The Little Nugget

t night. By sheer weight of boredom, Glossop drove me from the house, so that it came about that, at

bney's study for coffee. The room was called the study, but it was really more of a master

osphere of a private school that everybody is always meeting everybody else. To avoid a man for long is impossible. I had been a

mazed me that they should find the game worth the candle. What they add to their incomes I do not know, but it cannot be very much, and the trouble they have to take is colossal.

it. Mr Abney had scarcely left the room when he be

m purely altruistic motives, entirely for my good, and partly because he forced me to face the fact that I was not always going to be young. In an abstract fashion I had already realized that I should in time cease to be thirty, but the way in which Glossop spoke of my sixty-fifth birthda

; and, murmuring something about thin

able of following me, I had no refuge but the g

trees grew so closely about the house that it was too

ebody walking up the drive-one of the maids, I supposed, returning from her even

chances of happiness without the sense to realize and use them? If Nature had made me so self-satisfied that I had lost Audrey because of my self-satisfaction why had she not made me so self-satisfied that I could lose

ed. I did not know what sort of a man it was whom she had preferred to me. That, it struck me, was the crux of the matter. She had

. I might have known that Sanstead House would never permit solitary broodi

llness of the night was split by a sound which I could have heard in a gale and recognized among a hundred conflicting noises. It was a scream, a shrill, piercing squeal t

e of life, but tonight events succeeded one another with a rapidity which surprised me. A whol

and I stood, startled into rigidity, holding it in the air as if I had

few seconds later before some pe

fusion indoors, when this person, rounding the angle of the house i

from the ground as my solar plexus. In the brief impact which ensued between the two, the shoulder had the advantage of being i

ise and pain. He staggered. What happened to him after that was not a matter of interest to me. I gat

y ceased to occupy his mind from the moment when Mr Fitzsimmons administered that historic left jab. In my case the cure was instantaneous. I can remember reeling across the g

nter the old home, I do not know; but it cannot have been many minutes, for the house was only just beginning to disgo

ions of this remarkable night were not yet over. As I reached a sitting position, and paused before adventuring fu