"You might send a kiss, eh? Usual thing ... try again--I bet she's not left the wire." "Hello ... hello! You there, Alicia?... _Wheeee!_... I just rang up--_wheee_--to send you a kiss.... Good-by." "So we've set her mind at rest, Bangs. You lost your funk pretty soon!" "Well, Mr. Wild, somehow ... it's not quite the same thing talking to Alicia from a distance ... I felt quite brave!" "Perfect hero!... Now we've settled that, let's go and find the dragon in the garden." They found the vicar, but not the dragon, who was lashing her tail in the pantry, impotent, speechless, aflame with anger. To hear herself called a dragon, and by a pair of unprincipled adventurers! One of them, it appeared, was a man who had run away from his wife; the other, an idle fribble who might be anything. "Thank Heaven I have no daughter in the house!" thought Mrs. Peters in a paroxysm of resentful propriety. "Who could feel safe with such men about? And this comes of Charles picking up chance acquaintances in a common tavern! Oh, I must go and tell him--expose them at once! The impudent hypocrites!" On the threshold she paused. Was it because, despite her justification, she did not feel anxious to mention the vigil in the pantry? Or was it due to a wifely consideration for a husband's weakness? She chose to believe the latter. "Charles will not have the moral courage to expel them from the vicarage!" she reflected. "He is pitifully craven in such matters. I must manage it myself.... I had better wait and watch.... They may have any designs.... Perhaps I had better wait, and then ..." A smile, terrific in severity and menace, writhed her lips. Some signal act of vengeance was evidently maturing. "Yes! I will wait!" On the lawn she found Tony. Compelling herself to speak without undue hostility, she learned that the vicar had carried Robert off to inspect the greenhouse. Mrs. Peters, on the plea of a message, followed. She could not trust herself with Robert or his accomplice. "Is it he who has led Mr. Bangs astray, or the other way about?" she wondered viciously. "They both seem to be _most_ undesirable; but Mr. Bangs is older and ought to know better. Besides, he has a wife." Had she known of Tony's matrimonial vicissitudes she would have fainted. The odd-job man had just finished his digging, and Tony strolled over to exchange a word: he never despaired of finding interest in the most unpromising material. Chats with para-orators, enthusiastic Salvationists, members of the Junior Turf Club, constellations of the stage, even housemaids taking in the milk,--all might be, and often were, instruments in the warfare against boredom. All were fish for his net. But it must be confessed that his catch had hitherto been of little value. He had bought a few centimes' worth, paying for it with numerous rouleaus, and he was beginning dimly to wonder if it was not rather an extravagant method of exchange.