“I told you,” said Terence Lynne, clearly, “that if we started to talk like this, one, if not all of us, would regret it.”

Fabian turned on her with extraordinary venom. “But that one won’t be you, will it, Terry? At least, not yet.”

She put her work down in her lap. A thread of scarlet wool trickled over her black dress and fell in a little pool on the floor. “No,” she said easily, “it won’t be me. Except that I find all this talk rather embarrassing. And I don’t know what you mean by your ‘not yet,’ Fabian.”

“You will please keep Terry’s name…” Douglas began.

“Poor Douglas!” said Fabian. “Popping up all over the place as the little pattern of chivalry. But it’s no good you know. I’m hell-bent on my Buchmanism. And, really, Ursy, you needn’t mind. I may have a crack in my skull and seem to be a bit crazy, but I did pay you the dubious compliment of asking you to marry me.”

“It’s a further sidelight on Flossie,” Fabian said, “that the story is really significant,” and as he listened to it Alleyn was inclined to agree with him. It was also a sidelight, he thought, on the character of Ursula Harme, who, when she found there was no stopping Fabian, took the surprising and admirable line of discussing their extraordinary courtship objectively and with an air of judicial impartiality.

Fabian, it appeared, had fallen in love with her during the voyage out. He said, jeering at himself, that he had made up his mind to keep his feelings to himself: “Because, taking me by and large, I was not a suitable claimant for the hand of Mrs. Rubrick’s ward.” On his arrival in New Zealand he had consulted a specialist and had shown him the official report on his injury and subsequent condition. By that time Fabian was feeling very much better. His headaches were less frequent and there had been no recrudescence of the blackouts. The specialist took fresh X-ray photographs of his head, and, comparing them with the English ones, found an improvement at the site of injury. He told Fabian to go slow and said there was no reason why he should not make a complete recovery. Fabian, greatly cheered, returned to Mount Moon. He attempted to take part in the normal activities of a sheep station but found that undue exertion still upset him, and he finally settled down to work seriously on his magnetic fuse.

“All this time,” he said, “I did not change either in my feeling for Ursy or in my decision to say nothing about it. She was heavenly kind to me, which perhaps made things a little more difficult, but I had no idea, none at all, that she was in the least fond of me. I avoided anything like a declaration, not only because I thought it would be dishonest, but because I believed it would be useless and embarrassing.”

Fabian made this statement with simplicity and firmness, and Alleyn thought: He’s working his way out of this. Evidently it was necessary for him to speak.

One afternoon some months after his arrival at Mount Moon, Flossie had plunged upstairs and beat excitedly on the workroom door. Fabian opened it and she shook a piece of paper in his face. “Read that,” she shouted. “My Favourite Nephew! Isn’t it perfectly splendid!”

It was a cable taken down by Markins over the telephone, and it announced the imminent return of Douglas Grace. Flossie was delighted. He was, she repeated emphatically, her Favourite Nephew. “So sweet always to his old aunt. We had such high old times together in London before the war.” Douglas was to come straight to Mount Moon. As a schoolboy he had spent all his holidays there. “It’s his home,” said Flossie emphatically. His father had been killed in 1918, and his mother had died some three years ago when Douglas was taking a post-graduate engineering course at Heidelberg. “So he’s only got his old auntie,” said Flossie. “Your uncle says that if he’s demobilized he shall stay here as a salaried cadet. We don’t know how badly he’s been hurt, of course.” Fabian asked where Douglas had been wounded. “A muscular wound,” said Flossie evasively, and then added, “the glutœus maximus” and was deeply offended when Fabian laughed. But she was too excited to remain long in a huff, and Fabian saw that she hovered on the edge of a confidence. “Isn’t it fun,” she exclaimed, letting her lips fly apart over her prominent teeth, “that Ursy and Douglas should meet! My little A.D.C. and my Favourite Nephew. And you, of course, Fab. I’ve told Ursy so much about Douglas that she feels she knows him already.” Here Flossie gave Fabian a very sharp, gimlet-like glance. He came out, shut the workroom door and locked it. He felt a cold jolt of apprehension in the pit of his stomach, a dreadful turning-over. Flossie took his arm and walked him along the passage. “You’ll call me a silly, romantic old thing,” she began, and even in his distress he found time to reflect how irritating she was when she playfully assumed octogenarian whimsies. “It’s only a little dream of course,” she continued, “but it would make me so happy if they should come together. It’s always been a little plot of poor old Floosie’s. Now, if I was a French guardian and aunt…” She gave Fabian’s arm a little squeeze. “Ah, well,” she said, “we’ll see.” He received another gimlet-like glance. “He’ll be very good for you, Fab,” she said firmly. “He’s so sane and vigorous. Take you out of yourself. Ha!”

So Douglas arrived at Mount Moon, and presently the two young men began their partnership in the workroom. Fabian said, wryly, that from the beginning he had watched for an attraction to spring up between Ursula and Douglas. “Certainly Flossie made every possible effort to promote it. She left no stone unturned. The trips à deux to the Pass! The elaborate sortings-out. She displayed the virtuosity of Tommy Johns in the drafting yards. Ursy and Douglas to the right. Terry, Uncle Arthur and me to the left. It was masterly and quite shameless. One evening when, on the eve of one of her trips north, her machinations had been particularly blatant, Uncle Arthur called her ‘Pandora,’ but she missed the allusion and thought he was making a joke about her luggage.”

For a time Fabian had thought her plot was going to work and tried to accustom himself to the notion. He watched, sick with uncertainty, for intimate glances, private jokes, the small change of courtship, to develop between Ursula and Douglas and thought he saw them where they didn’t exist. “I was even glad to keep Douglas in the workshop because then, at least, I knew they were not together. I was mean and subtle but I tried not to be, and I don’t think anyone noticed.”

“I merely thought he was fed-up with me,” Ursula said to Alleyn. “He treated me with deathly courtesy.”

And then on a day when Fabian had one of his now very rare headaches, there had been a scene between them. “A ridiculous scene,” he said, looking gently at Ursula. “I needn’t describe it. We talked at cross-purposes like people in a Victorian novel.”

“And I bawled and wept and said if I irritated him he needn’t talk to me at all, and then,” said Ursula, “we had a magic scene in which everything was sorted out and it all looked as if it was going to be heaven.”

“But it didn’t work out that way,” Fabian said. “I came to earth and remembered I’d no business making love to anybody and, ten minutes too late, did the little hero number and told Ursy to forget me. She said no. We had the sort of argument that you might imagine from the context. I weakened, of course. I never was much good at heroics and— well, we agreed I should see the quack again and stand by what he told me. But we’d reckoned without our Floss.”

Fabian turned back to the fire-place and, thrusting his hands in his pockets, looked up at the portrait of his aunt.

“I told you she was as clever as a bagful of monkeys, didn’t I? That’s what this thing doesn’t convey. She was sharp. For example she was wise enough to avoid tackling Ursy about me, and, still more remarkable, she had denied herself, too, many heart-to-heart talks with Ursy about Douglas. I imagine what she did say was indirect, a building-up of allusive romantics. She was by no means incapable of subtlety. Just a spot or two of the Beatrice and Benedict stuff, and the merest hint that she’d be so so happy if ever — and then a change of topic… Like that, wasn’t it, Ursy?”