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Updated: June 7, 2025
He made this proposition to me on the first evening of my return. "The bride's father," said I, somewhat ironically, "is surely the proper person." "The bride's father," said he, "is miles away, and, like a wise and hoary villain, is likely to remain there." This was news. "Gedge has left Wellingsford?" I cried. "How did that come about?"
The majority, however, took the matter calmly, as we have had to take far more amazing social convulsions. The fact remained that Betty was married, and there was no reason whatever, on the score of the old engagement, for Boyce to manifest such exaggerated shyness with regard to Wellingsford society. If it had been any other man than Boyce, I should not have worried about the matter at all.
She gives me a daughter's dainty affection. Thank God for it! There have been other little changes in Wellingsford. Mrs. Boyce left the town soon after Leonard's death, and lives with her sister in London. I had a letter from her this morning a brave woman's letter. She has no suspicion of the truth.
But when you have done a man a foul injustice for years, you must make him some kind of secret reparation. So, by making him welcome, I did what I could. Now I don't know whether I ought to set down a trivial incident mentioned in my diary under the date of the 15th August, the day before Boyce left Wellingsford to join his regiment in France.
Everything had been finally settled. The station hung with flags and inscriptions. A guard of honour and a band in the station-yard, with a fleet of motor cars in waiting. Troops lining the route from station to Town Hall. More troops in the decorated Market Square, including the Godbury School O.T.C. and the Wellingsford and Godbury Volunteers.
Here was Boyce branding himself with complicity in the tragedy of Althea, and paying Gedge to keep it dark. Like Sir Anthony, Betty remembered trivial things that assumed grave significance. There was no room for doubt. Catastrophe following on his villainy had kept Boyce away from Wellingsford, had terrified him out of his engagement. And so her heart had grown bitter against him.
She said, "Thank you." Waved a hand. "Won't you sit down?" "Wasn't it rather sudden?" he asked. "Everything in war time is sudden except the action of the British Government. Your own appearance to-night is sudden." He laughed at her jest and explained, much as he had done to me, his reasons for wishing to keep his visit to Wellingsford a secret.
A couple of hours in a club smoking-room to the normal man a mere putting in of time, a vain surcease from boredom, a vacuous habit is to me, a strange wonder and delight. After Wellingsford the place is resonant with actualities. I hear all sorts of things; mostly lies, I know; but what matter?
I cudgelled back my memory into confirmation of his statement. To remember trivial incidents before the war takes a lot of cudgelling. Yes. I distinctly recollected the young man's telling me that Oxford being an intellectual hothouse and Wellingsford an intellectual Arabia Petrea, he was compelled, for the sake of his mental health, to find a period of repose in the intellectual Nature of London.
Otherwise why did she taunt him with hiding from the light of Wellingsfordian day? Now, please don't think me little-minded. Or, if you do think so, please remember the conditions under which I have lived for so many years and grant me your kind indulgence for a confession I have to make. Besides being worried, I felt annoyed. Wellingsford was my little world. I knew everybody in it.
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