LVII

Saxham, of St. Stephen's, had long ago faded from the recollection of

London Society, but Saxham, M.D., F.R.C.S., Late Attached Medical Staff,

Gueldersdorp, and frequently mentioned in Despatches from that bit of

debatable soil, while it was in process of debating, was distinctly a

person to cultivate. Not that it was in the least easy--the man was almost

quite a bear, but his brevity of speech and brusqueness of manner gave him

a cachet that Society found distinguished. He was married, too--so

romantic! married to a girl who was shut up with him in Gueldersdorp all

through the Siege. Quite too astonishingly lovely, don't you know? and

with manners that really suggested the Faubourg St. Germain. Where she got

her style--brought up among Boers and blacks--was to be wondered at, but

these problems made people all the more interesting. And one met her with

her husband at all the best houses since the Castleclares had taken them

up. Indeed, Mrs. Saxham was a relative--was it a cousin? No--now it all

came back! Adopted daughter, that was it, of an aunt--no, a step-sister of

Lord Castleclare, that ineffable little prig of twenty-two, who as a Peer

and Privy Councillor of Ireland, and a Lord-in-Waiting to boot, was

nevertheless a personage to be deferred to.

One had heard, hadn't one, ages ago, of the famous beauty, Lady

Bridget-Mary Bawne? Well, that was the very person, who had been Abbess,

or Prioress, or something-else-ess of a Roman Catholic Sisterhood at

Gueldersdorp, and died of pneumonia during the Siege, or did she get shot?

That was it, poor dear thing, and how quite too horrid for her!

We may know that that belated letter of the Mother's--written to her

kinswoman when the first mutterings of the storm were yet dulled by

distance, and the threatening clouds were beginning to build their

blue-black bastions and frowning ramparts on the horizon--had got through

at last. The Bawnes, true to their hereditary quality of generous loyalty,

threw open their doors and their hearts to dead Bridget-Mary's darling;

and Saxham was undisguisedly grateful when he saw how she warmed to them.

But he gave no encouragement, verbal, written, or tacit to their desire to

fulfil the dead woman's wishes in the settlement of a sum of money upon

Lynette. He had made such provision for her himself as his means

permitted. His books had been selling steadily for the past six years, his

publishers had paid him a handsome sum in royalties, and a thousand

guineas for the copyright of a new work. Plas Bendigaid was secured to his

wife; and Saxham's life was heavily insured, and the bulk of the sum

remaining from the purchase of the furniture and fixtures of the house in

Harley Street, with the practice of the physician who was giving up

tenancy, had been invested in her name with the other funds. Why should

strangers interfere with his sole privilege of working for her?

"I should prefer that the decision should be left entirely to my wife," he

said, when the Head of the House of Bawne, with the pompous solemnity

distinctive of a young man who takes himself and his position seriously,

formally broached the subject.

"Lady Castleclare has--arah!--already approached Mrs. Saxham on the

question," said Lord Castleclare, tapping the shiny surface of the

leather-covered writing-table near which he sat with the long, thin,

ivory-hued fingers, ending in long, narrow, bluish-tinted nails, that had

descended to him--with the peculiar sniffing drawl that prolonged and

punctuated his verbal utterance--from his late father. "And I regret to

hear from Lady Castleclare that Mrs. Saxham gave no encouragement to the

suggestion. I confess myself disappointed equally with my wife and my

elder step-sister, the Duchess of Broads, to whom the letter was

written--the letter that you will understand conveys to the family I

represent, the last wishes of one whose memory we hold in the most sacred

love and reverence----"

The Right Honourable Privy Councillor had here to stop and dry his eyes,

that were frankly overflowing. Though short, and not at all distinguished

of appearance, having derived from his mother, the Dowager Countess, nee

Miss Nancy McIleevy, of McIleevystown, County Down, certain personal

disadvantages to counterbalance the immense fortune amassed by her uncle,

the brewer, this little gentleman of great affairs possessed the kindly

heart, and the quick and sensitive nature of the paternal stock. Now he

continued:

"--Under the circumstances you will permit me to renew the proposal with a

slight modification. The sum we proposed to invest in Government

securities for Mrs. Saxham's benefit, carrying out a charge that we regard

it as a privilege to--to have received--is not large, merely five thousand

pounds." He coughed. "Well, now it has occurred to me that Mrs. Saxham's

objection to receive what she seems to regard as a gift from people upon

whom she has no claim--that is how she expressed herself to Lady

Castleclare--might be got over--if I may employ the expression, by our

settling the money upon your children?"

"Upon our children----"

They were sitting in Lord Castleclare's library at Bawne House, Grosvenor

Square. Great books in gilded bindings gleamed from their covered and

latticed shelves, and the perfume of Russia leather and cedar mingled with

the aroma of rare tobacco in the air. A thin fog hung over the West End,

deadening the sound of traffic, and dimming the polish of the tall

plate-glass windows. The fire burned red behind bars of silvered steel,

the ashes fell with a little clicking whisper. It seemed to Saxham that he

could hear his pierced heart bleeding, drip, drip, drip! But he sat like a

man of stone, his white, firm, supple hand clenched upon the carved knob

of the chair-arm. Then he said, looking the Right Honourable Privy

Councillor full in the face with those gentian-blue eyes of his, now sunk

in caves that grew deeper day by day:

"Let it be so, my lord. I am willing, if my wife consents, that the money

should be settled upon--her children."

He prescribed, at Lord Castleclare's request, for a political dyspepsia,

and took leave in his brusque, characteristic way, and sent away his

waiting motor-brougham, and walked home, thinking, by that new light that

had flashed upon him.

It was January, the London January of whirling dust clouds below, and

racing, murky vapours above. They had been settled in the Harley Street

house four months. It seemed to Saxham as though they had lived there for

years. The routine of professional life was closing in upon him once

again. Patients thronged to his door; Hospitals, and Societies, and

Institutions were open to him as of old; Society courted and flattered

him, and gushed about the beauty of Mrs. Saxham. It was as though that

celebrated Criminal Case, The Crown _v._ Saxham, had never developed into

ugly, sinister shape under the dirty skylight of the Old Bailey.

He crossed Grosvenor Square, and turned down Brook Street, thinking as he

went. Pretty women in furs, their make-up subdued by silk-gauze veils,

nodded to him from motor-broughams and victorias.

Though the horse-drawn hansom yet plied for hire, petrol was driving

brute-power off the streets. The hooting and clanking of the motor-omnibus

made Oxford Street hideous. And that St. Vitus's Dance of the Tube Railway

swept under the pavement beneath Saxham's tread as he had passed up New

Bond Street. Certainly London was not more beautiful or pleasanter to live

in for the six years that had gone by.

The Tube Works were responsible for much. The Companies were linking up

the North with the West, and strings of trolleys, coupled together like

railway-trucks, and laden with yellow clay or great balks of timber, or

giant scales of bored armour-plating, or moleskin-clad, brawny navvies,

progressed incessantly and at all hours through the thoroughfares of the

metropolis behind huge, giraffe-necked, splay-wheeled, smoke-vomiting

traction-engines. Houses and other buildings were being pulled down to

make stations; great hoardings were up, enclosing spaces where work went

on all day, amidst clankings and groanings of machinery, and clouds of

oily-smelling steam, and where work went on all night, with more groanings

and more clankings, deplorable shrieks of steam-sirens and hellish flares

that might have been reflections from a burning Tophet, cast upon yet

bigger and denser clouds of the oily-smelling steam.

Yes! the big black opulent city was greatly changed. But the change in the

people, affecting all ranks and every class, was even greater. There were

compensations, if you could balance against the decay of good manners the

improvements in sanitation, or set against the crop of evil sown by the

dissemination of the vilest literature in the cheapest printed forms, the

attainability, by the poorest, of the noblest productions of literary

genius. Or if in congratulating yourself upon the marvellous progress of

Scientific Inventions, hailing from the keen-brained West, you could

condone the degradation of the English language in the mouths of

Shakespeare's countrymen and countrywomen by the use of American slang

phrases, common, vulgar, coarse, alternating with choice expressions

culled from the vocabulary of the East End costermonger.

Privacy and reticence had become unfashionable, impossible in this, the

era of the guinea-hunting Press-Interviewer. The barriers of social

exclusiveness had given way before the push of the plutocrat. The Rubicon

between good Society and bad Society had become invisible. Racial suicide

and sexual licence most hideously prevailed, spreading like some vile

disease from rank to rank, and class to class. Woman had become less

womanly, man more effeminate. Home was a word that had no longer any

meaning. Religion had decayed; the fear of God had been forgotten. But

Socialism was springing up, a rank and lusty weed, in crude neglected soil

that might have been tilled to good purpose; and a cheap and rowdy form of

patriotism was in a very healthy state, although the Union Jack had not

yet replaced the Bible in the Board Schools.

Yes, things had changed, and not for the better! There was a tang upon the

moral atmosphere that made the material petrol-fumes of the motor-omnibus

almost acceptable by comparison. The air of Gueldersdorp had been cleaner,

even with that taint from the crowded trenches heavy on it. Things had

changed; and in the midst of all these changes, the last sands of the

Great Victorian Age were running out of the glass.

That wonderful life was drawing to its simple, peaceful, noble, profoundly

touching close, this January of 1901. And its ending had been hastened by

the War.

Truly of her it has been said, and shall be; even when scholars of another

race and another civilisation, springing from the ashes of this, wrest

from the relics of a history of to-day the secrets of an ancient Past:

"She was not only the Sovereign, but the Mother of her people."

* * * * *

Saxham turned into Cavendish Square, and was in Harley Street. The

white-enamelled door of a prosperous-looking corner-house bore a solid

brass plate with his name. He thought, as he opened the door with his Yale

key, how strange it was that this, the very house he had planned to live

in with Mildred, and had leased, and beautified, and decorated for her,

should have been offered for his inspection by the first West End

house-agent he applied to upon returning to London, whose dust he had

shaken off the soles of his feet forever, barely six years before.

The practitioner who occupied the house--not the same man who had taken

over the lease and fittings from Saxham--was ready to give it up, with all

its costly appurtenances and up-to-date appointments, together with the

practice, for quite a moderate slice of that legacy of thousands that had

come to Saxham from Mildred's dead boy. Saxham, diagnosing the man's fever

to realise and depart, wondered what secret, desperate motive lay at the

back of his hurry? The reason was soon evident. Like thousands of other

men, professional and private, the physician had been a dabbler on the

Stock Exchange, and had gone in heavily for South African mining-stock,

and had been ruined by the War.

It was a year of ruin. Society, led by Messrs. Washington P. Jukes and

Themistocles K. Mombasa, six-foot, full-blooded buck niggers, elegantly

scented, white-gloved, and arrayed in evening garments of Bond Street cut,

danced the newly-imported Cake Walk through its ball-rooms and

reception-saloons, with laughter on its reddened lips, and paste

imitations of its family jewels in its waved coiffure and on its powdered

bosom, and Ruin in its heart.

Great manufacturing enterprises, paralysed by lack of funds and lack of

hands, were ruined. Managers producing plays to empty houses were ruined.

Publishers publishing books that nobody cared any longer to buy, were

ruined. Painters expending time, and money, and toil, upon pictures that

no longer found purchasers were ruined. Millions of smaller folks were

ruined by the ruin of their betters. Only the great Mourning Warehouses

prospered exceedingly, like the Liquor Trade and the Drug Trade. And the

Remount and Forage Trades, and the Army-Contractors, flourished as the

green bay-tree.

Saxham's motor-brougham had gone on in advance, twisting knowingly in and

out of various corkscrew thoroughfares. It was waiting outside the house

in Lower Harley Street as the Doctor reached the door. The chauffeur, a

spare, short young man, punctiliously buttoned up in a long dark green,

white-faced livery overcoat, a cap with a white-glazed peak shading a

lean, brickdust-coloured face, with ugly, honest eyes that are familiar to

the reader, cocked one of the eyes inquiringly at his employer, and

receiving a sign implying that his services would not be required for some

space of time to come, pulled up the lever, moved on, and turned down the

side-street where were the entrance-gates of the stable-yard that had been

turned into a garage. He had been in Saxham's employment nearly two

months.

W. Keyse, late Corporal, Gueldersdorp Town Guards, had learned to clean,

manage, and drive a motor-car belonging to an officer of the Garrison in

spare hours during the Siege. This accomplishment, with some other

learning gained in those strenuous and bracing times, had justified him in

answering a _Times_ advertisement for a sober, active, and intelligent

young man, possessing the requisite knowledge of London--"Cripps!" said W.

Keyse, "as if I couldn't pick my way about the Bally Old Dustbin

blindfolded!"--to act in the capacity of chauffeur to a West End medical

practitioner.

An acquaintance who was a waiter at a Pall Mall Club gave him the tip, and

the chance came in the nick of time, for Mr. and Mrs. W. Keyse were up

against it, and no gay old error. "If you was to offer to blooming-well

work for people for nothing," said Mrs. Keyse, "my belief is, they

wouldn't 'ave you at the price!"

The Old Shop, as W. Keyse affectionately called his native island, had

drawn the exiles home. Good-bye to the bronzed, ungirdled vastness of veld

and karroo, and the clear, dark, distant blue of level-topped mountains

bathed in the pure stimulating atmosphere that braces like champagne. Old

England called with a voice there was no resisting, great draggle-tailed,

grimy London beckoned to her boy and girl, as the big grey liner, with the

scarlet smoke-stacks, engulfed her mails and passengers, dipped the Red

Ensign in farewell to Table Mountain, and sped homewards on even keel over

the heaving sapphire plain.

Southampton Dock was a pure delight to Mr. and Mrs. W. Keyse. The Waterloo

Arrival platform sent thrills through their boot-soles to the roots of

their hair. They sat in the Pit at the Oxford that night, and there was a

South African sketch on with two of the chronic-est jossers you ever see,

gassing away in khaki behind earthworks of sacks stuffed with straw, and

standing up to chuck sentimental and patriotic ballads off their chests,

while the Enemy, who had kept up an intermittent rifle-practice at the

wing, left off--presumably to listen. "After being used to the Reel

Thing," W. Keyse said, "it was enough to make you up and blub!"

That was the first disillusion. Others followed. The aunt who had

inhabited one of the ginger-brick almshouses over aginst 'Ighgyte Cemetery

was dead when they took her a whole pound of tea and three-quarters of

best cooked ham, and the delicacies had to be given to the old woman next

door, with whom the deceased had always had words. You couldn't 'ave

expected the old gal to last much longer, but still it was a blow.

Lobster had long ago given 'Melia the go-by, they learned, in return for

the ham and the tea; and they got her address and hunted her up in a

back-street behind the Queen's Crescent, and W. Keyse failed to recognise

his charmer of old in a red-nosed, frowsy slattern, married to a sweated

German in the baking-trade and mother of two of the dirtiest kids you

ever----! And Mrs. Keyse, to whom her William had expatiated upon the

subject of his family, maintained a portentous dumbness, punctuated with

ringing sniffs, during the visit, and was sarcastic on the bus, and

tearfully penitent when they got back to the Waterloo Road lodging that

was cheap at the weekly rent, she said, if you were paying for dirt and

live-stock.

You couldn't spend your time enjoying yourself for ever, she added a

little later on, as their small joint purse of savings dwindled and that

pale ghost that men call Want began to hover about their hired bolster. W.

Keyse had thought of soliciting a re-engagement at the fried-fish shop in

the High Street, Camden Town, but it had been swept away in favour of an

establishment where they mended your boots while you waited. So he sought

elsewhere. The War had drained away so many men, one would have thought

employment could be had by any chap who took the trouble to walk about and

look for it. But the soles of W. Keyse's boots were worn to their last

thickness of brown paper, and all his clothes and Emigration Jane's, with

the exception of the things him and her had on, had been pawned before it

occurred to the man that that kind of walking ended in the Workhouse. The

woman had known it from the very beginning. The valorous deeds of W. Keyse

stood him in no good stead. London was stiff with liars who boasted of

having been through the Siege, and their lies were more ornamental and

sparkling than his truths.

Mrs. W. Keyse would have took a situation as General, and glad, but there

were family reasons against that. She had broke down and cried somethink

dreadful on her William's shabby tweed shoulder the morning he went out to

answer the West End Doctor's advertisement. He kissed her and told her to

keep her hair on, but she was so hysterical that he was fair afryde to

leave 'er. So he took her along, and his good Angel must have suggested

that.

Cripps!--when the manservant in plain clothes said, "Step this way,

upstairs please"--W. Keyse and wife having applied at the area-door--"and

Dr. Saxham will see you," the name, not having been mentioned in the

advertisement, which gave only the address and an initial, imparted to

both an electrical shock of surprise. They had looked a very small and

very shabby and very lost and lonely little couple under those

high-moulded ceilings and upon the Turkey carpets that covered the

polished parquet of the handsomely-furnished and well-appointed

consulting-room that the practitioner who had caved in through South

African Gold-Mines had considered an adequate setting for his bald-browed

and portly presence. Now both curved backbones assumed the perpendicular,

and their wide Cockney mouths were wreathed in joyful smiles.

The man sitting in the Sheraton armchair at the writing-table that matched

it, the man with the black head and square pale face and heavy muscular

shoulders, who looked up from among his papers and notebooks with the

receiver of a telephone at his ear, rose to his feet, and came to them

with a kind, outstretched hand. Saxham never wasted a word or forgot a

face. And here were two faces from Gueldersdorp. He shook the hands that

belonged to them, and said in his curt way:

"How are you, Mrs. Keyse? And you, Keyse? You may guess when I heard that

somebody had called to answer my advertisement I hardly imagined that two

old patients had dropped down on me from the skies!"

The young woman stared at Saxham with her mouth agape and the tears

trickling down her hollow cheeks. The young man swallowed something with a

violent effort, and blurted out:

"Lumme, Doctor! it's more by 'arf like bein' shot up out of the Other

Shop--an' landin' in the middle of New Jerusalem! Weeks along"--he picked

up the shabby bowler that had dropped upon the Turkey carpet--"for weeks

along I've been tryin' to find out what was the matter wi' me! Now I

knows! I've bin 'omesick--fair old 'omesick for a sniffer of the very

plyce I was 'oppin' with 'appiness to git away out of four months back.

Good old Gueldersdorp!" He winked the wet out of his eyes and pointed to

Mrs. Keyse with his elbow. "An' look at 'er! Doin' a blub on the strength

of it! That's wot it is to be a woman! Ain't it, sir?"

Saxham's keen glance took in the altered shape of the thin girl in the

mended jacket and the large and feathered hat that topped the colossal

structure of fair, frizzled hair, even as she dried her eyes with a

twopenny handkerchief edged with cotton lace, and tried to laugh. He took

the lean chin of W. Keyse between his white, strong, supple fingers, and

turned the triangular, hollow-cheeked face to the light, and said,

touching the little round blue scar left by the enemy's bullet at the

angle of the wide left nostril and the other mark of its egress below the

inner corner of the right eye:

"You found out what a woman can be, my man, when she helped to nurse you

at the Hospital."

"Gawd knows I did!" affirmed W. Keyse. "An' since she's bin' my wife----"

The prominent Adam's apple in his thin throat jerked. He gulped a sob down

as he looked at her. And the red flew up in her pale cheeks, and in her

eyes, as she returned the look of him, her master and her mate, there

shone the answering light of love. And Saxham's face darkened with angry

blood, and his strong, supple surgeon's hand clenched with the savage

impulse to dash itself in the face of this ragged, seedy, out-at-elbows

Millionaire who flaunted riches in the face of his own beggary.

Never, never would a woman's eyes kindle with that sweet fire in answer to

the challenge of his own! Empty, empty the heart whose chambers were swept

and decked and garlanded for a guest who never came! Lonely, lonely,

desolate this life lived within sound of her, sight of her, touch of

her--dearer inexpressibly than ever woman was yet to man!

He had said to her: "But come to me, and I shall be content--even happy.

Live under my roof, take the shelter of my name--I ask no more!"

He asked more in the lonely nights that would never be companioned, in the

silence that would never be broken by Love's whisper or Love's kiss. He

was not content; his craving for her fretted the flesh from his bones and

gnawed his heart like some voracious, sharp-fanged, predatory animal.

Happy--was he? Happy as one who sits beside a stream of living water and

yet must perish of drought. He could only imagine one greater misery, one

more excruciating torture, one more exquisite unhappiness than this

happiness she had conferred upon him--and that was to be without her.

He drew a deep breath, and drove back his fierce, snarling misery, and

kicked it into its kennel, and befriended the absurd little couple. W.

Keyse was tested, proved capable of manipulating the steering-wheel, duly

certificated, and engaged. There were a couple of living-rooms over the

coach-house that was now a garage. Saxham sent in some plain furniture,

and behold an Eden! Pots of ferns purchased from a street hawker showed

greenly behind the tidiest muslin blinds you ever sor! and Mrs. William

Keyse, expectant mother of a potential Briton, sat behind them, and as she

patched the shirts that had been taken out of pawn--and whether they're

let out on hire to parties wanting such things or whether the mice eat

'oles in 'em, who can say? but the styte in which they come back from Them

Plyces is something chronic!--she sang, sometimes "Come, Buy My Coloured

'Erring," which they learned you along of the Tonic Sofa at the Board

School in Kentish Town; and sometimes "The Land Where Dreams Come True!"

This was a fulfilled dream, this little, cheap home of two rooms--one of

them opening upon nothing by a loft-door--over a garage that had been a

coach-house, at the end of the paved yard looking towards the rear of the

tall, drab-stuccoed house whose high double plate-glass windows were

shielded from plebeian eyes by softly-quilled screens of silk muslin

running on polished brass rods. But when the electric lights were switched

on, before the inner blinds were drawn down, you could see quite plain

into the consulting-room, a little below your level, where the Doctor sat

at his big writing-table that was heaped with notebooks and papers and had

a telephone on it, and all sorts of mysterious instruments in shining

brass and silver, as brightly polished as the gleaming thing with a lid,

shaped like a violin-case and with a spirit-lamp underneath it, in which

all sorts of wicked-looking knives and forceps were boiled when they were

taken out of the black bag; or into Mrs. Saxham's bedroom, that was on the

floor above, and was done up in the loveliest style you ever! "Not that

Missis W. Keyse would exchange 'er present quarters for Buckin'am Palace,"

she declared, pouring out her William's tea, "if invited to do so by 'er

Majesty the Queen 'erself."

William stopped blowing at his smoking saucer.

"They s'y She's dyin'!" His face lengthened. He put the saucer down. "They

'ave it in the evenin' pypers!"

Mrs. Keyse had a flash of inspiration.

"I reckon it don't seem dyin' to 'Er!"

"Wot are you gettin' at?" asked the man in bewilderment.

"I'm gettin' at it like this," said the lighter brain. "All 'er long life

she's 'ad to be a queen first, an' a wife after. Now she lays there she's

no more than a wife--a wife wots goin' to meet 'er 'usband agin after

yeers an' yeers o' waitin'. For 'er Crown she leaves be'ind 'er for 'er

son, but 'er weddin' ring goes wiv' 'er in 'er coffin! See?"

"I pipe. Wonder wot 'Er an' 'Im 'll s'y to one another fust thing they

meet?"

"They won't s'y nothink," said the visionary, soberly taking tea. "But I

shouldn't be surprised but wot they'd stand an' look in one another's

fyces wivout s'yin' a word, for a week or so by the Time Above, an' the

tears a-runnin' down an' never stoppin'!"

"Garn! There ain't no cryin' in 'Eaven," said W. Keyse, beginning on the

bread-and-butter. "The Bible tells you so!"

"That's right enough. But I lay Gawd lets folks do a bit o' blub--just

once," said Emigration Jane, "before 'E wipes their eyes, becos you don't

begin to know wot 'appiness means until you've cried for joy!"

"I pretty near did when the Doctor give me this chauffeuring job, and so I

tell you stryte," affirmed her lord. "D'you know I 'ad a shy at thankin'

'im agyne, an' got my 'ead bit orf. 'Shut your damned mouth!'--that's wot

the Doctor s'ys to me. Well, I 'ave shut it!" He closed his jaws upon an

inch-thick slice. "But wot I s'y to myself is," he continued, masticating,

"that makes the Third Time, an' the Third Time's the Charm!"

"Wot do you mean by the third time, deer?" asked Mrs. Keyse, putting more

hot water in the teapot.

"The First," said W. Keyse, with an air of mystery, "was in a saloon-bar

full o' Transvaal an' Free State Dutchies at Gueldersdorp."

"Lor'! You don't ever mean----" began his wife, and stopped short. The

scene of her first meeting with W. Keyse flashed back upon her mental

vision. She saw the big man waking up out of his drunken stupor and

lurching to the rescue of the little one. "Was it 'im?" she panted, as the

teapot ran over on the clean coarse cloth. "Was it Dr. Saxham?"

"You may tyke it from me it was." W. Keyse rescued the kettle, restored it

to the hob, returned to his place, and shook his finger at her warningly.

"And if you go to remind me as wot 'e were drunk when 'e done wot 'e

did----" He looked portentous warnings.

"I never would. Oh, William!"

"Mind as you never do, that's all!... I tried to thank 'im then," went on

W. Keyse, "an' 'e wouldn't 'ave it. I tried to thank 'im agyne at the

Hospital--an' e' wouldn't 'ave it. I tried to thank 'im yesterday on 'is

own doorstep, an' 'e wouldn't 'ave it. So wot I'm a-going to do is--Wait!

When I was a little nipper at Board School there was a fairy tyle in the

Third Standard Class Reader, all about a Lion wot 'ad syved the life of a

Louse, an' 'ow the Louse laid out to do somethin' to pay the Lion

back...."

"I remember the tyle, deer," confirmed Mrs. Keyse, "But it was a

mouse"--she repressed a shudder--"an' not the--thing you said."

"Mouse or Louse, it means the syme," declared W. Keyse with burning eyes.

"And the Doctor's goin' to find it does." He held up his lean right hand

and swore it. "So 'elp me, Jimmy Cripps!"