He drained his glass.  “The fact is,” said he, “this war is a nerve-racking business.  I never dreamed I was so jumpy until I came home.  I hate being by myself.  I’ve kept my poor devoted mother up till one o’clock in the morning.  To-night she struck, small blame to her; but, after five minutes on my lones, I felt as if I should go off my head.  So I routed out the car and came along.  But of course I didn’t expect to see Betty.  The sight of Betty in the flesh as a married woman nearly bowled me over.  May I help myself again?” He poured out a very much stiffer drink than before, and poured half of it down his throat.  “It’s not a joyous thing to see the woman one has been crazy over the wife of another fellow.”

“I suppose it isn’t,” said I.

Of course I might have made some subtle and cunning remark, suavely put a leading question which would have led him on, in his unbalanced mood, to confidential revelations.  But the man was a distinguished soldier and my guest.  To what he chose to tell me voluntarily I could listen.  I could do no more.  He did not reply to my last unimportant remark, but lay back in his armchair watching the blue spirals of smoke from the end of his cigar.  There was a fairly long silence.

I was worried by the talk I had overheard through the open door.  “You have behaved worse to others.  I don’t wonder at your shrinking from showing your face here.”  Betty had, weeks ago, called him a devil.  She had treated him to-night in a manner which, if not justified, was abominable.  I was forced to the conclusion that Betty was fully aware of some discreditable chapter in the man’s life which had nothing to do with the affair at Vilboek’s Farm, which, indeed, had to do with another woman and this humdrum little town of Wellingsford.  Otherwise why did she taunt him with hiding from the light of Wellingsfordian day?

Now, please don’t think me little-minded.  Or, if you do think so, please remember the conditions under which I have lived for so many years and grant me your kind indulgence for a confession I have to make.  Besides being worried, I felt annoyed.  Wellingsford was my little world.  I knew everybody in it.  I had grown to regard myself as the repository of all its gossip.  The fraction of it that I retailed was a matter of calculated discretion.  I made a little hobby—­it was a foible, a vanity, what you will—­of my omniscience.  I knew months ahead the dates of the arrivals of young Wellingsfordians in this world of pain and plenitude.  I knew of maidens who were wronged and youths who were jilted; of wives who led their husbands a deuce of a dance, and of wives who kept their husbands out of the bankruptcy court.  When young Trexham, the son of the Lord Lieutenant of the county, married a minor light of musical comedy at a registrar’s office, I was the first person in the place to be told; and I flatter myself that I was instrumental in inducing a pig-headed old idiot to receive an exceedingly