Seeing which, and having an engagement to join Mrs. Malwood and several others at a private dance club, she made for the door. “Well,” she said, “there it is. I did my best for you.” “An excellent best,” said Fallaray. “Thank you again. Are you leaving us?” She waved her hand, that long able hand which might have achieved good things but for that fatal kink in her,—and went. “Brilliant woman,” said Fallaray. It was on the tip of Lytham’s tongue to say “Brilliant what?” but he swallowed the remark. And presently they heard Feo’s high-pitched voice in the street below, giving an order to her chauffeur. And they resumed the discussion, coming back always to the point from which they started. The Old Bad Man, shuffling, juggling, lying to others as well as themselves, without the sense to realize that something far worse than the War was coming hourly to a head, blocked every avenue of escape. VII Lytham walked home in the small hours of that morning. He had the luck to live in the Albany, at the Piccadilly end. The streets, but for a silent-footed Bobby or two, were deserted. Even the night birds had given up hope and withdrawn to their various nests. He wondered once more, as he went along, what on earth had made Fallaray marry Feo, of all women. It was one of his favorite forms of mental pastime to try and discover the reason of ninety-nine per cent, of the marriages which had come under his fairly intimate observation. It seemed to him, in reviewing the whole body of his friends, not only that every man had married the wrong woman but that every woman had married the wrong man. There was his brother, for instance,—Charlie Lytham, master of foxhounds and one of the most good-natured creatures to be found on earth,—hearty, honest, charitable, full of laughter, a superb horseman, everybody’s friend. For some unexplained and astounding reason he hadn’t married one of the nice healthy English girls who rode and golfed and stumped about the countryside, perfectly content to live out of town for ten months of the year and enjoy a brief bust in London. He had been dragged to the altar by a woman who looked like a turkey and gobbled like one when she spoke, who wore the most impossible clothes with waggling feathers and rattling beads, spoke in a loud raucous voice and was as great a form of irritation to every one who came in contact with her as the siren of a factory. What was the idea?—Poor devil. He had condemned himself to penal servitude.