Gerald Cranston's lady

Chapter One 1

ONE upon a time, and not so very long ago at that, before

Major Gerald Cranston, D.S.O., Royal Field Artillery, had transformed himself into Gerald Cranston, Esquire, of Studley Farm, Leicestershire, the Ritz Hotel, Piccadilly, and Pinner’s Court, Old Broad Street, E.C., more than one hard-bitten horseman in war-soiled service-kit, sucking disgruntled it his unlit pipe as the six-gun column jolted slow through darkness toward a flash-stabbed horizon, had been wont to remark: “He ’s a devil about his march-discipline, mate.

But give the devil his due! I’ve been in this blinkin’

aliery ever since he took over; and—facts is facts, mate— though I ‘ve Seen every kind of hell in it, I ’ve never yet seen the kind that 'd put the wind up our Major Gerry.’’ A similar Temark—transmuted into the Scotch of his native keudbrightshire—ran through the canny mind of Christoee ennie, Sometime the major’s batman and now the Ale S valet, as, tea-tray in hand, he opened the outer door Gerald Cranston’s first-floor suite on the morning of the Y which was to See him married to the Lady Hermione light ave, and realized, with one swift glance at the fan- T a the bedroom door, that his master still slept. With: a calm deevil !?? thought Christopher Rennie. Which, he closed the door of the suite behind him, 3

4 et: - GERALD. CRANSTON'S LADY pushed on “the Tight. in ‘the exiguous ‘‘hall,’’ set down his tea-tray,- ahi, dvawihy his silver watch from his pocket, passed. into the sitting-room to compare it with the electrieally controlled clock on the white-paneled wall. The watch and the clock synchronized to a second; but, since both agreed that it still lacked two minutes to seven, Christopher Rennie passed back into the hall and waited.

Waiting, he continued—his dour gray-eyed clean-shaven face wrinkling with perplexity—to think about his master. Certainly, his master was a ‘‘calm deevil.’’ An exacting ‘“deevil,’’ too; more Scotch than English, in his precision, in his punctuality. Yet a ‘‘deevil’’ whom, quite apart from his money, one could respect. And, ‘‘It was a lucky day for me,’’ thought Christopher Rennie, ‘‘when he picked me for his batman—a luckier still when I left the army to enter his sairvice.’’ Then, with a last look at his watch, he picked up the tea-tray and tapped three times on the closed door of the bedroom.

At the third tap, a wide-awake decisive voice called the one word, ‘‘Come.”’

The man who raised himself slowly from his pillow, as Christopher Rennie pushed the control-button of the big alabaster center-light and poured out the tea, had awakened, as though he were still an officer on active service, to immediate full consciousness. His eyes—pale, china-blue eyes with a hint of frosty flame in the pupils of them—shone alert with superabundant health. His close-clipped hair—tawn, touched to auburn where the light caught it—was unrufiled as his temper; his hand—the «large capable hand which reached for the tea-cup—rock-like in its steadiness. His lips —the two firm lips that with a terse, ‘‘Thanks, Rennie,’’ drained the hot liquid in one steady gulp—showed healthy as his eyes on a countenance which revealed, even at first glance, decision.

Yet even at first glance, other qualities than decision showed in Gerald Cranston’s countenance. From it— whether one considered the lean jowl, the high forehead, the out-jutting chin, or the prominent cheek-bones—there radiated a force, a driving-power, a poised and a dominant individualism that bespoke the born leader.

He set down his tea-cup; ordered, terse as ever, ‘‘My bath, Rennie’’; and rose from bed. One saw, then, that the body of this man matched his countenance. He stood six feet two on arched, well shaped feet. His legs were powerful, long in the thigh and a trifle bowed with horsemanship. He had a flat back, a low waist-line, and narrow hips. The plain silk pajamas, open at the throat, displayed, under a neck whose sinews were muscled cords, a triangle of broad, almost hairless, chest. The shoulders of that body sloped like an athlete’s. The biceps of its either forearm might have been a boxer’s. One saw, too, when the owner of that body moved toward the bath-room, that—even as an athlete’s or a boxer’s —every movement of it was under an instinctive control, automatically and amazingly disciplined.

For ‘‘discipline,’’ whether of the body or of the mind, whether of the instincts or of the emotions, whether of himself or of others, was Gerry Cranston’s fetish—almost, one might say, his religion: a religion so sternly practised that it entered into every minutest detail of his existence.

Mostly—since he was by temperament an ascetic—this religion of self-discipline applied itself to Gerry Cranston’s mind, which now, as he locked himself into the big lavishly fitted bath-room and picked up his dumb-bells, began, in accordance with its training, to function quite independently of the mere physical routine.

On this, his wedding-morning, the processes of that mind, though more than ordinarily complicated, were as consecutively reasoned, as logical and as coldly detached as ever.

“‘Marriage,’’ they began, ‘‘should mark a definite point in & man’s career. Certainly mine does. On his marriage a man ought to take stock of himself. Well, I ’ve done that. I know just where I stand, and just how far I ’ve got to go. Within a thousand or so—reckoning the Cranston ordinaries at market-price—I ’m worth a quarter of a million pounds. That ’s not enough. Not nearly enough. I want a million at least. Possibly two. That ’ll only bring in a hundred thousand a year....

‘No difficulties there! Anybody with a disciplined brain ean get money. Get it straight, too! The difficulty is that I want more than money. I want power. The Lord knows why I should want power; it ’s natural, perhaps, when one feels one can run things. But anyway I do want it. I ll get it, too. But that ’Il take time. Hermione may help me there —though marrying into the old aristocracy doesn’t mean much nowadays. It ’s the new aristocracy, the plutocrats with titles, who run the empire. I ll have to buy a peerage, I suppose. That ’ll go against the graim—even out of a couple of million. Not that I ’d grudge the money. Money ’s only counters. It’s the principle of the thing I dislike. . . .’’

Gerald Cranston put down his dumb-bells, and began his tubbing. Deliberately he was keeping the personal issue between himself and Hermione out of his thoughts until such time as he had finished his mental stock-taking.

‘‘T ve got a few things against me,’’ went on that stock-taking. ‘‘Oakham Grammar School isn’t Eton, and a cornchandler’s office isn’t Oxford. The Eton-and-Oxford crowd are born to power, educated to it. I’m not—yet. That ’ll come. ... Power ’s like money. And as dangerous! One needs self-discipline, self-control to handle it. It must be fun, though, to run the really big things. Better fun than running a battery. ... That was luck—getting through the war without a scratch. I suppose I am lucky. Why should n’t I be? If a man knows what he wants, if he ’s got ability and self-discipline, he makes his own luck. Luck ’s like capital; you can either blue it or invest it. Take Cranston’s! If I had n’t persuaded Harold and Mother that it was necessary to float Cranston’s—’’

On that, temporarily, the mental stock-taking ceased. In the as yet half-polished diamond of Gerald Cranston’s character were many facets; and two of these, the sentimental and the imaginative, began to glimmer as his thoughts veered to the business which had been the corner-stone of his fortune.

Every investor in the Midlands, and, since the launching of it as a public company, some investors in the South, knew of ‘‘Cranston’s, Limited, Millers, Forage Contractors, and Coal Distributors’’; but nobody, not even his brother Harold, knew exactly how much Cranston’s, Limited, meant to Gerald Cranston. To him, its chairman, that business stood for a symbol—a symbol of success stamped with his own signature. In his way, and as far as it was yet in him to love, he loved it.

So, as a lover’s, his memory harked back to those days, long before the war, long before that double itch for power and money drove him from the provinces to London, when Cranston’s had been his whole life; to the day when, leaving school on his father’s death, he had found his brother Harold at the head of an almost moribund distributing business; found himself under-nurse to an anemic baby, to a thing almost bereft of life-blood, with hardly a kick in it... .

Kighteen years ago that! And now the anemic baby was grown to a lusty giant. Now the one-time corn-chandlers with their few clients and their fewer carts were a force in the Midlands. Their posters flared from the Wash to the Bristol Channel. Their lorries overran half England. For to corn he, Gerald Cranston, had added coal; and to coal, fertilizers; and to fertilizers, farm machinery. To-day, moreover, thanks to him, Cranston’s were no longer mere chandlers. What they sold, they produced—milling their own corn, mixing their own manures, mining their own coal, making their own machinery.

All that had been his own doing. The plans, the plans of which the war years saw the full fruition, had been all his. And, ‘‘Luck?’’ he thought, ‘‘you can’t call a thing like that luck, War or no war, the ultimate success was always certain.’’

The one-time corn-chandler got out of his bath, towelled limself vigorously, lathered his cheeks and shaved them clean with sure steady strokes of the long-bladed razor. Shaving, sentiment flickered out of him. But for a while imagination still glimmered. Cranston’s, after all, was only the corner-stone, the square-hewn solid corner-stone, whereon he meant to rear the edifice of even greater successes. Already, thanks to the capital set free by the flotation of the family business, the walls of that edifice were rising. In imagination, he saw them towering to the financial skies. And, ‘‘I must build well,’’ he thought. ‘‘I must watch each stone into its place, see each girder set solid in its concrete. Stability! Stability is the test of value, as self-discipline is the test of a man.’’

Then deliberately as he wiped his razor, Gerald Cranston wiped his mind clean of financial problems, and set himself to consider the stability of that, other edifice, the edifice of his marriage.

Every diamond, even the finest, has its flaw; every man, even the bravest, his fear; and Gerald Cranston, though nature had dowered him with a physical courage far beyond the average and a moral courage to match it, had his yellow streak —a fear none the less real because unrealized, none the less vital to any understanding of his character because he himself had never wholly understood it.

This fear (a fear one hesitates to describe as ‘‘fear of woman,’’ because it was more than that—an apprehension of the mind rather than of the body, a terror lest, loving some woman overmuch, he should lose that self-control, that self-discipline on which he so prided himself) lay deep-rooted in every fiber of his brain. Always it had been part of him. Always, not realizing it for fear, he had elated himself when considering the casual women of every man’s encounter with a stereotyped, ‘‘She suits me—but that ’s all.’’ So now his first thought of the woman he had decided to marry was a thankful, ‘‘Praise the Lord, there ’s no question of love between us.’’

For the war, with its welter of promiscuous sex-gratification, had intensified Gerald Cranston’s early fear to an obsession which drove him, even as his ambitions drove him, to detest the very word ‘‘love.’’ To him, that word—as understood between man and woman—represented only a danger, a form of madness, a disease that might wreck his eareer, as it had wrecked the careers of half a hundred men he knew. ‘‘Man’s love for woman,’’ he thought on his wedding morning, ‘‘is either bodily passion escaped from the brain’s control, or else a sickly sentimentality, a single weakness as fatal to success as one flawed girder can be fatal to some great building.”’

Well, there would be no such flawed girder in the edifice of his marriage to Hermione. Its foundations were firmconcreted on the bed-rock facts of their mutual interest. She needed a husband with money; he, a wife with position. For, of course, a man—and more especially a man making his bid for power—needed a wife. The women of casual encounters were unsatisfactory, grasping, dangerous. Wherefore, considering those women with the same cold consecutively reasoned logic he had employed in the consideration of his financial position, Gerald Cranston dismissed them definitely from his life.

Returning to his bedroom, attiring himself meticulously in the clothes Rennie had laid out for him, his consideration of matrimony continued. On his dressing-table stood a silverframed photograph of Hermione taken with the boy, with Tony Cosgrave’s boy. The child-baronet was fair, with a bonny smile; his mother, dark, serious-eyed, an aristocrat every inch of her.

Dispassionately, Gerald Cranston serutinized the pair of them. That Hermione had been Cosgrave’s wife affected him hardly at all. ‘‘A week’s war honeymoon,’’ he thought contemptuously. But that she was the mother of that bonny child moved him a little. ‘‘Love!’’ he thought. ‘‘Is that love—to marry, as Cosgrave married, a girl of eighteen and leave her child unprovided for?’’

It was for the child’s sake, of course, that she had consented to remarry. A fine motive! He could respect her for that.

He remembered the first time she had mentioned little Arthur, remembered her saying: ‘‘It isn’t poverty that I mind for him; it isn’t so much that I resent the fact he ll never be able to keep up Cosgrave. It’s his education that ’s worrying me, Mr. Cranston—and his chances. I ’d like Tony’s son to go to Tony’s old school; to join Tony’s old regiment ; to be the horseman Tony was, the shot, the fisherman—’’ That was the one occasion on which she had spoken of her feelings for her first husband. ‘‘I loved him,’’ she had said, speaking simply as always. ‘‘And he let me down. It wasn’t only over money, Mr. Cranston. There had been some one else. A chorus-girl. I found her letters after he died.’’

How that fitted in with his own picture of Love! Love was an instability, a disease of weak minds, of minds like Sir Anthony Cosgrave’s. Lucky for Hermione that Cosgrave had stopped a shell at Ginchy! Love-marriages—had not Hermione herself agreed with the verdict?—were foredoomed to failure. In the old easy-going days—his mother’s days—the love-match might have been possible. But not to-day! Not in this new and poverty-stricken world, where each man, each nation needed its utmost effort to survive. The new matrimony must be like the new business—orderly, disciplined, systematized. Their home, his and Hermione’s, would be an affair of partnership—the providing for it, his; the running of it, hers.

There would be many children in that home. ... But Cosgrave’s child should not suffer on account of them. Cosgrave’s child, when his stepfather had made those two millions, would be able to keep up Cosgrave. That was not in the bond to which he, Cranston, had set his hand on the day she promised herself to him. Indeed there had been no bond—only his promise: ‘‘I Il look after you both, Hermione—after you and the boy.”’

A bond! A promise! Was n’t his marriage to Hermione, though neither of them had ever put the thing into words, more than either bond or promise? Wasn’t it a bargain, a perfectly fair bargain to which he, on his side, brought money, and she, on hers, the potentialities of power? And why not? Better a clean bargain, a businesslike, orderly marriage, than the uncleanliness, the disorderliness of a love such as Tony Cosgrave’s!

Already, as, his dressing finished, Cranston stepped into the sitting-room, his benefits from that bargain were apparent. The newspapers to which he always devoted an exact quarterhour before his eight o’clock breakfast showed him, even at first glance, the power-potentialities of his marriage. Here was his photograph, her photograph; there the record of his career, of her lineage. ‘‘The Lady Hermione Cosgrave, only daughter of the Earl of Rorkton,’’ he read, ‘‘is the widow of Sir Anthony Cosgrave, Bart., of Cosgrave, Lincolnshire. The Rorkton peerage is one of the oldest in England—dating back to before the Restoration.’’

‘‘That Il make Hermione smile,’’ he thought. Poor Hermione! What was the use of being an earl’s daughter and a baronet’s widow—when two sons and the supertax swallowed your father’s income, and Tony Cosgrave’s white elephant of an unlet entailed estate threatened to encroach even on your four-hundred-a-year jointure. ‘‘She, too, benefits from the bargain,’’ went on Gerald Cranston’s thoughts.

For a full five minutes he continued to dally with the papers. Somehow the various photographs of Hermione annoyed him. It seemed to him that they gave a false impression of her, darkening the pallor of her complexion, fluffing out the straightness of her hair, making her pretty rather than handsome, stiff rather than dignified. ‘‘They don’t do her justice,’’ he said to himself, picturing the dignity of her dark eyes, the dignity of her carriage; and again, recalling the dignity of her voice: ‘‘She, as I, has her self-discipline, her self-control. . . .’’

Then, once more automatic in his routine, he turned from the social to the financial columns, and was still deep in market reports when the waiter brought his frugal breakfast.

At eight fifteen precisely, Christopher Rennie returned to his duties. His master, according to inevitable custom, had finished breakfast and was lighting the first cigarette of the day.

Rennie drew back the brocaded window-curtains, revealing, through lace brise-bise, the dun early-morning dullness of a crisp December day. ‘‘Maybe we ’ll have it sunny for the wedding, sir,’’ he ventured.

Cranston allowed himself one of his rare smiles. Though Rennie’s enthusiasm for the wedding left him cold, Rennie’s personal interest pleased him. He liked his servants to be devoted. That was one of the qualities for Which he paid them their high wages.

An Italian waiter, peremptorily summoned, came to clear away the breakfast things. Meanwhile, the valet waited for his orders. |

‘‘T want you to telephone to my mother’s,’’ said Cranston as soon as the waiter was out of the room. ‘‘Find out from her maid how she slept, and say I ’d like her to telephone me during the morning.’’

‘“Very good, sir.’’

‘“When you ’ve done that—you need n’t come back if she ’s all right—go up-stairs to Mr. Harold’s room—it ’s Number Four Fifty-five on the third floor—and tell him I shall be working till half-past nine. Make him understand that I don’t want to be disturbed till then.’’

‘‘Very good, sir.’’ |

‘And tell the hall-porter that I ’m expecting Mr. Tillotson at half-past eight. When he comes, he ’s to be shown straight up here. Mr. John Hardcastle is calling at ten. He can come up, too. Any other visitors are to send up their cards. Is that clear?’’

‘‘Pairfectly, sir.’’ Christopher Rennie, memorizing these instructions, hesitated a moment before asking, ‘‘ What time shall you dress, sir?’’

‘‘Twelve o’clock, sharp. Mr. Harold will take lunch with me. Here. At twelve forty-five. Tell the head waiter it ’s to be a light meal. Get on to Lees at the garage; remind him that he’s to bring the Rolls to the Arlington Street entrance. One thirty, sharp! Havers is fetching my mother in the Clement-Talbot. You need n’t say anything about that. I told Havers myself—last night. And, Rennie—’’

‘*Yes, sir?’’

‘‘There ‘Il be a seat for you at the back of the church. You 711 find the ticket for it on my dressing-table. Lees ’ll pick you up here after he ’s taken us on, and bring you to Rorkton House. Don’t forget to bring my kit-bag with you. And tell the luggage-porter he ’s not to be later than three forty-five at St. Pancras. Mr. Harold will be there. In case he ’s late, the porter can register the trunks to Oakham. That ’s all. You can go.’’

The valet disappeared. Cranston, extinguishing his cigarette, stepped to the windows; opened them, and passed out upon his balcony, below which, deep as a canon, ran Piceadilly.

Already, even as Rennie had predicted, a lemon-colored sun peeped up through the dissolving cloud-films. The leafless trees of Green Park were faintly rimed with hoar-frost. Reveling in the strength of his lungs, Gerald Cranston breathed deep of the frosty air. Now, once again, as his blue eyes looked out over Piccadilly, beyond Devonshire House to the roofs of Mayfair, imagination flickered up in him. Among those roofs, in Aldford Street, should be his own roof-tree. And from under that roof-tree he would conquer this London. ‘‘Our home,’’ thought Gerald Cranston. ‘‘Mine—and Hermione’s. An orderly home—disciplined. Yes—I 7ll buy the place—to-day.’’

A knock on the sitting-room door disturbed concentration; and, turning back from the window with the usual ‘‘Come!”’ on his lips, he found Tillotson, his confidential secretary, already in the room.

Stanley Tillotson was a dapper little man of the ex-officer type. The brown eyes behind his horn-rimmed glasses were alert with intelligence, and his complexion, though a trifle pallid, indicated the stamina necessary to his job; while the lips under his blond toothbrushed mustache—lips that opened thin above irregular teeth as he gave his chief good morning— seemed made for the preserving of secrets.

‘‘Morning, Tillotson.’’ Cranston’s voice was curt. ‘You ’re three and a half minutes late. Where ’s the post?’’

‘*In the office, sir.’’ Tillotson knew better than to excuse — himself. ‘‘I thought I ’d see if you wanted anything urgently before I opened the letters.’’

‘‘There ’s nothing urgent. Ill be with you in ten minutes. ’’

The secretary limped away, trailing his injured foot; and Cranston, concentrating on him as he went, thought: ‘“Wonder why he resents being here at half-past eight? Womanizes, I expect. That’s the trouble with most of them _

He returned to the balcony, and stood there, arranging his thoughts, for the allotted ten minutes. Then he stepped back, closed the windows with one deft movement of his capable hands, and made his way out of the sitting-room, across the hall of the suite.

The fourth room of that suite had been metamorphosed, at Cranston’s expense, into an office. It struck him, as he entered it, that the bass-wood roll-top desk at which Tillotson was seated, the oak typewriter-stand, and the plain mahogany table, bare except for its big leather-lined paper-box and its telephone, contrasted rather strangely with the white carteen-pierre wall-decorations, the bronze bracket-lights, and the red carpet. ‘‘Have to do something better for Aldford Street,’’ he thought, closing the door carefully behind him, and sitting down to his table with a terse, ‘‘Ready, Tillotson?’’

‘‘In a moment, sir.’’ The secretary slit the last of the many envelopes, inspected its contents, added them to the largest of the three piles of papers in front of him, picked up the three piles, rose, and faced his chief. ‘‘ About the wedding stuff, sir,’’ he began, the ghost of a smile on his lips. ‘‘Circulars, and that sort of thing. You won’t bother with them, I presume ?’’

“‘No. Burn the lot. Any bills?’’

‘‘About a dozen, sir.’’

‘*Read them over, please.’’

Tillotson detailed the accounts, and Cranston either passed them with a curt, ‘‘That ’s O.K. Pay it,’’ or queried them with a curter, ‘‘That ’s wrong. The price was twenty guineas. Write and tell him so.’’

This routine over—an unpaid bill was Cranston’s pet detestation—there remained some dozen letters, to each of which he devoted a minute’s attention. As he indicated his answer to the last of them—‘‘That ’s a service charity, is n’t itt Send ’em a tenner’’—the telephone-bell rang; and Tillotson, having answered it, announced: ‘‘Mrs. Cranston wishes to speak with you, sir.’’

Stanley Tillotson, though he had been in Cranston’s service a full year, never failed in his amazement at the change which overcame his employer’s erisp, businesslike voice whenever he spoke with his mother. It changed now, as he handed over the receiver and listened to the bantering:

‘‘Hullo, Mother, is that you? ... Up already, eh?... That ’s good. .. . Slept like atop? That ’s better still.... Listen: I ’ve arranged about your car. It ’ll be at Phillimore Gardens at a quarter past one. Don’t panic. That ’ll give you oceans of time. And have a good lunch first. The reception ’s sure to be a dog-fight. .. . Of course, old lady. I arranged that, too. The front pew on the lectern side! And mind you make for the vestry the moment we do.’’

Cranston, with a quiet smile, replaced the receiver; but when he next spoke the smile had vanished, and his voice was curter, more businesslike than ever.

‘*Tillotson,’’ he said, ‘‘I ’ve decided to buy that house off Park Lane. Fifteen-A Aldford Street. Get on to Trollope’s as soon as their office opens. Ask for Mr. Jones, tell him [I ll give him the thirty thousand, providing his client accepts in writing by eleven o’clock this morning.

Tell Mr. Jones that if the acceptance is legally binding I 71 pay three thousand deposit at once, and the balance on completion. Write that down, and give me Harrison’s report.’’

Tillotson, from a drawer of the desk, produced the architect’s report on Aldford Street; and Cranston, having scrutinized it, went on:

‘*Hardeastle ’s coming at ten o’clock with my will. I ll tell him to send you the deeds. The moment he sends them —before, if he sanctions it—instruct Harrison to send out his specifications for tender. Tell him I want to see the estimates. If 1 ’m still away, he must send them on to me. Make it very clear that the thing ’s urgent. To-day ’s the twelfth of December. I ’ve got to be in by the twelfth of March. Tell Harrison to put a penalty clause in his building eontracts. He ‘ll understand what I mean. Got all that?’’

‘‘Yes, sir.”? Tillotson, scribbling hieroglyphic shorthand, never looked up from his note-book, as Cranston’s mind switched to a fresh subject.

‘“‘About Cosgrave. That ’s urgent, too. It’s an accountant’s job. Write to Sir James Guthrie—you know, Guthrie, Jellybrand & Guthrie. Explain that Lady Hermione’s solicitors, Poole, Cartwright & Poole, have their instructions to let him have a copy of the estate-accounts. Tell Sir James Guthrie I ’d like him to look over them personally; and have one of his clerks prepare an exact balance-sheet of incomings and outgoings for the last five years, by the end of the week. When it’s ready, he’s to send it direct to me at Studley Farm.’’

‘“Very good, sir.’’* Almost before Tillotson had scribbled his last hieroglyphic, Cranston had switched again.

‘‘And take this telegram, please. ‘McManus, Liverpool. Sell my entire holding in Coronation Cotton ordinary and preferred at best price obtainable. No limit. Remit proceeds usual channels.’ You ’ll code that, of course.’’

The curt businesslike voice paused for a moment; and Tillotson, rather diffidently, broke in on its pause: ‘‘ Excuse me for interrupting, sir. But perhaps you haven’t seen the ‘Financial Times’ this morning. There ’s a stop-press which says Coronations have declared thirty-three and a third per cent for the half-year.’’

‘“Thanks.’’ Pleased again—Tillotson, as Rennie, was certainly worth his high wages—Gerald Cranston relaxed very nearly to intimacy. ‘‘Thanks. But J saw that three quarters of an hour ago. The thing ’s either a fake—or worse. I ’ve suspected it for some time. Sorry I ever touched the shares! Get that wire off by nine forty-five, please. That ‘ll give the Liverpool market just time to boil up. Now go on.’’

They went on till nine thirty brought Rennie with the information, ‘‘Mr. Harold ’s waiting in the sitting-room, sir.’’

Except for his height, Gerald Cranston’s elder brother Harold, managing director of Cranston’s, Limited, resembled him hardly at all. Harold’s hair showed gray against Gerald’s tawn, his eyes gray-green against Gerald’s blue. He wore a rough bristly mustache on his upper lip, and his lower sagged a little for sign of ill-health. Plump of jowl where Gerald was lean, he had a forehead broad rather than high, puffy good-natured cheeks, and an easy-going dimpled chin. Cheeks and chin did not belie Harold’s temperament, which, as Gerald entered the sitting-room and the two clasped hands, further displayed itself in the jocular sentence, “Well —and how ’s the blushing bridegroom ?’’

‘*Busier than his best man, apparently.’’

‘‘Same old Gerry!’’ The elder brother’s plump, ringless hand patted the younger on the shoulder. ‘‘ Always overdoing it! Mark my words: one of these days, if you ’re not deuced careful, you “ll have a nervous breakdown. I know I should if I went at things the way you do. I ’ll have to talk to Lady H.—by the by, do I call her Lady Hermione or just plain Hermione ?—about looking after you.’’

‘*T should n’t if I were you, Harry.’’ Though he respected his brother’s grasp of business detail, Gerald Cranston considered him, in private respects, rather a fool—pleasant enough as a companion, of course, and loyal to the backbone, but otherwise a sentimentalist, an indisciplinarian, a man with no granite in his make-up; and that lack of granite seemed particularly apparent now, as Harold, obviously a little above himself with the excitement of the occasion, commenced an aimless monologue which began: ‘‘Old chap! It ’s wonderful to think of you and me starting life in the old office at Leicester,’’ and continued, with a wave of the hand round the ornate sitting-room, ‘‘to end up here.’’