could never determine. Which was the more flagrant indecency--that he,
young Margerison of the lower fourth, should, without any encouragement
whatever, have asked Urquhart of the sixth, captain of the fifteen, head
of his house, to come and stay with him; or that his near relative should
have pressed half-a-crown into the great Urquhart's hand as if he
expected him to go forthwith to the tuck-shop at the corner and buy
tarts? Peter wriggled, scarlet from his collar to his hair.

Urquhart was a polite person. He took the half-crown. He murmured
something about being very glad. He even smiled his pleasant smile. And
Peter, entirely unexpectedly to himself, did what he always did in the
crises of his singularly disastrous life--he exploded into a giggle. So,
some years later, he laughed helplessly and suddenly, standing among the
broken fragments of his social reputation and his professional career. He
could not help it. When the worst had happened, there was nothing else
one could do. One laughed from a sheer sense of the completeness of the
disaster. Peter had a funny, extremely amused laugh; hardly the laugh of
a prosperous person; rather that of the unhorsed knight who acknowledges
the utterness of his defeat and finds humour in the very fact. It was as
if misfortune--and this misfortune of the half-crown and the invitation
is not to be under-estimated--sharpened all the faculties, never blunt,
by which he apprehended humour. So he looked from Hilary to Urquhart,
and, mentally, from both to his cowering self, and exploded.

Urquhart had passed on. Hilary said, "What's the matter with _you_?" and
Peter recovered himself and said "Nothing." He might have cried, with
Miss Evelina Anvill, "Oh, my dear sir, I am shocked to death!" He did
not. He did not even say, "Why did you stamp us like that?" He would not
for the world have hurt Hilary's feelings, and vaguely he knew that this
splendid, unusual half-brother of his was in some ways a sensitive