He watched them for a while, his hands clenched where they rested in
his coat pockets, the lean muscles in his cheeks twitching at
intervals.
When Innisbrae took himself off, Winifred still lounged gracefully
along the billiard table taking shots with any ball that lay for her.
And Clive looked on, absent-eyed, the flat jaw muscles working at
intervals.
"Well?" she asked carelessly, laying her cue across the table.
"Nothing.... I think I'll clear out to-morrow."
"Oh."
She did not even inquire where he was going. For that matter he did
not know, except that there was one place he could not go--home; the
only place he cared to go.
He had already offered her divorce--thinking of Innisbrae, or of some
of the others. But she did not want it. It was, perhaps, not in her to
care enough for any man to go through that amount of trouble. Besides,
Their Majesties disapproved divorce. And for this reason alone nothing
would have induced her to figure in proceedings certain to exclude her
from one or two sets.
"Anything I can do for you before I leave?" he asked, dully.
It appeared that there was nothing he could do for his young wife
before he wandered on in the jolly autumn sunshine.
So the next morning he cleared out. Which proceeding languidly
interested Innisbrae that evening in the billiard-room.
* * * * *
That winter Clive got hurt while pig-sticking in Morocco, being but an
indifferent spear. During convalescence he read "Under Two Flags," and
approved the idea; but when he learned that the Spahi cavalry was not
recruiting Americans, and when, a month later, he discovered how
much romance did not exist in either the First or Second Foreign
Legions, he no longer desired dangers incognito under the tri-colour
or under the standard bearing the open hand.
[Illustration: "During convalescence he read 'Under Two Flags' and
approved the idea."] Some casual wanderer through the purlieus of science whom he met in
Brindisi, induced him to go to Sumatra where orchids and ornithoptera
are the game. But he acquired only a perfectly new species of fever,
which took six months to get over.
He convalesced at leisure all the way from Australia to Cape Town; and
would have been all right; but somebody shot at somebody else one
evening, and got Clive. So it was several months more before he
arrived in India, and the next year before he had enough of China.
But Clive had seen many things in those two years and had learned
fairly well the lesson of his own unimportance in a world which misses
no man, neither king nor clown, after the dark curtain falls and
satiated humanity shuffles home to bed.