’s dummy and parody of a man, cast sheep’s eyes and made what he called “love” to her when down from Oxford (and was duly snubbed for it and for his wretched fopperies, snobberies, and folly).  He’d have to put the Haddock across his knee one of these days.

Then there was his old school pal and Sandhurst senior, Ormonde Delorme, who frequently stayed at, and had just left, Monksmead —­fairly dotty about her.  She certainly liked Delorme—­and no wonder, so handsome, clever, accomplished, and so fine a gentleman.  Rich, too.  Better Ormonde than another—­but, God! what pain even to think of it....  Why had he cleared off so suddenly, by the way, and obviously in trouble, though he would not admit it?...