The Mischief Maker | Page 7

talk to any one. I have had a rotten week
of it and just about as much as I can stand. Help yourself to a whiskey
and soda, say what you have to say and then go."
The newcomer nodded. He helped himself to the whiskey and soda, but
he seemed in no hurry to speak. On the contrary, he settled himself
down in an easy-chair with the appearance of a man who had come to
stay.

"Julien," he remarked presently, "you are up against it--up against it
rather hard. Don't trouble to interrupt me. I know pretty well all about it.
I said from the first you'd have to resign. There wasn't any other way
out of it."
"Quite right," Julien agreed. "There wasn't. I've finished up everything
to-day--resigned my office, applied for the Chiltern Hundreds, and I am
going to clear out of the country to-night."
"And all because you wrote a foolish letter to a woman!" Kendricks
murmured, half to himself. "By the bye, there's no doubt about the
letter, I suppose?"
"None in the world," Julien replied.
"There's nothing that the Press can do to set you right?"
"Great heavens, no!" Julien declared. "No one can help me. I've no one
to blame but myself. I wrote the letter--there the matter ends."
"And she passed it on to that shocking little bounder of a husband of
hers! What a creature! Did it ever occur to you that it was a plot?"
Julien shrugged his shoulders.
"It makes so little difference."
"You were in Carraby's way," Kendricks continued, producing a pipe
from his pocket and leisurely filling it. "There was no getting past you
and you were a young man. It's a dirty business."
"If you don't mind," Julien said coldly, "we won't discuss it any further.
So far as I am concerned, the whole matter is at an end. I was
compelled to take part in to-day's mummery. I hated it--that they all
knew. I suppose it's foolish to mind such things, David," he went on
bitterly, taking up a cigarette and throwing himself into a chair, "but a
year ago--it was just after I came back from Berlin and you may
remember it was the fancy of the people to believe that I had saved the

country from war--they cheered me all the way from Whitehall to the
Mansion House. To-day there was only a dull murmur of voices--a sort
of doubting groan. I felt it, Kendricks. It was like Hell, that ride!"
Kendricks nodded sympathetically.
"I suppose you know that a version of the letter is in the evening
papers?" he asked.
"My resignation will be in the later issues," Julien told him. "It was
pretty well known yesterday afternoon. I leave for the continent
to-night."
There was a short silence between the two men. In a sense they had
been friends all their lives. Sir Julien Portel had been a successful
politician, the youngest Cabinet Minister for some years. Kendricks
had never aspired to be more than a clever journalist of the vigorous
type. Nevertheless, they had been more than ordinarily intimate.
"Have you made any plans?" Kendricks inquired presently. "Of course,
you would have to resign office, but don't you think there might be a
chance of living it down?"
"Not a chance on earth," Julien replied. "As to what I am going to do,
don't ask me. For the immediate present I am going to lose myself in
Normandy or somewhere. Afterwards I think I shall move on to my old
quarters in Paris. There's always a little excitement to be got out of life
there."
Kendricks looked at his friend through the cloud of tobacco smoke.
"It's excitement of rather a dangerous order," he remarked slowly.
"I shall never be likely to forget that I am an Englishman," Julien said.
"Perhaps I may be able to do something to set matters right again. One
can't tell. By the bye, Kendricks," he went on, "do you remember when
we were at college how you hated women? How you used to try and
trace half the things that went wrong in life to their influence?"

The journalist nodded. He knocked the ashes from his pipe deliberately.
"I was a boy in those days," he declared. "I am a man now, getting on
toward middle age, and on that one subject I am as rabid as ever. I hate
their meddling in men's affairs, shoving themselves into politics,
always whispering in a man's ear under pretence of helping him with
their sympathy. They're in evidence wherever you go--women, women,
women! The place reeks with them. You can't go about your work,
hour by hour or day by day, without having them on every side of you.
It's like a poison, this trail of them over every