Free Before the Fact by Francis Iles

these days, Beaky?”
    “Me, eh? Oh, tooling around, you know. Nothing much.”
    “Lucky old cad, aren’t you, with so much money?”
    “Oh, come. Here, I say. Not so much as all that, you know. Draw it mild. Just enough, that’s all.”
    “It would certainly be enough for me,” Johnnie grinned.
    Johnnie did not ask Mr. Thwaite to dinner.
    Lina was so relieved that she quite forgot to pursue some inquiries she had intended into the art of cribbing.
    She did not see Mr. Thwaite again for four years.
2
    By the time she had lived in Upcottery three years, Lina was able to congratulate herself on two things.
    The first was that Johnnie, who before he met her had never done a stroke of work in his life and apparently had never contemplated doing one, should have really settled down to his job. More, he was now taking it for granted that he should have a job.
    Every morning still, with perhaps rather less punctuality but now without any resignation at all, Johnnie went forth to deal with estimates for repairs to labourers’ cottages, quotations for slates, and all the multifarious petty bargaining that his work entailed; and every morning Lina, having got up early in order to breakfast with him, kissed him good-bye on the doorstep just like any suburban wife.
    Johnnie, in fact, was altogether a reformed rake. Even General McLaidlaw acknowledged that Lina had turned him from whatever he had been into a useful member of society. It was a revolution of which Lina was quite aware, and for which she took full credit.
    She was still not sure how she had done it.
    She looked back on that evening when the revolution had been effected, with a kind of wonder. Something had seemed to take possession of her then: something which had given her a strength of character which she normally imagined she lacked, and which had certainly been greater for the moment than Johnnie’s. The odd thing was that, so far as Johnnie was concerned, its effects remained. On that evening Lina had established a moral superiority to which, as she realized vaguely, Johnnie still paid tribute. It was absurd, of course, for after that one effort Lina had quite reverted to her former perfectly contented moral dependence upon Johnnie; and it irked her to find Johnnie at times trying to placate or cajole her, instead of giving her the peremptory orders that she would much have preferred; though she did understand, in an indefinite way, that this was not Johnnie’s method of gaining his ends. She still adored Johnnie for the grown-up schoolboy he was; but she did not like being considered his schoolmistress.
    The other matter on which she was able to congratulate herself was that after three years’ residence in an English rural district, she was not yet a member of the Women’s Institutes, had never had a fête in the grounds of Dellfield, and had allowed herself to be persuaded into joining no body, secular or lay, for the dragooning of people into doing things they did not want for the benefit of institutions in which they had no interest.
    That is not to say that Lina did not admire those whose bent lay in such directions. Her closest friend in Upcottery, Janet Caldwell, actually ran the village branch of the Women’s Institutes; but Lina did not for a moment allow this fact to interfere with their friendship.
    On the contrary, she envied Janet her power of enjoying her duties.
    Lina knew herself to be lazy.
    At home this laziness of hers had been actually encouraged. “Oh,” they said, when it was a question of something practical, “it’s no good relying on Lina to do
that.
She couldn’t. Lina’s always up in the clouds.” And as Lina invariably did not at all want to do whatever it was that required doing, she took good care to foster the idea that she always was up in the clouds. It had been a quite mistaken idea, but nobody except Lina ever knew that.
    At home that had been all very well. In her own house it was impossible for Lina to shelter in