“He sings under his mother’s name--the famous Quetta. You’ve heard of _her_, I suppose, even at this Back o’ Beyond? You must have heard of him, too. _He’s_ the great Quetta, now--makes pots of money, and is wanted everywhere. His agent in town was tearing his hair to come along with us. He can close his account now. Quetta’s done! I suppose you _might_ not know, though. He liked to be incog. here, and his friends respected his wish for quiet. Well, _you’ve_ quietened him all right! He should have stopped singing, years ago, but he had a reason for going on, a good reason----” He caught the big man’s eyes fixed earnestly on his lips, and checked himself with a vexed start. The other stood up slowly and looked at Harriet. (It was strange how both seemed to forget Stubbs.) His voice was low, with a curious intonation. “I am that reason,” he said quietly. “I am Cyril’s half-brother, and once--it seems a very long time ago now--I was a singer, too. I had my own share of our mother’s gift, and I was getting on well. I might have been a great Quetta, also. Then I had an accident which left me totally deaf. I had no other trade in my hands, and I had both wife and children. Cyril was just coming out, and he took every engagement that came his way to bring us in a living. It was in those first hard years of fight that he broke his health. He kept us all then, and he keeps us all now. I do not know why he never told. Perhaps he was afraid that Mr. Shaw--his friend--would give him money. I do what I can for him--I learned the lip language, and I am now his secretary--but I do not earn half we cost him. And I have never heard him sing. I would give everything I have or ever hope to have, just to hear Cyril sing.” * * * * * Stubbs was sent down to the White Lion to telephone to Watters, and a middle-aged damsel at the other end clasped a treacle-posset to her bosom and wept. Long into the dawn Harriet sat by a burnt-out lamp in the little parlour. The walking-mail went by in the smallest hours, the creak of the wheels alone coming up to her, like a ghostly, undriven hearse of the dead. And when the first cock crew, just as if it were Harriet’s imperative voice calling him, the great Cyril Quetta, who was, after all, only Wiggie, struggled back to life, and observed that he was a sparking-plug. CHAPTER XXI THE TROUBLE COMING The twenty-ninth of March. Lancaster had been at the Pride. Now he was walking along the north road, where he had stood with Francey Dockeray, months ago. They had had a good winter, just enough hard weather and little wind, and the spring was wonderfully early. The whole countryside breathed an atmosphere more like that of late Easter than wild March. But March had had no lion in it, this year. It had come in like a lamb, and continued to frolic softly onwards, crowned with garlands, like a sacrifice frisking to the altar.