“Thanks awfully, Gordy.  It’s most frightfully decent of you,” and turned again to the Marriage Service.  He could make out some of it.  In places it seemed to him fine, and in other places queer.  About obeying, for instance.  If you loved anybody, it seemed rotten to expect them to obey you.  If you loved them and they loved you, there couldn’t ever be any question of obeying, because you would both do the things always of your own accord.  And if they didn’t love you, or you them, then—­oh! then it would be simply too disgusting for anything, to go on living with a person you didn’t love or who didn’t love you.  But of course she didn’t love his tutor.  Had she once?  Those bright doubting eyes, that studiously satiric mouth came very clearly up before him.  You could not love them; and yet—­he was really very decent.  A feeling as of pity, almost of affection, rose in him for his remote tutor.  It was queer to feel so, since the last time they had talked together out there, on the terrace, he had not felt at all like that.

The noise of the bureau top sliding down aroused him; Mr. Heatherley was closing in the remains of the artificial flies.  That meant he would be going out to fish.  And the moment he heard the door shut, Mark sprang up, slid back the bureau top, and began to write his letter.  It was hard work.

“Dear Mrs. Stormer,

“My guardian wishes me to beg you and Mr. Stormer to pay us a visit as soon as you come back from the Tyrol.  Please tell Mr. Stormer that only the very best fishermen—­like him—­can catch our trout; the rest catch our trees.  This is me catching our trees (here followed a sketch).  My sister is going to be married to-morrow, and it will be disgusting afterwards unless you come.  So do come, please.  And with my very best greetings,

“I am,

“Your humble servant,

“M.  Lennan.”

When he had stamped this production and dropped it in the letter-box, he had the oddest feeling, as if he had been let out of school; a desire to rush about, to frolic.  What should he do?  Cis, of course, would be busy—­they were all busy about the wedding.  He would go and saddle Bolero, and jump him in the park; or should he go down along the river and watch the jays?  Both seemed lonely occupations.  And he stood in the window—­dejected.  At the age of five, walking with his nurse, he had been overheard remarking:  “Nurse, I want to eat a biscuit—­all the way I want to eat a biscuit!” and it was still rather so with him perhaps—­all the way he wanted to eat a biscuit.  He bethought him then of his modelling, and went out to the little empty greenhouse where he kept his masterpieces.  They seemed to him now quite horrible—­and two of them, the sheep and the turkey, he marked out for summary destruction.  The idea occurred to him that he might try and model that hawk escaping with the little