Page:Possession (Roche, February 1923).pdf/268



got his knee put out in the New Year while playing hockey with a team composed of his own workmen against the Mistwell players. He was confined to his room for five weeks and Derek spent an hour or two every day with him, smoking, talking endlessly about cattle breeding and poultry raising, and playing chess, for which it turned out Hobbs had a passion.

Of his other passion—that concerning Miss Pearsall—he talked little and haltingly, but Derek gathered that he was acquiring her as a suitable mistress for Durras, one who would give a tone to the place that he never could. Derek found this rather pathetic, and he pitied Hobbs. He should not have liked to be tied up to Miss Pearsall himself and he wished Hobbs would not do it, but the man was determined that Durras should not lack tone. "The one drawback is," he confided, "that I shall have to go to church on Sundays, and that's my special day for loafing about the stables. In the stables I'm happy and cheerful, but put me in church and I'm a lost man."

Derek still kept up the fiction of Fawnie's illness. Well, she wasn't exactly sick, he said, but she had a delicate chest, couldn't stand the cold. Hobbs was sympathetic. "Your wife is what I call a raving beauty," he said. "As far as women go, just as women, well—if a fellow has the nerve—there's a woman for you."

The worst was when Mr. Jerrold brought some jelly to