That Which Hath Wings

In January, 1914, Francis Athelstan Sherbrand, Viscount Norwater, only son of that fine old warrior, General the Right Honourable Roger Sherbrand, V.C., K.C.B., first Earl of Mitchelborough, married Margot Mountjohn, otherwise known as "Kittums," and found that she was wonderfully innocent--for a girl who knew so much.

It was a genuine love-match, Franky being a comparatively poor Guardsman, with only two thousand a year in addition to his pay as a Second Lieutenant in the Royal Bearskins Plain, and Margot a mere Cinderella in comparison with heiresses of the American canned-provision and cereal kind.

It had seemed to Franky, standing with patent-leathered feet at the Rubicon dividing bachelorhood from Benedictism, that all his wooing had been done at Margot's Club. True, he had actually proposed to Margot at the Royal Naval and Military Tournament of the previous June, and Margot, hysterical with sheer ecstasy, as the horses gravely played at push-ball, had pinched his arm and gasped out:

And theatres, film-picture-shows and variety halls, race-meetings, receptions, balls and kettledrums, polo and croquet-clubs, had fostered the courtship of Franky and Margot; but all their love-making had been carried out to the accompanying hum of conversation and the tinkle of crystal and silver-plate in the dining-room of the "Ladies' Social," where Margot had her favourite table in the glass-screened corner by the fire-place; or in the circular smoking-room with the Persian divan and green-glass dome, that Margot had given the Club on her nineteenth birthday; or in the boudoir belonging to the suite she had decorated for herself on the condition that no other member got the rooms if Margot wanted them, which Margot nearly always did....

There was a big, rambling, ancient red-brick Hall, stone-faced in the Early Jacobean manner, standing with its rare old gardens and glass-houses, lawns and shrubberies, about it, within sight and sound of the Channel, amidst pine and beech-woods carpeted with bilberry-bushes, heathery moors, and coverts neck-high in July with the _Osmunda regalis_ fern. The Hall belonged to Margot, though you never found her there except for a week or two in September and three days at Christmas-tide. The first fortnight with the birds was well enough, but those three days at Christmas marked the limit. Of human endurance Margot meant, possibly. She never vouchsafed to explain.

She also possessed a house in town, but just as her deceased father's spinster sister lived at the Hall in Devonshire, so did her dead mother's brother Derek, with his collection of European moths and butterflies and other _Lepidoptera_, inhabit the fine old mansion in Hanover Square. Devonshire at Christmas marked the limit of dulness, but Hanover Square all the London season through beat the band for sheer ghastly boredom.... Not that there were any flies on little old London.... Paris and Ostend were ripping places, and you could put in a clinking good time at Monte Carlo.... Margot had tried New York and liked it, except for the place itself, which made you think of illustrations to weird Dunsany legends in which towering temples climb up unendingly upon each other into black star-speckled skies. But the Club and London, with Unlimited Bridge and Tango, constituted Margot's idea of earthly happiness. She never had dreamed of marrying anybody--until Franky had arrived on the scene.