week, Dr. and Mrs. Maclean would tell all their neighbours and friends what had happened.

The doctor and his wife reminded each other that there was something about Jean which attracted even cold people. She had such a bright, happy, eager nature. As for Harry Garlett, he was always ready to do anybody a good turn, and also, as a great cricketer, was very popular. Though some old-fashioned people might be shocked by so early a second marriage, every one knew that his late wife had been an invalid for years.

There was only one person to whom, for a reason he would have found it difficult to define even to himself, Harry Garlett felt bound to announce his forthcoming marriage. This was Agatha Cheale.

In answer to his brief letter, there came one even briefer:

Dear Mr. Garlett,

Dear Mr. Garlett

I am interested in your news, and I trust you will be as happy as you deserve to be.

Agatha Cheale

56

CHAPTER VI

“I am the most fortunate man in England! I am the happiest man in the world!”

As he swung along in the bright winter sunshine on the field path which formed a short cut to the town, again and again these words seemed to hammer themselves, in joyful cadence, on Harry Garlett’s brain.

What we call the human heart is full of the strangest twists and turnings, and so, though Garlett’s heart was full of Jean Bower, he threw an affectionately retrospective thought to his late wife. He and “poor Emily” had never had a really cross word during those long, quiet years before the war, when, most fortunately for himself, he had not even dimly apprehended what the passion of love can mean in a human life, and how it will make beautiful, and intimately delicious, even the most prosaic facts of day-to-day existence.

He looked at his watch. It was a quarter past ten. In just twenty-four hours from now he and Jean would be starting for 

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