THE COMBINED MAZE

BY MAY SINCLAIR

AUTHOR OF "THE DIVINE FIRE"

HARPER & BROTHERS PUBLISHERS
NEW YORK AND LONDON
MCMXIII

COPYRIGHT, 1913, BY HARPER & BROTHERS
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
PUBLISHED FEBRUARY, 1913

SHE CLOSED HER EYES, AND HIS HOLD TIGHTENED

CONTENTS

CHAPTER I
CHAPTER II
CHAPTER III
CHAPTER IV
CHAPTER V
CHAPTER VI
CHAPTER VII
CHAPTER VIII
CHAPTER IX
CHAPTER X
CHAPTER XI
CHAPTER XII
CHAPTER XIII
CHAPTER XIV
CHAPTER XV
CHAPTER XVI
CHAPTER XVII
CHAPTER XVIII
CHAPTER XIX
CHAPTER XX
CHAPTER XXI
CHAPTER XXII
CHAPTER XXIII
CHAPTER XXIV
CHAPTER XXV
CHAPTER XXVI
CHAPTER XXVII
CHAPTER XXVIII
CHAPTER XXIX
CHAPTER XXX
CHAPTER XXXI
CHAPTER XXXII

THE COMBINED MAZE

CHAPTER I

You may say that there was something wrong somewhere, some mistake, from the very beginning, in his parentage, in the time and place and manner of his birth. It was in the early eighties, over a shabby chemist's shop in Wandsworth High Street, and it came of the union of Fulleymore Ransome, a little, middle-aged chemist, weedy, parched, furtively inebriate, and his wife Emma, the daughter of John Randall, a draper.

They called him John Randall Fulleymore Ransome, and Ranny for short.

Ranny should have been born in lands of adventure, under the green light of a virgin forest, or on some illimitable prairie; he should have sailed with the vikings or fought with Cromwell's Ironsides; or, better still, he should have run, half-naked, splendidly pagan, bearing the torch of Marathon.

And yet he bore his torch.

From the very first his mother said that Ranny was that venturesome. He showed it in his ill-considered and ungovernable determination to be born, and it was hard to say which of them, Ranny or his mother, more nearly died of it. She must have been aware that there was a hitch somewhere; for, referring again and again, as she did, to Ranny's venturesomeness, she would say, "It beats me where he gets it from."

He may have got some of it from her, for she, poor thing, had sunk, adventurously, in one disastrous marriage her whole stock of youth and gaiety and charm. It was Ranny's youth and charm and gaiety that made him so surprising and so unaccountable.

Circumstances were not encouraging to Ranny's youth, nor to his private and particular ambition, the cultivation of a superb physique. For, not only was he a little chemist's son, he was a great furniture dealer's inexpensive and utterly insignificant clerk, one of a dozen confined in a long mahogany pen where they sat at long mahogany desks, upon high mahogany