"Oh, not at present," said Lady Dainton rather hurriedly. "I don't want two weddings in the family at the same time. Besides, Tony's only been at the Bar a short time. We must wait till his position's a little more established, don't you know?"
I agreed, as I always agree with Lady Dainton. Yet as I walked home that night I murmured to myself some hackneyed lines from Robert Burns. If there was one thing more certain to my mind than another, it was that the ever-shrewd Anthony Crabtree relied on the Daintons and the "desperate thing" of marriage to establish his position.
I saw and heard no more of the family until the autumn. One morning in October Loring rang me up with the news that Summertown was in London, dining that night at Hale's. I was invited to meet him and found that eleven months' travel had altogether failed to mature him. A spasmodic, sandy moustache hinted at increasing age, but in other respects he was the same freckled, snub-nosed embodiment of irresponsibility as ever. The same taste for local colour characterized him as when on his return from America he lisped of candy, cocktails, dollar-bills and the art of clubbing as practised by the New York police: he was now the completest Anglo-Indian I have ever met, and his conversation sparkled with sahibs and white men, the Rains and the Hot Weather, the Hills in general and half-sacred Simla in particular. Mr. Warren Hastings, looking sourly down from the wall of Hale's coffee-room, must have seen us as seated at endless Tiffin—paid by means of Chits—where Saises, Khitmutgars and Ayahs entered and salaamed, and twenty-one gun salutes boomed faintly in the distance—as men have politely sat for years round any returned traveller or student of Kipling's Indian stories.
"What have you done with Raney?" Loring asked as the Odyssey drew to its close.
"I left him in Paris," was the answer. "We were going on to Spain, but the guv'nor don't think he's a suitable companion for a simple, unspoiled lad like me. My own adored mother's choice, too, mark you."
"What happened?" I asked.
"Phew! What didn't?" Summertown leant back with his thumbs thrust importantly into the arm-holes of his waistcoat, "I suppose you fellows don't appreciate it's been touch and go for a European War? Nothing but the well-known family tact of the Marlyns——"
"Get to the point," Loring ordered him.