In the dimness of the stage-box, his eyes a little glassy and a dull despair in his soul, Uncle Chris was wondering how to begin. In his hot youth he had been rather a devil of a fellow in between dances, a coo-er of soft phrases and a stealer of never very stoutly withheld kisses. He remembered one time in Bangalore ... but that had nothing to do with the case. The point was, how to begin with Mrs. Peagrim. The fact that twenty-five years ago he had crushed in his arms beneath the shadows of the deodars a girl whose name he had forgotten, though he remembered that she had worn a dress of some pink stuff, was immaterial and irrelevant. Was he to crush Mrs. Peagrim in his arms? Not, thought Uncle Chris to himself, on a bet. He contented himself for the moment with bending an intense gaze upon her and asking if she was tired.
"A little," panted Mrs. Peagrim, who, though she danced often and vigorously, was never in the best of condition, owing to her habit of neutralizing the beneficent effects of exercise by surreptitious candy-eating. "I'm a little out of breath."
Uncle Chris had observed this for himself, and it had not helped him to face his task. Lovely woman loses something of her queenly dignity when she puffs. Inwardly, he was thinking how exactly his hostess resembled the third from the left of a troupe of performing sea-lions which he had seen some years ago on one of his rare visits to a vaudeville house.
"You ought not to tire yourself," he said with a difficult tenderness.
"I am so fond of dancing," pleaded Mrs. Peagrim. Recovering some of her breath, she gazed at her companion with a sort of short-winded archness. "You are always so sympathetic, Major Selby."
"Am I?" said Uncle Chris. "Am I?"
"You know you are!"
Uncle Chris swallowed quickly.
"I wonder if you have ever wondered," he began, and stopped. He felt that he was not putting it as well as he might. "I wonder if it has ever struck you that there's a reason." He stopped again. He seemed to remember reading something like that in an advertisement in a magazine, and he did not want to talk like an advertisement. "I wonder if it has ever struck you, Mrs. Peagrim," he began again, "that any sympathy on my part might be due to some deeper emotion which.... Have you never suspected that you have never suspected...." Uncle Chris began to feel that he must brace himself up. Usually a man of fluent speech, he was not at his best to-night. He was just about to try again, when he caught his hostess' eye, and the soft gleam in it sent him cowering back into the silence as if he were taking cover from an enemy's shrapnel.
Mrs. Peagrim touched him on the arm.
"You were saying...?" she murmured encouragingly.
Uncle Chris shut his eyes. His fingers pressed desperately into the velvet curtain beside him. He felt as he had felt when a raw lieutenant in India, during his first hill-campaign, when the etiquette of the service had compelled him to rise and walk up and down in front of his men under a desultory shower of jezail-bullets. He seemed to hear the damned things whop-whopping now ... and almost wished that he could really hear them. One or two good bullets just now would be a welcome diversion.
"Yes?" said Mrs. Peagrim.--
"Have you never felt," babbled Uncle Chris, "that, feeling as I feel, I might have felt ... that is to say might be feeling a feeling...?"
There was a tap at the door of the box. Uncle Chris started violently. Jill came in.
"Oh, I beg your pardon," she said. "I wanted to speak...."
"You wanted to speak to me?" said Uncle Chris, bounding up. "Certainly, certainly, certainly, of course. If you will excuse me for a moment?"
Mrs. Peagrim bowed coldly. The interruption had annoyed her. She had no notion who Jill was, and she resented the intrusion at this particular juncture intensely. Not so Uncle Chris, who skipped out into the passage like a young lamb.
"Am I in time?" asked Jill in a whisper.
"In time?"
"You know what I mean. Uncle Chris, listen to me! You are not to propose to that awful woman. Do you understand?"
Uncle Chris shook his head.
"The die is cast!"
"The die isn't anything of the sort," said Jill. "Unless...." She stopped, aghast. "You don't mean that you have done it already?"
"Well, no. To be perfectly accurate, no. But...."
"Then that's all right. I know why you were doing it, and it was very sweet of you, but you mustn't."
"But, Jill, you don't understand."
"I do understand."
"I have a motive...."
"I know your motive. Freddie told me. Don't you worry yourself about me, dear, because I am all right. I am going to be married."
A look of ecstatic relief came into Uncle Chris' face.
"Then Underhill...?"
"I am not marrying Derek. Somebody else. I don't think you know him, but I love him, and so will you." She pulled his face down and kissed him. "Now you can go back."
Uncle Chris was almost too overcome to speak. He gulped a little.
"Jill," he said shakily, "this is a ... this is a great relief."
"I knew it would be."
"If you are really going to marry a rich man...."
"I didn't say he was rich."
The joy ebbed from Uncle Chris' face.
"If he is not rich, if he cannot give you everything of which I...."
"Oh, don't be absurd! Wally has all the money anybody needs. What's money?"
"What's money?" Uncle Chris stared. "Money, my dear child, is ... is ... well, you mustn't talk of it in that light way. But, if you think you will really have enough...?"
"Of course we shall. Now you can go back. Mrs. Peagrim will be wondering what has become of you."
"Must I?" said Uncle Chris doubtfully.
"Of course. You must be polite."
"Very well," said Uncle Chris. "But it will be a little difficult to continue the conversation on what you might call general lines. However!"
Back in the box, Mrs. Peagrim was fanning herself with manifest impatience.
"What did that girl want?" she demanded.
Uncle Chris seated himself with composure. The weakness had passed, and he was himself again.
"Oh, nothing, nothing. Some trivial difficulty, which I was able to dispose of in a few words."
Mrs. Peagrim would have liked to continue her researches, but a feeling that it was wiser not to stray too long from the main point restrained her. She bent towards him.
"You were going to say something when that girl interrupted us."
Uncle Chris shot his cuffs with a debonair gesture.
"Was I? Was I? To be sure, yes. I was saying that you ought not to let yourself get tired. Deuce of a thing, getting tired. Plays the dickens with the system."
Mrs. Peagrim was disconcerted. The atmosphere seemed to have changed, and she did not like it. She endeavoured to restore the tone of the conversation.
"You are so sympathetic," she sighed, feeling that she could not do better than to begin again at that point. The remark had produced good results before and it might do so a second time.
"Yes," agreed Uncle Chris cheerily. "You see, I have seen something of all this sort of thing, and I realize the importance of it. I know what all this modern rush and strain of life is for a woman in your position. Parties every night ... dancing ... a thousand and one calls on the vitality ... bound to have an effect sooner or later, unless--unless," said Uncle Chris solemnly, "one takes steps. Unless one acts in time. I had a friend--" His voice sank--"I had a very dear friend over in London, Lady Alice--but the name would convey nothing--the point is that she was in exactly the same position as you. On the rush all the time. Never stopped. The end was inevitable. She caught cold, hadn't sufficient vitality to throw it off, went to a dance in mid-winter, contracted pneumonia...." Uncle Chris sighed. "All over in three days," he said sadly. "Now at that time," he resumed, "I did not know what I know now. If I had heard of Nervino then...." He shook his head. "It might have saved her life. It would have saved her life. I tell you, Mrs. Peagrim, that there is nothing, there is no lack of vitality which Nervino cannot set right. I am no physician myself, I speak as a layman, but it acts on the red corpuscles of the blood...."
Mrs. Peagrim's face was stony. She had not spoken before, because he had given her no opportunity, but she spoke now in a hard voice.
"Major Selby!"
"Mrs. Peagrim?"
"I am not interested in patent medicines!"
"One can hardly call Nervino that," said Uncle Chris reproachfully. "It is a sovereign specific. You can get it at any drug store. It comes in two sizes, the dollar-fifty--or large--size, and the...."
Mrs. Peagrim rose majestically.
"Major Selby, I am tired...."
"Precisely. And, as I say, Nervino...."
"Please," said Mrs. Peagrim coldly, "go to the stage-door and see if you can find my limousine. It should be waiting in the street."
"Certainly," said Uncle Chris. "Why, certainly, certainly, certainly."
He left the box and proceeded across the stage. He walked with a lissom jauntiness. His eye was bright. One or two of those whom he passed on his way had the idea that this fine-looking man was in pain. They fancied that he was moaning. But Uncle Chris was not moaning. He was humming a gay snatch from the lighter music of the 'nineties.
