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Updated: June 23, 2025
Pethel looked so very young for his age, whereas she would have had to be really old to look young for hers. I pitied her as one might a governess with two charges who were hopelessly out of hand. But a governess, I reflected, can always give notice. Love tied poor Mrs. Pethel fast to her present situation.
"Yes, but, darling Mother, you can't swim. Father and I are both splendid swimmers." To gloss over the mother's disability, I looked brightly at Pethel, as though in ardent recognition of his prowess among waves. With a movement of his head he indicated his daughter indicated that there was no one like her in the whole world. I beamed agreement. Indeed, I did think her rather nice.
I was shocked this morning when I saw in my newspaper a paragraph announcing his sudden death. I do not say that the shock was very disagreeable. One reads a newspaper for the sake of news. Had I never met James Pethel, belike I should never have heard of him: and my knowledge of his death, coincident with my knowledge that he had existed, would have meant nothing at all to me.
It might have occurred to me that, if there was any mystery in him, I could solve it through her. But, in point of fact, I had forgotten all about that possible mystery. The amateur detective was lost in the sympathetic observer of a father's love. That Pethel did love his daughter I have never doubted. One passion is not less true because another predominates.
Those pursed-out lips, so queerly different from the compressed lips of the normal motorist, and seeming, as elsewhere last night, to denote no more than pensive interest, had told me suddenly all that I needed to know about Pethel. Here, as there, and, oh, ever so much better here than there! he could gratify the passion that was in him. No need of any "make-believe" here.
Though you may think me very dense for not having thoroughly understood Pethel in the course of my first meeting with him, the fact is that I was only aware, and that dimly, of something more in him than he had cared to reveal some veil behind which perhaps lurked his right to the title so airily bestowed on him by Grierson.
Yet I see now that despite that wind, or, rather, because of it, I ought already to have known Pethel a little better than I did when we presently sat down together inside the cafe of the casino. There had been a point in our walk, or our stagger, when we paused to lean over the parapet, looking down at the black and driven sea.
Had it been mine, I should have asked to have it all in five-franc pieces. Pethel took it in the most compendious form, and crumpled it into his pocket. I asked if he were going to play any more to-night. "Oh, later on," he said. "I want to get a little sea air into my lungs now." He asked, with a sort of breezy diffidence, if I would go with him. I was glad to do so.
Its title is "Death of Wealthy Aviator," and its text is: Wide-spread regret will be felt in Leicestershire at the tragic death of Mr. James Pethel, who had long resided there and was very popular as an all-round sportsman. In recent years he had been much interested in aviation, and had had a private aerodrome erected on his property.
Pethel had given me a cigar, and his wife presently noticed that he himself was not smoking. He explained to her that he thought he had smoked too much lately, and that he was going to "knock it off" for a while.
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