Prendergast overwhelmed Miss Strickland completely. She sank on the floor beside his basket, sobbing as if her heart, which was already broken, could break again.

"They might have left me this!" she said between her sobs. She spoke as if Elsie and Peter between them had killed Prendergast, although she knew that this

was nonsense.

PETER GUBBINS had the type of mind. which swiftly and invariably sees danger in the most unlikely places. He apprehended it from every wayside flower and tree. Nothing was too trivial or too transitory for Peter to snatch from it in passing a whiff of disaster. And yet the mere sound of Onoria's voice had driven him frantically, helter-skelter, toward the abyss of matrimony.

He raced from the cathedral to the station as a man flees from a burning building, his one idea being not to be caught by Onoria. Even if he had envisaged Onoria's face at one end of the race and matrimony at the other, it is probable that he

would have continued running in the direction of matrimony. The true coward can see only one danger at a tiine, and falls light-heartedly into any other which lies. in the opposite direction. It says a great deal for Peter Gubbins's heart that even in that awful moment of panic he dragged Elsie after him.

It was not till they were safe in the train that he began to wonder how on earth he was going to get rid of her. The chief obstacle to murder has always been the disposal of the body, and the problem of rescues is very similar to it. Peter wished with a burning longing that he could deposit Elsie in the cloak-room at Paddington Station, even if it involved his paying twopence a day for her forever.

After the tooth episode, it was wonderful how Elsie cheered up. She had found in Mr. Gubbins a prop and stay, and that was all she wanted. A flower grows without the support of a stick, but its carriage depends on being tied to it.

Elsie held her head up, and her mind, which was always practical, turned to Aunt Anne at Clapham.

They had a late tea in the station and sent off Elsie's telegram; then they took a taxi to Clapham. They could have gone as conveniently and more cheaply by train, but a taxi appealed to them both as more bucaneerish.

Peter enjoyed feeling bucaneerish until they reached the common; then he began to tremble before the idea of explaining things to Aunt Anne. He knew that he had done right, but he was aware that flight and guilt are to many people synonymous, and few men like to explain that they found it safer to run away.

Elsie, with incredible finesse, relieved him of this difficulty. She said she thought it would be better if he left her at the door and came back next day.

"You'll have time then," she explained, "to think things over, and I know authors and people think of their plots better alone. Whatever you decide is sure to be wonderful, and Aunt Anne will be more likely to listen to me if you 're not there." Peter gave a sigh of relief.

"Yes—yes," he agreed, "perhaps the explanation had better come from you direct. I know from personal experience that the way to tackle a difficult situation is easier to me if I am left alone face to face with it, as it were. Perhaps this is merely because I am a man. Onoria would say so; but, roughly speaking, I should say that women have the same gift."

"I don't know if it 's a gift," said Elsie, modestly; "but I can't say anything if other people are there, and I can't say much if they are n't. But I'll do what I can."

Aunt Anne required a good many explanations. She had never received a niece before at seven o'clock in the evening without a tooth-brush. She followed every explanation given by Elsie with:

"Still, I can't quite see, dear, how you have arrived without your night things. I am very glad to see you, of course, but it all sounds so precipitate."

It was on the edge of this precipice that Elsie fell asleep. She wisely kept Mr. Gubbins for breakfast. She then confessed to her Aunt Anne that she had not only

run away from the oratorio because Miss Strickland did not like oratorios, but because Mr. Gubbins was with her, and Miss Strickland would have liked his presence even less than an oratorio.

Aunt Anne laid down her knife and fork and gazed at Elsie. The mystery was solved. It had been a mystery; it was now simply a crime. Aunt Anne had not understood before why Miss Strickland should object to certain parts of the Bible set to music. She herself was doubtful of opera, even if it had not been expensive; but sacred music was surely both educational and devout and not even very interesting. It was unreasonable for a highschool teacher to object to such a performance, but a young man!

Her gaze was awful, and Elsie shuddered under it, and, swallowing her tea hurriedly, choked.

When she had stopped choking, Aunt Anne said portentuously: "Is Mr. Gubbins a young man, Elsie?"

Elsie said that that depended on what you meant by young; she had known him for years and years, and he had gray hair and wore spectacles.

"Spectacles," said Aunt Anne, solemnly, "do not prevent youth, though they may disguise it. Gray hair is nothing. Am. I to gather that there is some understanding between you and this—this Mr. Gubbins, Elsie, perhaps unknown to your dear parents?"

Elsie wriggled and twisted.

"They would n't mind him," she murmured forlornly; "at least I don't think so. Of course we understand each other in a way. I play his accompaniments."

"Elsie, you are hedging!" exclaimed Aunt Anne, majestically. "I must see this young man for myself."

Elsie was not really hedging. If she had seen a hedge, she would most certainly have taken shelter under it; but she was not aware of the exact danger her aunt supposed her to be avoiding.

The idea of marriage conveyed nothing personal to Elsie. Marriage was merely something that happened to other people, with a cake. She helped herself to marma

lade, and hoped that Peter Gubbins would blow over.

Her aunt pursed up her lips and said, "This is dreadful"; but as Elsie refused to fall into the trap of asking what was dreadful, her aunt could not follow it up in any way except by telling Mary, the parlormaid, to show Mr. Gubbins, when he arrived, into her dead husband's study.

The study of a dead clergyman is not usually an invigorating spot. Aunt Anne was a massive lady, and she sat between Peter and the door. All the windows were closed as if on purpose. Even if Peter had had the courage to try to escape, it would have been very difficult. You cannot get out of dead people's rooms briskly without appearing heartless; besides, he had not the courage.

Peter was not as surprised at Aunt Anne's attitude as Elsie would have been, but he was more frightened. He saw in Aunt Anne's eye that matrimony had fallen upon him like a bolt from the blue.

One cannot put bolts back into the blue when they have fallen, and one could not dislodge the idea of matrimony from Aunt Anne's mind when once it had taken root there. If young people would go to oratorios together, they ought to be married. She saw that quite plainly, even without the lawless journey at the other end, which made the prospect, as she explained to Peter, "simply compulsory."

"You see," she explained, "Elsie arrived here literally without a tooth-brush. Need I say more?"

Peter assured her that there really was no need. It contained the case against them in a nutshell.

On the whole, he was not averse into being frightened into marriage with Elsie. One or two things had to be made perfectly plain before he would consent to it. One was that they should not go back to Little Ticklington on any account, and the other that the marriage should take place as quietly as possible without wedding guests. They might have relatives, but not friends. It was all terribly uncertain and disintegrating, but it was not as terrible as having to face Onoria.

Peter proposed to Elsie quite easily. He simply said:

"On the whole, I think the best way out for both of us is to be married. For a long time I have been feeling Little Ticklington too restricted for me mentally. One needs to be nearer the great pulse of life. Not too near, of course. I thought somewhere in the suburbs-Chiswick, for instance. There are some nice little houses in that direction, or Turnham Green. I could cultivate sweet-peas there, and yet attend literary causeries in London. Of course it's a great upheaval for both of us, especially at my age; but looking at it all round, it appears to me the wisest course to take. What do you feel about

it?"

Elsie nodded. She was n't looking at it all round. She was seeing that it involved her not having to meet Onoria just yet. She said yes; she thought it was the best plan, if Peter did n't mind.

Peter said:

"You must take the rough with the smooth." Of course he had not contemplated such a step for many years, but he thought that if they were very careful and took things quietly they might be able to

manage.

He understood from Aunt Anne that one wrote to the bishop's chaplain for a license, and did not have to see the bishop. The conversation came to an abrupt pause. Their eyes met guiltily, and they looked away from each other."

What were they going to do about Onoria? Peter hummed, and Elsie twiddled her fingers. Onoria never allowed these mitigations of self-control to take place. It was a great relief to them. They decided, in silence, to do nothing. It was as if they had been married already.

Peter said he had one or two things to do, and left her. Aunt Anne came in and wept on Elsie's neck and they decided to go out and do a little shopping.

Everything went quite smoothly. Elsie's parents came up to town, and were very pleased when they discovered that Peter had six hundred a year in trust funds, without counting what he made by his ar

ticles. They privately thought that marriage from Clapham was absurd, but Peter was unexpectedly firm upon the subject. He quite simply asserted that at Little Ticklington no such marriage would ever take place. He would marry Elsie at Clapham or he would not marry Elsie at all.

Mrs. Binns, Peter's former housekeeper, brought Samson up to town in a basket. Samson would not speak to Peter for several days, but he ate heartily.

It was the night before the wedding that Peter and Elsie heard of the death of Prendergast. Mrs. Binns had bought Peter a china dog as a wedding present, and this had put it into her head. Elsie and Peter concealed their emotion until they were alone; then they gazed at each other in sympathetic anguish. They could no longer keep silence about Onoria.

"Oh," said Elsie, "if only we could give Onoria another pug. Perhaps she would see then that we are n't really doing anything to upset her; and besides she would n't mind so much if she had somethingyou know what I mean-something of her own to fall back upon?"

"I was thinking the same thing myself," agreed Peter. "Between you and me, Onoria never had quite the subtlety for cats. Samson would never look at her, but dogs she knew through and through. I think she would appreciate our getting her a dog. It might heal any little breach that our-our coming together may have appeared to cause."

They bought a pug puppy directly after the marriage, on the way to Chiswick.

It was an expensive animal, and it re

lieved their feelings very much. Onoria would have returned it to them had she not discovered, on opening the basket, that with their usual inefficiency they had sent the poor little creature to her in a most deplorable condition.

First it had to be fed, and then a carbolic bath was more than indicated, and after Onoria had spent several hours over the puppy, she began to feel that it would be cruelty to send it back. It was obvious that neither of the Gubbins could take proper care of a dog.

Onoria never altogether lost touch with Peter and Elsie. She told them what she thought of them when she acknowledged the pug; but letters do not carry sound. They became used to the idea of what Onoria thought of them; it seemed less significant at Chiswick.

Onoria spent a night with them every now and then, and once a year they visited her for a week-end at Little Ticklington. Of course it was not the same thing. Onoria was just the same, and the Gubbins were not really very different; but they were more critical of Onoria. They did not stand up to her before her face, but they stood up to her behind her back quite easily. When Onoria got the better of them in argument, as she invariably did, they would wait until she was out of ear-shot. Then they would smile and say to each other with the secret consciousness of superior achievement:

"It stands to reason that an unmarried woman like Onoria can't understand things as we do. She has n't had the experience."

E came out to Shanghai a generation ago, in those days when Shanghai was not as respectable as it is now, whatever that says to you. It was, of course, a great change from home, and its crude pleasures and crude companions gave him somewhat of a shock; for he was of decent stock, with a certain sense of the fitness of things, and the beach-combers, adventurers, rough traders, and general riffraff of the China coast, gathered in Shanghai, did not offer him the society he desired.

He was often obliged to associate with them more or less, however, in a business way, for his humble position as minor clerk in a big corporation entailed certain responsibilities out of hours, and this responsibility he could not shirk for fear of losing his position. Thus by these acts of civility, more or less enforced, he was often led into a loose sort of intimacy, into companionship with people who were distasteful to his rather fastidious nature. But what can you expect on the China coast?

He was rather an upright sort of young man, delicate and abstemious, and the East, being new to him, shocked him. He took pleasure in walking along the Bund, marveling at the great river full of the ships of the world, marveling at the crowds from the four corners of the world who disembarked from these ships and scattered along the broad and sunny thoroughfare, seeking amusements of a primitive sort. But in these amusements he took no part. Being a gentleman, they did not attract him; not for long. The singsong girls and the

"American girls" were coarse, vulgar creatures, and he did not like them. It was no better in the back streets. Bars and saloons, gaming-houses and opium divans, all the coarse paraphernalia of pleasure, as the China coast understood the word, left him unmoved. These things had little influence upon him, and the men who liked them overmuch, who chaffed him because of his squeamishness and distaste for them, were not such friends as he needed in his life.

However, there were few alternatives. There was almost nothing else. Companionship of this kind or the absolute loneliness of a hotel bedroom were the alternatives which confronted him. He had little money, just a modest salary; therefore the excitement of trading, of big, shady deals, said nothing to him. He went to the races, a shy onlooker. He could not afford to risk his little salary in betting. Above all things, he was cautious. Consequently, life did not offer him much outside of office hours, and in office hours it offered him nothing at all.

You will see from this that he was a very limited person, incapable of expansion. Now, as a rule, life in the far East does not have this effect upon young men. It is generally stimulating and exciting even to the most unimaginative, while the novelty of it, with the utter freedom and lack of restraint and absence of conventional public opinion, is such that usually within a very short time one becomes unfitted to return to a more formal society. In the old days of a generation ago life on the China coast was probably much more exciting and inciting than it is to-day, al