That Which Hath Wings

In January, 1914, Francis Athelstan Sherbrand, Viscount Norwater, only son of that fine old warrior, General the Right Honourable Roger Sherbrand, V. C., K. C. B., first Earl of Mitchelborough, married Margot Mountjohn, otherwise known as "Kittums," and found that she was wonderfully innocent-for a girl who knew so much. It was a genuine love-match, Franky being a comparatively poor Guardsman, with only two thousand a year in addition to his pay as a Second Lieutenant in the Royal Bearskins Plain, and Margot a mere Cinderella in comparison with heiresses of the American canned-provision and cereal kind. It had seemed to Franky, standing with patent-leathered feet at the Rubicon dividing bachelorhood from Benedictism, that all his wooing had been done at Margot's Club. True, he had actually proposed to Margot at the Royal Naval and Military Tournament of the previous June, and Margot, hysterical with sheer ecstasy, as the horses gravely played at push-ball, had pinched his arm and gasped out: "Yes, but don't take my mind off the game just now; these dear beasts are so heavenly! ..."