Upon a sudden impulse he looked at his watch. Only just after twelve. He could get back in time for lunch. Lonely for her, day after day, and left as he had left her that morning. They could have a jolly afternoon together. He could make it a jolly afternoon. Nona kept coming into his thoughts--and more so after this Twyning business. He would have Mabel in his thoughts. He went in and told Mr. Fortune he rather thought of taking the afternoon off if he was not wanted. He mounted his bicycle and rode purposefully back to Mabel. CHAPTER III I The free-wheel run down into Perry Green landed him a little short of his gate,--not bad! Pirrip, the postman, whom he had passed in the bicycle's penultimate struggles, overtook him in its death throes and watched with interest the miracles of balancing with which, despite his preoccupation of mind, habit made him prolong them to the uttermost inch. He dismounted. "Anything for me, Pirrip?" "One for you, Mr. Sabre." Sabre took the letter and glanced at the handwriting. It was from Nona. Her small, neat, masculine script had once been as familiar to him as his own. It was curiously like his own. She had the same trick of not linking all the letters in a word. Her longer words, like his own, looked as if they were two or three short words close together. To this day, when he did not get a letter from her once in a year--or in five years--his address on an envelope in her handwriting was a thing he could bring, and sometimes did bring with perfect clearness before his mental vision. He glanced at it, regarded it for slightly longer than a glance, and with a little pucker of brows and lips, then made the action of putting it, unopened, in his pocket. Then he rested the bicycle against his hip and opened her letter. "Northrepps. Tuesday." She never dated her letters. He used to be always telling her about that. Tuesday was yesterday. Dear Marko--We're back. We've been from China to Peru--almost. Come up one day and be bored about it. How are you? Nona. He thought: "Funny she didn't mention she'd written just now. Perhaps she thought it was funny I didn't say I'd had it. I must tell her." He returned her letter to its envelope and put the envelope in his pocket. Then wheeled his bicycle into his gate. He smiled. "Mabel will be surprised at me back like this." Mabel was descending the stairs as he entered the hall. In the white dress she wore she made a pleasant picture against the broad, shallow stairway and the dark panelling. But she did not appear particularly pleased to see him. But he thought, "Why should she be? That's just it. That's why I've come back." "Hullo?" she greeted him. "Have you forgotten something?" He smiled invitingly. "No, I've just come back. I suddenly thought we'd have a holiday." She showed puzzlement. "A holiday? What, the office? All of you?" She had paused three steps from the foot of the stairs, her right hand on the banisters. His wife!...