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“While you sat there, eating your supper,” continued Miss Greene remorselessly, “you made her bring you her books.”

Mr. Korner had passed the stage when anything could astonish him.

“You lectured her about her housekeeping.” There was a twinkle in the eye of Mrs. Korner’s bosom friend. But lightning could have flashed before Mr. Korner’s eyes without his noticing it just then.

“You told her that she could not add, and you made her say her tables.”

“I made her–” Mr. Korner spoke in the emotionless tones of one merely desiring information. “I made Aimee say her tables?”

“Her nine times,” nodded Miss Greene.

Mr. Korner sat down upon his chair and stared with stony eyes into the future.

“What’s to be done?” said Mr. Korner, “she’ll never forgive me; I know her. You are not chaffing me?” he cried with a momentary gleam of hope. “I really did it?”

“You sat in that very chair where you are sitting now and ate poached eggs, while she stood opposite to you and said her nine times table. At the end of it, seeing you had gone to sleep yourself, I persuaded her to go to bed. It was three o’clock, and we thought you would not mind.” Miss Greene drew up a chair, and, with her elbows on the table, looked across at Mr. Korner. Decidedly there was a twinkle in the eyes of Mrs. Korner’s bosom friend.

“You’ll never do it again,” suggested Miss Greene.

“Do you think it possible,” cried Mr. Korner, “that she may forgive me?”

“No, I don’t,” replied Miss Greene. At which Mr. Korner’s face fell back to zero. “I think the best way out will be for you to forgive her.”

The idea did not even amuse him. Miss Greene glanced round to satisfy herself that the door was still closed, and listened a moment to assure herself of the silence.

“Don’t you remember,” Miss Greene took the extra precaution to whisper it, “the talk we had at breakfast-time the first morning of my visit, when Aimee said you would be all the better for ‘going it’ occasionally?”

Yes, slowly it came back to Mr. Korner. But she only said “going it,” Mr. Korner recollected to his dismay.

“Well, you’ve been ‘going it,'” persisted Miss Greene. “Besides, she did not mean ‘going it.’ She meant the real thing, only she did not like to say the word. We talked about it after you had gone. She said she would give anything to see you more like the ordinary man. And that is her idea of the ordinary man.”

Mr. Korner’s sluggishness of comprehension irritated Miss Greene. She leaned across the table and shook him. “Don’t you understand? You have done it on purpose to teach her a lesson. It is she who has got to ask you to forgive her.”

“You think–?”

“I think, if you manage it properly, it will be the best day’s work you have ever done. Get out of the house before she wakes. I shall say nothing to her. Indeed, I shall not have the time; I must catch the ten o’clock from Paddington. When you come home this evening, you talk first; that’s what you’ve got to do.” And Mr. Korner, in his excitement, kissed the bosom friend before he knew what he had done.

Mrs. Korner sat waiting for her husband that evening in the drawing-room. She was dressed as for a journey, and about the corners of her mouth were lines familiar to Christopher, the sight of which sent his heart into his boots. Fortunately, he recovered himself in time to greet her with a smile. It was not the smile he had been rehearsing half the day, but that it was a smile of any sort astonished the words away from Mrs. Korner’s lips, and gave him the inestimable advantage of first speech.

“Well,” said Mr. Korner cheerily, “and how did you like it?”

For the moment Mrs. Korner feared her husband’s new complaint had already reached the chronic stage, but his still smiling face reassured her–to that extent at all events.