What Timmy Did | Page 7

must yet not be so near London
that a fellow would be tempted to be always going to town. It seemed
to him amazing that he now had it within his power to achieve what
had always been his ideal. But when he had acquired exactly the kind
of place he wanted to find, what those whom he had set seeking for him
had assured him with such flattering and eager earnestness he would
very soon discover--what then? Did he mean to live there alone? He
thought yes, for he did not now feel drawn to marriage.
As a boy--it now seemed æons of years ago--it had been far otherwise.
But Betty Tosswill had been very young, only nineteen, and when he
had fallen on evil days she had thrown him over in obedience to her
father's strongly expressed wish. He had suffered what at the time

seemed a frightful agony, and he had left England full of revolt and
bitterness.
But to-day, when the knowledge that he was so soon going to
Beechfield brought with it a great surge of remembrance, he could not
honestly tell himself that he was sorry. Had he gone out to Australia
burdened with a girl-wife, the difficult struggle would have been
well-nigh intolerable, and it was a million to one chance that he would
ever have met the man to whom he owed his present good fortune.
What he now longed to do was to enjoy himself in a simple,
straightforward way. Love, with its tremors, uncertainties, its blisses
and torments, was not for him, and in so far as he might want a pleasant
touch of half sentimental, half sexless comradeship, there was his
agreeable friendship with Mrs. Crofton.
Enid Crofton? The thought of how well he had come to know her in the
last three weeks surprised him. When he had first met her in Egypt she
had been the young, very pretty wife of Colonel Crofton, an elderly
"dug-out," odd and saturnine, whose manner to his wife was not always
over-kindly. No one out there had been much surprised when she had
decided to brave the submarine peril and return to England.
Radmore had not been the only man who had felt sorry for her, and
who had made friends with her. But unlike the other men, who were all
more or less in love with her, he had liked Colonel Crofton. During his
visit to Fildy Fe Manor, the liking had hardened into serious regard. He
had been surprised, rather distressed, to find how much less well-off
they had appeared here, at home, than when the Colonel had been on
so-called active service. It had also become plain to him--though he
was not a man to look out for such things--that the husband and wife
were now on very indifferent terms, the one with the other, and, on the
whole, he blamed the wife--and then, just before he had started for
home again, had come the surprising news of Colonel Crofton's death!
In her letter to one who was, after all, only an acquaintance, the young
widow had gone into no details. But, just by chance, Radmore had seen
a paragraph in a week-old London paper containing an account of the
inquest. Colonel Crofton had committed suicide, a result, it was stated,

of depression owing to shell-shock. "Shell-shock" gave Radmore pause.
He felt quite sure that Colonel Crofton had never--to use a now familiar
paraphrase--heard a shot fired in anger. The fact that his war service
had been far from the Front had always been a subject of bitter
complaint on the old soldier's part.
Radmore had written a sympathetic note to Mrs. Crofton, telling her the
date of his return, and now--almost without his knowing how and
why--they had become intimate, meeting almost daily, lunching or
dining together incessantly, Radmore naturally gratified at the
admiration his lovely companion--she had grown even prettier since he
had last seen her--obviously excited.
And yet, though he had become such "pals" with her, and though he
missed her society at his now lonely meals to an almost ridiculous
extent, Radmore would have been much taken aback had an angel from
heaven told him that the real reason he had sought to get in touch with
Old Place was because Enid Crofton had already settled down at
Beechfield.
CHAPTER III
After Timmy Tosswill had been to the village shop and done his
mother's errand, he wandered on, his dog, Flick, at his heels, debating
within himself what he should do next.
Like most children who lead an abnormal, because a lonely, childhood,
he was in some ways very mature, in other ways still very babyish. He
was at once secretive and--whenever anything touched his
heart--emotionally expansive. To the indifferent observer Timmy
appeared to be an