and I set myself, therefore, still more assiduously to efface
the first bad impression I had made and win his confidence to the pitch
of voluntary speech. In that endeavour I had a social advantage.
Being a person of affability and no apparent employment, and wearing
tweeds and knickerbockers, I was naturally classed as an artist
in Bignor, and in the remarkable code of social precedence prevalent
in Bignor an artist ranks considerably higher than a grocer's assistant.
Skelmersdale, like too many of his class, is something of a snob;
he had told me to "shut it," only under sudden, excessive provocation,
and with, I am certain, a subsequent repentance; he was, I knew,
quite glad to be seen walking about the village with me. In due course,
he accepted the proposal of a pipe and whisky in my rooms readily
enough, and there, scenting by some happy instinct that there
was trouble of the heart in this, and knowing that confidences beget
confidences, I plied him with much of interest and suggestion from
my real and fictitious past. And it was after the third whisky
of the third visit of that sort, if I remember rightly, that a propos
of some artless expansion of a little affair that had touched and
left me in my teens, that he did at last, of his own free will
and motion, break the ice. "It was like that with me," he said,
"over there at Aldington. It's just that that's so rum. First I didn't
care a bit and it was all her, and afterwards, when it was too late,
it was, in a manner of speaking, all me."

I forbore to jump upon this allusion, and so he presently threw out
another, and in a little while he was making it as plain as daylight
that the one thing he wanted to talk about now was this Fairyland
adventure he had sat tight upon for so long. You see, I'd done
the trick with him, and from being just another half-incredulous,
would-be facetious stranger, I had, by all my wealth of shameless