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did not even occur to Harold Pickering. The only way out of the difficulty that suggested itself to him was to drive back to his cottage, secure the few pounds which he knew to be on the premises, throw into a suitcase some articles of clothing and his cheque book and then drive off again into the sunset.
    As it happened, however, he would not have been able to drive into the sunset, for it was quite dark when he arrived at his destination. He alighted from his car, and was about to enter the house, when he suddenly observed that there was a light in the sitting-room. And creeping to the window and peering cautiously through a chink in the curtains, he saw that it was precisely as he had feared. There on a settee, scowling up at the ceiling, was Sidney McMurdo. He had the air of a man who was waiting for somebody.
    And scarcely had Harold Pickering, appalled by this spectacle, withdrawn into a near-by bush to think the situation over in all of its aspects and try to find a formula, when heavy footsteps sounded on the gravel path and, dark though it was, he had no difficulty in identifying the newcomer as Agnes Flack. Only she could have clumped like that.
    The next moment, she had delivered a resounding buffet on the front door, and Sidney McMurdo was opening it to her.
    There was a silence as they gazed at one another. Except for that brief instant when she had introduced Harold Pickering to Sidney McMurdo outside the clubhouse, these sundered hearts had not met since the severance of their relations, and even a fifteen-stone man and an eleven-stone girl are not immune from embarrassment.
    Agnes was the first to speak.
    "Hullo," she said. "You here?"
    "Yes," said Sidney McMurdo, "I’m here all right. I am waiting for the snake Pickering."
    "I've come to see him myself."
    "Oh? Well, nothing that you can do will save him from my wrath."
    "Who wants to save him from your wrath?"
    "Don't you?"
    "Certainly not. All I looked in for was to break our engagement."
    Sidney McMurdo staggered. "Break your engagement?"
    "That's right."
    "But I thought you loved him."
    "No more. The scales have fallen from my eyes. I don't marry men who are as hot as pistols in a friendly round with nothing depending on it, but blow up like geysers in competition golf. Why are you wrathful with him, Sidney?"
    Sidney McMurdo gnashed his teeth.
    "He stole you from me," he said hoarsely.
    If Agnes Flack had been about a foot shorter and had weighed about thirty pounds less, the sound which proceeded from her might have been described as a giggle. She stretched out the toe of her substantial shoe and made a squiggle with it on the gravel.
    "And did you mind that so much?" she said softly, - or as softly as it was in her power to speak.
    "Yes, I jolly well did," said Sidney McMurdo. "I love you, old girl, and I shall continue to love you till the cows come home. When I was demolishing the reptile Pickering this afternoon, your face seemed to float before me all the way round, even when I was putting. And I'll tell you something. I've been thinking it over, and I see now that I was all wrong that time and should unquestionably have used a Number Four iron. Too late, of course," said Sidney McMurdo moodily, thinking of what might have been.
    Agnes Flack drew a second arabesque on the gravel, using the toe of the other shoe this time.
    "How do you mean, too late?" she asked reasonably softly.
    "Well, isn't it too late?"
    "Certainly not."
    "You can't mean you love me still?"
    "Yes, I jolly well can mean I love you still."
    "Well, I'll be blowed! And here was I, thinking that all was over and life empty and all that sort of thing. My mate!" cried Sidney McMurdo.
    They fell into an embrace like a couple of mastodons clashing in a primeval swamp, and the earth had scarcely ceased to shake when a voice spoke.
    "Excuse me."
    In his hiding-place in the bush Harold Pickering leaped as if somebody had touched off a land mine under his feet and came to rest quivering in