In justice to the lady it may be said that she called at the hospital regularly every day and left violets for the sufferer. She penned a tearful apology in which she begged Tuppy’s forgiveness, appealing to him as a man of the world to realize that a person in drink is not responsible for her actions. Providentially, about this time, the lady’s first husband initiated proceedings for divorce on the grounds of incompatability of temperament, and Tuppy, reading the account with his one unbandaged eye, was fervently grateful that the case had not been heard before his marriage. He returned to England a pronounced misogynist with a slight limp. Of his other ventures the Sea Gold Extraction Syndicate is the most notorious; his attempt to break the bank at Monte Carlo; his adventures as correspondent in the Balkans, these events are too recent to need particularizing. Summing up his life, one might say that he had indeed a great future behind him. As Tuppy himself would say, with a suspicion of tears in his eyes— "My dear old bird! I never had a chance. I was saddled with rank an’ bridled by circumstance. I’m a rumbustious error of judgment, a livin’ mark of interrogation against the Wisdom of Providence!" Let no man think that Tuppy was a fool; he was a poet. His play was in blank verse. Nor accuse him of improvidence: he was a philosopher who scorned the conventional obligations of life. He never paid his bills because he never had the money to pay. If he had possessed the means, he would have discharged his liabilities, for he was an honest man. It has been argued that in his circumstances it was wholly wrong to contract such liabilities, but Tuppy had an answer to such a twiddling splitting of hairs. "Dear old feller," he was wont to say, "you talk like a foolish one. Must I forgo my last shreds of faith in human nature and the mysterious workin’s of providence? Must I, because of temp’ray misfortune, refuse to recognize the illimitable possibilities of the future? I have three cousins each with pots of money, and one at least coopered up with asthma—it runs in the family—who might pop off at any minute." Thus Tuppy justified his optimism. If Tuppy had a failing it was his antipathy to his father’s second wife. To the dowager he ascribed all his misfortunes, in every piece of bad luck he saw the dowager’s hand. She, poor soul, was a mild colourless lady with a weakness for bridge, who spent her life in a vain attempt to restrict her requirements to the circumscribed limits of a small annuity payable quarterly. Tuppy rented a flat in Charles Street, W. He was at breakfast when Hal’s letter arrived, and the young man’s interesting communication might well have gone unread, for Tuppy’s man was handling the morning post. "Bill from Roderer’s, m’lord." "Chuck it in the fire." "Letter from the lawyers about Colgate’s account." "Chuck it in the fire." "Letter E.C.—no name on the back."