Page:The Works of H G Wells Volume 8.djvu/311

 present, and that each one would have an anagram; pinned on. "They give you a card to put your guesses on, rather like a dence programme, and then, you know, you go round and guess," said Coote. "It's rather good fun."

"Oo rather!" said Kipps, with simulated gusto.

"It shakes everybody up together," said Coote.

Kipps smiled and nodded

In the small hours all his painful meditations were threaded by the vision of that Anagram Tea; it kept marching to and fro and in and out of all his other troubles, from thirty to sixty people, mostly ladies and callers, and a great number of the letters of the alphabet, and more particularly P. I. K. P. S. and T. O. E. C. O., and he was trying to make one word out of the whole interminable procession

This word, as he finally gave it with some emphasis to the silence of the night, was "Demn!"

Then, wreathed as it were in this lettered procession, was the figure of Helen as she had appeared at the moment of "words"; her face a little hard, a little irritated, a little disappointed. He imagined himself going around and guessing under her eye

He tried to think of other things, without lapsing upon a still deeper uneasiness that was decorated with yellow sea poppies; and the figures of Buggins, Pierce and Carshot, three murdered Friendships, rose reproachfully in the stillness and changed horrible apprehensions into unspeakable remorse. Last night had been their customary night for the banjo, and Kipps, with a certain tremulous uncertainty, had put old Methuselah amidst a retinue of glasses on the