"No, I wasn't," said Ben stiffly.
"Oh, well then—it was one of the other fellows. Bill or Tubby or——"
"Wasn't it Eric Fennington?" asked Alice very quietly. She picked up her cup and drank, her light eyes never leaving Ben's flushed face.
Eric Fennington? To Muriel the name was not quite unfamiliar. "Who was Eric Fennington?" she asked, but without much interest, because she felt as though the powers of darkness were behind her locked away in the front parlour, and she was afraid.
"Eric Fennington," explained Dolly volubly, "was one of the lads all right. You bet he was! He was one of the officers at Follerwick Camp, two pips up, and a great flame of Connie's. I thought you'd know him. She said she met him at Kingsport, knew him well at home. My word, he was a knut! D'you remember when he hired a car and took us to the Movies at Scarshaven, Alice? And that time he put the alarm clock in the Major's box and it went off during the third act of 'Romance' with an awful row—just when that curate was beginning to carry on!"
"Old Eric's married, isn't he?" asked Matthew heavily.
"Married or engaged or something. It was you who saw that bit in the paper, wasn't it, Alice? Anyway he's in Mespot."
"Just as well, Ben, eh?" laughed Matthew. Ben rose, his mouth still full of pie. "Where you going, lad?"
"Up t'see why Connie don't come down," interposed Mrs. Meggie. "That's a good fellow."
Muriel watched him shamble from the room, an uncouth figure, part boy, part man. This overgrown weakling whom Connie had married, how had he done it? What had induced Connie to—to—Muriel wondered for the hundredth time how it had come about. Had she been sorry for him? Surely he cared for her. There was in his manner a hint of wistfulness, of manhood undeveloped. Had the craving for self-assertion forced him to madness, aping the passion of a man without a man's self-mastery? Connie had said that he had over-mastered her. It was difficult, watching him now retreat before his family's rough humour, to imagine him mastering anyone, even himself.