something of him at his worst; he was more approachable than he had been before his great surrender. All October and November he kept it up, his name a byword far beyond the confines of the Estate, and by December he must have been near the inevitable climax. Then he disappeared. The servants had no idea of his whereabouts; but he had taken luggage. That was the best reason for believing him to be still alive, until he turned up with his boy for the Christmas holidays.

It would be too much to say that he looked as he had looked last holidays. The man had aged; he seemed even a little shaken, but not more than by a moderate dose of influenza; and to a casual eye the improvement was more astounding than the previous deterioration, especially in its rapidity. His spirits were at least as good as they had been before, his hospitality in keeping with the season. I ate my Christmas dinner with father and son, and Delavoye and I first-footed them on New Year's morning. What was most remarkable on these occasions was the way Coplestone drank his champagne, with the happy moderation of a man who has never exceeded in his life. There was now no shadow of excess, but neither was there any of the weakling's recourse to the opposite extreme of meticulous austerity. A doctor might have forbidden even a hair of the sleeping dog, but to us young fellows it was a joy to see our hero so completely his own man once more.

Early in January came a frost--a thrilling frost--with skating on the gravel-pit ponds beyond the Village. It was a pastime in which I had taken an untutored delight, all the days of my northern youth, and now I put in every hour I could at the clumsy execution of elementary figures. But Coplestone had spent some winters in Switzerland, and he was a past master in the Continental style. Ordinary skaters would form a ring to watch his dazzling displays, and those who had not seen him in the autumn must have found it hard to credit the whispers of those who had. His pink skin regained its former purity, his blue eyes shone like fairy lamps, and the whole ice rang with the music of his "edge" as he sped careening like a human yacht. It was better still to watch him patiently imparting the rudiments to Ronnie, who picked them up as a small boy will, and worked so hard that the perspiration would stand upon the smooth brown face for all that wondrous frost. It froze, more or less, all the rest of those holidays, and the Coplestones never missed a day until the last of all. I was hoping to find them on the ice at dusk, if only I could manage to get away in time, but early in the afternoon Uvo Delavoye came along to disabuse my mind.

 Prev. P 67/136 next