The child wasn't his. The heir to Groby! All his brother's were childless . . . There was a deep well in the stable yard. He had meant to teach the child how, if you dropped a pebble in, you waited to count twenty-three. And there came up a whispering roar. . . . But not his child! Perhaps he hadn't even the power to beget children. His married brothers hadn't. . . . Clumsy sobs shook him. It was the dreadful injury to the horse which had finished him. He felt as if the responsibility were his. The poor beast had trusted him and he had smashed it up. Miss Wannop had her arm over his shoulder. "My dear!" she said, "you won't ever take me to Groby . . . It's perhaps . . . oh . . . short acquaintance; but I feel you're the splendidest . . ." He thought: "It _is_ rather short acquaintance." He felt a great deal of pain, over which there presided the tall, eel-skin, blonde figure of his wife. . . . The girl said: "There's a fly coming!" and removed her arm. A fly drew up before them with a blear-eyed driver. He said General Campion had kicked him out of bed, from beside his old woman. He wanted a pound to take them to Mrs. Wannop's, waked out of his beauty sleep and all. The knacker's cart was following. "You'll take Miss Wannop home at once," Tietjens said, "she's got her mother's breakfast to see to. . . . I shan't leave the horse till the knacker's van comes." The fly-driver touched his age-green hat with his whip. "Aye," he said thickly, putting a sovereign into his waistcoat pocket. "Always the gentleman . . . a merciful man is merciful also to his beast. . . . But I wouldn't leave my little wooden 'ut, nor miss my breakfast, for no beast. . . . Some do and some . . . do not." He drove off with the girl in the interior of his antique conveyance. Tietjens remained on the slope of the bank, in the strong sunlight, beside the drooping horse. It had done nearly forty miles and lost, at last, a lot of blood. Tietjens said: "I suppose I could get the governor to pay fifty quid for it. They want the money. . . ." He said: "But it wouldn't be playing the game!" A long time afterwards he said: "Damn all principles!" And then: "But one has to keep on going. . . . Principles are like a skeleton map of a country--you know whether you're going east or north." The knacker's cart lumbered round the corner. PART II I