"No; I haven't let it."
"Ought to go off like smoke, properly advertised. Somethin' like this: 'To let, Roselawn Cottage, Cookham: a charmin' Thames-side bijou residence. Small grounds and large cellar, a boathouse and a houseboat, stables, a pigeon-cote, and a private post-box. Duodecimo oak dinin'-room, boudoir by Rellis. Ideal nest for a honeymoon, real thing or imitation. Might have become the real thing if owner hadn't been whisked off in time to South Africa.' And a dashed good job for him. For you've had a decentish lot of narrow escapes, Toby, my boy!" pursues the oracular Captain Bingo, disregarding his junior's forbidding scowl, "and come out of a goodish few tight places, and you've got out of 'em, if I may say so, more through luck than wit; but that little entanglement I'm delicately alludin' to was one of the closest things on record in the career of a Prodigal Son."
"Thanks. You're uncommonly complimentary to-day." Beauvayse pitches away his cigar, knocks a feather of ash from his clean silk shirt, and folds his arms resignedly on his broad flat chest.
"Upon my word, I didn't mean to be. Does it ever strike you," goes on Captain Bingo doggedly, "that if that wire from the Chief asking for your address hadn't found me at the Club, and if I hadn't run down and dug you out at the—I won't repeat the name of the place, since you don't seem to like it—you'd have been married and done for, old chap—any date you like to name between then and the beginning of the war? And, to put things mildly, there would have been the mischief to pay with your people."
"Yes," Beauvayse agrees rather dreamily; "there would have been an awful lot of bother with my people."
"Not that I object to the stage myself," Captain Bingo says, waving a large, tolerant hand; "and it seems getting to be rather the fashion to recruit the female ranks of the Peerage from Musical Comedy, and a prettier and cleverer little woman than Lessie ... What are you stoppin' your ears for?"
"I'm not," says a muffled, surly voice. "It's a—twinge of toothache."
"All I've got to say is," declares Captain Bingo, "that marriage with one's equal in point of breedin' is sometimes a blank draw, but marriage with one's inferior is a howling error. And if you had done as I'd stake my best hat you would have done, supposin' you'd been left to loll in the lap of the lovely Lessie——"
Beauvayse jumps up in a rage.
"Wrynche, how much longer do you think I can go on listening to this? You're simply maundering, man, and my nerves won't stand it."