The Clicking of Cuthbert

her in pink, and that on two separate occasions had insisted on her dog

eating the leg of a chicken instead of the breast; but Time, the great

healer, seemed to have removed all bitterness, and she greeted him

affectionately.

"Wassums going to win great big championship against nasty rough strong

man?" she said.

"Such," said Vincent Jopp, "is my intention. It was kind of you,

Luella, to trouble to come and watch me. I wonder if you know Mrs.

Agnes Parsons Jopp?" he said, courteously, indicating a kind-looking,

motherly woman who had just come up. "How are you, Agnes?"

"If you had asked me that question this morning, Vincent," replied Mrs.

Agnes Parsons Jopp, "I should have been obliged to say that I felt far

from well. I had an odd throbbing feeling in the left elbow, and I am

sure my temperature was above the normal. But this afternoon I am a

little better. How are you, Vincent?"

Although she had, as I recalled from the reports of the case, been

compelled some years earlier to request the Court to sever her marital

relations with Vincent Jopp on the ground of calculated and inhuman

brutality, in that he had callously refused, in spite of her pleadings,

to take old Dr. Bennett's Tonic Swamp-Juice three times a day, her

voice, as she spoke, was kind and even anxious. Badly as this man had

treated her--and I remember hearing that several of the jury had been

unable to restrain their tears when she was in the witness-box giving

her evidence--there still seemed to linger some remnants of the old

affection.

"I am quite well, thank you, Agnes," said Vincent Jopp.

"Are you wearing your liver-pad?"

A frown flitted across my employer's strong face.

"I am not wearing my liver-pad," he replied, brusquely.

"Oh, Vincent, how rash of you!"

He was about to speak, when a sudden exclamation from his rear checked

him. A genial-looking woman in a sports coat was standing there, eyeing

him with a sort of humorous horror.

"Well, Jane," he said.

I gathered that this was Mrs. Jane Jukes Jopp, the wife who had

divorced him for systematic and ingrowing fiendishness on the ground

that he had repeatedly outraged her feelings by wearing a white

waistcoat with a dinner-jacket. She continued to look at him dumbly,

and then uttered a sort of strangled, hysterical laugh.

"Those legs!" she cried. "Those legs!"

Vincent Jopp flushed darkly. Even the strongest and most silent of us

have our weaknesses, and my employer's was the rooted idea that he

looked well in knickerbockers. It was not my place to try to dissuade

him, but there was no doubt that they did not suit him. Nature, in

bestowing upon him a massive head and a jutting chin, had forgotten to

finish him off at the other end. Vincent Jopp's legs were skinny.

"You poor dear man!" went on Mrs. Jane Jukes Jopp. "What practical

joker ever lured you into appearing in public in knickerbockers?"

"I don't object to the knickerbockers," said Mrs. Agnes Parsons Jopp,

"but when he foolishly comes out in quite a strong east wind without

his liver-pad----"

"Little Tinky-Ting don't need no liver-pad, he don't," said Mrs. Luella

Mainprice Jopp, addressing the animal in her arms, "because he was his

muzzer's pet, he was."

I was standing quite near to Vincent Jopp, and at this moment I saw a

bead of perspiration spring out on his forehead, and into his steely

eyes there came a positively hunted look. I could understand and

sympathize. Napoleon himself would have wilted if he had found himself

in the midst of a trio of females, one talking baby-talk, another

fussing about his health, and the third making derogatory observations

on his lower limbs. Vincent Jopp was becoming unstrung.

"May as well be starting, shall we?"

It was Jopp's opponent who spoke. There was a strange, set look on his

face--the look of a man whose back is against the wall. Ten down on the

morning's round, he had drawn on his reserves of courage and was

determined to meet the inevitable bravely.

Vincent Jopp nodded absently, then turned to me.

"Keep those women away from me," he whispered tensely. "They'll put me

off my stroke!"

"Put you off your stroke!" I exclaimed, incredulously.

"Yes, me! How the deuce can I concentrate, with people babbling about

liver-pads, and--and knickerbockers all round me? Keep them away!"

He started to address his ball, and there was a weak uncertainty in the

way he did it that prepared me for what was to come. His club rose,

wavered, fell; and the ball, badly topped, trickled two feet and sank

into a cuppy lie.

"Is that good or bad?" inquired Mrs. Luella Mainprice Jopp.

A sort of desperate hope gleamed in the eye of the other competitor in

the final. He swung with renewed vigour. His ball sang through the air,

and lay within chip-shot distance of the green.

"At the very least," said Mrs. Agnes Parsons Jopp, "I hope, Vincent,

that you are wearing flannel next your skin."

I heard Jopp give a stifled groan as he took his spoon from the bag. He

made a gallant effort to retrieve the lost ground, but the ball struck

a stone and bounded away into the long grass to the side of the green.