There is a pond at the end of the lawn covered with green sedge. She shivers. She has courage, but not that sort of courage. She rises and leans against the Adams' fireplace. The Adams' fireplace leans against her. It falls on to her with a tremendous crash.... _Lord Gumthorpe_ comes forward and gazes at the jumbled _debris_. He is conscious of a sense of despairing conflict--the conflict between contemplative amazement and some natural but well-controlled demand for concrete action. An appalling conviction comes to him that he ought to _do_ something. Under the fallen mess of brick, marble, and wood there are feeble undulations. A phrase keeps running through his mind--"Expressing her primitive virility." He tries to think where he has read it, and what it means, and how it could apply to the present case. The undulations cease. He decides that the phrase could not apply to it. He returns to the window-seat. A new horror obsesses him. The moon has moved round. The chessboard has been blotted out. _In extremis_, _Lord Gumthorpe_ falls back on his primitive instincts and rings for the butler. There is an imperceptible pause. _Stud_ glides in and stands in the middle of the room, tears of reverence and respectability streaming down his cheeks. LORD GUMTHORPE. (after an interminable pause). _Your mistress has dropped her fan into the fireplace!_ [With a little croon of pleasure, Stud falls towards the fireplace. Suddenly he stops, beholding the-fallen wreckage. For a fraction of a second the fetters of a generation of servile habits are almost broken. A fugitive expression of surprise passes over his face. Then, remembering himself, he stumbles over the _debris_ and, groping among the cinders, picks up the fan. STUD (with finesse). _Here is the fan, my Lord. Shall I present it to her Ladyship?_ LORD GUMTHORPE. (with extraordinary subtlety). _No, you may keep it. Her Ladyship does not require it._ [_Stud_ goes out with the fan. _Lord Gumthorpe_ stands irresolutely warming his hands at the fire. _Angela's_ father from Atlantis, Tennessee, is heard outside in the hall eating cantaloup. The pips rattle against the door. Unable to withstand this further symbol of inevitable doom, _Lord Gumthorpe_ throws himself on to the fire. He is burnt up. The fire is blotted out. Everything is blotted out. CURTAIN. * * * * * [Illustration: _Irritable Plus 4 (whose opponent is standing too close behind him)._ "NOW THEN, SIR, WHAT ARE YOU SUPPOSED TO BE DOING THERE?" _Mild 18._ "ONLY GETTING READY TO CLAP."] * * * * * From an account of a football match by "Brigadier" in _The Daily Record_:-- "Cresswell sustained an injury, and took no risks, but R. M. Morton would have risked going at a battalion of dragoons with bayonets drawn."