Mr. Grimmer looked up with a grin. “I don’t know what the old joker will say if you bring your scheme to a head,” he remarked.

Ethel, who was standing in front of the fireplace, smoking daintily, tried hard to look shocked.

“My dear Billy,” she drawled. “That is hardly the way to speak of an Honorary Canon who expects to become a bishop, if his father-in-law lives long enough to get into another Cabinet. Then, for one thing, Jimmy won’t propose for some time yet, not until Vera has been away and come back again; and when they are engaged what can the old joker, as you call him, do to me?”

“He might preach about you,” her husband suggested.

Ethel shrugged her shoulders. “I shouldn’t be there to hear him; it would make May Marlow blush and send that hateful Ida Fenton white with passion. By the way, did I tell you that Ida had taken a house in town? They think she’s going to be married again, to that horrid, clean-shaven man with the damp hands, who’s always collecting for some mission or other. You must know him, Billy. Surely you do; we used to call him the Additional Curate. Well, to go back to Jimmy. He wouldn’t give Vera up, and her money is under her own control.”

“He had to give you up,” Grimmer said.

His wife laughed. “He never had me to give up, really. Besides, I hardly knew you then, Billy, so it didn’t count, did it?... Billy, you must not behave in that ridiculous way; you have crushed my flowers, and the gong will go in a moment.”

It was a fortnight since Jimmy had met Ethel Grimmer again, and during that time he had not written a line. Every day, and often twice a day, he had been up at Drylands, at first, because Ethel had insisted on his attendance; and latterly, because it seemed the natural thing to do. His original feeling had been one of sincere relief at the break in the monotony of his exile, and he had been equally glad to see both Vera and Ethel; but after a while Ethel seemed to become almost uninteresting by comparison with the younger woman. He was not passionately in love, as he had been with Lalage. The thought of Vera gave him no sleepless nights. In fact, now he slept far better than he had done for many months past. He had a sense of restfulness to which he had long been a stranger, as though he had taken some mental opiate to soothe the pain of remembrance. London, and the flat, and the grinding drudgery of Fleet Street, the miserable little creditors worrying at the door all these seemed now to belong to some former existence, to be part of the life of a different Jimmy Grierson. Vera knew nothing of such things; and, in her society, he himself managed to forget them.

Lalage’s letter was still unanswered. Day after day he meant to write; but, somehow, there was never time. He wanted to think it over carefully, he kept on telling himself, and then deliberately turned his mind to something else.

He had smartened himself up considerably so far as appearance went. True, once or twice, it gave him a twinge of remorse when he found that he was doing again the very things on which Lalage had insisted with gentle patience in those now-distant days, observing little conventions which he had dropped during his sojourn abroad, and had lately dropped anew. Then, too, he was drinking far less. He did not need the spirit now to bring him oblivion, and he did want to keep his hand steady and his eye clear. Vera had once spoken very strongly on the subject of intemperance, which she knew only in theory; and Jimmy had listened to her words with respectful contrition. She would never forgive a man who drank, she said, and he had gone a little cold at the thought. Yet, forgetting that Lalage had known of his failing, and had tried to help him fight his demon, he told himself that Vera’s was the right view for a girl of her position. She was too good and pure to come into contact with the ugly things of life.

Already, he had made up his mind to ask her to marry him, later on, when she came back from a promised visit of indefinite duration. There was no hurry, Ethel had told him so frankly, no other suitor being in the running. At first, the thought of the past troubled him a little, in the abstract, as a kind of treason to Vera; but, after a while, he put that thought aside. She need never know, and Lalage had gone out of his life now.

His book had been published a week, and the one or two reviews which had appeared had been satisfactory, almost flattering, though one reviewer apparently voiced the general opinion when he said, “Mr. Grierson seems anxious to uphold the conventions of modern society, and yet he writes of them without conviction, as though he would like to believe in them, and could not manage to do so.”

Vera had frowned over the notice. “What rubbish, Mr. Grierson. It is as much as to say that you would write one of the nasty kind of book, if you dared. I think yours is very, very good and perfectly sincere.” Whereupon Jimmy had gone home well pleased, feeling that, at last, he was receiving absolution, if not from his own family, at least from his own people.

When Vera went back to town, Ethel deputed Jimmy to see her off at the station, alleging that she herself had a headache.

“It’s only au revoir,” Jimmy said, as he shook hands at the railway carriage door.

Miss Farlow smiled brightly. “That’s all. I am coming down again very soon. Father is going away for a couple of months’ holiday; and, as he is taking my younger sister, Florence, Ethel has made me promise to come down here. She is awfully good-hearted, isn’t she?”

Jimmy nodded emphatically. “She is indeed. One of the best I know.”

As the train steamed out of the station, he stood a full minute deep in thought, staring at it until it disappeared round a slight curve; then he turned to find the doctor watching him with a grim smile.

“Hullo, Grierson,” the old man said. “I’ve hardly seen you lately, only caught glimpses of you whizzing past in a motor, surrounded by millinery.” Then he scanned the other’s face critically. “You’re looking better. Found the cure for it, eh? I always thought that both the reason and the remedy would prove to wear skirts.”

Jimmy flushed awkwardly. He did not altogether admire Dr. Gregg’s frankness; and yet he was grateful for the implied testimony to his reformation, so he answered with a laugh, and, after a few minutes’ conversation, willingly consented to go up to dinner at the doctor’s that night. After all, it would be dull alone in the cottage, and he knew that Ethel would not want him, as she, too, was dining out.

The doctor was an old bachelor, or at least the town assumed him to be one. True, when he had first bought the practice, thirty years previously, he had made no definite statement on the matter; and, for a time, people had shaken their heads, and, on that purely negative evidence, had done what they called “drawing their own conclusions.” His wife had run away from him, and they would hear of her one day, in connection with some scandal, and she would allege, and probably prove, that he had ill-used her. However, as months went by, and they did not hear in fact they never heard anything they admitted they had been wrong, and began to pity him as the husband of an incurable lunatic, who was confined in an asylum near London. But even that story had died a lingering death from sheer want of nourishment, and long before Jimmy had appeared in the neighbourhood, even the mothers’ meetings had ceased to discuss the doctor’s private affairs. He was just the gruff and well-beloved friend of everyone in the place, a man of whom even the preacher in the Peculiar People’s chapel spoke with respect.

“Old friends of yours at Drylands, after all?” the doctor asked abruptly, as they sat smoking in his study after dinner.

Jimmy nodded. “Yes, you got the name wrong, you see, and, naturally, I didn’t recognise it. I’ve known the Grimmers, or at least Mrs. Grimmer, all my life.”

“It’s a bad thing to get out of touch with people you know,” the other went on. “A very bad thing. Never have a family quarrel, if you can avoid it, Grierson, or, rather, never have another.”

“How do you know I have had one?” Jimmy demanded.

The old man smiled. “You’ve as good as told me so, a score of times. Bad things family quarrels. After all, your relations are your own flesh and blood.”

Jimmy did not answer; latterly, he had begun to realise the truth of what the other was saying; and he knew more than ever the value of peace.

For a little while they smoked in silence, then, “How did you happen to light on this town in the first instance?” the doctor asked.

“I hardly know myself,” Jimmy answered. “I wanted some quiet place, and someone I have never been able to remember who it was had once mentioned it to me as the ideal spot. The name had stuck in my memory, so I came down here on chance and liked it from the first. I must say, though, I’ve found it dull at times.”

“No place is dull when you know it well enough,” the old man retorted. “Yes, I mean it. You, as a writer, ought to understand that. It’s only dull if you make it so for yourself by being out of sympathy with its people.... How’s the book getting on?”

“Pretty well, I believe. The publishers say they’re quite satisfied with it for a first novel. One doesn’t expect to make a big splash at the start.”

“Some never make a splash at all, even though they do good work. I knew one.” The doctor shook his head sadly. “He lived in this town, only a few doors from here. He used to write scientific books, and was admitted to be the best man in England on his own subject; yet he got more and more hard up all the time. I don’t know what he and his daughter really did live on for the last year or two. It ended in something very like a tragedy. Ah, it was a bad business, a terrible business,” and he sighed heavily.

Jimmy’s lips seemed suddenly to have become dry and hard; but his voice was almost normal as he asked, “What was it, doctor?”

The old man began to fill a pipe with rather exaggerated care. “It was the daughter,” he answered, without looking up. “She was a sweet girl, the best, most unselfish girl I ever knew; but curiously young in many ways, dangerously young you understand? She had been brought up alone with him no woman to tell her things. That’s bad. Confound it all, sir,” he raised his voice in a sudden explosion of wrath, “parents have no right to keep their girls in ignorance. It’s criminal negligence; at least it was in this case. They were desperately poor, and he was dying; wanted all sorts of things.” He paused again and made a show of lighting his pipe, but the match burnt out ineffectually, then he went on. “They hadn’t a shilling, and none of the tradesmen would trust them. And a man, a young scoundrel belonging to this very town, offered her ten pounds to go away with him for a couple of days, showed her the gold.... What was that?” he demanded quickly as Jimmy’s pipe stem snapped suddenly in his hands.

Jimmy himself had shifted slightly, so that the lamplight did not fall on his face; but the old man was not looking at him as he resumed his story.

“She said she was going to town, to beg his publishers for money, and he, luckily, died believing it. But someone else had seen her; and the women hunted her out. She fled to London, no money, no friends, and you can guess what must have happened. Poor child!”

“What happened to the man?” Jimmy asked in a voice which made the doctor give a grim little nod of approval as he answered:

“I felt that way myself. He abandoned her like a skunk, and his people threw the blame on her for tempting him. Tempting him! He had a motor smash soon after, and I tried my utmost to pull him through, because he would have been a hideously disfigured cripple; but he died, and I never regretted a patient more.”

Jimmy got up abruptly. He knew now who it was who had mentioned that town to him, and unconsciously sent him to live there. He had not the slightest doubt in his own mind what the answer would be when he asked:

“What was their name?”

“Penrose,” the doctor answered. “She was Lalage Penrose.”