The Kingdom Round the Corner

a half to three-quarters of an hour. At the earliest he wouldn't have to leave the house till six-thirty. So he had the best part of two hours during which to think out his

hamed to have to own to himself how quickly nowadays he could use up his physical reserves. For

when the ostentation and entertaining at Taborley House had become too much for her; this nest of refuge had been her secret-her place of retreat where she had regarnered her sincerities. She had loved the Square's old-fashioned primness, its tininess, its unchanging atmosphere of rest. It was scarcely invaded by the strum of London. In the cloud of greenness which drifted above its communal garden, one could

ld be the upshot? Would Braithwaite accept his challenge to visit him? If he did, what then? He, Tabs, couldn't very well ask his ex-valet, merely because he was his ex-valet, to desist from loving the same girl. He had no doubt that Br

unnatural tolerance for Adair; her reiterated excuse for the current love-madness, that people had the right at any cost to be happy; and the eagerness with which she had seized on his own words, "to recover our lost years by violence." In the silence of his brain he heard her voice pleading, urgent with pain and underlying terror, "Don't you see why I don't condemn? I'm sorry for you

would never have borrowed a car from that quarter to meet her ex-lover on his home-coming. She had been testing-trying to discover. She had scented a mystery-one for the solving of which none of the General's explanations had proved convincing. Then ha

" he muttered, "if there hadn't been a war, the fellow

reposterous situations which had resulted from it. Terry was right in at least

He sat up. "By Jove, I've got it. Terry's proud as Lucifer. I can stop this nonsense at any time by telling her who her lover was. Braithwaite will have to call to see m

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the bell. When Ann appeared, he handed it to h

shave. Between these acts he whistled snatches of street-songs to prove to himself his genuine light-heartedness. It was while he was drying his razor that he started on the wrong air.

against this chap? To rise from a private to a General is no crime; it's to his

overtaken him that, on this, his first day of freedom, he had immediately surrendered to this orgy of outrageous selfishness? It was Terry that mattered and only Terry. The stronghold of her happiness was threatened by Braithwaite's lie. There was a kingd

uch of his exhausted capacity for self-abnegation. He was starving for her. His old hunger