So I mused for a considerable time. Then, becoming conscious of the flatness, staleness and unprofitableness of it all, as far as my elderly selfishness was concerned, I threw my extinct cigar end into the fire, and thanking God that I had come to an age when all this storm and fuss over a creature of the opposite sex was a thing of the past, and yet with an unregenerate pang of regret for manifold what-might-have-beens, I put out the lights and went to bed. The next day I succeeded by hook or by crook in guiding the pet lambs, Evadne included, in the way they should go. I reported progress to Lady Auriol. "Good dog," she said. I returned to London on Monday morning. When next I heard of her, she was, I am thankful to say, not on the adventurous path to the brimstone objective of her predilection, but was fooling about, all by herself, in a five-ton yacht, somewhere around the Outer Hebrides, in the foulest of weather. In the days of my youth I was the victim of a hopeless passion and meditated suicide. A seafaring friend of mine suggested my accompanying him on his cargo steamer from the Port of London to Bordeaux. It was blazing summer. But I was appallingly sea-sick all the way, and when I set foot on land I was cleansed of all human emotion save that of utter thankfulness that I existed as an entity with an un-queasy stomach. I was cured for good and all. But a five-ton yacht off the Outer Hebrides in bleak tempests--No, it was too heroic. Even my dear old friend Burton for all his wit and imagination had never devised such a _remedia amoris_, such a remedy for Love Melancholy. And then came June and with it the manuscript and all the flood of information about the Agence Moignon and Bakkus and Petit Patou and Prépimpin and Elodie and various other things that I have yet to set down. Chapter XIV While Lady Auriol Dayne was rocking about the Outer Hebrides, we find Andrew Lackaday in Paris confronted with the grim necessity of earning a livelihood. His pre-war savings had amounted to no fortune, and in spite of Elodie's economy and occasional earnings with her birds, they were well-nigh spent. The dearness of everything! Elodie wrung her hands. Where once you had change out of a franc, now you had none out of a five-franc note. He could still carry on comfortably for a year, but that would be the end of it. When he propounded the financial situation, Elodie did not understand. "I must work," said he. "But Generals don't work," she protested incredulously.