"Well, I have played and lost. But that is best.
Where was my right to win and keep such glory?
Now I will let the book of living rest.
Closed is my story."
—ALICE HERBERT.
Hubert's motor traversed the distance from the sports to Ilbersdale at a rate so far beyond the police limit as to make limits seem ridiculous.
On his way he encountered Mr. Cooper, pushing his bicycle up hill. The seething excitement which had gripped him that afternoon had not yet expended itself; and he pulled up.
"Good evening, Vicar. Just a word! I hope you have not been to the Burmesters with any of those awful lies about your niece that Otis was getting off his chest in that field?"
The vicar assumed his most stony aspect. His cold eye said eloquently, "Beware!" Aloud his reply was: "I fear I do not understand you, Captain Brooke."
"Sorry; it's my slang makes me difficult to follow. I drop into it when I'm excited. You see, I happen to know all about Otis, and I've just been enlightening the bystanders a bit. There isn't enough of him left to make a War Office clerk! They've hissed him off the ground, General Ayres has washed his hands of him, and I've given him twelve hours to choose between a libel action and a written apology."
"It is a—surely—a somewhat extraordinary proceeding on your part to talk of libel actions on behalf of a young lady who has her own relatives to protect her," said the vicar, fastening, in the whirl of his mind, upon a breach of conventionalities which he might legitimately resent.
"Her own relatives didn't seem to me to be doing much protecting this afternoon," observed Bert drily. "However, Mrs. Cooper and your daughters will be able to tell you all about it. They saw the brute knocked out of time."
The vicar began to be anxious to get home.
"I fancy you are under a misapprehension," he said. "I have just been to Ilbersdale to correct a misunderstanding. I own I was disturbed this afternoon to find that Mr. and Mrs. Helston had allowed the engagement between Mr. Burmester and my niece to take place, without informing the bridegroom's relatives of the serious family disabilities of the bride. I was anxious to assure Lady Burmester that, had the affair rested with me, I should have been quite frank; but that I naturally imagined that Miss Lutwyche's adopted parents had supplied all the facts."