"Dear little souls
In nice white stoles, – "
and is trying to teach himself intoning. He produces at present only prolonged whining groans, but it is a step in the right direction.
Rest is good after exertion, and so Essie thinks. The south wind has been playing tricks with the dusk riches of her hair. Nature has been laying on her bistre under the great liquid eyes, and emptying a whole potful of her rouge on the rose velvet round of her cheeks. She is not in apple-pie order at all, and yet
"She was most beautiful to see,
Like a lady from a far countree."
If Esther were to murder any one, and her guilt were to be brought home to her as plainly as the eye of day shines in the sky at noon, judge and jury would combine to acquit her.
"Blessed be God, who has made beautiful women!" says the Bedouin, and Gerard echoes the benediction, as he stands with his big lavender thumb on one side of the hymn book, and her small, lavender thumb on the other, while the "dear little souls" are singing sweetly and quickly:
"There God for ever sitteth,
Himself of all the Crown;
The Lamb, the Light that shineth,
And goeth never down."
Grand words, that make one feel almost good and almost happy merely to say them!
There is only one hymn-book in the pew, and St. John is glad of it. There is something pleasant in the sense of union and partnership, though it be only a three minutes' partnership in a dog's-eared psalter.
"Is not there some different way of going home?" asks Essie, as they stand side by side, after service, in the high churchyard, looking down on the straggling damson trees, the grey smoke spiring northwards under the south wind's faint blowing, the dark-blue green of the turnip fields. "I hate going back the same way one came; it shows such a want of invention!"
"There is another way," answers St. John, scooping out a little plump green moss from a chink in the wall with the point of his umbrella, while the parson and the parson's sister, on their homeward way, turn their heads to look at them – the parson at Esther, the parson's sister at St. John – Jack at Jill, and Jill at Jack as is the way of the world; "but it is a good deal longer and a great deal muddier than the one we came by."
"I like mud," says Essie, gaily, stooping and picking a daisy from a little child's grave at her feet; "it is my native element; at home we are up to our knees in mud in winter, and over our ankles in summer."
So they chose the longer and the muddier way. It is its length that is its recommendation to them both, I think.
Down the village street, past the Loggerheads and the Forge, and along a long country lane, paved unevenly with round stones after a way our forefathers in some of the northern counties had of paving, in imperfect prophetic vision of MacAdam. To-day no broad waggon-wheel groans, nor hoofed foot clatters along; only a few cottagers and smart-bonneted servant girls trudge along to the Primitive Wesleyan Methodist Chapel, built A.D. 1789, that stands in simple, dissenting ugliness at the hill-foot, while over its newly-painted, gingerbread-coloured door stands this modest announcement: "This is the Gate of Heaven."
"It strikes me," says St. John, rousing himself out of a reverie which has lasted a quarter of an hour – "it strikes me as one of the few instances in which one's experience tallies with what one reads in novels, the awkward knack people have of interrupting one at the wrong moment."
"How do you mean?" asks Essie, coming out of a reverie, too.
"I never," pursues he, taking off his hat, and passing his hand over the broad red mark it has made on his forehead – "I never read aloud to any one in my life – I was rather fond of reading poetry at one period of my history, I leave you to guess which – not that she cared about it – she did not know Milton from Tommy Moore; but I never read to her in the course of my life without the footman coming in to put coals on at the most affecting passages – Arthur's parting from Guinevere, say, or Medora's death – and clattering down the tongs and shovel, making the devil's own row."
Esther laughs.
"These reflections are à propos of – what?"
"Of Conny's most ill-timed entry last night," he answers, with energy. "I don't suppose she makes such a midnight raid once in five years, and she certainly could not have found you and me tête-à-tête at two in the morning more than once in fifty years. Why could not she leave us in peace that once? We did not grudge her any amount of pleasant dreams; why need she grudge us our pleasant wakefulness?"
"Do you think she came on purpose, then?" asks Essie, her eyes opening as round in alarmed surprise as a baby's when a grown-up person makes ugly faces at it.
He shrugs his shoulders slightly. "Cannot say, I'm sure. Conny is not much in the habit of burning the midnight oil in the pursuit of knowledge generally. If it was accident, she came in at a wonderfully à propos, or rather mal à propos, moment. Tell me," he says, crossing over to her side of the road, and fixing frankly-asking eyes upon her; "I may be mistaken – it is a misfortune to which I am often incident – but I could not help thinking that, just as that unlucky candle appeared round the corner last night, you were going to tell me something – something about yourself? I thought I saw it in your face. I think I deserved some little reward for raking up for your behoof the ashes of that old fire that I burnt my fingers at so badly once."
Esther still remains silent, but turns her long neck from one side to the other with a restless, uneasy motion.
"Are lamplight and the small hours indispensable accessories?" he asks, with gentle pleading in look and words – "or could not you tell me as well now?"
"Tell you what?" she says, turning round sharp upon him, and snapping, as a little cross dog snaps at the heels of the passer-by – "must I invent something?"
"Are you sure that it is necessary to invent?" he asks, scanning the fair, troubled face with searching gaze.
She pulls a bunch of nuts out of the hedge from among their rough-ribbed green leaves, and begins to pick them out of their sheath. "What am I to tell you?" she says, petulantly, a suspicion that he may have heard a rumour of her engagement crossing her mind: "that I live in an old farmhouse with my brother Jack, and that we are very hard up – you know already; that 'Su dry da chi' is Welsh for 'How do you do?' and that our asparagus has answered very badly this year?"
"Of course, I cannot force your confidence," he answers, rather coldly.
"Why do you insist upon my having something to confide? What reason have you for supposing that I have?" she cries, with increased irritation.
"None whatever, but what you yourself have given me!"
"I!"
"Yes, you; not your words, but your face now and then. Don't think me impertinent. You know what unhappy reason I have had to be suspicious. But tell me" (trying his best to get a look round the corner into the averted, perturbed face of his companion) – "tell me whether there is not something between you and – and – that fellow that gave you the prayer-book?"
Esther's heart gives one great bounding throb; the thin muslin of her dress but poorly conceals its hard, quick pulsings.
One more chance for her! Fate generally gives us two or three chances before it allows us to consign ourselves irrecoverably to the dogs. One more choice between loyalty and disloyalty – a plain question, to be answered plainly, unequivocally – Yes or No; Robert or St. John. The man whose conversation bores her, whose proximity and whose gaze leave her colder than snow on an alp's high top an hour before sunrise, and with whom she has promised to live till death do them part; or the man, no whit better or handsomer, whose coming, felt, though unseen, makes her whole frame vibrate, as a harp's strings vibrate under the player's hands – beneath whose eyes hers sink down bashful, yet passionate – the man whom, after this week, she must see never again until death do them unite. Woman-like, she tries to avoid the alternative.
"What is that to you?" she retorts, abruptly, endeavouring to be playful, and succeeding only in being rude.
"Nothing whatever," he replies, flushing angrily; and then they walk on for some distance in silence.
"Are you angry?" asks Esther, presently, with a smile, half saucy, half frightened.
"I? not in the least," he replies, with an air of ostentatious indifference, but with a complexion undoubtedly florider than nature made his.
"You look excessively cross, and have not uttered a word for the last half mile," she says, pouting out her full red under-lip, and then looking (a little alarmed at her own audacity) to see in what spirit he takes her impertinence.
"When I do not get civil answers to civil questions, I think it best to hold my tongue," he says, stalking along with his head up, and hitting viciously with his umbrella at the tall, yellow mulleins in the hedge.
"People's ideas differ as to what are civil questions," says Essie, trying to stalk too, and to elevate nose and chin in emulation of his. "Suppose that I had asked you how many times you had been refused, would you have answered me?"
"Undoubtedly I should," he replies, gravely.
"How many times have you?" she asks, coming down from her elevation of offended dignity with a jump, and looking up at him with naïve, eager curiosity.
"Questions should be answered in the order of priority in which they are asked," he replies, with a smile of amusement at her simplicity, but with a good deal of dissatisfied doubt underlying the smile. "Answer my question, and I'll answer yours."
Esther turns away, and passes her hand along the hedge, catching idly at any grasses or flowers that come in her way, to the great detriment of her Sunday gloves. His anxiety overcomes his hurt pride.
"Give me an answer one way or another," he says, breathing rather short. "Is there not something between you and him?"
Esther is silent. "No" is a plain downright lie, at which conscience demurs, and "Yes" a cannon-ball that will knock her away from St. John's side out into the drear, great world for ever.
"For God's sake answer me!" he says again, in great agitation at a dumbness that seems to him ominous.
Hearing the sharp pain and angry fear in his voice, she hesitates no longer. Lie or no lie, she takes the plunge.
"Nothing!" she says, faintly, turning first milk-white, then red as a rose in her burning prime.
"Why do you turn away your face? Are you quite certain?" he asks, quickly, only half convinced by her weak negation.
"Certain," she replies, indistinctly, as if just able to echo his words, but not to frame any of her own.
"Why do you stammer and blush, then, whenever his name is mentioned?" he asks, with jealous impatience.
"I won't stand being catechised in this way," she cries, blazing out angrily, and stopping short, while sparks of fire, half quenched in tears of vexation, dart from the splendid night of her eyes. "I have answered a question which you ought never to have asked; you must be a person of very little observation," she continues, sharply, "not to have discovered during the three weeks that I have been with you that I blush at everything and nothing; I should be as likely as not to blush when Sir Thomas's name was mentioned, or – or – "
"Or mine," suggests St. John, ironically; "put it as strongly as you can."
"Or yours, if you like," she answers, hardily, but crimsoning painfully meanwhile in confirmation of her words.
At a little distance farther on, their path forsakes the road and leads across a line of grass fields. St. John crosses the first stile, and waits politely on the other side to help Esther over.
"No, no!" she cries, petulantly, withdrawing her foot from the first rung – "I hate being helped over stiles. Go on, please."
He obeys, and walks on. Her dignity does not allow her to hurry her pace to overtake him, nor does his permit him to slacken his steps till she come up with him; and they walk on in single file, goose-fashion, through two fields and a half.
Dividing and watering the third field, as the four ancient rivers divided and watered the rose gardens and asphodel fields of Paradise, a little beck, with many turns and bends and doublings back upon itself, strays babbling, like a silver ribbon twisted among the meadow's green hair. It is not like the Welsh brooks, fretful and brawling, making little waterfalls and whirlpools and eddies over and about every water-worn stone; smoothly it flows on, as a holy, eventless life flows towards the broad sea whose tides wash the shores of Time. In dry weather it is slow-paced enough, and crystal clear; now the late heavy rains have quickened its current, and rolled it along, turbid and muddy. Even though swollen, however, it is still but a narrow thread, and St. John clears it at a jump.
"Shall I go on still?" he asks, with a malicious smile from the other side, addressing Esther, who stands looking down rather ruefully at the quick, brown water at her feet.
"I believe you knew of this, and brought me here on purpose to make a fool of me," she cries, reproachfully.
"I did nothing of the kind," he answers, quietly. "Last time I was here there was a plank thrown across; but you see the stream has been higher than it is now" (pointing to the drenched grass and little deposit of sticks and leaves on the bank), "and has probably carried it away."
"How am I to get over?" she asks, hopelessly, with a look of childish distress on her face.
"I'll carry you," he answers, springing back to her side; "the brook is shallower farther down; I can lift you over with the greatest ease imaginable."
"That you shan't!" answers Esther, civilly turning her back upon him.
"May I ask why?" he asks, coolly. "After the number of times I have carried you up and down stairs at Felton, you can hardly be afraid of my letting you fall?"
"The very fact of my having already had so many obligations to you makes me resolved not to add to their number," she replies, stiffly, with an effort to look dignified, which her laughing, débonnaire, seductive style of beauty renders peculiarly unsuccessful.
"If you can suggest any better plan, I shall be delighted to assist you in carrying it out," rejoins he, smothering a smile.
"I'll jump!" she says, desperately, eyeing meanwhile the hurrying stream and space between bank and bank with calculating look.
"You cannot," he cries, hastily; "you'll get a ducking as sure as I stand here. Don't be so silly!"
The word "silly" acts as a whip and spur to Essie's flagging courage. She retreats a few yards from the edge, in order to get a little run to give her a better spring.
"As headstrong as an allegory on the banks of the Nile!" remarks Gerard, resignedly, quoting Mrs. Malaprop and folding his arms.
Neither the preparatory run, nor the tremendous bound she takes, avail to save Miss Craven from the fate which her obstinacy and the comparative shortness of her legs render unavoidable. She jumps short, and falls forward on the wet bank; her lavender kid gloves digging convulsively into it, and her legs disporting themselves fish-like in the brook.
He is at her side in an instant, raises gently and lifts her on to the grass, unmindful of the pollution caused to his coat by the muddy contact.
"What a fool I was!" she cries, passionately, sinking down among a grove of huge burdock leaves, smothered in shame and angry blushes.
St. John thinks it rude to disagree with her, so holds his peace.
"Why don't you laugh at me? why don't you jeer me?" she continues, vehemently; "why don't you tell me you are very glad of it, and that I richly deserve it, as I see you are longing to do? Anything would be better than standing there like a stock or a stone!"
"It is not of much consequence how I stand or how I look," he replies, coldly. "It would be more to the purpose to know how you are to get home!"
"I will walk as I am," she cries impulsively, springing to her feet; "it will be a fit penance for my idiocy, and you shall go on ahead. I don't want you to be disgraced by being seen in company with such an object."
"That is very probable, isn't it?" he answers, laughing good-humouredly. "No, I have a better proposition than that, I think. It has just occurred to me that an old servant of ours lives at no great distance from here, her cottage is not more than three or four fields off. If you can manage to get there she would dry your clothes for you in a minute."
Rendered docile by her late disaster, feeling very small, and hanging her head, Esther acquiesces. Her gown, from which every particle of starch or stiffness has fled, clings to her limbs and defines their form; the water drips down from her in a thousand little spouts and rivulets: bang, bang, go her soaked petticoats against her ankles at every step she takes.
"You have had almost enough of taking me out to walk, I expect," she remarks presently, rather grimly.
"You have had almost enough of jumping brooks, I expect," he retorts, drily; and then they walk on in silence till they reach a little whitewashed cottage, with its slip of potato ground and plot of pinks and marigolds and lark-spurs – an oasis of tilled ground among the wilderness of pasturage.
St. John knocks at the half-open door and puts his head in. "Are you at home, Mrs. Brown? How are you?" says he, in that frank, friendly voice that goes far to make the Felton tenants wish that Sir St. John reigned in Sir Thomas's stead.
"Quite well, thank you, Mr. St. John; I hope I see you the same," replies the person addressed, coming to the door with a jolly red face and a voluminous widow's cap that contradict one another; "it's a long time since we've seen you come our way."
"So it is, Mrs. Brown; but, you see, I have been after the partridges."
"And Sir Thomas, I hope he keeps pretty well, Mr. St. John?"
"Yes, thanks."
"And Miladi, I hope she has her health."
"Yes, thanks."
"And Miss Bl – ?"
"Yes, thanks," interrupts St. John, rather impatiently, breaking through the thread of her interrogatories. "Do you see, Mrs. Brown, that this young lady has met with an accident: she has tumbled into the brook. Do you think you could let her dry herself at your fire a bit?"
"Eh dear, Miss, you are in a mess!" ejaculates Mrs. Brown, walking round Esther, and surveying her curiously, as she stands close behind Gerard, dripping still, with a hang-dog air and chattering teeth. "Why, you have not a dry stitch upon you; you are one mask of mud! Would you please to step in?"
Mrs. Brown and Essie retire into an inner chamber for the purpose of removing the wet clothes and replacing them temporarily with some of the contents of Mrs. Brown's wardrobe.
St. John remains in the outer room, looks at the clock, behind whose dial-plate a round china-moon-face peeps out; takes up the mugs on the dresser: "For a Good Boy," "A Keepsake from Melford," "A Present from Manchester," hiding amongst numberless gilt flourishes; chivies the tabby cat; counts the flitches of bacon hanging from the rafters; walks to the door, and watches the bees crawling in and out of the low door of their straw houses, and the maroon velvet nasturtiums trailing along the borders, and lifting their round leaves and dark faces up to the knees of the standard rose.
As he so stands, whistling softly and musing, some one joins him in the doorway. He turns and beholds Esther, bashful, shame-faced, metamorphosed. To Mrs. Brown's surprise, she has declined the magnanimous offer of her best black silk. There is nothing coquettish or picturesque, as she is aware, about an ill-made dress that tries to follow the fashion and fails – destined, too, for a woman treble her size. She has chosen in preference, a short, dark, linsey petticoat and lilac cotton bedgown, which, by its looseness, can adapt itself to the round slenderness of her tall, lissom figure. Her bonnet was not included in the ruin of her other garments, but she has taken it off, as destructive to the harmony of her costume.
St. John surveys her for some moments: looks upward from petticoat to bedgown, and downward from bedgown to petticoat, but observes a discreet silence.
"Does it become me?" she asks at last, with shy vanity. "Why do not you say something?"
"I have been so unlucky in two or three of my remarks lately," replies he, with a concluding glance at the round, bare arms that emerge whitely from the short cotton sleeves, "that I have become chary of making any more."
"You need not be afraid of offending me by telling me that it is unbecoming," she says, gravely – "quite the contrary!" – she continues rather discontentedly – "think that it suits me too well, as if it were a dress that I ought to have been born to. Upon Miss Blessington now such a costume would look utterly incongruous."
St. John bursts out laughing. "A goddess in a bedgown! Diana of the Ephesians in a linsey petticoat! Perish the thought!"
Esther looks mortified, and turns away.
The cleansing of Miss Craven's garments is a lengthy operation. Mrs. Brown retreats into her back kitchen, draws forward a washtub, kneels down beside it, turns up her sleeves, and with much splashing of hot water and s lathering of soap, rubs and scrubs, wrings out, dries, and irons the luckless gown and petticoat.
It is latish and duskish by the time that St. John and his companion set out on their homeward way. Two or three starflowers have already stolen out, and are blossoming, infinitely distant, in the meadows of the sky. They are not loquacious: it is the little shallow rivulet that brawls; the great deep river runs still. Silently they walk along; her little feet trip softly through the rustling grass beside him: the evening wind blows her light garments against him. He has taken her little gloveless hand as he helps her over a stile (adversity has made her abject, and she no longer spurns his assistance), and now retains it, half absently. Bare palm to bare palm, they saunter through the rich, dim land. It is dusk, but not so dusk but that they can see their dark eyes flashing into one another: sharp, stinging pleasure shoots along their young, full veins. The vocabularies of pain and of delight are so meagre, that each has to borrow from the other to express its own highest height and deepest depth. As they pass along a lane, whose high grass banks and overgrown hawthorn hedges make the coming night already come, Esther's foot stumbles over a stone. The next moment she is in his arms, and he is kissing her repeatedly.
"Esther, will you marry me?" he asks, in a passionate whisper, forgetting to make any graceful periphrasis to explain his meaning, using the plain words as they rise in his heart.
No answer. Emotions as complicated as intense check the passage of her voice. Even here, on this highest pinnacle of bliss – pinnacle so high that she had hardly dared hope ever to climb there – the thought of Bob and his despair flashes before her: her own remarks about the senselessness of kissing – about its being a custom suited only to savages, and her own great aversion to it – recur to her with a stab of remorse.
"You won't?" cries St. John, mistaking the cause of her silence, in a voice in which extreme surprise and profound alarm and pain are mixed in equal quantities.
Still no answer.
"If you have been making a fool of me all this time, you might, at least, have the civility to tell me so," he says, in a voice so sternly cold that remorse, coyness, and all other feelings merge into womanish fear.
"Don't blame me before I deserve it," she says, with a faint smile. "I will mar – "
She finishes her sentence on his breast.
Perfect happiness never lasts more than two seconds in this world; at the end of that time St. John's doubts return. He puts her a little way from him, that she may be a freer agent. "Esther," he says, "I half believe that you said 'yes' out of sheer fright; you thought I was going to upbraid you; and I am aware" (with a half smile) "that there are few things you would not do or leave undone to avoid a scolding; you did not say it readily, as if you were glad of it. I know that you have only known me three weeks, that I am not particularly likeable, especially by women, and that I always show to the worst possible advantage at home. All I beg of you is, tell me the truth: Do you like me, or do you not?"
"I do like you."
"Like is such a comprehensive word," he says, with a slight, impatient contracting of his straight brows. "You like Mrs. Brown, I suppose, for washing your clothes?"
"I like you better than Mrs. Brown."
"I did not doubt that," he answers, laughing; "probably you like me better than Sir Thomas, than my mother, than Constance, perhaps; but such liking as that I would not stoop to pick off the ground. I must be first or nowhere. Am I first?"
"No, you are not," she answers firmly.
His countenance falls, as Cain's did.
"I am not!" he repeats, in a constrained voice. "Who is then, may I ask?"
"Jack, my brother – he is, and always will be!"
"Bah!" cries Gerard, laughing, and looking immensely relieved. "How you frightened me! I believe you did it on purpose, as you said to me about the brook this afternoon. After him, am I first?"
"Yes."
"Before – what's his name? – the fellow that writes such a remarkably good hand – before Brandon?"
"Why do you always worry me about him?" she exclaims, angrily, turning away.
"Why do you so strongly resent being worried about him?" retorts St. John suspiciously.
"It is wearisome to hear a person always harping on one string," she answers coldly. "Believe me or not, as you choose; but please spare me the trouble of these repeated and useless asseverations."
"I beg your pardon!" he says, his countenance clearing, and passing his arm round her half-shrinking, half-yielding form. "I will never dig him up as long as I live. Peace to his ashes! Oh darling!" he continues, his voice changing to an emphatic, eager, impassioned key – "I have been so little used to having things go as I wish, that I can hardly believe it is I that am standing here. Pinch me, that I may be sure that I am awake! Oh Esther! is it really true? Can you possibly be fond of me? So few people are! Not a soul in the wide world, I do believe, except my old mother. The girl that I told you about last night lay in my arms, and let me kiss her as you are doing; she kissed me back again, as you do not do; I looked into her eyes, and they seemed true as truth itself, and all the while she was lying to me: my very touch must have been hateful to her, as it is to you, perhaps?"
"You are always referring to that – that person," says Esther, lifting great jealous eyes, and a mouth like a ripe cleft cherry, through the misty twilight towards him. "I perceive that I am only a pis aller after all. If you had ceased to care for her, you would have forgiven her long ago, and have given up measuring everybody else by her standard."
"I have forgiven her fully and freely," he answers, magnanimously, and standing heart to heart with a woman
"… fairer than the evening air,
Clad in the beauty of a thousand stars;
More lovely than the monarch of the sky,
In wanton Arethusa's azured arms."
He may afford to be magnanimous. "I not only forgive her, but hale down blessings on her own and her plunger's ugly head. To be candid," he ends, laughing, "I forgave her a year ago, when I met her at Brainton Station, grown fat, with a red nose, and a tribe of squinting children, who, but for the finger of Providence interposing, might have been mine."
Speaking, he lays his lips upon the blossom of her sweet red mouth; but she, pricked with the sudden smart of recollected treachery, draws away from him.
"Come," she says, with a slight shiver, "let us go home. We shall get into dreadful disgrace as it is; what will Sir Thomas say?"
"I can tell you beforehand," says St. John, gaily; "he will say, with his usual charming candour, that, if we ask his opinion, we are a couple of fools to go gadding about to strange churches just to see a parcel of lighted candles and squeaking little boys and popish mummeries; that, for his part, he has stuck to his parish church for the last fifty years, and means to do so to the end of the chapter; and that, if we don't choose to conform to the rules of his house, &c."
"Does he always say the same?" asks Esther, smiling.
"Always. A long and affectionate study of his character has enabled me to predicate with exactness what he will say on any great subject, Esther."
"How do you know that my name is Esther?" she asks naïvely. "You have never heard any one call me so."
"Do you forget the flyleaf of the Prayer-book that – Hang it! I was on the point of uttering the forbidden name!"
Smiling, he looks for an answering smile from her, but finds none.
"I have heard of you as Esther Craven from my youth up," he continues. "Before you came we speculated as to what 'Esther' Craven would be like; it was only when you arrived in propriá personâ that you rose into the dignity of 'Miss' Craven."
"I hate being called Esther," she says, plaintively, with eyes down-drooped to the lush-green grasses that bow and make obeisance beneath her quick feet; "it always makes me feel as if I were in disgrace. Jack never calls me Esther unless he is vexed with me. Call me Essie, please."
"Essie, then."
"Well?"
"I think it right to warn you" (putting an arm of resolute possession, bolder than ever poor Brandon's had been, round her supple figure – for who is there in these grey evening fields to witness the embrace?) – "I think it right to warn you that I may very possibly grow like Sir Thomas in time; they tell me that I have a look of him already. I do not see that myself; but, even if that does come to pass, can you promise to like me even then?"
"Even then."
"I may very probably d – n the servants, and be upset for a whole evening if there are lumps in the melted butter; I may very probably insist on your playing backgammon with me every evening, and insist, likewise, on your being invariably beaten. Can you bear even that?"