“I should have had to tell them that it was to—to attend a funeral!” I retorted, with a memory of Mrs. Skinner. “Or”—here I checked the suggestion of getting my hair singed and cut. I thought I’d better not begin by mentioning my hair! And I added recklessly—“or that I’d got to go to the dentist’s and have every one of my teeth out!” “Rather than stay here in these circumstances. I see. Yes. I——Do you know, I have felt uncommonly like that myself,” admitted my employer. “That’s what I’ve been wanting to talk to you about. I thought it over last night, as I told you, and I’ve been thinking about it again to-day.” I wondered what sort of a game of golf he’d played. “It can’t go on like this!” he said, suddenly stopping in our stroll and facing me in the deepening dusk under the copper-beech. “I can’t stand it. It’s got a—a bit too thick!” he concluded, quite schoolboyishly. Then he began again, incoherently, indignantly, as if each word he said were a shell that held showers of bullets of other words. “Theo’s tomfoolery! Those dashed flowers! My uncle and his—his remarks!” “I know!” I said fervently. He turned on me again, and added unexpectedly, “And _you_!” “M-me?” “Yes!” explosively. “You’re the worst of all—and you do know it! Because I’ve let you in like, this—” “They’ll hear you from the house—you really are like Theo sometimes.” —“Because I’ve let you in,” sinking his voice and speaking once more calmly and deliberately, “for lots of unpleasantnesses which nobody could have—well, which _I_ never anticipated—you do all in your power to pay me back!” “All that—at dinner last night,” I said virtuously, “was nothing to do with me. You can’t say it was.” “No, I admit it was Theo.... But it was all part and parcel of the same impossible situation. Impossible! It can’t go on like this.” “So you said before! But this morning you said you were unable to release me?” “So I am. Which means that there’s only one other thing to be done about it,” said my employer. I waited, wondering what on earth this might be. Utterly unexpected was his next remark: “Don’t you think you could manage to be—_friends_ with me?” “_Friends?_” I repeated incredulously. Then something of his meaning began to dawn upon me, and it was with a return of Manner B that I added: “I suppose you mean ‘official’ friends?” “No, I don’t,” he said rather tartly. (That manner never has been lost on him.) “I mean, why can’t we be really friends and call ‘_Pax_’—for at least the time that you’re here? Don’t you see how much better it would make it if we could face these awkwardnesses together, instead of my knowing every time that you are only waiting for the chance to rub it in and to get at me?”