Part 78

"Flyblown, do I look?" inquires Bingo, with dispassionate interest.

"Well, yes, decidedly," Beauvayse agrees, without removing his eyes from the whitewashed verandah-pillar at which they blankly stare.

"Streaky yellow in the whites of the eyes, and pouchy under 'em?" Captain Bingo demands of his young friend with unmistakable relish. "'Yes' again? And I grouse and maunder? Of course I do, my dear chap! How can I help it? A married man who, for all he knows, may be a widower----"

"I wish to God I knew I was one!"

"My good fellow?"

"You heard what I said," Beauvayse flings over his shoulder.

Captain Bingo, his hands upon his straddling knees, regards his junior with circular eyes staring out of a large, kind, rather foolish face of utter consternation.

"That you wished to God you were a widower?"

"Well, I mean it."

XXXIV

"Good Lord!"

There is a gap of silence only broken when Captain Bingo says heavily:

"Then you did marry the Lavigne after all? When was it----"

"We'd pulled off the marriage at the local Registrar's a fortnight before you came down with--his wire."

"By the Living Tinker, then it was a genuine honeymoon after all!" A faint grin appears on Captain Wrynche's large perturbed face.

"Don't be epigrammatic, Wrynche." The dull weariness in the young voice gives place to quick affront. "And keep the secret. Don't give me away."

"Did I ever give you, or any other man who ever trusted me, away? Tell me that."

Captain Bingo gets up and covers the distance between the deck-chairs with a single stride, and puts a big kind hand on the averted shoulder.

"Of course you never did." The boy reaches up and takes the hand, and squeezes it with the shyness of the Englishman who responds to some display of solicitude or affection on the part of a comrade. "Don't mind my rotting like this. There are times when one must let off steam or explode."

"I thought--and so did a few others, the Chief among 'em--that South Africa had saved you by the skin of your teeth," says Captain Bingo, smoking vigorously, and driving his hands very deep into his pockets. "Confoundedly odd how taken in we were! I could have sworn, my part, that you'd just stopped short at----"

"At making a blithering idiot of myself," interpolates Beauvayse. "If you'll go back and sit decently in your chair, instead of standing behind me rattlin' keys and coins in your pocket, and dropping hot cigar-ash on my head, I'll tell you how it happened. Nobody listening?"

"Not a soul," says Captain Bingo, padding back after a noiseless prowl to the coffee-room window.

Beauvayse grips either arm of the chair he sits in so fiercely that they crack again.

"I--I was desperately hard hit over Lessie a year ago----"

"So were a lot of other young idiots."

"That's a pleasant reflection. They were."

"Of course, I"--Bingo's large face becomes very red--"I inferred nothing in any way against Miss Lavigne's chara---- Dash it, I beg your pardon! I ought to call her Lady Beauvayse."

"Don't trouble. I think I'd rather you didn't. It would rub things in rather too much," says Beauvayse, paling as the other has reddened.