Spring Fever

1

Spring had come to New York, the eight-fifteen train from Great Neck had come to the Pennsylvania terminus, and G. Ellery Cobbold, that stout economic royalist, had come to his downtown office, all set to prise another wad of currency out of the common people.

It was a lovely morning, breathing of bock beer and the birth of a new baseball season, and the sap was running strongly in Mr. Cobbold's veins. He looked like a cartoon of Capital in a labor paper, but he felt fine. It would not have taken much to make him break into a buck-and-wing dance, and if he had had roses in his possession it is more than probable that he would have strewn them from his hat.

Borne aloft in the elevator, he counted his blessings one by one and found them totting up to a highly satisfactory total. The boil on the back of his neck had yielded to treatment. His golf handicap was down to twenty-four. His son Stanwood was in London, safely removed from the wiles of Miss Eileen Stoker of Beverly Hills, Cal. He was on the point of concluding remunerative deals with the Messrs. Simms and Weinstein of Detroit and the Consolidated Nail File and Eyebrow Tweezer Corporation of Scranton, Pa. And a fortunate glance at Debrett's Peerage that morning had reminded him that tomorrow was Lord Shortlands' birthday.

He floated lightly into the office and found Miss Sharpies, his efficient secretary, there, right on the job as always, and a mass of torn envelopes in the wastepaper basket told him that she had attended to his correspondence and was all ready to give him the headline news. But though that correspondence almost certainly included vital communications from both Simms and Weinstein and the Nail File and Eyebrow Tweezer boys, it was the matter of Lord Shortlands' natal day that claimed his immediate attention.

"Morning, Miss Sharpies," he said, and you could see that what he really meant was 'Good morning, good morning, Miss Sharpies, what a beautiful morning it is, is it not? With a Hey and a Ho and a Hey nonny no, Miss Sharpies.' "Take a memo."

"Yes, Mr. Cobbold."

"Western Union."

"Western Union," echoed Miss Sharpies, inscribing on her tablet something that resembled an impressionistic sketch of a pneumonia germ.

"Tell them to put in a personal call at... Say, what time do you reckon an English peer would be waking up in the morning?"

He had come to the woman who knew.

"Eleven, Mr. Cobbold."

"Eleven?"

"That's the time young Lord Peebles wakes up in the novel I'm reading. He props his eyes open with his ringers and presses the bell, and Meadowes, his man, brings him a bromo-seltzer and an anchovy on hot toast."

Mr. Cobbold uttered a revolted "Pshaw."

"This fellow isn't one of those dissolute society playboys. He lives in the country, and he's fifty-two. At least, he will be tomorrow. Seems to me seven would be more like it. Have Western Union put in a personal call at seven, English time, tomorrow to the Earl of Shortlands, Beevor Castle, Kent, and sing 'Happy birthday,' to him."

"'Happy birthday,'" murmured Miss Sharpies, pencilling in two squiggles and a streptococcus.

"Tell them to pick out a fellow with a nice tenor voice."

"Yes, Mr. Cobbold."

"Or maybe they tear it off in a bunch, like a barbershop quartette?"

"I don't think so, Mr. Cobbold. Just one vocalist, I believe."

"Ah? Well, see that they do it, anyway. It's important. I wouldn't like Lord Shortlands to think I'd forgotten his birthday. He's the head of my family."

"You don't say!"

"Sure. Cobbold's the family name. There's a son, Lord Beevor, who's out in Kenya, but all the others are Cobbolds. Three daughters. The eldest married a fellow named Topping I was in college with. I'll tell you how I first came to hear of them. I was in the club one day, and I happened to pick up one of those English illustrated weeklies, and there was a photograph of a darned pretty girl with the caption under it 'Lady Teresa Cobbold, youngest daughter of the Earl of Shortlands.' 'Hello,' I said to myself. 'Cobbold? Well, what do you know about that?', and I had the College of Arms in London get busy and look into the thing."

"And it turned out that you were a relation?"

"That's right. Just what kind I couldn't exactly tell you. Sort of cousin is the way I figure it out. I've written Lord Shortlands a letter or two about it and sent him a few cables, but he hasn't got around to answering yet. Busy, maybe. Still, there it is. Seems that in 1700 or thereabouts one of the younger sons sailed for America—"

Mr. Cobbold broke off the gossip from the old home and gave a rather formal cough. He perceived that the spirit of Spring had lured him on to jeopardize office discipline by chewing the fat with one who, however efficient and however capital a listener, was after all an underling.

"Well, that's that," he said. "And now," becoming his business self after this frivolous interlude, "what's new?"

Miss Sharpies would have been glad to hear more of the younger son who had sailed for America and all the rest of the Hands-Across-the-Sea stuff, for hers was a romantic nature, but she, too, recognized that this was not the time and place. She consulted her notes.

"Simms and Weinstein will meet your terms, Mr. Cobbold," she said, translating the one that looked like part of Grover Whalen's moustache.

"They better."

"But the Nail File and Eyebrow Tweezer people don't seem any too well pleased."

"They don't, don't they?"

"They say they are at a loss to comprehend."

"Is that so? I'll fix 'em. Anything else?"

"No letters of importance, Mr. Cobbold. There is a cable from Mr. Stanwood."

"Asking for money?"

"Yes, Mr. Cobbold."

"He would be. Seems to me he spends more in London than he did over here."

A frown came into Ellery Cobbold's bulbous face. He was a man of enviable financial standing, for despite the notorious hardness of the times, he always managed to get his, but this did not make it any the more agreeable to him to be tapped by his son. A great many prosperous fathers have this adhesive attitude towards their wealth when the issue show a disposition to declare themselves in on the gross.

A song of his youth flitted through Mr. Cobbold's mind:

Then he brightened. Whatever kind of hell Stanwood might be up to, his father's heart had this consolation, that he was not up to it in the society of Miss Eileen Stoker. With restored equanimity he dismissed him from his thoughts and settled down to dictate a letter to the Consolidated Nail File and Eyebrow Tweezer Corporation of Scranton, Pa., which would make them realize that life is stern and earnest and that Nail File and Eyebrow Tweezer Corporations are not put into this world for pleasure alone.

The morning wore on, filled with its little tasks and duties. Lunch time came. The afternoon followed. In due season everything needed to keep Mr.

Cobbold's affairs in apple-pie order for another day had been done, and he took the six-ten train back to his Great Neck home. At eight he dined, and by nine he was in his favorite armchair, a cigar between his lips and a highball at his side, preparing to read the evening paper which the intrusion of a garrulous neighbor had prevented him perusing on the train.

But even when settled in his chair he did not begin to read immediately. Dreamily watching the smoke curl up from his perfecto, he found his thoughts turning to his son Stanwood and the adroitness with which he had flung the necessary spanner into that young man's incipient romance with Miss Eileen Stoker of Hollywood.

The discovery that his offspring was contemplating marrying into celluloid circles had come as an unpleasant shock to Mr. Cobbold, filling him with alarm and, until he rallied and took action, despondency. During the first anxious days he had twice refused a second helping of spaghetti Caruso at lunch, and his golf handicap, always a sensitive plant, had gone up into the thirties.

He mistrusted Stanwood's ability to choose wisely in this vital matter of selecting a life partner, for though he loved his child he did not think highly of his intelligence. Stanwood, a doughty performer on the football field during his college career, was a mass of muscle and bone, and it was Mr. Cobbold's opinion that the bone extended to his head. And he had a good deal of support for this view. Even those who had applauded the young man when he made the All-American in his last season had never claimed for him that he was bright. Excellent at blocking a punt or giving a playmate the quick sleeve across the windpipe, but not bright. It seemed to Mr. Cobbold that he must be saved from himself.

If the bride-to-be had been the Lady Teresa Cobbold whose photograph he had seen in the English illustrated weekly, that would have been a vastly different matter. A union between his son and the daughter of the head of the family he would have welcomed with fervour. But a film star, no. He knew all about film stars. Scarcely had they settled down in the love nest before they were bringing actions for divorce on the ground of ingrowing incompatibility or whatever it might be and stinging the bridegroom for slathers of alimony. And the thought that at the conclusion of the romance under advisement it would be he, the groom's father, who would be called upon to foot the bills had acted on him as a powerful spur, causing him to think on his feet and do it now.

He had shipped Stanwood off to England on the next boat in the custody of an admirable fellow named Augustus Robb, whom he had engaged, principally on the strength of the horn-rimmed spectacles he wore, at an agency which supplied gentlemen's personal gentlemen, with instructions to remain in England till further notice. It is one of the great advantages of being a tycoon that your life trains you to take decisions at the drop of the hat. Where lesser men scratch their heads and twiddle their fingers, the tycoon acts.

To Mr. Cobbold, as he sat there drawing at his cigar, it was a very soothing reflection that three thousand miles of land and another three thousand miles of water separated his son and Miss Stoker, and for some moments he savoured it like some rare and refreshing fruit. Then with a contented sigh he opened his paper.

It was to the financial section that he turned first; then to the funnies, in which he surprisingly retained a boyish interest. After that he allowed his eye to wander at random through the remainder of the sheet. And it was while it was doing so, flitting idly from spot to spot like a hovering butterfly, that it found itself arrested by a photograph on one of the inner pages of a personable young woman with large eyes, curving lips and apparently lemon-coloured hair.

He had been on the verge of sleep at the moment, for he generally sank into a light doze at about this time in the evening, but there was something about those wistful eyes gazing into his, with their suggestion of having at last found a strong man on whom they could rely, which imparted sufficient wakefulness to lead him to glance at the name under the photograph. And having done so, he sat up with a jerk.

MISS EILEEN STOKER

A snort broke from Mr. Cobbold's lips. He frowned, as if he had found a snake on his lap.

So this was Eileen by golly Stoker, was it? No devotee of the silver screen, he had never seen her before, and now that he was seeing her he did not like her looks. A siren, he thought. Designing, he felt. Not to be trusted as far as you could throw an elephant, he considered, and just the sort who would spring with joy to the task of nicking a good man's bank roll. He eyed the lady askance, as he eyed all things askance that seemed potential threats to his current account.

MISS EILEEN STOKER

Universally Beloved Hollywood Star

The phrase "universally beloved" is, of course, a loose one. It cannot ever really include everybody. In this instance it did not include Mr. Cobbold. All over the United States, and in other countries, too, for Art knows no frontiers, there were clubs in existence whose aim it was to boost for Eileen Stoker, to do homage to Eileen Stoker and to get the public thinking the Eileen Stoker way, but the possibility of Ellery Cobbold joining one of them was remote. A society for dipping Eileen Stoker in tar and sprinkling feathers on her he would have supported with pleasure.

There were a few lines in smaller print below this absurd statement that Miss Stoker was universally beloved, and Mr. Cobbold's eye, having nothing

better to do at the moment, gave them a casual glance. And scarcely had it done so when its proprietor leaped in his chair with a wordless cry like that of a sleeping cat on whose tail some careless number-eleven shoe has descended.

Once at the country club, coming out of the showers in the nude and sitting down on the nearest bench to dry himself, Mr. Cobbold's attention had been drawn to the fact that a fellow member had left a lighted cigar there, and until tonight he had always regarded this as the high spot of his emotional life. He was now inclined to relegate it to second place.

For this was what he had read:

MISS EILEEN STOKER

Universally Beloved Hollywood Star

Has arrived in England to take up her contract for two pictures with the Beaumont Co. of London.

The words seemed to print themselves in letters of fire on his soul. So devastating was their effect that for quite an appreciable time he sat paralysed, blowing little air bubbles and incapable of movement. Then, once more his alert, executive self, he rose and bounded to the telephone.

"Gimme Western Union!"

It occurred to him as a passing thought that he seemed to be putting a lot of business in the way of Western Union these days.

"Western Union?"

He was suffering much the same mental anguish as that experienced by generals who have allowed themselves to become outflanked. But how, he asked himself, could he have anticipated this? How could he have foreseen this mobility on the part of the foe? He had always supposed that Hollywood stars were a permanency in Hollywood, like swimming pools and the relations by marriage of a studio chief.

"Western Union?" said Mr. Cobbold, still finding a difficulty in controlling his voice. "I want to send a couple of cables."

2

On the following morning, at about the time when the Lord Peebles of whose habits Miss Sharpies had spoken was accustomed to begin his day, a young man lay sleeping in the bedroom of a service flat at Bloxham House, Park Lane, London. A silk hat, dress trousers, a pair of evening shoes, two coloured ballons and a squeaker were distributed about the floor beside the bed. From time to time the young man moaned softly, as if in pain. He was dreaming that he was being bitten in half by a shark, which is always trying.

We really do not know why we keep saying "young man" in this guarded way. There is no need for secrecy and concealment. It was Stanwood Cob-bold, and he was sleeping at this advanced hour because he had got home at four in the morning from the party which he had given to welcome Miss Eileen Stoker to England.

Except for the bulge under the bedclothes which covered his enormous frame, very little of Stanwood Cobbold was visible, and that little scarcely worth a second look, for Nature, doubtless with the best motives, had given him. together with a heart of gold, a face like that of an amiable hippopotamus. And everybody knows that unless you are particularly fond of hippopotami, a single cursory glance at them is enough. Many blase explorers do not even take that.

Augustus Robb came softly in, bearing a tray. Augustus Robb always came into rooms softly. Before getting saved at a revival meeting and taking up valeting as a career, he had been a burglar in a fair way of practice, and coming into rooms softly had grown to be a habit.

Once in, his movements became less stealthy. He deposited the tray on the table with a bang and a rattle and raised the blind noisily.

"Hoy!" he cried in a voice like someone calling the cattle home across the Sands of Dee. He had rather a bad bedside manner.

Stanwood parted company with his shark and returned to the world of living things. Having done so, he clasped his forehead with both hands and said "Oh, God!" He had the illusion that everything, including his personal attendant, had turned yellow.

"Brekfuss," roared Augustus Robb, still apparently under the impression that he was addressing a deaf friend a quarter of a mile away. "Eat it while it's hot, cocky. I've done you a poached egg."

There are certain words which at certain times seem to go straight to the foundations of the soul. "Egg" is one of these, especially when preceded by the participle "poached." A strong shudder passed through Stanwood's sensitive person.

"Take it away," he said in a low, tense voice. "And quit making such a darned noise. I've got a headache."

Augustus Robb adjusted the horn-rimmed spectacles which had made so powerful an appeal to Mr. Cobbold senior, and gazed down at the fishy-eyed ruin before him with something of the air of a shepherd about to chide an unruly lamb. He was a large, spreading man with a bald forehead, small eyes, extensive ears and a pasty face. He sucked a front tooth censoriously, his unpleasant habit when in reproachful mood.

"Got a headache, have you? Well, don't forget you asked for it, chum. I heard you come in this morning. Stumbling all over the place you was and knocking down the furniture. 'Ah,' I says to myself. 'You wait,' I says. 'The day of retribution is at hand,' I says, 'when there will be wailing and gnashing of teeth.' And so there is, cocky, so there is. Well, now you're awake, better eat your brekfuss and get up and go out and 'ave a good brisk walk around the park."

The suggestion seemed to strike Stanwood Cobbold like a blow. He drew the bedclothes higher, partly to exclude the light, but principally so that he might avoid seeing his personal attendant. Even when at his most robust he found the sight of the latter disagreeable, for there seemed to him something all wrong about a valet in horn-rimmed spectacles, and at a time like this it was insupportable.

"It's a lovely day, the sun's shining a treat and the little dicky birds are singing fit to bust," said his personal attendant, by way of added inducement. "Upsy-daisy, and I'll have your clobber all ready for you by the time you're out of your tub."

The effort was almost too much for his frail strength, but Stanwood managed to open an eye.

"Get me a highball."

"I won't get you no such thing."

"You're fired!"

"No, I'm not. Don't talk so silly. Fired, indeed! No, cocky, you can't have no highball, but I'll tell you what you can have. I stepped out to the chemist's just now and asked him to recommend something suitable for your condition, and he give me this."

Stanwood, examining the bottle, brightened a little, as if he had met an old friend.

"This is good stuff," he said, shaking up its dark contents. "I've tried it before, and it's always saved my life."

Removing the cork, he took a hearty draft, and after a brief interval, during which his eyeballs revolved in their sockets and his whole aspect became that of one struck by a thunderbolt, seemed to obtain a certain relief. His drawn features relaxed, and he was able to remove the hand which he had placed on top of his head to prevent it coming off.

"Wow!" he said in a self-congratulatory manner.

Augustus Robb was still amused at the idea of his employer dispensing with his services.

"Fired?" he said, chuckling at the quaint conceit. "How can you fire me, when I was specially engaged by your pop to look after you and be your good angel? 'Robb,' he says to me. I can see him now, standing in his office with his weskit unbuttoned and that appealing look in his eyes. 'Robb, my faithful feller,' he says, 'I put my son in your charge. Take the young barstard over to England, cocky, and keep an eye on him and try to make him like what you are,' he says. Meaning by that a bloke of religious principles and a strict teetotaller."

"And a burglar?" said Stanwood with a flicker of spirit.

"Ex-burglar," corrected Augustus Robb coldly. It was a point on which he was touchy. "Seen the light this many a year past, hallelujah, and put all that behind me. And listen," he went on, stirred by a grievance. "Why did you go and tell Mr. Cardinal I'd been a burglar once?"

"I didn't."

"Yes, you did, and you know it. How else could he have found out? I wish I'd never mentioned it now. That's the trouble with you, chum. You're a babbler. You can't keep from spilling the beans. 'So you used to be a burglar used you?' says Mr. Cardinal, day before yesterday it was, when you'd asked me to step over to his apartment and borrow his new Esquire. 'And your name's Robb.' 'What about it?' I says. 'Ha, ha,' he says, laughing a sort of silvery laugh. 'Very suitable name for a burglar,' he says. 'You're the fifty-seventh feller that's told me that,' I says. 'Then you have known fifty-seven brilliantly witty people,' he says. 'I congratulate you.' And he takes a couple of little whatnots off the mantelpiece and locks 'em in a cupboard, as it were ostentatiously. Wounding, that was. I wish you'd be more careful."

"Mike won't tell anyone."

"That's not the point. It's the principle of the thing. A feller that's been saved don't want his sinful past jumping out at him all the time like a ruddy jack-in-the-box. Was he at that do of yours last night?"

"Yes, Mike was along," said Stanwood.

He spoke with a trace of flatness in his voice, for the question had awakened unpleasant memories. It might have been his imagination, but it had seemed to him that during the course of the festivities alluded to his friend Mike Cardinal had paid rather too marked attentions to Miss Stoker and that the latter had not been insensible to his approaches. Of course, the whole thing might have been just a manifestation of the party spirit, but Mike was such an exceptionally good-looking bird that a lover, especially a lover who had no illusions about his own appearance, was inclined to be uneasy.

"And was strictly moderate in his potations, I've no doubt," proceeded Augustus Robb. "Always is. I've seen Mr. Cardinal dine here with you and be perfectly satisfied with his simple half-bot. And him with his spirit on the rack, as you might say, and so with every excuse for getting stinko. Fine feller. You ought to take example by him."

Stanwood found himself mystified.

"How do you mean?"

"How do I mean what?"

"Why is Mike's spirit on the rack?"

"Because he's suffering the torments of frustrated love because he can't get the little bit of fluff to say Yus. That's why his ruddy spirit's on the rack."

"What little bit of fluff?"

"This Lady Teresa Cobbold."

Stanwood was intrigued. Terry Cobbold was an old friend of his.

"You don't say!"

"Yus, I do."

"This is the first I've heard of this."

"The story's only just broke."

"Mike never said a word to me."

"Why would he? Fellers don't go around singing of their love like tenors in a comic opera. Specially if the girl's giving 'em the raspberry and they can't seem to make no 'eadway."

"Well, he told you."

"No, he didn't any such thing. So 'appened that when I was in his apartment day before yesterday there was an envelope lying on the desk addressed to Lady Teresa Cobbold, Beevor Castle, Kent, and beside it a 'alf-finished letter, beginning 'Terry, my wingless angel.' I chanced to glance at it, and it told the 'ole story."

"You've got a hell of a nerve, reading people's letters."

"Language. There's a habit you want to break yourself of. Let your Yea be Yea and your Nay be Nay, as the Good Book says. I've a tract in my room that bears on that. I'll fetch it along. Yus, pleading with her to be his, this letter was. Very well expressed, I thought, as far as he'd got, and so I told him."

A sudden spasm of pain contorted Stanwood's homely features, and the comment he had been about to make died on his lips. The telephone at his side had rung with a shattering abruptness.

"Gimme," said Augustus Robb. "I'll answer it. 'Ullo? Yus? Oh, 'ullo, Mr. Cardinal, we was just talking about you. Yus, cocky, I'll tell him. It's Mr. Cardinal. Says not to forget you're giving him lunch at Barribault's Hotel today."

"Lunch?" Stanwood quivered. "Tell him it's off. Tell him I'm dead."

"I won't do no such thing. You can't evade your social obligations. Yus, that's all right, chum. One-fifteen pip emma in the small bar. Right. Goo'bye. What I'd advise," said Augustus Robb, replacing the receiver, "is a nice Turkish bath. That'll bring the roses back to your cheeks, and Gawd knows they need 'em. You look more like a blinkin' corpse than anything 'uman. Well, I can't stand here all day chinning with you, cocky. Got my work to do. 'Ullo, the front doorbell. Wonder who that is."

"If it's anyone for me, don't let them in."

"Unless it's the undertaker, eh? Haw, haw, haw," laughed Augustus Robb, and exited trilling.

Left alone, Stanwood gave himself up to his thoughts, and very pleasant thoughts they were, too, though interrupted at intervals by the activities of some unseen person who appeared to be driving white-hot rivets into his skull. The news about Mike Cardinal and Terry Cobbold had taken a great weight off his mind and, his being a mind not constructed to bear heavy weights, the relief was enormous.

For obviously, he reasoned, if Mike Cardinal was that way about young Terry, he could scarcely be making surreptitious passes at Eileen Stoker.

Or could he?

Surely not?

No, definitely not, Stanwood decided. What he had witnessed at last night's supper party must have been merely the routine civilities of a conscientious guest making himself agreeable to his host's future bride. Odd, of course, that Mike had said nothing to him about Terry. But then, if things were not going too well, no doubt, as Augustus Robb had pointed out, he wouldn't.

Too bad, felt Stanwood, that the course of true love was not batting .400. Inexplicable, moreover. To him, Mike Cardinal seemed to have everything: looks, personality and, seeing that he was a partner in one of Hollywood's most prosperous firms of motion-picture agents, money, of course, to burn. Difficult to see why Terry shoald be giving him the run-around.

He grieved for Mike Cardinal. Mike was his best friend, and he wished him well. He had, besides, during the month or two which she had spent in London as a member of the chorus of a popular musical comedy, conceived a solid affection for Terry. They had lunched together a good deal, and he had told her about his love for Eileen Stoker and she had told him about her life at home and the motives which had led her to run away from that home and try to earn her living.

A peach of a girl, was Stanwood's view, pretty and cheerful and abounding in pep. Just, in short, the sort for Mike. Nothing would have given Stanwood more pleasure than to have seen the young couple fading out on the clinch.

Still, that was the way things went, he supposed, and he turned his thoughts to the more agreeable subject of Eileen Stoker and the big times they were going to have together, now that she had hit London. So soothing was the effect of these meditations that he fell asleep.

His slumber was not long-lived. "Hoy!" roared a voice almost before he had closed his eyes, and he saw that Augustus Robb was with him once more.

"Now what?" he said wearily.

Augustus Robb was brandishing a document.

"Cable from your pop," he announced. "I'll read it and give you the gist."

He removed his spectacles, fished in his pocket, produced a case, opened it, took out another pair of spectacles, placed these on his nose, put the first pair in the case and the case in his pocket and cleared his throat with a sound like the backfiring of a motor truck, causing Stanwood, who had sat up, to sag down again as if he had been hit over the head with a blunt instrument.

"Here's the substance, chum. He says—"

"Is it money?"

"Yus, he's cabled a thousand dollars to your account, if you must know, but you think too much of money, cocky. Money is but dross, and the sooner you get that clearly into your nut, the 'appier you'll be. But that's only the start. There's a lot more. He says ... 'Ullo, what's this?"

"What?"

"Well, well, well!"

"What is it?"

"Well, well, well, well! Quite a coincidence, I'd call that. Your pop," said Augustus Robb, becoming less cryptic, "says you're to proceed immediately to Beevor Castle—"

It was foreign to Stanwood's policy to keep sitting up, for the process accentuated the unpleasant illusion that somebody was driving white-hot rivets into his skull, but in his emotion he did so now.

"What's that?"

"You 'eard. You're to proceed immediately to Beevor Castle and stay there till he blows the All Clear. You can guess what's happened, of course. He's been apprised that this Stoker jane of yours has come to London, and he's took steps. But you see what I meant about it being a coincidence. Beevor Castle's where this little number of Mr. Cardinal's lives that we was talking about."

Stanwood was still endeavouring to grasp the appalling news.

"Leave London and go to some darned castle?"

"I shall enjoy a breath of country air. Do you good, too. It's what you need, cocky. Fresh air, milk and new-laid eggs."

Stanwood struggled for utterance.

"I'm not going anywhere near any darned castle."

"That's what you say. Cloth-headed remark to make, if you ask me. You've got to do what your pop tells you, or he'll cut off supplies, and then where'll you be? It's like in the Good Book, where the feller said 'Go' and they goeth and 'Come' and they cometh. Or, putting it another way, when Father says Turn,' we all turn. It's an am-parce."

Even to Stanwood, clouded though his mind was at the moment, the truth of this was evident. With a hollow groan he buried his face in the pillow.

"Oh, gosh!"

Fruitless now those dreams of sitting beside Eileen Stoker with her little hand in his and pouring into her little ear all the good stuff he had been storing up for so many weeks. Goodbye to all that. She would be in London, pursuing her art, and he would be at this blasted castle. As so often occurred in the pictures in which she appeared, two young hearts in springtime had been torn asunder.

"Beevor Castle," said Augustus Robb, seeming to roll the words round his tongue like some priceless wine. No more fervent worshipper of the aristocracy than he existed among London's millions. He read all the society columns, and the only episode of his burglarious past to which in his present saved condition he could look back with real pleasure was the occasion when he had got in through a scullery window belonging to a countess in her own right and had been bitten in the seat of his trousers by what virtually amounted to a titled wirehaired terrier. "Come to think of it, I've seen Beevor Castle. Cycled there once when I was a lad. Took sandwiches. Nice

place. Romantic. One of those stately homes of England they talk about. Who'd have thought I'd of ever got inside of it? It just shows, don't it? What I mean is, you never know. And now, cocky, you'd better hop out of that bed and go and have your Turkish bath. I'll be putting out your things. The blue suit with a heliotrope shirt and similarly coloured socks will be about the ticket, I think," said Augustus Robb, who had an eye for the rare and the beautiful.

Nothing, in his opinion, could actually convert his employer into an oil painting, but the blue suit and the heliotrope shirt might help to some small extent.

3

Some four and a quarter hours after a silver-voiced Western Union songster, even more of a human nightingale than usual owing to sucking throat pastilles, had chanted into the receiver of his telephone that beautiful lyric which begins:

and goes on (in case the reader has forgotten):

Claude Percival John Delamere Cobbold, the fifth Earl of Shortlands, was standing at the window of his study on the ground floor of Beevor Castle in the county of Kent, rattling in his trousers pocket the two shillings and eightpence which was all that remained of his month's pocket money and feeling how different everything would be if only it were two hundred pounds.

The sun which had evoked the enthusiasm of Augustus Robb in London at eleven o'clock was shining with equal, or even superior, radiance on Beevor Castle at eleven-fifteen. It glittered on the moat. It also glittered on the battlements and played about the ivied walls, from the disused wing which had been built in 1259 to the modernized section where the family lived and had their being. But when a couple of rays of adventurous disposition started to muscle into the study, they backed out hastily at the sight of this stout, smooth-faced man who looked like a discontented butler, finding his aspect forbidding and discouraging.

For the morning of May the twelfth, the fifty-second anniversary of his birth, had caught Lord Shortlands in poor shape. A dark despondency had him in its grip, and he could see no future for the human race. He glowered at the moat, thinking, as he had so often thought before, what a beastly moat it was.

As a matter of fact, except for smelling a little of mud and dead eels, it was, as moats go, rather a good moat. But you would have been wasting your time if you had tried to sell that idea to Lord Shortlands. A sullen dislike for the home of his ancestors and everything connected with it had been part of his spiritual make-up for some years now, and today, as has been indicated, he was in the acute stage of that malady which, for want of a better name, scientists call the heebie-jeebies.

It generally takes a man who likes to sleep till nine much more than four and a quarter hours to recover from the shock of having "Happy birthday" sung to him over the transatlantic telephone at seven, and in addition to this shattering experience there had been other slings and arrows of outrageous Fortune whistling about the fifth earl's ears this morning.

His dog Whiskers was sick of a fever. His favourite hat, the one with the broken rim and the grease stains, had disappeared, stolen, he strongly suspected, by his daughter Clare, who was collecting odds and ends for the vicar's jumble sale. Breakfast, in the absence of Mrs. Punter, the cook, away visiting relatives in Walham Green, had been prepared by the kitchenmaid, an indifferent performer who had used the scorched-earth policy on the bacon again. Cosmo Blair, the playwright, who had been staying at the castle for the past week, much against his lordship's wishes, was extending his visit indefinitely, in spite of the fact that there had been a clean-cut gentleman's agreement that he would leave this afternoon.

And, shrewdest buffet of all, his daughter Adela, a woman who, being the wife of Desborough Topping, one of those Americans at the mention of whose name Bradstreet raises his hat with a deferential flourish, could have fed such sums to the birds, had refused to lend him two hundred pounds.

Wanted to know why he wanted two hundred pounds, of all silly questions. As if he could possibly tell her that he wanted it in order to buy a public house and marry Mrs. Punter, the cook.

What the average rate or norm of misfortune for earls on their birthdays might be Lord Shortlands did not know, but he would have been greatly surprised to discover that he had not been given an unusually liberal helping; and he was about to sink for the third time in a sea of self-pity when he became aware of a presence and, turning, saw that his daughter Clare had entered the room.

Self-pity gave way to righteous wrath. There are men from whom old hats can be snitched with impunity, and men from whom they cannot. Lord Shortlands was a charter member of the second and sturdier class. His

prominent eyes glowed dangerously, and he spoke in a voice the tones of which King Lear, had he been present, would have memorized for personal use.

"Clare," he boomed, "did you take that hat of mine?"

She paid no attention to the question. She was a girl who had an annoying habit of paying no attention to questions, being brisk and masterful and concentrated on her own affairs; the sort of girl, so familiar a feature of the English countryside, who goes about in brogue shoes and tweeds and meddles vigorously in the lives of the villagers, sprucing up their manners and morals till you wonder that something in the nature of a popular uprising does not take place. The thought sometimes crossed Lord Shortlands' mind that if he had been a villager compelled to cope with Lady Clare Cobbold and her sister Lady Adela Topping, he would have turned his face to the wall and given up the struggle.

"Whose is this, Father?" she asked, and he saw that she was extending towards him a battered volume of some kind. It might have been, as indeed it was, an album for the reception of postage stamps.

It is interesting to reflect that this stamp album, which was to play so considerable a part in Lord Shortlands' affairs, made upon him at its first introduction but a slight impression. It was to be instrumental before the week was out in leading him to break Commandments and court nervous prostration, but now he merely looked at it in distaste, like a butler inspecting a bottle of wine of an inferior vintage. Coming events do not always cast their shadows before them.

"Don't point that beastly thing at me," he said. "It's all over dust. What is it?"

"A stamp album."

"Well, it's caked with grime. Put it on the table. Where did you get it?"

"I found it in a cupboard," said Clare, deviating from her practice of not answering questions. "Whose is it, do you know? Because if it doesn't belong to anyone, I want it for my jumble sale."

This would have been an excellent cue for the restating of the hat motif, but Lord Shortlands had now begun to be interested in this album. Like most people, he had once collected stamps, and strange nostalgic emotions were stirring within him. He approached the table and gave the book a tentative prod with the tip of his ringer, like a puppy pawing at a tortoise.

"Why, this is mine."

"Why should it be yours?"

"I used to collect stamps."

"I should imagine it's Tony's."

"Why should it be Tony's any more than mine?"

"I've told Desborough, and he's coming here to look through it. He knows all about stamps."

This was true. A confirmed philatelist from his early years, Desborough Topping was as much looked up to by Stanley Gibbons as by Bradstreet. Stamps and the reading of detective stories were his two great passions.

"There may be something valuable in it. If there is," said Clare, who, while she believed in supporting jumble sales in aid of indigent villagers, did not believe in overdoing it, "we can take it out."

She moved towards the door, and Lord Shortlands remembered that the vital issue was still unsettled.

"Just a minute. How about that hat? Somebody has taken my hat. I left it last night hanging on a peg in the coatroom. I go there this morning, and no hat. Hats don't run away. Hats don't leap lightly off pegs and take to the great open spaces. Have you seen my hat?"

"Have you seen Terry?" asked Clare. Unquestionably she was a difficult girl to talk to about hats.

The eccentricity of her conversational methods bewildered Lord Short-lands, who had never been nimble-minded.

"Terry?"

"Have you seen her?"

"No."

"Well, if you do, tell her that Cosmo Blair wants to read her MS second act."

The name seemed to grate upon Lord Shortlands' sensibilities.

"Cosmo Blair!"

"Why do you say 'Cosmo Blair' like that?"

"Like what?"

"Like you did."

"I didn't."

"Yes, you did."

"Well, why shouldn't I?" demanded Lord Shortlands, driven out into the open. "He's a potbellied perisher."

Clare quivered from head to foot.

"Don't call him a potbellied perisher!"

"Well, what else can you call him?" asked Lord Shortlands, like Roget trying to collect material for his Thesaurus. "I've studied him closely, and I say he's a potbellied perisher."

"He's a very brilliant man," said Clare, and swept from the room, banging the door behind her.

"His last play ran nine months in London," she added, reopening and rebanging the door.

"And a year in New York," she said, opening the door again and closing it with perhaps the loudest bang of the series.

Lord Shortlands was not a patient man. He resented the spectacle of a daughter behaving like a cuckoo in a cuckoo clock. When the door opened once more a moment later, he was all ready with a blistering reproof, and was on the point of delivering it when he perceived that this was not his child playing a return date, but a godlike figure with short side whiskers that carried a glass of malted milk on a salver. One of Lord Shortlands' numerous grievances against his daughter Adela was the fact that she made him drink a glass of malted milk every morning, and this was Spink, the butler, bringing it.

Nature is a haphazard caster, and no better example of her sloppy methods could have been afforded than by the outer husks of the fifth Earl of Short-lands and Spink, his butler. Called upon to provide an earl and a butler, she had produced an earl who looked like a butler and a butler who looked like an earl. Mervyn Spink was tall and aristocratic and elegant, Lord Shortlands square and stout and plebeian. No judge in a beauty contest would have hesitated between them for an instant, and no one was more keenly aware of this than Lord Shortlands. He would willingly have given half his fortune—amounting at the moment, as we have seen, to two shillings and eightpence—to have possessed a tithe of this malted milk carrier's lissomeness and grace. For something even remotely resembling his profile he would probably have gone still higher.

The butler advanced into the room with the air of an ambassador about to deliver important dispatches to a reigning monarch, and Lord Shortlands turned to the window, to avoid looking at him. He did not like Mervyn Spink.

It is to be doubted if he would have liked him even in the most favourable circumstances; say, just after the other had saved him from drowning or death by fire, for some people are made incompatible by nature, like film stars and their husbands. And the circumstances were very far from favourable. Lord Shortlands wanted to marry Mrs. Alice Punter, the cook, and so did Spink. And it not agreeable for the last of a proud line to have his butler as a rival in love.

Not that you have to be the last of a proud line to chafe at such a state of affairs. No householder would like it. In a race for which the hand of a cook is the prize a butler starts with the enormous advantage of being constantly at her side. While the seigneur has to snatch what surreptitious interviews he can, quivering all the while at the thought that his daughter Adela may pop in at any moment and catch him, the butler can hobnob with her by the hour, freely exerting the full force of his fascination.

And you simply could not afford to be handicapped like that in a struggle against such an adversary as Mervyn Spink, facially a feast for the eye and in addition a travelled sophisticate who had seen men and cities. Spink had been for a time in service in the United States, and so was able to bring to his wooing a breath of the great world outside. He also had a nephew on the stage. And while it was true that this nephew had so far played only minor character parts, and those only intermittently, a nephew on the stage is always a nephew on the stage.

Add the fact that he could imitate Spencer Tracy and do tricks with bits of string, and it was only too easy to picture the impact of such a personality on a woman of Mrs. Punter's cloistered outlook. Lord Shortlands, who was doing it now, shuddered and gave vent to a little sighing sound like the last gurgle of an expiring soda-water syphon.

Had happier conditions prevailed, there might have taken place at this juncture a word or two of that genial conversation which does so much to smooth relations between employer and employed. Such snatches as "Nice day, Spink," "Yes indeed, m'lord," or "Your malted milk, m'lord," "Eh? Oh? Ah. Right. Thanks!" suggest themselves. But now the silence was strained and unbroken. Spink put the salver on the table without comment, and Lord Shortlands continued to present a chilly back. The shadow of Alice Punter lay between these men.

Spink withdrew, gracefully and sinuously, with a touch of the smugness of the ambassador who is pluming himself on having delivered the important despatches without dropping them, and Lord Shortlands pursued the train of thought which the man's entry had started. He was musing dejectedly on Mervyn Spink's profile, and trying to make himself believe that it was not really so perfectly chiselled as he knew in his heart it was, when the telephone rang.

He approached it warily, as any man would have done whose most recent unhooking of the receiver had resulted in the impact on his eardrum of a Western Union tenor's "Happy birthday." The burned child fears the fire.

"Hullo?" he said.

"Hello," replied a pleasant male voice. "Can I speak to Lady Teresa?"

"Terry? I haven't seen her this morning."

"Who is that speaking?"

"Lord Shortlands."

"Oh, how do you do, Lord Shortlands? You've probably forgotten me. Mike Cardinal."

Lord Shortlands was obliged to confess that the name did not seem familiar.

"I was afraid it wouldn't. Well, would you mind telling Terry I called up. Good-bye."

"Good-bye," said Lord Shortlands, and returned to his meditations. He was sinking steadily again into the slough of despond in which he had spent most of the morning, when the door opened again, this time to admit the Lady Teresa of whom the pleasant voice had spoken.

"Ha!" said Lord Shortlands, brightening.

To say that he beamed at the girl would be too much. A man who has lost his favourite hat and is contending in the lists of love against a butler who might have stepped out of a collar advertisement in a magazine does not readily beam. But his gloom perceptibly lightened. A moment before, you would have taken him for a corpse that had been some days in the water. Now, he might have passed for such a corpse at a fairly early stage of its

immersion. After his trying morning the sight of Terry had come to him like that of a sail on the horizon to a shipwrecked mariner.

Even at the nadir of his depression Lord Shortlands, contemplating the inky clouds that loomed about him as far as the eye could reach, had always recognized that there was among them a speck of silver lining; the fact that his youngest daughter, who some time previously had run off to London to seek a venturous freedom in the chorus of a musical comedy, had now run back again and was once more at his side to comfort and advise.

His eldest daughter Adela might be hard to bear, his second daughter Clare difficult to endure. A man might well come near to cracking under the strain of Mervyn Spink and Cosmo Blair. But Terry, God bless her, was all right.

4

Lady teresa Cobbold was considerably better worth looking at than the Lady Clare, her sister. The latter took after her father in appearance, which was an unfortunate thing for any girl to do, for it has already been stressed that the fifth Earl of Shortlands, though a worthy soul and no thicker in the head than the average member of the House of Peers, presented to the eye the facade of an Eric Blore rather than that of a Robert Taylor. Terry had had the good sense to resemble her late mother, who had been in her day one of the prettiest debutantes in London. Slim, blue-eyed, fair-haired and bearing Youth like a banner, she was the sort of girl at the sight of whom strong men quiver and straighten their ties.

"Good morning, Shorty," she said. "Many happy returns, darling."

"Thank you, my dear."

"Here's my little gift. Only a pipe, I'm afraid."

"It's a jolly good pipe," said Lord Shortlands stoutly. "Just what I wanted. There was a fellow on the phone for you just now."

"Name of Cardinal?"

"Yes. Seemed to know me, but I couldn't place him."

"You wouldn't. It's years since you saw him. Well, never mind young Mike Cardinal," said Terry, perching herself on the end of the battered sofa. "How have you come out on the takings? Did the others do their bit?"

Lord Shortlands' face clouded. He had had a lean birthday.

"Adela gave me a couple of ties. Desborough gave me a book called Murder at some dashed placed or other. Clare—"

"No cash?"

"Not a penny."

"What a shame. I was hoping we could have slunk up to London and had lunch somewhere. How much have you got?"

"Two and eightpence. How much have you?"

"Three bob."

"You see. That's how it goes."

"That's how it goes, Shorty."

"Yes, that's how it goes," said Lord Shortlands, and fell into a moody silence.

These times in which we live are not good times for earls. Theirs was a great racket while it lasted, but the boom days are over. A scattered few may still have a pittance, but the majority, after they have paid their income tax and their land tax and all their other taxes and invested in one or two of the get-rich-quick schemes thrown together for their benefit by bright-eyed gentlemen in the City, are generally pretty close to the bread line. Lord Shortlands, with two and eightpence in his pocket, was more happily situated than most.

But even he cannot be considered affluent. There had been a time, for he had seen better days, when he had thought nothing of walking into his club and ordering a bottle of the best. We find him now reduced to malted milk and dependent for the necessities of life on the bounty of his daughter Adela, that levelheaded girl who had had the intelligence to marry into Bradstreet.

Dependence in itself was not a state of being which would have grated on the fifth earl. He had always preferred not to have to pay for things. But it was another matter to be dependent on a daughter who checked his expenditure so closely; who so consistently refused to loosen up—as it might be when a fellow wanted two hundred pounds in order to marry the cook; and, above all, who was so devoted to the ancestral home that she insisted on staying in it all the year round.

Why anyone with the money to live elsewhere should elect to live at Beevor Castle, which was stuffy in summer and cold in winter, was one of the mysteries which Lord Shortlands knew that he would never solve.

"Do you realize, Terry," he said, his thoughts during the lull in the conversation having turned to his perennial grievance, "that the last time I was away from this place for even a couple of hours was when those Americans took it last summer? And then Adela made me go with her to Harrogate, of all loathsome holes. Some nonsense about Desborough's lumbago. I offered to rough it at my club, but she said she couldn't trust me alone in London."

"I suppose you aren't the sort of man who can be trusted alone in London."

"I suppose not," said Lord Shortlands with modest pride.

"You used to paint it red in the old days, didn't you?"

"Reddish," admitted Lord Shortlands. "And since then I've not been out of the damned place. I'm just a bird in a gilded cage."

"Would you call it a gilded cage?"

"Well, a bird in a bally mausoleum."

"Poor old Shorty. You don't like Ye Olde much, do you?"

"And this infernal feeling of dependence. 'Adela, could I have a shilling?' 'What do you want a shilling for?' 'For tobacco.' 'I thought you had tobacco.' 'I've smoked it.' 'Oh? Well, here you are. But you smoke a great deal too much.' It oifends one's manly pride. I can't tell you how much I admired your spirited behavior, Terry, in breaking away as you did. It thrilled me to the core. A bold bid for freedom. I wish I had the nerve to do it, too."

"Perhaps the mistake we made was in not going away together and working as a team. We might have got bookings in vaudeville as a cross-talk act."

"What on earth made you come back?"

"Hunger, my angel. The show I was in collapsed, and I couldn't get another job. Have you ever tried not eating, Shorty?"

"Do you mean you didn't get enough to eat?"

"If it hadn't been for one faithful friend, who was a perfect lamb, I should have starved. He used to take me out to lunch and tell me about the girl he was in love with. His father had sent him to England to get him out of her way. He was an American, and, oddly enough, his name was the same as mine."

"What, Cobbold?"

"Well, you didn't think I meant Teresa?"

Lord Shortlands was interested. Since seven that morning the name Cob-bold had been graven on his heart.

"I wonder if he was any relation of that lunatic of mine. There's a borderline case in New York named Ellery Cobbold who keeps writing me letters and sending me cables. And this morning he incited some blasted friend of his to ring me up on the telephone and howl into my ear a lot of dashed rot about 'Happy birthday.' At seven! Seven sharp. The stable clock was just striking when the beastly outrage occurred."

"I should imagine Stanwood is his son. He told me his father lived in New York, or somewhere just outside. Well, he kept me alive, though growing thinner every day, but I found I couldn't take it, Shorty, so I came back."

"Why couldn't you get another job? I should have thought a girl as pretty as you could have walked into something."

"I couldn't even crawl. And I couldn't afford to wait."

"No cash?"

"No cash."

Lord Shortlands nodded.

"Yes, that's it. The problem of cash. One comes up against it at every turn. Look at me. If I had two hundred pounds, I could strike off the shackles. Mrs. Punter still sticks rigidly to her terms."

"I know. She told me."

"She will only marry a man who can set her up in a pub in London. Wants to chuck service and settle down. Enjoy the evening of her life, and all that. One can understand it, of course. Women must have the little home with their own sticks of furniture about them. But it makes it dashed awkward. I don't see how I can raise the money, and there's Spink piling it up hand over fist. I saw that chap Blair slip him a quid the other day. It nearly made me sick. And who knows what those Rossiters may not have tipped him last summer? Spink must be getting very near the goal by now."

"But he bets."

"Yes, and suppose one of these days he strikes a long-priced winner."

"According to Mrs. Punter, he loses all the time, and it prejudices her against him. She wants a steady husband."

"Did she tell you that?"

"Yes, that comes straight from the horse's mouth. I went to her just before she left for her holiday, and pleaded your cause. It seems that she once had a sad experience in her life. She didn't tell me what it was, but I gathered that some man had let her down pretty badly, and now she's looking for someone she can rely on."

"The sturdy oak, not the sapling."

"Exactly. I plugged your reliable qualities, and she quite agreed. 'Your pa hasn't got Mr. Spink's fascination and polish,' she said. 'He isn't so much the gentleman as Mr. Spink. But he's steady.'"

"Ha!"

"So carry on and fear nothing, is my advice. Don't give a thought to Spink's fascination and polish. It's the soul that counts, and that's where you have the bulge on him. I think you're Our Five Horse Special and Captain Coe's Final Selection. You'll romp home, darling."

Lord Shortlands, though not insensible to this pep talk, was unable to bring himself to rejoice wholeheartedly. The sort of life he had been living for the last few years makes a man a realist.

"Not if I can't get that two hundred."

"Yes, we shall have to look into that."

The telephone rang, and Lord Shortlands went to it more confidently this time, like one who feels that the danger is past.

"It's for you."

"Mike Cardinal?"

"Yes. He says did you get his letter."

"Yes, I did. Tell him I won't."

"Won't?"

"Won't."

"Won't what?"

"Just won't. He'll understand."

"Yes," said Lord Shortlands into the instrument, mystified but dutifully obeying instructions, "she says she did, but she won't. Eh? I'll ask her. He wants to know if you're still doing your hair the same way."

"Yes."

"She says yes. Eh? Yes, I'll tell her. Good-bye. He says very sensible of you, because it makes you look like a Botticelli angel. What won't you do?" asked Lord Shortlands, who still found the phrase perplexing.

Terry laughed.

"Marry him."

"Does he want to marry you?"

"He keeps saying so."

Lord Shortlands looked as like a conscientious father with his child's welfare at heart as it was possible for him to do.

"You ought to marry."

"I suppose so."

"Think what it would mean. Liberty. Freedom. You would never have to see that moat again."

"Adela wants me to marry Cosmo Blair."

"Don't do it."

"I won't."

"That's the spirit. I mean to say, dash it, it's all very well wanting to get away from the moat, but you can pay too high a price."

"I feel like that, too. Besides, he's going to marry Clare."

"Good God! Does he know it?"

"Not yet. But he will."

Lord Shortlands reflected.

"By George, I believe you're right. She bit my head off just now because I called him a potbellied perisher. Even at the time it struck me as significant. Well, I'm glad there's no danger as far as you're concerned."

"None whatever. I can't stand that superior manner of his. He talks to me as if I were a child."

"He talks to me as if I were a bally fathead," said Lord Shortlands, who, being one, was sensitive about it. "Well, tell me about this fellow Cardinal. When did you meet him?"

"Do you remember Tony bringing a school friend of his here for the summer holidays about eight years ago?"

"How can I possibly remember all Tony's repulsive friends?"

"This one wasn't repulsive. Dazzlingly good-looking. I met him again when I was lunching with Stanwood Cobbold one day. They knew each other in America."

"He's American, is he?"

"Yes. He was at school with Tony, but he comes from California. He came up and asked me if I remembered him."

"And did you?"

"Vividly. So he sat down and joined us, and after lunch Stanwood went off to write to his girl and Mike immediately proposed to me over the coffee cups."

"Quick work."

"So I pointed out to him. He then said he had loved me from the first moment we met, but had been too shy to speak."

"He doesn't sound shy."

"I suppose he's got over it."

"What is he?"

"A Greek god, Shorty. No less."

"I mean, what does he do?"

"He's a motion-picture agent in Hollywood. Motion-picture agents are the people who fix up the stars with engagements at the studios. They get ten per cent of the salaries."

Lord Shortlands' eyes widened. He had read all about motion-picture stars' salaries.

"Good heavens. He must make a fortune."

"Well, he's only a junior partner, but I suppose he does pretty well."

Lord Shortlands gulped emotionally.

"I'd have grabbed him."

"Well, I didn't."

"Don't you like him?"

"Yes, I do. Very much. But I'm not going to marry* him."

"Why not?"

"There's a reason."

"What reason?"

"Oh, just a reason. But don't let's talk about me any more. Let's talk about you—you and your two hundred pounds."

Lord Shortlands would have preferred to continue the probe into his daughter's reasons for being unwilling to marry a rich and good-looking young man, whom she admitted to liking, but it was plain that she considered the subject closed. And he was always ready to talk about his two hundred pounds.

"That still remains the insuperable obstacle. I don't see how I can raise it."

"Have you tried Desborough?"

"I keep starting to pave the way, but he always vanishes like a homing rabbit. The impression he gives me is that he sees it coming."

"Well, he'll be here at any moment to look at that stamp album Clare found. And he can't vanish like a rabbit this time, because he's got lumbago again."

"That's true."

"Tackle him firmly. Don't pave the way. Use shock tactics. Oh, hullo, Desborough."

A small, slight, pince-nezed man in the middle forties, who looked like the second vice-president of something, had entered. He came in slowly, for he was supporting himself with a walking stick, but his manner was eager. When there were stamps about, Desborough Topping always resembled a second vice-president on the verge of discovering some leakage in the monthly accounts.

"Hello, Terry. Say, where's this . . . Ah," he said, sighting the album and becoming lost to all external things.

The eyes of Lord Shortlands and his daughter met in a significant glance. "Do it now," said Terry's. "Quite. Certainly. Oh, rather," said Lord Short-lands'. He advanced to the table and laid a gentle hand on his son-in-law's shoulder.

"Some interesting stamps here, eh?" he said affectionately. "Desborough, old chap, can you lend me two hundred pounds?"

The invalid started, as any man might on rinding so substantial a touch coming out of a blue sky.

"Two hundred pounds?"

"It would be a great convenience."

"Why don't you ask Adela?"

"I did. But she wouldn't."

Desborough Topping was looking like a stag at bay.

"Well, you know me. I'd give you the shirt off my back."

Lord Shortlands disclaimed any desire for the shirt off his son-in-law's back. What he wanted, he stressed once more, was not haberdashery but two hundred pounds.

"Well, look. Here's the trouble. Adela and I have a joint account."

It was the end. A man cannot go on struggling against Fate beyond a certain point. Lord Shortlands turned and walked to the window, where he gave the moat a look compared with which all previous looks had been loving and appreciative.

"This whole matter of joint accounts for married couples—" he was beginning, speaking warmly, for the subject was one on which he held strong views, when his observations were interrupted. The door had opened again, and his eldest daughter was coming in.

Lady Adela Topping, some fifteen years younger than her husband, was tall and handsome and built rather on the lines of Catherine of Russia, whom she resembled also in force of character and that imperiousness of outlook which makes a woman disinclined to stand any nonsense. And that she had recently been confronted with nonsense of some nature was plainly shown in her demeanour now. She was visibly annoyed; so visibly that if Desborough Topping had not become immersed in the stamp album once more and so missed the tilt of her chin and the flash of her eye, he would have curled up in a ball and rolled under the sofa.

"Do you know a man named Cobbold, Father?" she said. She consulted the buff sheet of paper in her hand. "Ellery Cobbold he signs himself."

Like a bull which, suddenly annoyed by a picador, turns from the matador who had previously engrossed its attention, Lord Shortlands shelved the thought of joint accounts for the time being and puffed belligerently.

"Ellery Cobbold? That fellow in New York? I should say I do. He sours my life."

"But how do you come to be connected with him?"

"He's connected with me. Or says he is. Claims he's a sort of cousin."

"Well, I cannot see that that entitles him to expect us to put his son Stanwood up for an indeterminate visit."

"Does he?"

"That's what he says in his cable. I never heard such impertinence."

"Bally crust," agreed Lord Shortlands, indignant but not surprised. After what had occurred that morning when the stable clock was striking seven, he could scarcely be astonished at any excesses on Mr. Cobbold's part.

Only Terry seemed pleased.

"Is Stanwood Cobbold coming here?" she said. "Splendid."

"Do you know him?"

"We're like ham and eggs."

"Like what?"

"I mean that's how well we get along together. Stanwood's an angel. He saved my life in London."

Down at the table something stirred. It was Desborough Topping coming to the surface.

"Ellery Cobbold?" he said, the name having just penetrated to his stamp-drugged consciousness. "I was in college with Ellery Cobbold. Fat fellow."

"Indeed?"

"Very rich now, I believe."

Lady Adela started.

"Rich?"

"Worth millions, I guess," said Desborough, and dived back into the album.

A change had come over Lady Adela's iron front. Her eyes seemed softer. They had lost their stern anti-Cobbold glare.

"Oh, is he? And you say he's some connection of ours, Father? And his son is friend of yours, Terry? Then of course we must ask him here," said Lady Adela heartily. "Desborough, go and send him a telegram—here's the address—saying that we shall be delighted to put him up. Sign it 'Shortlands.' The cable was addressed to you, Father."

"Was that why you opened it?" asked Lord Shortlands, who had begun to feel ruffled again about that joint account.

"Say that Father will be coming in this afternoon in the car—"

A sigh escaped Lord Shortlands. Permission to go to London, and only two-and-eightpence to spend when he got there. This, he supposed, was the sort of thing Cosmo Blair had been alluding to at dinner last night, when he had spoken of tragic irony.

"—and will bring him back with him. Have you got that clear? Then run along. Oh, and you had better cable Mr. Cobbold, saying how delighted we are. Pistachio, New York. New York is one word."

"Yes, dear. I'll take this album with me. It's quite interesting. I've already found a stamp that's worth several pounds."

"Then Clare must certainly not give the thing to her jumble sale until you have thoroughly examined it," said Lady Adela with decision. She shared her sister's views about not overdoing it when you are aiding indigent villagers.

It seemed to Lord Shortlands that the time had come to get his property rights firmly established. The mention of stamps worth several pounds had stirred him profoundly, and all this loose talk about jumble sales, he felt, must be checked without delay.

"Just a minute, just a minute," he said. "Clare isn't going to have that album. Ridiculous. Absurd."

"What do you mean?"

"Perfect rot. Never heard of such a thing."

"But what has it to do with you?"

"It's my album."

"Nonsense."

"It is, I tell you. I used to collect stamps."

"Years ago."

"Well, the thing's probably been in that cupboard for years. Look at the dust on it. What more likely than that I should have put my album in a cupboard and forgotten all about it?"

"Well, I haven't time to discuss it now. Run along, Desborough."

"Yes, dear."

As the door closed, Lady Adela had another idea.

"It might be a good thing, Father, if you were to start at once. Then you could give Mr. Cobbold lunch."

"What!"

Lady Adela repeated her remark, and Lord Shortlands closed his eyes for a moment, as if he were praying.

"An excellent idea," he said in a hushed voice. "At the Ritz."

"You're behind the times, Shorty," said Terry. "Barribault's is the posh place now."

"Then make it Barribault's," said Lord Shortlands agreeably.

"And you can take Terry with you."

Terry blinked.

"Did you hear what I heard, Shorty?"

"'Take Terry with you' was the way I got it."

"That's what it sounded like to me, too. Do you really mean this, Adela?"

"Make yourself look nice."

"A vision," said Terry, and started off to do so.

She left Lord Shortlands uplifted but bewildered. He was at a loss to account for this sudden spasm of openhandedness in a daughter generally prudent to a fault. He found himself reminded of the Christmas Day activities of the late Scrooge.

"This may be a most fortunate thing that has happened, Father," said Adela. "Terry is a very attractive girl, and apparently she and this Mr. Cobbold are good friends already. And he saved her life, she says. Odd she should not have mentioned that before. I wonder how it happened. It seems to me that, being here together, they might quite easily—"

"Good Lord!" said Lord Shortlands, enlightened. He was also a little shocked. "Don't you women ever think of anything but trying to fix up weddings?"

"Well, it's quite time that Terry got married. It would steady her."

"Terry doesn't need steadying."

"How can you talk like that, Father, after the way she ran off and—"

"Oh, all right, all right. And now," said Lord Shortlands, for he felt that too much time was being wasted on these trivialities, "in the matter of expenses. I shall need quite a bit of working capital."

"Nonsense. Two pounds will be ample."

It is not often that anyone sees an earl in the act of not believing his ears. Lady Adela was privileged to do so now. Lord Shortlands' prominent eyes, so well adapted for staring incredulously, seemed in danger of leaping from their sockets.

"Two pounds?" he cried. "Great heavens! How about cocktails? How about cigars? How about wines, liqueurs and spirits?"

"I'm not going to have you stuffing yourself with wines and liqueurs. You know how weak your head is."

"My head is not weak. It's as strong as an ox. And it is not a question of stuffing myself, as you call it, with wines and liqueurs. I shall have to do this boy well, shan't I? You don't want him thinking he's accepting the hospitality of Gaspard the miser, do you? It's a little hard," said Lord Shortlands, quivering with the self-pity which came so easily to him. "You bundle me off to London at a moment's notice, upsetting my day and causing me all sorts of inconvenience, to entertain a young man of whom I know nothing except that his father is off his bally onion, and you expect me to keep the expenses down to an absurd sum like two pounds."

"Oh, very well."

"It's going to be a nice thing for me at the end of lunch, when the coffee is served and this young fellow gazes at me with a wistful look in his eyes, to have to say 'No liqueurs, Cobbold. It won't run to them. Chew a toothpick.' I should blush to my very bones."

"Oh, very well, very well. Here is five pounds."

"Couldn't you make it ten?"

"No, I could not make it ten," said Lady Adela with the testiness of a conjurer asked to do too difficult a trick.

"Well, all right. Though it's running it fine. I foresee a painful moment at the table, when the chap is swilling down his wine and I am compelled to say 'Not quite so rapidly, young Cobbold. Eke it out, my boy, eke it out. There isn't going to be a second bottle.' How about seven pounds ten? Splitting the difference, if you see what I mean. Well, I merely asked," said Lord Short-lands, addressing the closing door.

For some moments after the founder of the feast had left him, he stood gazing—in a kindlier spirit now—at the moat. In spite of the misgivings which he had expressed, he was not really ill pleased. For a proper slap-up binge, of course, on the lines of Belshazzar's Feast, five pounds is an inadequate capital, but you can unquestionably do something with it. Many a poor earl, he knew, would have screamed with joy at the sight of a fiver. It was only that he did wish that some angel could have descended from on high and increased his holdings to ten, in his opinion the minimum sum for true self-expression.

So softly did the door open that it was not until he heard his emotional breathing that he became aware of his son-in-law's presence. Desborough Topping had stolen into the room furtively, like a nervous member of the Black Hand attending his first general meeting.

"Psst!" he said.

He glanced over his shoulder. The door was well and truly closed. Nevertheless, he continued to speak in a hushed, conspiratorial whisper.

"Say, look, about that two hundred. I can't manage two hundred, but—"

Something crisp and crackling slid into Lord Shortlands' hand. Staring, he saw his son-in-law receding towards the door. His pince-nezed eyes were shining with an appealing light, and Lord Shortlands had no difficulty in reading their message. It was that fine old family slogan "Not a word to the wife!" The next moment his benefactor had gone.

Terry, returning some minutes later, was stunned by a father's tale of manna in the wilderness.

"Ten quid, Terry! Desborough's come across with ten quid! I cannot speak in too high terms of the fellow's courage—no, dash it, heroism. Men have got the V.C. for less. Fifteen quid in my kick that makes. Fifteen solid jimmy-o'-goblins. Not counting my two-and-eightpence."

"Golly, Shorty, what a birthday you've had."

"Nothing to the birthday I'm going to have. Today, my child, a luncheon will be served in Barribault's Hotel which will ring through the ages. It will go down in story and song."

"That will be nice for Stanwood."

"Stanwood?" Lord Shortlands snorted. "Stanwood isn't going to get a smell of it. Just you and I, my dear. A pretty thing, wasting my hard-earned money on a fellow whose father eggs his confederates on to getting people out of bed at seven in the morning and bellowing 'Happy birthday' at them," said Lord Shortlands severely.

In the drawing room Lady Adela had rung the bell.

"Oh, Spink," she said as the butler slid gracefully over the threshold.

"M'lady?"

"A Mr. Cobbold who is over here from America will be coming to stay this afternoon. Will you put him in the Blue Room."

"Very good, m'lady." A touch of human interest showed itself in Mervyn Spink's frigid eye. "Pardon me, m'lady, but would that be Mr. Ellery Cob-bold of Great Neck, Long Island?"

"His son. You know Mr. Cobbold?"

"I was for some time in his employment, m'lady, during my sojourn in the United States of America."

"Then you have met Mr. Stanwood Cobbold?"

"Oh yes, m'lady. A very agreeable young gentleman."

"Ah," said Lady Adela.

She had invited this guest of hers to the castle in the spirit of the man who bites into a luncheon-counter sausage, hoping for the best but not quite knowing what he is going to get, and this statement from an authoritative source relieved her.

5

It is pleasant to be able to record that Stanwood Cobbold's Turkish bath did him a world of good, proving itself well worth the price of admission. They took him and stripped him and stewed him till he bubbled at every seam and rubbed him and kneaded him and put him under a cold shower and dumped him into a cold plunge and sent him out into the world a pinker and stronger young man. It was with almost the old oomph and elasticity that shortly after one o'clock he strode into Barribault's Hotel and made purposefully for the smaller of its two bars. This was not because he had anything against the large bar—he yielded to none in his appreciation of its catering and service—but it was in the small bar, it will be remembered, that he had arranged to meet Mike Cardinal.

His friend was not yet at the tryst, the only occupant of the room, except for the white-jacketed ministering angel behind the counter, being a stout, smooth-faced man in the early fifties of butlerine aspect. He was seated at one of the tables, sipping what Stanwood's experienced eye told him was a McGuffy's Special, a happy invention on the part of the ministering angel, whose name—not that it matters, for except for this one appearance he does not come into the story—was Aloysius St. X. McGuffy. He had the air of a man in whose edifice of revelry this McGuffy's Special was not the foundation stone but one of the bricks somewhat higher up. Unless Stanwood's eye deceived him, and it seldom did in these matters, this comfortable stranger had made an early start.

And such was indeed the case. A lunch of really majestic proportions, a lunch that is to ring down the ages, a lunch, in short, of the kind to which Lord Shortlands had been looking forward ever since his daughter Adela with that wave of her magic wand had transformed the world for him, demands a certain ritual of preparation. The fifth earl's first move, on arriving in the centre of things and giving Terry three pounds and sending her off to buy a hat, after arranging to meet her in the lobby of Barribault's Hotel at one-thirty, had been to proceed to his club and knock back a bottle of his favorite champagne, following this with a stiff whiskey and soda. Then, and only then, was he ready for Aloysius McGuffy and his Specials.

Stanwood took a seat at an adjoining table, and after he in his turn had called on the talented Aloysius to start pouring, a restful silence reigned in the bar. From time to time Stanwood shot a sidelong glance at Lord Shortlands, and from time to time Lord Shortlands shot a sidelong glance at Stanwood. Neither spoke, not even to comment on the beauty of the weather, which was still considerable, yet each found in the other's personality much that was attractive.

There is probably something about men crossed in love which tends to draw them together, some subtle aura or emanation which tells them that they have found a kindred soul. At any rate, every time Lord Shortlands looked at Stanwood, he felt that, while Stanwood unquestionably resembled a hippopotamus in appearance, it would be a genuine pleasure to fraternize with him. And every time Stanwood looked at Lord Shortlands, it was to say to himself: "Granted that this bimbo looks like a butler out on the loose, nevertheless something whispers to me that we could be friends." But for a while they remained mute and aloof. It was only when London's first wasp thrust itself into the picture that the barriers fell.

One is inclined to describe this wasp as the Wasp of Fate. Only by supposing it an instrument of destiny can one account for its presence that morning in the small bar of Barribault's Hotel. Even in the country its arrival on the twelfth of May would have been unusual, the official wasping season not beginning till well on in July, and how it came to be in the heart of London's steel and brick at such a time is a problem from which speculation recoils.

Still there it was, and for a space it volplaned and looped the loop about Lord Shortlands' nose, occasioning him no little concern. It then settled down for a brief breather on the back of Stanwood's coat, and Lord Shortlands, feeling that this was an opportunity which might not occur again, remembered his swashing blow, like Gregory in Romeo and Juliet, and downed it in its tracks with a large, flat hand.

A buffet between the shoulder blades does something to a man who is drinking a cocktail at the moment. Stanwood choked and turned purple.

Recovering his breath, he said (with some justice) "Hey!", and Lord Short-lands hastened to explain. He said:

"Wasp."

"Wasp?"

"Wasp," repeated Lord Shortlands, and with a pointing finger directed the other's attention to the remains. "Wasp," he added, driving the thing home.

Stanwood viewed the body, and all doubt concerning the purity of his preserver's motives left him.

"Wasp," he said, fully concurring.

"Wasp," said Lord Shortlands, summing the thing up rather neatly. "Messing about on your back. I squashed it."

"Darned good of you."

"Not at all."

"Courageous, too."

"No, no. Perhaps a certain presence of mind. Nothing more. Offer you a cocktail?"

"Or me you?"

"No, me you."

"Well, you me this time," said Stanwood, yielding the point with a pleasant grace. "But next time me you."

The ice was broken.

When two men get together who are not only crossed in love but are both reasonably full of McGuffy's Specials, it is inevitable that before long confidences will be exchanged. The bruised heart demands utterance. Gradually, as he sat there drawing closer and closer spiritually to this new friend, there came upon Stanwood an irresistible urge to tell his troubles to Lord Shortlands.

The orthodox thing, of course, would have been to tell them to Aloysius McGuffy, who may be said to have been there more or less for the purpose, but this would have involved getting up and walking to the bar and putting his foot on the rail and leaning forward and pawing at Aloysius McGuffy's shoulder. Far simpler to dish it out to this sympathetic stranger.

Very soon, accordingly, he was explaining his whole unhappy position to Lord Shortlands in minute detail. He told him of his great love for Eileen Stoker, of his father's short way with sons who loved Eileen Stoker, of his ecstasy on learning of Eileen Stoker's impending arrival in London, of his welcome to her when she did arrive and finally of the crushing blow which had befallen him, knocking his new-found happiness base over apex; this wholly unforeseen cable from his father, ordering him to leave the metropolis immediately and go to some ghastly castle, the name of which had escaped him for the moment.

Throughout the long and at times rambling exposition Lord Shortlands had listened with the owlish intentness of a man who has already started lunching, uttering now a kindly "Ah?" and anon a commiserating "Good gad!" At this mention of going to castles a grave look came into his face. He had grown fond of this young man, and did not like to see him heading for misery and disaster.

"Keep away from castles," he advised.

"But I can't, darn it."

"Castles," said Lord Shortlands, speaking the word with a bitter intonation. "I could tell you something about castles. They have moats."

"Yay, but—"

"Nasty smelly moats. Stinking away there since the Middle Ages. Be guided by me, my dear boy, and steer jolly clear of all castles."

Stanwood was beginning to wonder if it would not have been wiser to stick to the sound old conservative policy of telling his troubles to the barman. This stranger, though sympathetic, seemed slow in the uptake.

"But don't you understand? I've got to go to this castle."

"Why?"

"My father says so."

Lord Shortlands considered this. Until now, though Stanwood had been at some pains to elaborate it, the point had escaped him. It was not long before a happy solution presented itself.

"Kick him in the eye."

"How can I? He's in America."

"Your father is?"

"Yay."

"I could tell you something about fathers in America, too," said Lord Shortlands. "This very morning, as the stable clock was striking seven—"

"If I don't do what he tells me to, he'll slice off my allowance. It's like in the Bible," said Stanwood, searching for an illustration and recalling Augustus Robb's observations on the subject. "You remember? Where the bozo said 'Come' and they goeth."

Lord Shortlands had now a complete, if muzzy, grip of the position of affairs.

"Ah, now I see. Now I understand. You are financially dependent on your father?"

"That's right."

"As I am on my daughter Adela. Most unpleasant, being dependent on people."

"You betcher."

"Especially one's daughter. Adela—I wouldn't tell this to everyone, but I like your face—Adela oppresses me. You have heard of men being henpecked. I am chickpecked. She makes me live all the time at my castle."

"Have you a castle?"

"I have indeed. One of the worst. And she makes me live there. I feel like a caged skylark."

"I feel like a piece of cheese. Run out of London just at the very moment when I want to be sticking to Eileen like a poultice, and chased off to this damned castle. A hell of a setup, don't you think?"

Lord Shortlands, who had a feeling heart, admitted that his young friend's predicament was such as to extort the tear of pity.

"Though it is scarcely," he went on to say, "to be compared with the one in which I find myself. I'm just a toad beneath the harrow."

"You said you were a skylark."

"A toad, too."

"Have you got to go to a castle?"

"I'm at a castle already. I told you that before."

"Gee, that's tough."

"You . . . What was that expression you used just now? Ah yes, You betcher."

"Must grind you a good deal, being at a castle already."

"You betcher. But that, serious though it is, is not my principal trouble."

"What's your principal trouble?"

Lord Shortlands hesitated for a moment. So far his British reserve had triumphed over a pint of champagne, a double whiskey and splash and three McGuffy Specials; but now he felt it weakening. A brief spiritual conflict, and he, too, had decided to tell all.

"It is this. At my castle there is a cook."

"Look, look, lookie, here comes cookie!"

"I beg your pardon?"

"Just a song I happened to remember."

"I see. Well, as I was saying, at my castle there is a cook."

"Another cook?"

"No, the same cook. And the fact is, well, I—er—I want to marry her."

"Good for you."

"You approve?"

"You betcher."

"I am delighted to hear you say so, my dear boy. You know how much your sympathy means to me. Marry her, you suggest?"

"You betcher."

"But here is the difficulty. My butler wants to marry her, too."

"The butler at your castle?"

"You betcher. It is a grave problem."

Stanwood knitted his brows. He was thinking the thing out.

"You can't both marry her."

"Exactly." This clear-sightedness delighted Lord Shortlands. An old head on young shoulders, he felt. "You have put your finger on the very core of the dilemma. What do you advise?"

"Seems to me the cagey move would be to fire the butler."

"Impossible. When I spoke of him as 'my' butler, I used the word loosely. His salary is paid by my daughter Adela. Firing butlers is her prerogative, and she guards it jealously."

"Gee, that's like it is with me and Augustus Robb. Well, then, you'll have to cut him out."

"Easier said than done. He is a man of terrific personal attractions. His profile alone ... The only thing that gives me hope is that he bets."

"Would he know anything good for Kempton Park next Friday?"

"Most unlikely. He seems to pick nothing but losers. That is why the fact that he is a betting man causes me to hope. He squanders his money, and Alice disapproves."

"Who's Alice?"

"The cook."

"The cook at your castle? The cook we've been talking about?"

"That very cook. She wants a steady husband. And she thinks me steady."

"She does?"

"I have it from a reliable source."

"Then you're set. It's in the bag. All you've got to do is keep plugging away and giving her the old personality. I think you'll nose him out."

"Do you, my dear boy? You are certainly most comforting. But unfortunately there is one very formidable obstacle in my path. She won't marry anyone who cannot put up two hundred pounds to buy a public house."

"Ah? So the real trouble is dough?"

"You betcher. In this world," said Lord Shortlands weightily, "the real trouble is always dough. All through my life I have found that out. And mine has been a long life. I'm fifty-two today."

Stanwood started as if a chord in his soul had been touched. He threw back his head and began to sing in a booming bass:

He broke off abruptly and pressed both hands to his temples. Too late he realized that the whole enterprise of throwing his head back and singing old music-hall ballads, however apposite, was one against which his best friends would have warned him.

"If you'll excuse me," he said, rising, "I think I'll just go to the washroom and put my head under the cold tap. Have you ever had that feeling that someone is driving white-hot rivets into your bean?"

"Not in recent years," said Lord Shortlands with a touch of wistfulness. "As a young man—"

"Ice, of course, would be better," said Stanwood, "but you look so silly ordering a bucket of ice and sticking your head in it. But maybe cold water will do something."

He tottered out, hoping for the best, and Lord Shortlands, allowing his lower jaw to droop restfully, gave himself up to meditation.

He thought of Mrs. Punter, and wondered how she was enjoying herself with her relatives at Walham Green. He thought of Terry, and hoped she would buy a nice hat. He thought of ordering another McGufTy Special, but decided that it was not worth the effort. And then suddenly he found himself thinking of something else, something that sent an icy chill trickling down his spine and restored him to a sobriety which could not have been more complete if he had been spending the morning drinking malted milk.

Had he been wise, he asked himself, had he been entirely prudent in confiding to that charming young fellow who had just gone out to put his head under the tap the secret of his love? Suppose the thing were to come to Adela's ears?

A look of glassy horror came into Lord Shortlands' eyes. Perspiration bedewed his forehead, and the word "Crikey!" trembled on his lips. From the very inception of his wooing he had been troubled by the thought of what the deuce would happen if Adela ever got to hear of it.

Then Reason reassured him. The young fellow and he were just ships that pass in the night. They had met and spoken, and now they would part, never to meet again. There could be no possibility of the other ever coming into Adela's orbit. He had been alarming himself unnecessarily.

Comforted and relieved, but feeling an imperative need for an immediate restorative, he turned, with the purpose of establishing communication with Aloysius McGuffy, and found that he was being scrutinized by a pair of extraordinarily good-looking twins, who on closer inspection coalesced into one extraordinarily good-looking young man in a grey suit, who had come in unperceived and taken a seat at the adjoining table. And to his surprise this young man now rose and approached him with outstretched hand.

"How do you do?" he said.

6

Lord Shortlands blinked.

"How do you do," he replied cautiously. Sixteen years ago he had once been stung for five by an agreeable stranger who had scraped acquaintance with him in a bar, and he could not forget that he had at this moment nearly twelve pounds on his person. "Be on the alert, Claude Percival John Delamere," he was saying to himself.

"I have not got my facts twisted?" the other proceeded. "You are Lord Shortlands?"

Though still wary, the fifth earl saw no harm in conceding this. He said he was, and the young man said he had been convinced of it; he, the fifth earl, having changed very little since the old days; looking, in fact, or so it seemed to him, younger than ever.

Lord Shortlands, though continuing to keep a hand on the money in his pocket, began to like this young man.

"You don't remember me. You wouldn't, of course. It's a long time since we met. Your son Tony brought me to Beevor for the summer holidays once, when we were boys together. Cardinal is the name."

"Cardinal?"

"I mentioned that on the phone this morning, if you remember, but nothing seemed to stir. Nice running into one another like this. How is Tony?"

"He's all right. Cardinal? Out in Kenya, growing coffee and all that. Cardinal?" said Lord Shortlands, his McGuffy-Specialized brain at last answering the call. "Why, you're the chap who's in love with my daughter Terry."

The young man bowed.

"I could wish no neater description of myself," he said. "It cuts out all superfluities and gets right down to essentials. One of these days I shall be President of the United States, but I am quite content to live in history as the chap who was in love with your daughter Terry. It must be a very wonderful thing to have such a daughter."

"Oh, decidedly."

"Makes you chuck the chest out more than somewhat, I should imagine?"

"You betcher."

"I'm surprised you don't go around singing all the time. It was a great relief to me when you told me she was still doing her hair the same way. It would be madness to go fooling about with that superb superstructure. And yet I don't know. I doubt whether any rearrangement of the tresses could destroy their charm. The first time I saw her, she had them down her back in pigtails, and I remember thinking the effect perfect."

"Yes, Terry has pretty hair."

"I would have said gorgeous. I love her eyes too, don't you?"

Lord Shortlands said that he thought his daughter had nice eyes, and the young man frowned.

"Not 'nice.' If we are going to talk about Terry, we must take a little trouble to get the right word. Her eyes are heavenly. I don't suppose there's another pair of eyes like that in existence. How do you check up on her nose? That way it turns up slightly at the tip."

"Ah," said Lord Shortlands, wisely refraining from a more definite expression of opinion in the presence of this evidently meticulous critic, and the young man paused to light a cigarette.

Lord Shortlands goggled at him with a solemn intentness. He could see what Terry had meant about the fellow being good-looking. The word understated it. He was sort of super-Spink. Sitting where he did, he presented his profile to Lord Shortlands, and the latter was able to study its clean-cut lines. There was no getting away from it. The chap began where Spink left off.

Mike Cardinal had finished lighting his cigarette and was ready to talk once more.

"Yes, she's got everything, hasn't she? I don't suppose you've the slightest conception of how I love that girl. What a great day that was when she came back into my life; on the hoof, as it were, and not merely as a golden, insubstantial memory. It happened quite by chance, and at a moment, oddly enough, when I was not thinking of her but of chump chops, Brussels sprouts and French-fried potatoes. I was sauntering through the grillroom here, looking for a table, and I saw a friend of mine sitting with a girl and went over to exchange a word, and—"

"Yes, she told me."

"Ah, she has been talking about me, has she? A promising sign. By the way, have I your permission to pay my addresses to your daughter? One likes to get these things settled."

"Well, dash it, you have been paying your addresses to her."

"Unofficially, yes. But unsuccessfully. And why unsuccessfully? Because unofficially."

"Say that again," said Lord Shortlands, whose mental powers were not at their keenest.

"What I mean is that I have not been going at this thing in the right way. I need official backing. If I had your approval of my suit, I feel sure I could swing the deal. A father's influence means so much. You could put in an occasional good word for me, guiding her mind in the right direction. Above all, you could invite me to Beevor for an indefinite stay, and in those romantic surroundings—"

"No, I couldn't. I can't invite people to Beevor."

"Nonsense. A child could do it."

Well, I can't. My daughter Adela won't let me."

"Ah? A nuisance, that. It's a pity I have never met Lady Adela."

"Wasn't she at Beevor when you were there?"

"No."

"Those were the days," sighed Lord Shortlands.

Mike rose to a point of order. His voice, when he spoke, was a little stern.

"Then how about Stanwood Cobbold?"

"Eh?"

"It seems to me that your whole story about not being able to invite people to Beevor falls to the ground. I was round at his place just now, and his man told me a telegram had arrived for him from you, freely extending your hospitality. I shall be glad to hear what you have to say to that."

"I never sent that telegram. It was Adela. Why. should I want the chap messing around? He's probably a perisher."

"Not at all."

"Well, his father is."

"Ah, there I cannot speak with firsthand knowledge. I have never met his father. But you'll like Stanwood. Everybody does. He's the best fellow that ever stepped, and I love him like a brother. When you get Stanwood, you've got something. However, to return to myself, I should have thought that, considering that I have already visited the castle and apparently gave satisfaction, seeing that nobody slung me out, Lady Adela would have stretched a point."

"Not a hope. She never asks anyone down who doesn't write or paint or something. They have to be these bally artistic blighters."

"Stanwood isn't an artistic blighter."

"He's an exception."

"I don't get in, then?"

"No, you don't."

"Well, it's all very exasperating. You see how I'm handicapped. No wooer can possibly give of his best if he's in London and the divine object is in Kent and won't answer the telephone. Have you a vacancy for a butler?"

Lord Shortlands sighed wistfully.

"I wish I had. But it wouldn't be any use you coming to Beevor. Terry won't marry you."

"She thinks she won't. But once let me get there—"

"There's some reason. She didn't tell me what."

Mike frowned.

"The reason is that she's a little fathead and doesn't know what's good for her," he said. "It is that fatheaded streak that I am straining every nerve to correct. I keep pointing out to her that it's no use looking like an angel if you can't spot a good man when you see one. And that she does look like an angel no one in his senses would deny. For the last five years I've been living in Hollywood, positively festooned with beautiful women, and I've never set eyes on one fit to be mentioned in the same breath with Terry. She stands alone."

"Yes, Terry told me you worked in Hollywood. Motion-picture agent or something, aren't you?"

"That's right."

"Must make a good thing out of it, what?"

"Quite satisfactory. Have no fear that I shall not be able, when the moment comes, to support your daughter in the style to which she has become accustomed. But it is absolutely essential, as I say, that I come to Beevor, for this business of pressing my suit by mail and having her tell someone to say 'She says she won't' on the telephone is getting me nowhere. Try to think of some method whereby I can be eased into the dear old place."

Lord Shortlands thought hard. An obviously amiable and well-disposed son-in-law with a lucrative connection in Hollywood was just what he had been scouring the country for for years. He was still thinking when Stanwood Cobbold returned, looking brighter and fitter. The cold-water cure had proved effective.

"Hiya, Mike," he cried, in quite a buoyant tone.

"Hello, there," said Mike, "You look extraordinarily roguish. How come? I stopped in at your place on my way here, and Augustus Robb told me you were a sort of living corpse."

"I had a Turkish bath, and I've just been putting my head under the cold tap."

"I see. Do you know Lord Shortlands?"

"Never heard of the guy."

"This is Lord Shortlands."

"Oh, sure, I know him. We've just been chatting. He was telling me about his cook."

"And this, Lord Shortlands, is the Stanwood Cobbold of whom you have heard so much; your forthcoming guest, who ... Why, what's the trouble?" asked Mike, concerned. Some powerful upheaval appeared to be taking place in the older man's system, manifesting itself outwardly in a sagging jaw and a popeyed stare of horror.

"Is your name Stanwood Cobbold?" cried Lord Shortlands, seeming to experience some difficulty in finding utterance.

"Sure. Why not? What's biting him, Mike?"

Mike was wondering the same thing himself. He hazarded a possible conjecture.

"I think it's joy. Augustus Robb tells me you are leaving today for Beevor Castle in the county of Kent. Lord Shortlands, who owns Beevor Castle, will consequently be your host. Apprised of this, he registers ecstasy. As who would not?"

Lord Shortlands was still finding it hard to speak.

"But this is terrible!"

"Oh, come. There's nothing wrong with Stanwood."

"You see, I want to marry my cook—"

"Well, that's all right by me. How about you, Stanwood?"

"—and I told him. Suppose, when he gets to Beevor, he lets it out to my daughter Adela?"

"She would not be pleased?"

"She would make my life a hell on earth. Is he the sort of chap who's likely to go babbling?" asked Lord Shortlands, fastening his protruding eyes on Stanwood as if seeking to read his very soul.

"I fear he is."

"Good Lord!"

"There is no vice in Stanwood Cobbold. His heart is the heart of a little child. But like the little child whom in heart he so resembles, he has a tendency to lisp artlessly whatever comes into his head. His reputation is that of a man who, if there are beans to be spilled, will spill them with a firm and steady hand. He has never kept a secret, and never will. His mother was frightened by a B.B.C. announcer."

"Oh, my God!"

"Inevitably there will come a time at Beevor Castle when, closeted with Lady Adela and hunting around for some theme to interest, elevate and amuse, he will turn the conversation to the subject of you and the cook. He will mean no harm, of course. His only thought will be to make the party go."

"Great heavens!"

"Most probably the disaster will occur at the dinner table this very night. One can picture the scene. The fish and chips have been dished out, and Stanwood starts digging in. 'Egad, Lady Adela,' he says, speaking with his mouth full. 'You have a darned good cook.' 'Glad you think so, Mr. Cobbold. Eat hearty.' 'Is that the cook Lord Shortlands wants to marry?' says Stan-wood. 'I'm not surprised. I'd like to marry her myself.' That's a thing you want to be prepared for."

"This is frightful!"

"Yes, one can picture your embarrassment. That'll be the time to keep cool. But fortunately I have a suggestion to make which, if adopted, will, I think, ease the situation quite a good deal. How do you react to the idea of his staying in London and not going to Beevor at all?"

Stanwood frowned. He had been feeling so much better, and now all this.

"But I've got to go to Beevor, you poor fish. Father says so."

Lord Shortlands, too, seemed displeased.

"Exactly. It is not kind, my dear fellow, to talk drivel at such a moment. Adela sent me in to fetch him. What's she going to say if I return alone?"

"You won't return alone. I shall be at your side. I ought to have mentioned that earlier."

"You?"

"It seems the logical solution. I want to go to Beevor, Stanwood wants to remain in London, you want a guest who can be relied on not to introduce the cook motif into the conversation. The simple ruse which I have suggested would appear to make things all right for everybody."

Lord Shortlands was a slow thinker.

"But Adela doesn't want you. She wants him."

"Naturally, in embarking on such an enterprise, I should assume an incognito. The name Stanwood Cobbold suggests itself."

Stanwood uttered a piercing cry of ecstasy. It made his head start aching again, but one cannot always be thinking of heads.

"Gosh, Mike, could we swing it?"

"It's in the bag."

"This is genius."

"You must expect that when you string along with me."

"Gee, and it's only about half an hour since I was calling Eileen up and telling her I'd got to leave her. I must rush around and see her at once."

"How about our lunch?"

"To hell with lunch."

"And how about Augustus Robb?"

"To hell with Augustus Robb."

"His heart was set on this visit."

"To hell with Augustus Robb's heart and his lungs and his liver, too. If he starts acting up, I'll poke him in the eye," said Stanwood, and departed like one walking on air.

Lord Shortlands, who could work things out if you gave him time, was beginning to get it now.

"You mean you'll come to Beevor instead of him?"

"Exactly."

"Pretending to be him, and so forth?"

"That's right. It's a treat to see the way you're taking hold."

"But, dash it."

"Something on your mind?"

"How can you? Terry knows you. And, by Jove, now I remember, she knows him, too. Used to lunch with him and all that."

"I had not overlooked the point you raise. I am taking it for granted that a daughter's love will ensure her silence."

"That's true. Yes, I suppose it will."

"It might, however, be as well to call her up and prepare her."

"But she's here. Is it half-past one?"

"Just on."

"Then she'll be out in the lobby. 1 told her to be there at half-past one."

"This is glorious news. A chat with Terry is just what I wanted, to make my day. I have a bone to pick with that young half-wit. She and her 'She says she won't's. Hello, what's this?"

A small boy in buttons had entered the bar. All the employees of Barnbault's Hotel have sweet, refined voices. This lad's sweet, refined voice was chanting "Lord Shortlands. Lord Shortlands."

Lord Shortlands cocked an enquiring eye at Mike.

"He wants me."

"Who wouldn't?"

"Here, boy."

"Lord Shortlands, m'lord? Wanted on the telephone, m'lord."

"Now, who the deuce can that be?" mused Lord Shortlands.

"Go and see," suggested Mike. "I, meanwhile, will be having the necessary word with Terry. Do you mind if I rub her turned-up little nose in the carpet?"

"Eh?"

"'She says she won't,' indeed!" said Mike austerely.

7

Barribault's hotel being a favourite haunt of the wealthy, and the wealthy being almost uniformly repulsive, its lobby around the hour of one-thirty is always full of human eyesores. Terry in her new hat raised the tone quite a good deal. Or so it seemed to Mike Cardinal. She was sitting at a table near two financiers with four chins, and he made his way there and announced his presence with a genial "Boo!" in her left ear. Having risen some six inches in a vertical direction, she stared at him incredulously.

"You!"

"You should have put your hand to your throat and rolled your eyeballs," said Mike. "It is the only way when you're saying 'You!' Still, I know what you mean. I do keep bobbing up, don't I? One realizes dimly how Mary must have felt."

"Yes, I think you must have lamb blood hi you. Delighted to see you, of course."

"Naturally."

"But how did you know I was here?"

"Your father told me."

"You've met him?"

"Just now."

"It's a small world, isn't it?"

"Not in the least. Why do you speak of it in that patronizing way? Because I met your father? We could hardly have helped meeting. He was in the bar, and I came in, and there we were, face to face."

"Was he enjoying himself? Till then, I mean."

"He seemed happy."

"Not too happy?"

"Oh no."

"You see, today is his birthday, and he rather hinted that he intended to celebrate. I don't quite like this lounging hi bars."

"He has ceased to lounge. He was called to the telephone."

"Called to the telephone?"

"Called to the telephone, Mister Bones. Why not?"

"But who could have been calling him?"

"I'm afraid I couldn't tell you. I'm a stranger in these parts myself."

"Nobody knows he's here, I mean. Except the family at home, of course."

"Then perhaps it was the family at home. Look, do you mind if we change the subject? I think we've about exhausted it. Let us speak of that letter I wrote you. Well-expressed, didn't you think? Full of good stuff? The phrases neatly turned?"

"Very."

"So a friend of mine named Augustus Robb considered. I came in and found him reading it. A winner, he said cordially, and Augustus Robb is not a man who praises lightly. Personally, I thought it a composition calculated to melt a heart of stone. That's going to drag home the gravy,' I said to myself as

I licked the stamp. But I was wrong, it seems. Or did your father report you incorrectly when he said 'She says she won't'?"

"No. That was what I told him to say."

"Your idea being to break it gently?"

"You wouldn't have had me be abrupt?"

"Of course not. So you won't marry me?"

"No."

"Somebody's got to."

"Not me."

"That's what you say now, but I don't despair."

"Don't you?"

"Not by a jugful. Much may be done by persistence and perseverance. I shall follow you around a good deal and keep gazing at you with the lovelight in my eyes, and one of these days my hypnotic stare will do the trick. It's like a dog at mealtime. You say to yourself 'I will not feed this dog. It is not good for him,' but he keeps his pleading eye glued on you, and you weaken. Talking of marrying, your father tells me he wants to marry the cook. I said he might."

"Oh, Shorty! I knew something would happen if I let him run around loose in London with all that money in his pocket. Did he really get as confidential as that? You won't go spreading it about, will you?"

"My lips are sealed."

"If my sister Adela ever heard about it, his life would not be worth a moment's purchase."

"She shall never learn his secret from me. Clams take my correspondence course."

"That's good. And now tell me how you come to be here. Lunching with some girl, I suppose?"

"Not at all. Stanwood Cobbold."

"Really? Dear old Stanwood. Bless his heart."

"Amen. He brought us together. Do you remember that day? You were sitting there in the grillroom', listening to him telling you about La Stoker, and I came along. 'Good Lord,' I said to myself. 'I believe it's Terry!'"

"And was it?"

"Yes."

"I don't call that much of a story."

"It's a peach of a story. I don't know what more you want."

"Has Stanwood told you that he's coming to Beevor?"

"He isn't."

"Yes, he is. We're taking him back with us this afternoon. His father cabled Shorty, asking him to put Stanwood up."

"I know all that. The old man wants to get him out of the orbit of the Stoker, who has just arrived in London. But you haven't got the scenario absolutely correct. To give you a complete grasp of it I shall have to go back to the beginning. I came here to meet Stanwood, and ran into your father. All straight so far?"

"Quite."

"Good. Well, for a while, as I told you, he appeared quietly happy. I introduced myself, and we chatted at our ease. About you, and how lovely your hair was and how your nose turned up at the tip and how I was going to marry you, and so on and so forth. All very pleasant and cosy. And then Stanwood blew in, and his happiness waned."

"Didn't he like Stanwood?"

"That's just the trouble. He loved him not wisely but too well. Apparently they had met earlier in the proceedings and formed a beautiful friendship. You know those friendships where Friend A can conceal nothing from Friend B, and vice versa."

"You don't mean he—"

"Exactly."

"Oh, Shorty, Shorty, Shorty!"

"No doubt Stanwood began by telling your father all about the Stoker, and your father, not to be outdone in the courtesies, told Stanwood all about the cook. Not being aware who he was, of course. In these casual encounters in bars names are rarely exchanged. Until I introduced them, Stanwood had been to your father merely a pleasant stranger who looked like a hippopotamus."

"He does look like a hippopotamus, doesn't he?"

"Much more than most hippopotamuses do."

"Not that it matters."

"Not in the least."

"The important thing is, can he keep a secret? Because if he's coming to Beevor—"

"—He will meet your sister Adela. And if he mentions this little matter to your sister Adela, hell's foundations are going to quiver. Precisely. That was the reflection which cast a shadow on your father's sunny mood. He sought for reassurance, but I was not able to give him any. In the lexicon of Stanwood Cobbold, I was compelled to tell him, there is no such word as reticence. He is a beans-spiller of the first order. Over in America we seldom advertise in the papers now. If there is anything we want known, we just tell Stanwood. It's cheaper."

"But this is frightful."

"Exactly what your father said."

"Oh, my goodness."

"I'm not sure if he said that, too, but I think so. The drama gets you, does it? I thought it would. But it's all right. I've only been working up the agony in order to make the happy ending more of a punch."

"Is there a happy ending?"

"There always is when I take things in hand. I found the solution first crack out of the box."

"Are there no limits to the powers of this wonder man?"

"None have yet been discovered. My solution was a very simple one. I suggested that Stanwood should remain in London and that I should go to Beevor in his place."

"As him, do you mean?"

"As him," said Mike.

He beamed at her in the manner of one expecting the approving smile and the word of praise, but Terry was looking thoughtful.

"I see."

"Ingenious?"

"Very."

"It's the only way out of what Augustus Robb would call the am-parce. I am taking it for granted, of course, that you will not gum the game by denouncing me."

"Well, naturally. I can't let Shorty down."

"Of course not. Stoutly spoken, young pip-squeak. Well, that's the scheme, and it seems to me ideal. Your sister wants to entertain Stanwood Cobbold, and she will get a far better Stanwood Cobbold than the original blueprints called for. Stanwood wants to stay in London, because of the Stoker. Your father wants him to stay in London, so that his fatal secret may be preserved. And I want to be at Beevor in order to buckle down to my wooing at close range. It is difficult to see how the setup could be improved. We seem to have a full hand. As one passes through this world, one strives always to scatter light and sweetness and to promote the happiness of the greatest number, and here everybody will be pleased."

"Except me."

"Come, come. Is this the tone?"

"I repeat, except me."

"Don't you want me at Beevor, Lady Teresa?"

"I do not, Mr. Cardinal."

"You say that now, but wait till I start growing on you. Wait till my beautiful nature begins to expand before your eyes like some lovely flower unfolding its petals. Don't you see what a wonderful opportunity this will be for you to become hep to my hidden depths?"

"You haven't any."

"I have, too. Dozens."

"I still stick to it that I don't want you at Beevor."

"Well, it's a mercy I'm coming there. How vividly I remember dear old Beevor, with all its romantic nooks and corners. A lovers' paradise. Sauntering in the shrubberies, seated on the rustic benches, pacing the velvet lawns in the scented dusk and fishing for eels together in the moat, we shall soon get all this nonsense about not marrying me out of your head. 'Golly,' you'll say to yourself, 'what a little mutt I must have been not to have recognized at the very outset that this bimbo was my destined mate!' And you will probably shed a tear or two at the thought of all the time you've wasted. Do you realize that we might have been an old married couple by now if you had let yourself think along the right lines?"

"Aren't you keeping Stanwood waiting?"

"He's left. Our lunch is off. I shall take potluck with you and your father."

"You haven't been invited."

"I don't need to be. I'm from Hollywood. Look, he approaches."

Lord Shortlands was crossing the lobby towards them from the direction of the telephone booths, and so arresting was his aspect that Terry gave a little squeak of surprise.

"What on earth is the matter with him?"

The impression Mike Cardinal received was that someone had been feeding his future father-in-law meat, and he said so.

And certainly in Lord Shortlands' demeanour there was a quite unusual effervescence. Though solidly built, he seemed to skip and amble. His whole appearance closely resembled that of Stanwood Cobbold immediately after taking the healing medicine which Augustus Robb had bought at the drugstore. Stanwood's eyes had revolved in their sockets. His did the same. Stanwood had had the air of a man struck behind the ear by an unexpected thunderbolt. So had Lord Shortlands.

"Terry," he cried, "you know that album?"

He had to swallow once or twice before he could proceed.

"I've just been talking to Desborough on the telephone. He says he's found a stamp in it worth well over a thousand pounds!"