“Welcome home, my wife!� said Sir Vivian. “Now please to leave us here together!�
So the servants and the bearers withdrew.
“It was the same face!� Mrs. Ansdey whispered, as her faithful old comrade led her away. “Why did she come?�
Cradell said: “Because she’d made up her mind to—and she was a woman! There’s two answers in one!�
He stooped mechanically to pick up the sable-trimmed mantle that had lain upon the floor. No hand had touched it, but it was no longer there.
THE MOTOR-BURGLAR
A Development of the Age of Petrol
“A QUITE remarkable case of coincidence, dear fellars—a parallel without precedent,� said Hambridge Ost to a select circle of listeners in the smoking-room of the Younger Sons’ Club, “is that the giant plate-burglary successfully accomplished at Lord Whysdale’s shooting-box in Deershire on Tuesday last by a party of three polite persons traveling in a large, roomy and handsomely-appointed pale blue ‘Flygoer’ automobile, was echoed, so to put it—on Friday by a colossal robbery at the seat of my cousin, Lord Pomphrey; the defrauding persons being also, in that case, a trio of civil-spoken and well-dressed strangers, occupying a light green ‘Runhard’ of twenty-eight horse-power with a limousine body and singularly brilliant nickel fittings. The most remarkable point on one side, and one which has given cause for the noisy derision of the profanum vulgus—do you foller me?—being that Lord Pomphrey—I regret to add—assisted and abetted by the humble individual now speaking, actually assisted the thieves to get clear off with his property, includin’ an Elizabethan beaker with a cover, out of which the Virgin Monarch graciously quaffed a nightcap of the cordial called ‘lambswool’ when staying at The Towers during a Royal progress in the year 1566, and a silver tea-kettle and punch-bowl presented by the tenants on the late Earl’s coming-of-age, with a cargo of other valuables, out of which I had the melancholy privilege of rescuing one Queen Anne Apostle spoon.
“My cousin Wosbric, between attacks of his hereditary gout, is an ardent golfer. Residing at his Club during the absence of Lady Pomphrey and the family in the Tyrol, he takes every feasible opportunity of cultivating his skill and renewing his enthusiasm for the game, the intricacies of which, dear fellars, I may own I have never been able to master. To me, when a large, cheerful, whiskered man, dressed in shaggy greenish clothes, with gaiters, announces, rubbing his hands, which are invariably encased in woolen mitts, that he has taken his driver twice going to the twelfth hole; did not altogether mishit either shot, and yet was not up to the green, because the wind bore down like a Vanguard omnibus;—to me nothing wildly incredible or curious has been said. The large man in the shaggy clothes is talking a shibboleth I do not and never could understand, dear fellars, if I bent my whole intelligence—considered by some decent judges not altogether contemptible—to the task, until the final collapse of the present Social System. But, nevertheless, Lord Pomphrey is partial to the company of this humble individual upon his golfing days, and to me the Head of my House—d’ye foller me?—in mentioning a preference issues a mandate. Enveloped in a complete golfing costume of Jaeger material, surmounted by two fur-lined overcoats, the pockets of the under one containing two patent ‘keep-hot’ bottles of warm and comforting liquids—coffee and soup—which aid to maintain the temperature of the outer man at normal, before being transferred to the inner individual—I manage to defy the rigors of the English climate and support the exhaustion consequent upon indulgence in the national game of North Britain. My walking-stick is convertible into a camp-stool; the soles of my thick boots are protected by goloshes, a peaked cap with flaps for the ears crowns my panoply; and, place in the mouth of the individual thus attired one of Dunhill’s ‘Asorbal’ cigarettes, each of which is furnished with a patent hygienic mouthpiece-filter which absorbs the deleterious oil of nicotine, and catches the stray particles of tobacco—d’ye foller me, dear fellars?—which otherwise find their way into the system of the smoker—and the picture is complete.
“The run by road from the Club doorsteps to Cluckham Pomphrey, where the Fargey Common Golf-links equal any that our country can boast, faithful copies of the eighteen best holes in the world having been carefully made under the supervision of Lord Pomphrey—the run can be made within four hours. We started. I had received the Fiery Cross from my kinsman, so to put it, in a laconic note, running: ‘Golf to-morrow if the weather keeps up and the gout keeps down.—Yours, Pomphrey.’ We started in a mild drizzle, at six-thirty. Our car, a ‘Rusher,’ of twenty-six horse-power, with a detachable top and glass driving-screen, behaved excellently. Driving through Cluckham, our county town—it happened to be market-day!—we accidentally converted a lamb into cutlets; but the immolated creature, as it chanced, being the property of one of my cousin’s farmer-tenants, the casualty passed over with fewer comments than generally ensue. Bowing to several well-known yeomen and county land-holders, my cousin and myself alighted at the Pink Boar, kept by an old retainer of the family, took a light but nourishing ante-luncheon or snack of a couple of raw eggs beaten up with whisky, and proceeded on our way to the Fargey Common Links.