Chapter II—THE FOOL’S WISDOM

LIKE the inexplicable run on a particular number at the roulette-table, there often seems to be a run on some particular phenomenon thrown up by the wheel of daily life. Such a recurrent incident was the meeting of Norma and Jimmie Padgate during the next few weeks. She met him at Mrs. Deering’s, she ran across him in the streets. Going to spend a weekend out of town, she found him on the platform of Paddington Station. The series of sheer coincidences established between them a certain familiarity. When next they met, it was in the crush of an emptying theatre. They found themselves blocked side by side, and they laughed as their eyes met.

“This seems to have got out of the domain of vulgar chance and become Destiny,” she said lightly.

“I am indeed favoured by the gods,” he replied.

“You don’t deserve their good will because you have never come to see me.”

Jimmie replied that he was an old bear who loved to growl selfishly in his den. Norma retorted with a reference to Constance Deering. In her house he could growl altruistically.

“She pampers me with honey,” he explained.

“I am afraid you’ll get nothing so Arcadian with us,” she replied, “but I can provide you with some excellent glucose.”

They were moved a few feet forward by the crowd, and then came to a halt again.

“This is my ward, Miss Aline Marden,” he said, presenting a pretty slip of a girl of seventeen, who had hung back shyly during the short dialogue, and looked with open-eyed admiration at Jimmie’s new friend. “That is how she would be described in a court of law, but I don’t mind telling you that really she is my nurse and fostermother.”

The girl blushed at the introduction, and gave him an imperceptible twitch of the arm. Norma smiled at her graciously and asked her how she had liked the play.

“It was heavenly,” she said with a little sigh. “Did n’t you think so?”

Norma, who had characterised the piece as the most dismal performance outside a little Bethel, was preparing a mendacious answer, when a sudden thinning in the crush brought to her side Mrs. Hardacre, from whom she had been separated. Mrs. Hardacre inquired querulously for Morland King, who had gone in search of the carriage. Norma reassured her as to his ability to find it, and introduced Jimmie and Aline. Mr. Padgate was Mr. King’s oldest friend. Mrs. Hardacre bowed disapprovingly, took in with a hard glance the details of Aline’s cheap, homemade evening frock, and the ready-made cape over her shou