What Timmy Did | Page 6

embittered lad of
twenty-three, believing that he would never come back or, at any rate,
not till he was an old man having "made good."
But everything--everything had fallen out absolutely differently from
what he had expected it to do. The influence of Mars, so fatal to
millions of his fellow beings, had brought him marvellous, unmerited
good fortune. He had rushed home the moment War was declared, and
after putting in some time in a training which he hated to remember, he
had at last obtained a commission. Within a fortnight of having reached
his Mecca--the Front, he was back in England in the--to him--amazing
guise of wounded hero. But he had sent for none of his old friends for
he was still ashamed. After the Armistice he had rushed through

England on his way to Australia, putting in a few days with a Colonel
and Mrs. Crofton, with whom he had been thrown in Egypt. More to do
his host a kindness than for any other reason, Radmore had sent his
godson, Timothy Tosswill, a pedigree puppy, from the queer little
Essex manor-house where the Croftons were then making a rather futile
attempt to increase their slender means by breeding terriers.
The days had slipped by there very pleasantly, for Radmore liked his
taciturn host, and Mrs. Crofton was very pretty--an agreeable
playfellow for a rich and lonely man. So it was that when it came to the
point he had not cared to look up any of the people associated with his
early youth.
But now he was going to see them--almost had he forced himself upon
them. And the thought of going home to Old Place shook and stirred
him to the heart.
To-day he felt quite queerly at a loose end. This perhaps, partly because
the lately widowed Mrs. Crofton, with whom he had spent a good deal
of his time since his arrival in London three weeks ago, had left town.
She had not gone far, only to the Surrey village where he himself was
going on Friday.
When pretty Mrs. Crofton had told Radmore that she had taken a house
at Beechfield, he had been very much surprised and taken aback. It had
seemed to him an amazing coincidence that the one place in the wide
world which to him was home should have been chosen by her. But at
once she had reminded him, in her pretty little positive way, that it was
he himself who, soon after they had become first acquainted in Egypt,
had drawn such an attractive picture of the Surrey village. That, in fact,
was why, in July--it was now late September--when she, Enid Crofton,
had had to think of making a new home, Beechfield had seemed to her
the ideal place. If only she could hear of a house to let there! And by
rare good chance there had been such a house--The Trellis House! A
friend had lent her a motor, and she had gone down to look at it one
August afternoon, and there and then had decided to take it. It was so
exactly what she wanted--a delightful, old, cottagy place, yet with all
modern conveniences, lacking, alas! only electric light.

All this had happened, so she had explained, after her last letter to him,
for she and Radmore had kept up a desultory correspondence.
And now, with Janet Tosswill's voice still sounding in his ears, Godfrey
Radmore was not altogether sorry to feel a touch of loneliness, for at
times his good fortune frightened him.
Not only had he escaped through the awful ordeal of war with only one
bad wound, while many of his friends and comrades--the best and
bravest, the most happily young, had fallen round him--but he had
come back to find himself transformed from a penniless adventurer into
a very rich man. An old Brisbane millionaire, into whose office he had
drifted in the January of 1914, and with whom he had, after a fashion,
made friends, had re-made his will in the memorable autumn of that
year, and had left Radmore half his vast fortune. Doubtless many such
wills were made under the stress of war emotion, but--and it was here
that Radmore's strange luck had come in--the maker of this particular
will had died within a month of making it. And, as so often happens to
a man who had begun by losing what little he had owing to folly and
extravagance, Godfrey Radmore, though exceptionally generous and
kindly, now lived well within his means, and had, if anything,
increased his already big share of this world's goods.
Now that he was home for good, he intended to buy a nice
old-fashioned house with a little shooting, and perchance a little fishing.
The place, though not at Land's End,