or a fluke?"

"In my view, always," I replied, hardening my heart for ever.

"That's all right, then," said he with his schoolboy laugh. "You pays your money and you takes your choice."

CHAPTER III A Vicious Circle

The Berridges of Berylstow--a house near my office in the Witching Hill Road--were perhaps the very worthiest family on the whole Estate. Old Mr. Berridge, by a lifetime of faithful service, had risen to a fine position in one of the oldest and most substantial assurance societies in the City of London. Mrs. Berridge, herself a woman of energetic character, devoted every minute that she could spare from household duties, punctiliously fulfilled, to the glorification of the local Vicar and the denunciation of modern ideas. There was a daughter, whose name of Beryl had inspired that of the house; she was her mother's miniature and echo, and had no desire to ride a bicycle or do anything else that Mrs. Berridge had not done before her. An only son, Guy, completed the _partie carrée_, and already made an admirable accountant under his father's eagle eye. He was about thirty years of age, had a mild face but a fierce moustache, was engaged to be married, and already picking up books and pictures for the new home.

As a bookman Guy Berridge stood alone.

"There's nothing like them for furnishing a house," said he; "and nowadays they're so cheap. There's that new series of Victorian Classics--one-and-tenpence-halfpenny! And those Eighteenth Century Masterpieces--I don't know when I shall get time to read them, but they're worth the money for the binding alone--especially with everything peculiar taken out!"

_Peculiar_ was a family epithet of the widest possible significance. It was peculiar of Guy, in the eyes of the other three, to be in such a hurry to leave their comfortable home for one of his own on a necessarily much smaller scale. Miss Hemming, the future Mrs. Guy, was by no means deficient in peculiarity from his people's point of view. She affected flowing fabrics of peculiar shades, and she had still more peculiar ideas of furnishing. On Saturday afternoons she would drag poor Guy into all the second-hand furniture shops in the neighbourhood--not even to save money, as Mrs. Berridge complained to her more intimate friends--but just to be peculiar. It seemed like a judgment when Guy fell so ill with influenza, obviously contracted in one of those highly peculiar shops, that he had to mortgage his summer holiday by 

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