Men of Marlowe's

by Mrs. Henry Dudeney

“Yes.”

“Let’s give up this house and go into the country. You can have a pony trap and a season ticket.”

“That isn’t half a bad idea,” he responded lazily—he was too happy to be positive or vehement about anything. “The rent here is very high and I don’t see what we get for it.”

*****

They went abroad for two months, and when they returned they took a house somewhere in Surrey. They lived there for four years—with a pony trap, a man for the garden, and all the other accessories of rural gentility. Mrs. Conifer was very happy. She had two charming children. She was in the third best set—the set which draws the line at tenant farmers, but thinks it rather a privilege to be invited to the Vicarage.

She never thought of Kinsman, of that dazed, magic time when she had been a traitor to Dick. She only heard of him twice—once when they saw his name in the newspaper—co-respondent in a divorce suit or something of that sort—and wondered if it were the same man—their Kinsman—casually over dinner.

That was all. Except for that, she never gave Kinsman a thought, not even a shudder. She was too happy, too prosperous, too busy. She had her children. She had also her dogs, her bees, her poultry—all the live things that women gather about them in the country, to take the place of shopping. She had her little social excitements—summer garden parties and winter hockey. She had her little heart-burnings and triumphs—being snubbed by this woman or dropping that one.

But one day when she was out alone on her bicycle she came upon Kinsman in a lane near the house. He was very shabby, obviously very down on his luck. She remembered all at once that he had never given her back her letters—those foolish, imprudent letters in which she had bared her soul. She gripped the handle bars of her machine desperately. He was standing in her path. For a moment she had a wild plan of running him down. But the next moment her foot was on the ground. She had dismounted and faced him.

That was the first of many meetings. He was on his last legs, he was absolutely unscrupulous, and he regularly bled the poor little woman. Once her husband commented on her shabby hat, offered to raise her allowance, and gave her five sovereigns to go on with. The yellow coins dropped like burning blood into her palm. Twice a week she met Kinsman in the lane—Kinsman, shabby and dissolute and a blackmailer. I don’t know what he had been up to in those four years, something queer, no doubt. He was always a bit of an enigma. He cleaned her out at last. She had to tell him that she could not give him another penny. It was in the lane as usual. A wet, sodden October afternoon. The sky was gray and unrelenting, like Kinsman’s face. When they parted, after a piteous scene on her part, it was on the understanding that he would come to the house that night and give her husband those letters. That was all.

On her way home she met one or two people—her best friends. They chatted a bit of little social things—the hockey ball, a wedding, to which she had not been asked, some new people at a house on the hill, on whom nobody had yet called.