* * * * *

"Feather" had not been called by that delicious name when she married
Robert Gareth-Lawless who was a beautiful and irresponsibly rather
than deliberately bad young man. She was known as Amabel Darrel
and the loveliest girl in the lovely corner of the island of Jersey
where her father, a country doctor, had begotten a large family of
lovely creatures and brought them up on the appallingly inadequate
proceeds of his totally inadequate practice. Pretty female things
must be disposed of early lest their market value decline. Therefore
a well-born young man even without obvious resources represents a
sail in the offing which is naturally welcomed as possibly belonging
to a bark which may at least bear away a burden which the back
carrying it as part of its pack will willingly shuffle on to other
shoulders. It is all very well for a man with six lovely daughters
to regard them as capital if he has money or position or generous
relations or if he has energy and an ingenious unfatigued mind. But
a man who is tired and neither clever nor important in any degree
and who has reared his brood in one of the Channel Islands with a
faded, silly, unattractive wife as his only aid in any difficulty,
is wise in leaving the whole hopeless situation to chance and luck.
Sometimes luck comes without assistance but--almost invariably--it
does not.

"Feather"--who was then "Amabel"--thought Robert Gareth-Lawless
incredible good luck. He only drifted into her summer by merest
chance because a friend's yacht in which he was wandering about
"came in" for supplies. A girl Ariel in a thin white frock and with
big larkspur blue eyes yearning at you under her flapping hat as
she answers your questions about the best road to somewhere will