Chapter XXXVI: Epilogue: The Doctor Drinks a Toast

In the Spring of the year following upon Gavin Ord's return from Bukharest, the Reverend Harry Fillimore playing, as he claimed, "the game of his life" upon the links at Moretown, found himself to his chagrin both oblivious of the troubles of others and utterly unsympathetic toward his old friend Doctor Philips.

"My dear fellow," he would say, "what can you expect when you will take your eye off the ball? Now do be patient. For my sake, be patient."

The doctor, driving his ball with savage ferocity into a deep and awful pit, treated these observations with the just scorn they merited. He neither criticised nor contested them; but having struck the offending ball five times with little result, he picked it up deliberately and uttered a remark which the vulgar at any rate might have considered appropriate.

"She's at Gibraltar," he said without preface.

"Come, dear fellow--now do be patient. I will not encourage strong language; you know that I will not."

Dr. Philips laughed such a melancholy laugh that even the good-natured parson looked up from his beloved ball.

"I was talking of the Lady Evelyn," he said quietly.

"I'm sorry--I'd forgotten it, Fred."

"Oh, well, memory isn't a jewel in these cases. I had a letter from the Earl this morning--eh, yes? He says the yacht's become a nest of turtledoves. They're going on to Malta if the weather's not too hot. He doesn't mean to come here at all this year, you see. That's what I wanted to tell you. It seems that the man Odin went back to Bukharest and is now fighting the Government for his father's property. They confiscated it or something, according to the criminal law there. Pity the gypsies didn't kill him at Hampstead--eh? They seem to have come pretty near it by all accounts."

The vicar expressed the opinion that the gypsies were the only honest men that Bukharest would be likely to send to Moretown; but neither spoke of Evelyn again until they were alone with their cigars after dinner that night. Then, as a sacred confidence between them, Harry Fillimore confessed something that had long been on his mind.

"Father and daughter," he said, "shared the burden of a terrible heritage. One might have said that they had been born under an Eastern sun and had inherited Eastern passions. In all of us, as the novelist Robert Louis Stevenson believed, there are two personalities--the good and the evil; and our lives are lived as we conquer the one and foster the other. Robert Forrester never made an honest effort to extirpate those weaker traits of character which ruined his career at the beginning. Evelyn, on her part, did not realize the meaning of her life until Gavin Ord taught her to love him. Her escapade in London, the craving for light and music and glitter ... there you had the East speaking to her. But the man's voice was the voice of the West, and she listened to it. Such a woman has found peace or none will ever find it. Her will has saved both herself and her father. Let us grudge her nothing of her happiness, Fred. You loved her? What man that had not loved would not? But you'll wish a blessing on her and lift a glass to her as I do, just because you're what you are--a great big-hearted Englishman, who will share his joys with all, but will tell his sorrows to none."

The doctor turned his head away. Very slowly and deliberately he filled his glass, and, lifting it, he said:

"God bless her!"

THE END

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