Spring Fever

8

From down Westminster way there floated over London the sound of Big Ben striking half-past two, and Augustus Robb came softly into the living room of Number 7 Bloxham House, Park Lane. He had just finished a late lunch, and was now planning to top it off with a good cigar from his employer's box. He was surprised and disconcerted, having made his selection, to observe Stanwood lying on the sofa.

"Why, 'ullo, cocky," he said, hastily thrusting the corona into the recesses of his costume. "I didn't 'ear you come in."

Stanwood did not speak. His face was turned to the wall, and Augustus Robb, eyeing him, came to a not unnatural conclusion.

"Coo!" he exclaimed. "What, again? You do live, chum. Only a few hours since you 'ad one of the biggest loads on I ever beheld in my mortal puff, and here you are once more, equally stinko. Beats me how you do it. Well, it's lucky for you you ain't in my old line of business, because there intemperance hampers you. Yus. I knew a feller once, Harry Corker his name was, Old Suction Pump we used to call him, got into a house while under the influence, caught hold of the safe as it come round for the second time, started twiddling the knobs, and first thing you know he'd got dance music from a continental station. If he hadn't retained the presence of mind to dive through the window, taking the glass with him, he'd have been for it. Steadied him a good deal, that experience. Well, I suppose I'll have to step out and fetch along another bottle of that stuff. I'll tell the young fellow behind the counter to make it a bit stronger this time."

Stanwood sat up. His features were drawn, but his voice was clear and his speech articulate.

"I'm not plastered."

"Ain't you?" said Augustus Robb, surprised. "Well, you look it. Country air's what you need. I've packed."

"Then unpack."

"What? Aren't we going to this Beevor Castle?"

"No," said Stanwood, and proceeded to explain.

One points at Augustus Robb with pride. A snob from the crown of his thinly covered head to the soles of his substantial feet, his heart had been set on going to stay at Beevor Castle. He had looked forward to writing letters to his circle of friends on crested stationery and swanking to them later about his pleasant intimacy with the titled and blue-blooded, and, as he listened to Stanwood's story, he felt like a horn-rimmed spectacled peri excluded from paradise.

But his sterling nature triumphed over the blow. A few muttered "Coo's," and he was himself again. Of all the learned professions none is so character-building as that of the burglar. The man who has been trained in the hard school of porch climbing, where you often work half the night on a safe only to discover that all it contains is a close smell and a dead spider, learns to take the rough with the smooth and to bear with fortitude the disappointments from which no terrestrial existence can be wholly free.

But, though philosophic, he could not approve.

"No good's going to come of this," he said.

"Why not?"

"Never does, cocky, from lies and deceptions. Sooner or later you'll find you've gone and got yourself into a nasty mess with these what I might call subterfuges. 'Oh, what a tangled web we weave, when first we practise to deceive!' I used to recite that as a nipper. Many a time I remember my old uncle Fred giving me a bag of peppermints to stop. Said it 'ampered 'im in the digesting of his dinner. Used to keep the peppermints handy, in case I started. Well, if you're not stinko, what are you looking like that for?"

"Like what?"

"Like the way you are. You look like three penn'orth of last week's cat's meat," said Augustus Robb, who was nothing if not frank.

In ordinary circumstances Stanwood might have hesitated to confide his more intimate secrets to the flapping ears of one whose manner he sometimes found a little familiar and who, he suspected, needed but very slight encouragement to become more familiar still. But a great sorrow had just come into his life, earthquakes and black frosts had been playing havoc with his garden of dreams, and at such moments the urge to tell all to anyone who happens to be handy cannot be resisted.

"If you really want to know," he said hollowly, "my heart's broken."

"Coo! Is it?" Augustus Robb was surprised and intrigued. "Lumme, no that this Stoker jane of yours is in London and you 'aven't got to leave her, I'd have thought you'd have been as happy as a lark. What's gone wrong? Been playing you up, has she? Always the way with these spoiled public favorites. You young fellows will keep giving them flattery and adulation, when what they really need is a good clump over the ear'ole, and that makes 'em get above themselves. Found somebody else, has she, and gone and handed you your hat? I thought something like that would happen."

Stanwood groaned. He was finding his companion's attitude trying, but the urge to confide still persisted.

"No, it's not that. But I went to see her just now—"

"Shouldn't have done that, cocky. Rash step to take. Girls often wake up cross after a binge."

"She wasn't cross. But she told me she had been thinking it over and had made up her mind she wasn't going to get married again unless the fellow had money."

"Mercenary, eh? You're well out of it, chum."

"She's not mercenary, blast you."

"Language!"

"It's just that she says she's tried it a couple of times and it doesn't work. She says you can't stop marriage being a bust if the wife has all the dough."

Augustus Robb seated himself on the sofa and, having shifted his employer's knees to one side, for they were interfering with his comfort, put the tips of his fingers together like Counsel preparing to give an opinion in chambers.

"Well, she's quite right," he said. "You can't get away from that. I wouldn't have thought a Hollywood star would have had so much sense. Never does for the old man to have to keep running to the missus every time he wants a bob for a packet of gaspers or half a dollar to put on some 'orse he's heard good reports of. Prevents him being master in the 'ome, if you follow my meaning. It's 'appened in me own family. My uncle Reginald—"

"Damn your uncle Reginald!"

"Language again." Augustus Robb rose, offended. "Very well, I was going to tell you about him, and now I won't. But the fact remains she's perfectly correct. I'd have thought you'd have seen that for yourself. You don't want to be supported by your old woman, do you? Where's your self-respect?"

"To hell with self-respect!"

"Language once more. I wonder if you've ever considered the risk you're running of everlasting fire? Well what are you going to do about it?"

"I don't know."

"Nor me. Well, I'll tell you what I'll do, seeing that things has arrived at such a pass that it's only 'umane to relax the rules a bit. I'll fetch you a brandy and soda."

"Make it brandy straight."

"All right, churn, if you prefer it. No use spoiling the ship for a ha'p'orth of tar."

It was some little time before Augustus Robb returned, for a ring at the front doorbell had delayed him. When he did so, he found his employer sitting up and taking nourishment in the shape of a cigarette.

"I'll tell you what I'm going to do," said Stanwood, accepting the brandy gratefully. He had the air of one who has been thinking things over. "I'm going to talk her out of it."

Augustus Robb shook his head.

"Can't see how that's to be done," he said. "You aren't in the posish. It would mean pursuing 'er with your addresses; going to 'er and pleading with 'er, if you see what I mean, using all the eloquence at your disposal."

"That's what I'm going to do."

"No, you're not, chum. Talk sense. How can you pursue her with your addresses if she's in London and you're in the country? It's the identical am-parce Mr. Cardinal found himself up against, only there the little parcel of goods was in the country and 'im in London. Still, the principle's the same."

Stanwood, though feeling better after the brandy, was still ill disposed to listen to the gibberings of a valet who appeared to have become mentally deranged. He stared bleakly at Augusuts Robb.

"What are you talking about? I told you I wasn't going to the country."

"But you'll have to, chum, now this cable's arrived."

"What cable?"

Augustus Robb slapped his forehead self-reproachfully.

"Forgot you 'adn't seen it. Be forgettin' me own 'ead next. It come while I was fetching you that brandy, and I was reading it in the hall and left it on the hall table. It's from your pop. There's been a new development."

"Oh, my God! What's happened now?"

"It's about these photografts."

"What photographs?"

"All right, all right, don't bustle me. I'm coming to that. It's a long cable, and I can't remember it all, but here's the nub. Your pop, taking it for granted, as you might say, that you're going to this Beevor Castle, says he wants you to send along a lot of photografts of its interior, with you in 'em."

"What!"

"Yus. Seems funny," said Augustus Robb with an indulgent smile, "anyone wanting photografts of a dial like yours, don't it? But there's a reason. He don't say so in so many words, but, reading between the lines, as the expression is, it's obvious that why he wants 'em is so's he can show 'em around among his cronies in New York and stick on dog. See what I mean? He meets one of his gentlemen friends at the club or wherever it may be, and the gentleman friend says, Tell me, cocky, what's become of that son of yours? Don't seem to have seen 'im around in quite a while.' 'Ho,' says your pop. 'Ain't you 'card? He's residing with this aristocratic English earl at his old-world castle.' 'Coo!' says his pal. 'An earl?' 'Yus,' says your pop. 'One of the best of'em, and the castle has to be seen to be believed. My boy's just sent me some photografts of the place. Look, this is 'im lounging in the amber droring room, and 'ere's another where he's sauntering around the portrait gallery. Nice little place, ain't it, and they treat him like one of the family, he tells me.' And then he puffs out his blinkin' chest and goes off to tell the tale to someone else. Sinful pride, of course, like Jeshurun who waxed fat and kicked, but there you are."

A greenish pallor had manifested itself on Stanwood's face.

"Oh, gosh!"

"You may well say 'Gosh!', though I'm not sure as I'd pass the expression, coming as it does under the 'ead of Language, or something very like it."

"But how can I get photographs of the inside of this foul castle?"

"R. That's what we'd all like to know, isn't it? Properly up against it, you are, ain't you? The Wages of Sin you might call it. Seems to me the only thing you can do is 'urry and catch Mr. Cardinal before he starts and tell him you're going to this Beevor Castle, after all. Look slippy, I should."

Stanwood looked slippy. He was out of the flat in five seconds. A swift taxi took him to Barribault's Hotel. He shot from its interior and grasped the arm of the ornate attendant at the door, a man who knew both Mike and himself well.

"Say, listen," he gasped. "Have you seen Mr. Cardinal?"

"Why, yes, sir," said the attendant. "He's just this minute left, Mr. Cob-bold. Went off in a car with an elderly gent and a young lady."

It seemed to Stanwood that there was but one thing to do. He tottered to the small bar, and feebly asked Aloysius McGuffy for one of his Specials. As he consumed it, staring with haggard eyes into the murky future, he looked like something cast up by the tide, the sort of flotsam and jetsam that is passed over with a disdainful jerk of the beak by the discriminating sea gull.

9

The car rolled in through the great gates of Beevor Castle, rolled up the winding drive, crossed the moat and drew up at the front door; and Mike, looking out, heaved a sentimental sigh.

"How all this takes me back," he said. "It was here that I saw you for the first time."

"Was it?" said Terry. "I don't remember."

"I do. A big moment, that. You were leaning out of that window up there."

"The schoolroom."

"So I deduced from the fact that there was jam on your face. It hinted at schoolroom tea."

"I never had jam on my face."

"Yes, you did. Raspberry jam. I loved every pip of it. It seemed to set off to perfection the exquisite fairness of your skin."

Lord Shortlands heaved like an ocean billow, preparatory to alighting. For the last twenty miles he had been sitting in a sort of stupor, engrossed in thought, but before that, and during the luncheon which had preceded the drive, he had been very communicative. There was nothing now that Mike did not know concerning the Shortlands-Punter romance and the rivalry, happily no longer dangerous, of Spink, the butler. He could also have passed an examination with regard to the stamp.

The stamp, Lord Shortlands had told him, not once but many times, was a Spanish 1851 dos reales blue unused. Desborough, whose industry and acumen could not in his opinion be overpraised, had happened upon it just as the luncheon gong was sounding, with such stirring effects on his morale that for the first time in his association with his wife Lady Adela he had become the dominant male, stoutly refusing to go to the table until he had telephoned the great news to his father-in-law. According to Desborough, a thousand pounds for such a stamp might be looked upon as a conservative figure. A similar one had sold only the other day for fifteen hundred.

"As far as I could follow him, there's an error in colour or something," said Lord Shortlands, returning to the theme as the car stopped. He had mentioned this before, during lunch at least six times and in the earlier stages of the drive another four, but it seemed to him worth saying again. "An error in colour. Those were the words he used. Why that should make it so valuable I'm blessed if I know."

"From what I recall of my stamp-collecting days," said Mike, "an error in colour was always something to start torchlight processions about."

"Used you to collect stamps?" asked Terry.

"As a boy. Why, don't you remember—"

"What?"

"I forget what I was going to say."

"This is disappointing."

"It was probably nothing of importance."

"But one hangs on your lightest word."

"I know. Still, it can't be helped. It may come back. It'll be something to look forward to."

What he was looking forward to, Lord Shortlands said with a grim smile, was the meeting with the viper Spink. By this time, he explained, the news of his sudden accession to wealth must have seeped through to the Servants Hall, and he made no attempt to conceal the fact that he was anticipating considerable entertainment from the sight of his rival's face, the play of expression on which would, no doubt, in the circumstances be well worth watching. He could hardly wait, he said. A mild and kindly man as a rule, Lord Shortlands could be a tough nut in his dealings with vipers.

It was consequently with keen disappointment that he stared at the small maid who had opened the door. To a man who has been expecting to see a butler with heart bowed down, small maids are a poor substitute.

"Hullo! Where's Spink?"

"Mr. Spink's gone off on his motorcycle, m'lord."

"Gone off on his motorcycle?" said Lord Shortlands, obviously disapproving of this athleticism. "What's he gone off on his motorcycle for?"

But the butler, it appeared, was one of those strong, silent butlers. He had not revealed to the maid the motive behind the excursion.

"Oh? Well, all right. Just wanted to see him about something. It'll have to wait. Lady Adela in the drawing room?"

"Yes, m'lord."

"Then come along, Cobbold, my boy. I'll take you to her."

The maid passed out of earshot, and Lord Shortlands seemed to preen himself.

"Notice how I called you Cobbold?"

"Very adroit."

"Can't start too early."

"The start is everything."

"Don't go forgetting."

"Trust me."

"And you, Terry, don't you go forgetting."

"I won't."

"One false step, and ruin stares us in the face."

"Right in the face. But isn't there something you're forfeiting, Shorty?"

"Eh? What's that?"

"The possibility of Adela sticking to this stamp."

Lord Shortlands gaped.

"Sticking to it? You mean keeping it?"

"That's what I mean. I feel I can speak freely before this synthetic Cobbold—"

"Do," said Mike. "Go right ahead. I like this spirit of wholesome confidence."

"—because there isn't much about your private affairs that you haven't already told him. He could write your biography by this time. Suppose she decides to set the stamp against services rendered?"

Lord Shortlands'jaw fell limply.

"She wouldn't do that?"

"She will. I can feel it in my bones."

"And what bones they are!" said Mike cordially. "Small and delicate. When I was a boy, I promised my mother I would never marry a girl who hadn't small, delicate bones."

"You must go and look for one. You and I and Clare between us, Shorty, must owe Desborough well over a thousand pounds by this time for board and lodging, and it isn't a thing Adela is likely to have overlooked."

"Then what the devil are we to do?"

"Would you care to hear my plan?" asked Mike, ever helpful.

"Have you a plan?"

"Cut and dried."

"He always has," said Terry. "They call him the One-Man Brains Trust."

"And not without reason," said Mike. "I'm good. Here is the procedure, as I see it. When we arrive in Lady Adela's presence, you introduce me to her. 'Shake hands with Mr. Cobbold' is a formula that suggests itself."

"'Mitt Mr. Cobbold' would be friendlier."

"She mitts you."

"Exactly. And I hold her hand as in a vise. While she is thus rendered powerless, your father snatches up the album and rushes out and hides it somewhere. This is what is called teamwork."

Lord Shortlands' eyes did not readily sparkle, but they were sparkling now. As far as he was concerned, Mike had got one vote.

"What an admirable idea!"

"I told you I was good. With my other hand I could be choking her."

"I don't think I'd do that."

"It's how I see the scene. Still, just as you please. Tell me," said Mike, the trend of the conversation and certain previous observations on the part of both his host and his host's youngest daughter having suggested a thought to him. "If I am not intruding on delicate family secrets, is your sister Adela what is technically known as a tough baby?"

"None tougher. Her bite spells death."

"I thought as much. Yet here I am, about to stroll calmly into her presence, impersonating an honoured guest, a thing which, if discovered, must infallibly bring her right to the boil. You must be admiring me a good deal."

"Oh, I am."

"'My hero!' you are possibly saying to yourself."

"Those very words."

"So I supposed. Women always admire courage. And how quickly admiration turns to love. Like a flash. It won't be long before you are weeping salt tears and asking me if I can ever forgive you for having tortured me with your coldness. A week at the outside. What is this door before which we have paused?"

"The drawing room. You seem to have forgotten the geography of the house."

"They didn't allow me in the drawing room much, when I was here before. Rightly or wrongly, they considered that my proper place was in the tool shed, playing ha'penny nap with Tony and the second footman. All right, Lord Shortlands, lead on."

Lord Shortlands led on.

There was a moment, when Mike caught his first glimpse of Lady Adela Topping, when even his iron courage faltered a trifle. He had been warned, of course. They had told him that the chatelaine of Beevor Castle was a tough baby. But he had not been prepared for anything quite so formidable as this. Lady Adela had just returned from the garden and was still holding a stout pair of shears, and the thought of what a nasty flesh wound could be inflicted with these had a daunting effect.

And apart from the shears he found her appearance intimidating. She was looking even more like Catherine of Russia than usual, and it is pretty generally agreed that Catherine of Russia, despite many excellent qualities, was not everybody's girl.

However, he rallied quickly and played his part well in the scene of introduction, helped not a little by the fact that his hostess was showing her most affable and agreeable side. His spectacular good looks had made a powerful impression on the woman behind the shears, who noted with approval that Terry also was looking her best. It seemed to Lady Adela that it would be a very young man who could fail to be attracted by so alluring a girl, and that Terry, for her part, unaccountable though she was in many ways, could scarcely remain indifferent for long to such outstanding physical qualities in a man whose father was a millionaire. She was cordiality itself to Mike.

"So delighted that you were able to come, Mr. Cobbold."

"So kind of you to have me, Lady Adela."

"I hope you will like it here. Terry must show you round after tea."

"She was just suggesting it."

"The rose garden—"

"She particularly mentioned the rose garden. She was telling me how romantic and secluded it was. 'We shall be quite alone there,' she said."

"Your window looks out on it. You might show Mr. Cobbold his room, Terry. There is just time before tea. He is in the Blue Room."

The door closed behind Terry and Mike, and Lord Shortlands, who during these polished exchanges had been shuffling his feet with some impatience, opened the subject nearest his heart.

"Where's that stamp?" he demanded.

"Stamp?" Lady Adela seemed to come out of a trance. In moving to the door Mike had shown his profile to her and she had been musing on it in a sort of ecstasy. Surely, she was feeling, a profile like that, taken in conjunction with a father's bank balance . . . "Oh, the stamp? You mean the one Desborough found."

"Yes. I want it in my possession."

"But it's not yours."

"Yes, it is. Certainly it's mine."

"Oh, of course, I had forgotten. You don't know. That wasn't your album. After lunch Clare started hunting around for things for her jumble sale, and she found yours at the back of one of the drawers of the desk in your study. It had your name on it, so there can't be any mistake. So the other one must belong to Spink."

A nightmare feeling that the solid floor was slipping from under him gripped Lord Shortlands.

"Spink!"

The name Spink has qualities—that "s" at the begining, which you can hiss, and that strong, culminating "k"—which render it almost perfect for shouting at the top of his voice. It was at the top of his voice that Lord Shortlands had shouted it, and his daughter quivered as if he had hit her.

"Father! You nearly deafened me."

"Spink?" repeated Lord Shortlands, a little more on the piano side, but still loudly.

"Yes. Desborough was talking about the stamp at lunch, and Clare was telling Mr. Blair how she had found the album in a cupboard, and after lunch Spink came to me and explained that it was one which had been given him by Mr. Rossiter, the son of those Americans who took the castle last summer. He said he had been looking for it everywhere."

Lord Shortlands clutched for support at a chair. He was conscious of a feeling that it was very hard that a man with a high blood pressure should be subjected to this kind of thing. He could not forget that it was the death by apoplectic stroke of his uncle Gervase that had enabled him to succeed to the title.

"Spink said that?"

"Yes."

Lord Shortlands suddenly came to life.

"It's a ramp!" he cried passionately.

Every instinct told him that Mervyn Spink's story was a tissue or, putting it another way, a farrago of falsehood. Do Americans who take castles for summers give butlers stamp albums? Of course they don't. They haven't any, to start with, and if they have they don't give them away. What on earth would they give them away for? And who ever heard of a philatelist butler? Preposterous, felt Lord Shortlands.

"It's a bally try-on!" he thundered.

"I don't know what you mean. Spink tells me he has collected stamps since he was a boy, and I see nothing improbable in his story. Anyhow, he claims the thing."

"I don't care if he claims it till he's blue in the face."

Lady Adela's eyebrows rose.

"Well, really, Father, I can't see why you are making such a fuss."

"Fuss!"

"I mean, it isn't as if there were any chance of it being yours. And it must belong to somebody, so why not Spink? No doubt Mr. Rossiter did give it to him. It's just the sort of thing an American would do."

"Well, I strongly protest against your handing this stamp over to Spink till he produces Rossiter. His statement is that Rossiter gave it to him. All right, then, let him produce Rossiter."

"He's going to."

A faint gleam of hope illumined Lord Shortlands' darkness.

"Then you haven't given it to him?"

"Naturally not on his unsupported word. He says he thinks Mr. Rossiter is in London, and he has gone up to try to find him. In the meantime the stamp will be quite safe. I have got it locked away. Ah, tea," said Lady Adela welcomingly.

Lord Shortlands, though generally fond of his cup at this hour, exhibited no corresponding elation. He was staring before him with unseeing eyes and wishing that the kindly Aloysius McGuffy could have been at his side, to start shaking up six or seven of his justly famous Specials.

10

A song on his lips and the sparkle of triumph in his eye, opening his throttle gaily and tooting his horn with a carefree exuberance, Mervyn Spink sped home from London on his motorcycle, his air that of a man who sits on top of the world. Only the necessity of keeping both hands on the handle bars prevented him patting himself on the back.

The world was looking very beautiful to Mervyn Spink. He gazed at the blue skies, the fleecy clouds, the fluttering butterflies, the hedgerows bright with wild flowers and the spreading fields of wheat that took on the appearance of velvet rubbed the wrong way as the light breeze played over them, and approved of them all, in the order named. He did not actually sing "tra-la," but it was a very close thing. In the whole of Kent at that moment you could not have found a more cheerio butler.

The sight of Lord Shortlands standing in the road outside the castle gates increased his feeling of bien-etre. He had been looking forward to meeting Lord Shortlands. A nasty knock, he felt correctly, this stamp sequence would be for his rival, and he wished to gloat on his despair. Mervyn Spink was a man who believed in treating rivals rough.

He braked his motorcycle, removed trousers seat from saddle and alighted.

"Ah, Shortlands," he said.

Lord Shortlands started. His face, already mauve, took on a deeper shade, and his eyes seemed to be suspended at the end of stalks, like those of a snail or prawn.

"How dare you address me like that?"

A frown marred the alabaster smoothness of Mervyn Spink's brow.

"We'd better get this settled once and for all, Shortlands," he said coldly. "Want me to call you 'm'lord,' do you? Well, if we were the other side of those gates, I'd call you 'm'lord' till my eyes bubbled. But when I'm off duty and we meet in the public highway, I am no longer your employee."

It was a nice piece of reasoning, well expressed, but Lord Shortlands continued dissatisfied.

"Yes, you are."

"No, I'm not. We're man and man. If you think otherwise, you can complain to her ladyship. It'll mean telling her the whole story and explaining just how matters stand between us, but I don't mind that, if you don't."

The purple flush died out of Lord Shortlands' face. A man with his consistently high blood pressure could not actually blench, but he came reasonably near to doing so. The picture those words had conjured up had made him feel as if his spine had been suddenly removed and the vacancy filled with gelatine. His manner, which had had perhaps almost too much in it of the mediaeval earl dealing with a scurvy knave or varlet, changed, taking on the suggestion of a cushat dove calling to its mate.

"Well, never mind, Spink. Quite all right. The point is—er—immaterial."

"Okey-doke, Shortlands."

"Just a technicality. And now what's all this about that stamp?"

"What about it?"

"My daughter tells me you've claimed it."

"I have."

"Says you say you were given it by this fellow Rossiter. I don't believe it," cried Lord Shortlands, recapturing something of the first fine careless rapture of his original manner. The spirit of his fighting ancestors was once more strong within him, and if he had been Lady Adela Topping herself he could not have been more resolutely determined to stand no nonsense. "It's a bally swindle!"

It seemed for an instant as though Mervyn Spink, in defiance of the first rule laid down by the Butlers Guild for the guidance of its members, was about to laugh. But he managed to check the impulse and to substitute for the guffaw a quiet smile.

"Listen," he said. "I'll tell you something."

Until now we have seen this butler only at his best, a skilful carrier of malted milk and a man whose appearance would have shed lustre on a ducal home; his only fault, as far as we have been able to ascertain, the venial one of liking to have an occasional ten bob on the two-thirty. He now strips the mask from his face and stands revealed as the modern Machiavelli he was. The typewriter falters as it records his words, and even Lord Shortlands, though he had known all along that dirty work was in progress in some form or other, found himself stunned and amazed.

"You're quite right, Shortlands. It is a bally swindle, and what are you going to do about it? Nothing. Because you can't."

He was right, and Lord Shortlands realized it. However bally the swindle, he could make no move to cope with it. His fear of his daughter Adela held him gagged and bound. Tortured by the humiliating sense of impotence, he uttered a wordless sound at the back of his throat. Augustus Robb, in a similar situation, would have said "Coo!" Both would have meant the same thing.

"Young Rossiter didn't give me that album. I've never seen the thing in my life. But I've a nephew on the stage who plays character parts and doesn't stick at much, so long as he knows there's something in it for him. Well, he's going to play another character part tomorrow. I've just been to see him, and we've fixed everything up."

He paused for an instant, his face darkening a little. The only flaw in his contentment was the lurking feeling that a shade more energy on his part during the initial bargaining might have resulted in his nephew closing for fifty quid, instead of sticking out, as he had done, for ten down and a further ninety on the completion of the deal. But a man about to collect fifteen hundred can afford to be spacious, and he had brightened again when he resumed his remarks.

"I'm telling her ladyship that I had the good luck to catch Mr. Rossiter on the eve of his departure for France, and that he'll be delighted to stop off at the castle tomorrow on his way to Dover and substantiate my claim. You'll be seeing him about lunch time. So there you are. All nice and smooth, I call it."

Lord Shortlands did not reply. He turned and started to totter home. Mervyn Spink wheeled his motorcycle beside him.

"Beautiful evening, m'lord," he said deferentially. They had passed through the gates. "Weather keeps up nicely, m'lord."

He contemplated his companion's face with all the pleasure he had known he was going to feel at the sight of it. Lord Shortlands was looking like Stanwood Cobbold on the morning after. Transferring his gaze to the local flora and fauna, Mervyn Spink felt more uplifted than ever. He drew satisfaction from the lilac bush that blossomed to the left and from the bird with the red beak which had settled on a tree to the right. And perhaps the best proof of his exalted frame of mind is that he found something exhilarating even in the appearance of Cosmo Blair, the playwright, who came towards them at the moment, smoking a cigarette. For this gifted man, though the author of half a dozen dramas which had brought him pots of money both in England and in the United States, was in no sense an eyeful. The normal eye, resting upon Cosmo Blair, was apt to blink and turn away.

Successful playwrights as a class are slender. Vertically there may be quite a lot, though not more than their admirers desire, of George S. Kaufman and, in a greater degree, of Robert E. Sherwood, but you can hardly see them sideways. Cosmo Blair struck a new note by being short and tubby. Lord Shortlands had called him a potbellied perisher; and though the fifth earl was prejudiced, his young guest having an annoying habit of addressing him as "My dear Shortlands" and contradicting every second thing he said, it must be admitted that there was something in the charge.

He scanned the pair through a glistening eyeglass.

"Ah, my dear Shortlands."

Lord Shortlands uttered a sound like a cinnamon bear with a bone in its throat.

"Ah, Spink."

"Good evening, sir."

"Been out for a ride?"

"Yes, sir."

"Nice evening."

"Extremely, sir."

"Oh, by the way, Spmk," said Cosmo Blair.

He, too, was feeling serene and contented. There had been crumpets for tea, dripping with butter, as he liked them, and after tea he had read his second act again to Clare. Her outspoken admiration had been very pleasant to him, inducing a sensation of benevolence towards his fellows, and this benevolence had been increased by the beauty of the spring evening. He looked at Mervyn Spink and was glad that it was within his power to do him a kindness.

"By the way, Spink, you remember asking me the other day to do something for that nephew of yours, the actor? Roland Winter, didn't you say his name was?"

"Roland Winter, yes, sir."

"Is he fixed up just now?"

"No, sir. He is at present at liberty."

"Well, I've got something for him in this thing I'm writing. It's an odd thing, my dear Shortlands," said Cosmo Blair, drawing at his cigarette, "how one forgets people. This nephew of our good friend Spink. I've been trying ever since he spoke to me to think why the name Roland Winter was familiar, and I only remembered this afternoon. I had him in a show of mine last year, and he was quite—"

He had been about to say "good," but the word changed on his lips to a startled exclamation. The motorcycle had fallen from Mervyn Spink's nerveless fingers with a crash.

"You know my nephew, sir?"

"Oh, rather. Tall, thin chap with a slight squint and a funny-shaped mouth. Red hair hasn't he got? Yes, now I recall it, red hair. Well, tell him to go and see Charlie Cockburn at the St. George's. I'll drop Charlie a line."

Cosmo Blair went on his way, conscious of a good deed done, and Lord Shortlands uttered an explosive "Ha!"

"Now how about it, you Spink?" he cried exultantly.

Mervyn Spink did not speak. His face was very sad.

"If this blighter Blair knows your blighted nephew so well," proceeded Lord Shortlands, elaborating his point and making it clear to the meanest intelligence, "how the dickens do you propose to introduce him into the place as this blighted Rossiter? You're pipped, Spink. Your whole vile scheme strikes a snag."

Mervyn Spink did not deign to reply. Sombrely he picked up the motorcycle, sombrely mounted it, sombrely opened the throttle and rode off in the direction of the village.

His heart, so light before, was heavy now. He looked at the blue skies and fleecy clouds and took an instant dislike to them. He resented the presence of the fluttering butterflies. The fields of wheat jarred upon his eye. There are few things which more speedily modify the Pippa Passes outlook on life of a butler who has been congratulating himself on having formulated a cast-iron scheme for putting large sums of money in his pocket than the discovery that that scheme, through the most capricious and unforeseeable of chances, has come unstuck.

"Hell!" mused Mervyn Spink, brooding darkly.

At the post office he alighted and dispatched a telegram to his nephew, briefly canceling all arrangements; then rode sombrely back to the castle and sought refuge in the seclusion of his pantry.

He had been sitting there for some little time, feeling with the poet that of all sad words of tongue or pen the saddest are these—It might have been, when the bell of Lady Adela's room rang.

Bells must be answered, though the heart is aching.

"M'lady?"

"Oh, Spink, Mr. Cobbold has arrived. Will you go and see that he has everything he wants."

"Very good, m'lady."

"Did you find Mr. Rossiter?"

"No, m'lady. I regret to say that the gentleman is not at the moment in London."

"But you will be able to get in touch with him?"

"No doubt, m'lady."

Mervyn Spink departed on his errand. He experienced no soaring of the spirits at the prospect of renewing his acquaintance with one with whom his relations had once been cordial. During their association in Mr. Ellery Cobbold's palatial home at Great Neck he had found Stanwood a pleasant and congenial companion, practically a buddy; for Stanwood, a gregarious soul, had often dropped in on him for a drink and a chat and on several occasions they had attended prize fights together.

But as he approached the Blue Room his heart was still heavy.

11

In the Blue Room, Mike, dressed and ready for dinner, was thoroughly approving of his quarters. To Lord Shortlands, that modern Prisoner of Chillon, everything connected with Beevor Castle might be the abomination of desolation, but to Mike, coming to it with a fresh eye, the Blue Room seemed about as satisfactory a Blue Room as a man could wish for.

Its windows, as his hostess had stated, looked out upon the rose garden and beyond it on a pleasing panorama of woods and fields, rooks cawing in the former, rabbits moving briskly to and fro in the latter, and its interior was comfortable, even luxurious. He particularly like the easy chair. Too often in

English country-house bedrooms the guest finds himself fobbed off with something hard and upright constructed to the order of some remote ancestor by the upholsterer of the Spanish Inquisition, but this one invited repose.

He was reclining in it with his feet on the table, thinking long, lingering thoughts of Terry, when his reverie was interrupted. The door had opened, to reveal a handsome stranger, from his dress and deportment apparently the castle butler. He eyed him with interest. This, then, was the Spink whose rivalry had caused Lord Shortlands so much concern, the cork-drawing Adonis who had threatened at one time to play the Serpent in his lordship's Garden of Eden. He could understand how any earl might have feared such a man.

"Good evening, sir."

"Good evening."

On Spink's mobile lips, in spite of his heaviness of heart, there had appeared a faint, respectful smile; the smile of a butler who sees that an amusing blunder has been made by those higher up. G.H.Q. had told him that he would find Stanwood Cobbold in the Blue Room. This was unquestionably the Blue Room, but the man before him was not his old buddy.

"Excuse me, sir, I must have misunderstood her ladyship. I supposed her to say that Mr. Cobbold was occupying this apartment."

"I'm Mr. Cobbold."

Butlers do not start. Spink merely rippled a little.

"Mr. Stanwood Cobbold?"

"That's right."

There was a short pause. Then Spink said, "Indeed, sir?"

It is a very unintelligent butler who, expecting to see in a Blue Room a Stanwood Cobbold with a face like a hippopotamus and finding himself confronted by one with a face like a Greek god, does not suspect that there is funny business afoot. To Spink, who was highly intelligent, the very air seemed thick with funny business, and his eye grew stern and bleak.

And simultaneously there came to him, for his was a mind that worked like a steel spring where his financial interests were concerned, the thought that here was where he might be able to do something towards repairing the ruin of his fortunes. Young men who come to castles calling themselves Stanwood Cobbold when they are not Stanwood Cobbold not do so without an important reason, and a butler who knows their secret may reasonably expect to exact the price of his silence. It seemed to Mervyn Spink that things were looking up.

"I wonder if I might make an observation, sir?"

"Go ahead."

"I would merely wish to remark that I know Mr. Stanwood Cobbold extremely well."

Mike saw that he had made a mistake about that easy chair. He had supposed it comfortable, and in reality it was red hot. He left it quickly.

"You do?"

"Yes, sir. I was for nearly a year in the employment of Mr. Cobbold senior at his home in Great Neck, Long Island, and saw Mr. Stanwood daily."

Mike ran a finger around the inside of his collar. It had seemed, when he put it on, a well-fitting collar, but now it felt unpleasantly tight.

"This opens a new line of thought," he said.

"I fancied it might, sir."

"A new and very interesting line of thought."

"Yes, sir."

The fact that he was still calling him "sir" suggested to Mike that the other had not, as a lesser butler would have done, leaped immediately to the conclusion that he was visiting Beevor Castle in the hope of making away with the spoons. No doubt some subtle something in his appearance, some touch of natural dignity in his bearing, had caused the man to reject what on the face of it would have been the obvious explanation of his presence.

This encouraged him. He would have been the last person to dispute that the situation still presented certain embarrassing features, but the thought came to him, remembering that all men have their price, that it might be possible by exploring every avenue to find some formula that would be acceptable to both parties. There were, in short, in the Blue Room at that moment two minds with but a single thought.

He proceeded to try to pave the way to an understanding.

"Your name is Spink, I believe?"

"Yes, sir."

"Then sit down at this table, Spink. It is, you will notice, a round table, always essential on these occasions. Now, first and foremost, Spink, we must keep quite cool."

"Yes, sir."

"We must not lose our heads. We must get together over the round table and thresh this thing out quietly and calmly in a spirit of mutual co-operation."

"Yes, sir."

"I will begin by conceding a point. I am not Stanwood Cobbold."

"No, sir."

"Very good. We make progress. The question now arises, Who am I? Any suggestions?"

"I am not aware of your surname, sir, but I would hazard the conjecture that your first name is Michael."

"This is uncanny."

"I would also hazard the conjecture that you are a friend of Mr. Stanwood, and that you obtained his permission to impersonate him here because you desired to be in the society of Lady Teresa."

"How do you do it? With mirrors?"

Mervyn Spink smiled gently.

"A letter recently arrived for Lady Teresa, couched in impassioned terms and signed 'Mike.'"

"Good God! She didn't show it around?"

"No, sir. A member of the domestic staff came upon it while accidentally glancing through the contents of her ladyship's dressing table and, having perused it, reported its substance to the Servants Hall."

A pretty blush suffused Mike's cheeks. He ground his teeth a little.

"He did, did he?"

"She, sir. It was one of the maids. I rebuked her."

"You didn't wring her neck?"

"That did not occur to me, sir."

"You missed a bet. Did she enjoy it?"

"No, sir. I chided her severely."

"I mean the letter. It entertained her?"

"Yes, sir."

"Fine. One likes to feel that one's letters have given pleasure. Augustus Robb thought it good, too. He looked it over before it left."

"Sir?"

"A London critic. You haven't met him. If you ever do, introduce him to the maid. They will want to swap views on my literary style. Well, seeing that you are so well informed, I will admit that I did come here for the reason you suggest. So where do we go from here? My name, by the way, is Cardinal."

"I have often heard Mr. Stanwood speak of you, sir."

"Very likely. We're old friends. And you're right in supposing that I have his full sympathy and approval in the venture which I have undertaken. He was all for it."

"It is the attitude which one would have expected in Mr. Stanwood. He has a big heart and would, of course, do all that lay in his power to further a friend's romance. But you were saying, sir—"

"Yes, let's get back to it. Where do we go from here?"

"Sir?"

"Come, come, Spink, use the bean. The first essential, as you must see for yourself, is the ensuring of your silence. One word from you to the lady up top, and I am undone."

"Yes, sir."

"How is this silence to be contrived?"

"Well, sir, if I might make the suggestion—"

"You have the floor."

"—I would propose that we came to some amicable arrangement."

"Of a financial nature?"

"Precisely, sir."

Mike drew a breath of relief. It was as he had hoped. They had explored every avenue, and here came the formula, hot from the griddle. He beamed upon Mervyn Spink, as the inhabitants of Ghent no doubt beamed upon the men who brought the good news to that city from Aix.

"Now you're tooting. Now the fog of misunderstanding is dissipated and we can talk turkey. How do you react to the idea of a tenner?"

"Unenthusiastically, sir."

"Ten pounds is nice sugar, Spink."

"Inferior to two hundred, sir."

There was a pause. Mike laughed.

"Funny how one's ears play one tricks. It sounded to me for a moment as though you had said two hundred. Something to do with the acoustics, no doubt."

"That was the sum I mentioned, sir."

Mike clicked his tongue.

"Now listen, Spink. Your comedy is good, and we all enjoy a little wholesome fun, but we mustn't waste time. Twenty was what you meant, wasn't it?"

"No, sir. Two hundred. Mr. Stanwood has frequently spoken of the large income which you make in the exercise of your profession in Hollywood, and I am sure you will feel that two hundred pounds is a small price to pay for the privilege of making an extended stay at the castle. Judging by the tone of your letter."

"I wouldn't harp too much on that letter. I might plug you in the eye."

"Very good, sir."

"Already I feel a strong urge in that direction."

"I am sorry to hear that, sir."

"Two hundred pounds!"

"I require the sum for a particular purpose, sir."

"I know."

"His lordship has confided in you, sir?"

"From soup to nuts. And that's another thing that gives me pause. Apart from the disagreeableness of having to cough up two hundred pounds, there is the Lord Shortlands angle. This is going to be tough on him. It will dish his hopes and dreams."

"Into each life some rain must fall."

"Eh?"

"I was merey wishing to indicate, sir, that you cannot make an omelette without breaking eggs."

"Is this time to talk of omelettes, Spink? You realize, of course, that you are a lop-eared blackmailer?"

"Yes, sir."

"And you don't shudder?"

"No, sir."

"Then there is no more to be said."

"You will find pen and ink on the writing table, sir."

Mike made his way slowly to the writing table, and took pen in hand.

"Well, it's a comfort to think that this sort of thing is bound to grow on you and that eventually you will get it in the neck," he said. "I can read your future like a book. Before long another opportunity of stinging some member of the general public will present itself, and you will be unable to resist it. And after that you will go on and on, sinking deeper and deeper into the mire of crime. The appetite grows by what it feeds on, Spink."

"Yes, sir."

"You don't feel like pulling up while there is yet time?"

"No, sir."

"Just as you say. Let us hurry on, then, to the melancholy end. You will, as I say, go on and on, blackmailing the populace like nobody's business, until one day you make that false step which they all make and—bingo!—into the dock for yours, with the judge saying 'Well, prisoner at the bar, it's been nice knowing you—' And then off to the cooler for an exemplary sentence. I shall come on visiting days and make faces at you through the bars."

"I shall be delighted to receive you, sir."

"You won't be when you see the faces. What's the date?"

"The twelfth of May, sir."

"And your first name?"

"Mervyn, sir."

"A sweet name."

"So my mother felt, sir."

"Can you think of your mother at a moment when you are gouging a stranger, scarcely an acquaintance, for two hundred of the best and brightest?"

"Yes, sir."

"Ponder well, Spink. She is looking down on you from heaven—"

"She lives in East Dulwich, sir."

"Well, from East Dulwich, then. It makes no difference to my argument. She is looking down on you from East Dulwich—"

"If you would kindly make the check open—"

"All right. Here you are."

"Thank you, sir."

"Yes, she is —"

Mike paused. Somebody had knocked on the door.

"Come in."

Lady Adela entered.

"I thought I would come and see if you were all right, Mr. Cobbold," said Lady Adela brightly. "Are you quite comfortable?"

"Very, thank you."

"I suppose you and Spink have been having a talk about old times? He tells me he used to be your father's butler. Did you find Mr. Cobbold just the same, Spink?"

There were things about Mervyn Spink which many people did not like, but he always gave value for money.

"Just the same, m'lady. The sight of him brought back many happy memories. Mr. Stanwood was always very kind to me during the period of my sojourn in the United States of America, m'lady."

From down the corridor came the plaintive note of a husband in distress.

Desborough Topping, hampered by lumbago, was experiencing a difficulty in tying his tie. Like a tigress hearing the cry of her cub, Lady Adela hurried from the room.

"Thank you, Spink," said Mike.

"Not all, sir."

"That handsome testimonial should fix me nicely."

"Yes, sir."

"I wish there was something I could do for you in return."

Mervyn Spink smiled benevolently.

"You have done something, sir."

"The check? You feel satisfied?"

"Entirely, sir."

"Well, that's fine, but you're easily pleased. That check's no good. You will have noted that it is signed 'Michael Cardinal,' which will cause the bank to sling it back at you like a bouncer ejecting a cash customer. For you were mistaken in supposing Michael to be my Christian name. It is Mycroft, like Sherlock Holmes's brother, and that is my official signature. You see what I mean?"

Mervyn Spink reeled. His clean-cut face twisted. If he had had a moustache, he would have looked like a baffled baronet.

"I'll go straight to her ladyship—"

"And tell her that you were mistaken in stating that I was the Stanwood Cobbold who was so kind to you during the period of your sojourn in the United States of America? I wouldn't. It would mean a good deal of tedious explaining. No, no, I think we may look on the incident as closed. This is a glad day for your mother, Spink. The son she loves has been saved from the perpetration of a crime at which her gentle spirit would have shuddered. If you ask me," said Mike, "my bet is that she'll go singing about East Dulwich."

12

Lord Shortlands was beginning to perk up.

For a father whose daughter treats him as a problem child, and is inclined at the slightest offense to stand him in the corner and stop his pocket money, it must always be a matter of extreme delicacy and danger to introduce into that daughter's home a changeling in place of the guest she is expecting to entertain, and during the early stages of Mike's stay at Beevor Castle the fifth earl, fully appreciating this, had run the gamut of the emotions.

At first fear had reigned supreme, causing him to start at sudden noises and to understand with a ghastly clarity what must have been the feelings of that Damocles of whom he had read in his school days. Then gradually hope had come stealing in, stiffening the jellied backbone. But it was only on the evening of the third day, as he sat in his study before dinner prodding the ribs of his dog Whiskers, happily cured of his recent indisposition, that he was able to view the position of affairs with any real confidence. It seemed to him that, as far as the great imposture was concerned, things had settled down nicely.

With regard to the activities of the viper Spink, he continued to feel apprehensive. So far, that snakelike man had been foiled, but he feared for the future. Butlers, he knew, though crushed to earth, will rise again, and he shuddered to think how nearly Mervyn Spink had triumphed already. If it had not been for the quick brainwork of his young friend Cardinal, he realized, this would have been a big week end for vipers.

Mike's description of his duel with Mervyn Spink had thrilled Lord Shortlands to the core. He had no words to express his admiration for the splendid qualities which this beardless youth had displayed in circumstances which might well have proved too much for a veteran strategist, and more and more did it seem to him inexplicable that his daughter Terry, wooed by such a suiter, should not scoop him in with a cry of joy and grapple him to her soul with hoops of steel.

He looked at Terry meditatively, planning the word in season. She had come in a few moments before and was assisting him in his kindly attentions to the dog Whiskers by tickling the latter's stomach.

"Terry," he said.

But before he could proceed further the door had opened and Mike was standing on the threshold.

A gentle glow permeated Mike's system as he surveyed the charming domestic scene. His future wife, his future father-in-law and his future dog by marriage all on the spot and doing their stuff before him. What could be sweeter? It pained him to have to break up the pretty picture, but he had come to impart news, and it must be imparted.

"Good evening, good evening, Lord Shortlands," he said. "Though I'm not sure I like that 'Lord Shortlands.' If you're going to be my father-in-law, I really ought to begin calling you something not quite so formal. 'Pop' or 'Dad' or something. In this connection, I find Desborough Topping a disappointing guide. I had hoped to pick up some hints from him, but he doesn't seem to call you anything, except occasionally 'Er.' I don't like 'Er.'"

"Adela wanted Desborough to call Shorty 'Pater,' " said Terry.

"I don't like 'Pater,' either."

"Nor did Desborough. It was too much for him. So now he just coughs."

"Coughing should be well within my scope."

Lord Shortlands had a better idea.

"Call me 'Shorty,' as Terry does."

"You solve the whole difficulty," said Mike gratefully. "I doubt if coughing would have been really satisfactory. In constant association with a roupy son-in-law, a father-in-law's love falters and dies. Too tedious, always having to be passing the lozenges. Well, Shorty, you are doubtless wondering what brings me here, intruding on your privacy."

"My dear fellow!"

"Intruding, I repeat. No need to tell me I am butting in. But the fact is, I bring news. And not too good news, I'm afraid. Hang on to your chair."

In spite of the fact that his mind, such as it was, was a good deal easier than it had been, it took very little to alarm Lord Shortlands nowadays. At these ominous words he quivered like a blancmange and, as Mike had advised, clutched the arms of his chair in a fevered grip.

"Has Adela found out?" he gasped.

"No, no, no. Not quite so bad as that. It has to do with Stanwood Cobbold. I regret to have to inform you that dear old Stanwood is in our midst."

As far as a man can reel who is seated in an armchair, Lord Shortlands reeled.

"You don't mean that?"

"I do. Stanwood is here. Himself. Not a picture."

Terry squeaked.

"Here in the house?"

"Not actually in the house, no. He is at present infesting the local inn. He sent me a note from there this afternoon, asking me to go and confer with him. But he speaks of paying us a visit."

The dog Whiskers indicated with a gesture that there was still an area of his person which had not been attended to, but Lord Shortlands was in no mood now for massaging dogs.

"My God! He'll meet Adela!"

Mike said that that was precisely the thought which he, too, found disturbing.

"And if he does, and she asks him who he is, you can bet that his instant reply will be 'Stanwood Cobbold, ma'am.' He would never let slip such a gorgeous opportunity of spilling the beans. So I did my best to make him see how essential it was that he should remain at the inn and not move a step in this direction. I assured him that the finest brains at the castle would be strained to their utmost capacity to find a solution for his problem. You see, what has happened is that his father has cabled telling him to send along a number of photographs of the interior of the house with himself prominently displayed in the foreground."

"Good God!"

"The cable apparently arrived the day we left London, and Stanwood has been pondering ever since on what was to be done about it. Last night he got the bright idea that if he came down here, I would be able to sneak him into the place in the early morning and act as his photographer. He has brought a camera."

Lord Shortlands writhed like a wounded snake, and Terry squeaked again.

"The early morning?" moaned Lord Shortlands. "Fatal!"

"The very worst time," agreed Terry. "The place will be seething with housemaids—"

"Who'll take him for a burglar—"

"And scream—"

"Thus bringing Lady Adela to the spot with her foot in her hand and putting us right in the soup," said Mike. "That was the very picture that rose before my eyes when he outlined the scheme. But cheer up. There's nothing to be worried about."

It was a well-intentioned remark, but Terry appeared to take exception to it. Her squeak this time was one of justifiable indignation, and provoked a thoughtful comment from Mike.

"Tell me," he said. "How do you manage to produce that extraordinary sound? It's like a basketful of puppies. I wouldn't have thought the human voice could have done it."

Terry was not to be lured into a discussion on voice production.

"What do you mean by scaring us stiff like that, and then saying there's nothing to be worried about?"

"There isn't. Have I ever let you down?"

"You've never had the chance."

"No, that's true. But I should have thought you would have realized by this time that there is no am-parce so sticky that the Cardinal brain cannot make it play ball. I have the situation well in hand."

"You haven't thought of something?"

"Of course I've thought of something."

"Then I think you might have told us before, instead of giving us heart failure. Shorty has high blood pressure."

"Very high," said Lord Shortlands. "Runs in the family."

Mike saw their point.

"Yes. I suppose you're right. I was to blame. I don't know if you've noticed that I have a rather unpleasant habit of painting a setup in the darkest colours in order to make the joy bells, when they ring, sound louder. It has got me a good deal disliked."

"I don't wonder."

"It's the artist in me. I have to play for Suspense. But you are waiting for the low-down. Here it comes. Is it not a fact that on Saturday afternoons throughout the spring and summer months this historic joint is thrown open to the general public on payment of an entrance fee of a bob a nob?"

"Why, of course!"

"Don't say 'of course' in that light way. You wouldn't have thought of it in a million years."

"Stanwood can come with the crowd—"

"Complete with camera."

"He can get all the photographs he wants."

"Without incurring the least suspicion."

"But how about Spink? He shows them round."

"Disregard Spink. He can't do a thing. We have the Indian, sign on him. Spink is as the dust beneath our chariot wheels."

Terry drew a deep breath.

"You know, you're rather wonderful."

"Why 'rather'?"

"Have you told Stanwood?"

"Not yet. The brain wave came after I had left him. I propose to look in on him tomorrow morning and set his mind at rest. He seemed a little feverish when we parted. That's the trouble with Stanwood. He worries. He lets things prey on his mind. And now ought we not to be making our way to the drawing room? I should imagine that your sister Adela is a woman who throws her weight about a good deal if people are late for dinner."

Lord Shortlands started.

"Has the gong gone?"

"Not yet. But it's past eight."

"Come on, come on, come on!" cried Lord Shortlands, stirred to his depths, and was out of the room in two impressive leaps.

Mike and Terry followed more slowly.

"Did you know," said Mike, "that a flea one twelfth of an inch long, weighing one eighty thousandth of an ounce, can broad-jump thirteen inches?"

"No," said Terry.

"A fact, I believe. Watching your father brought it to my mind. He's very agile."

"Well, you scared him. He's frightened to death of Adela."

"I don't blame him. If the Cardinals knew what fear is, I should be frightened of her myself. As hard an egg as ever stepped out of the saucepan."

"You ought to see her doing her imitation of an angry headmistress."

"Well worth watching, I imagine. Odd how different sisters can be. I can't imagine you scaring anyone. Yours is a beautiful nature: kind, sweet, gentle, dovelike, the very type of nature that one wants to have around the house. Will you marry me?"

"No."

"I think you're wrong. One of these days, when we are walking down the aisle together, with the choir singing 'The Voice That Breathed o'er Eden,' I shall remind you of this. 'Aha!' I shall say. 'Who said she wouldn't marry me?' That'll make you look silly."

They caught Lord Shortlands up at the drawing-room door, and soothed him into something resembling calm. The gong, they pointed out, is the acid test as to whether you are in time for or late for dinner, and the gong had not yet sounded.

So firmly based on reason was their argument that the fifth earl was able to enter the room with almost a swagger. It subsided a little as he saw that they were the last arrivals, but he still maintained a fairly firm front.

"Hullo, hullo," he said. "Dinner's a bit late, isn't it?"

There was no frown on Lady Adela's face. She appeared quite amiable.

"Yes," she said. "I told Spink to put it back ten minutes. We're waiting for Mr. Rossiter."

At the moment of his entry Lord Shortlands had paused at an occasional table and picked up a china ornament, in order to fortify his courage by fiddling with it. At these words, it slipped from his grasp, crashing to ruin on the parquet floor.

"Rossiter!"

"Yes. I wish you wouldn't break things, Father."

At another moment Lord Shortlands would have wilted at the displeasure in his daughter's voice, and would probably have thrown together some hasty story about somebody having joggled his arm. But now he had no thought for such minor matters.

"Rossiter?" he cried. "How do you mean Rossiter?"

"Apparently Mr. Rossiter has been staying at the inn in the village for the fishing. Quite a coincidence that he should have been there just when Spink was trying to find him. Spink happened to go to the inn this evening, and met him. Of course I asked him to come to the castle."

The door opened, and Mervyn Spink appeared. His eye, as it rested upon Lord Shortlands, had in it a lurking gleam.

"Mr. Rossiter," he announced.

Stanwood Cobbold walked into the room, tripping over a rug, as was his habit when he entered rooms.

13

"It's no good looking to me for guidance, my dear Shorty," said Mike. "I'm sunk."

He spoke in response to a certain wild appeal in the other's eye, which he had just caught. Dinner was over, and a council of three had met in Lord Shortlands' study to discuss the latest development. Its president was pacing the floor with his hands behind his back, occasionally removing them in order to gesticulate in a rather frenzied manner. Mike and Terry, the remaining delegates to the conference, were seated. The dog Whiskers was present, but took no part in the proceedings. He was trying to locate a flea which had been causing him some annoyance.

"Sunk," Mike repeated. "I am stunned, bewildered and at a loss. Bouleverse, if you would like a little French."

Lord Shortlands groaned and flung his arms up like a despairing semaphore. He was thinking of Mervyn Spink's face as he had seen it during the recent meal. For the most part, as befitted a butler performing his official duties, it had been impassive; but once, on Lady Adela asking Mr. Rossiter if he remembered having given her head of staff his stamp album and Mr. Rossiter who seemed a nervous young man, inclined to start violently and try to swallow his uvula when spoken to, upsetting his glass and replying "Oh, sure," it had softened into a quick smile. And hi the gesture with which the fellow had offered him the potatoes there had been something virtually tantamount to a dig in the ribs. It had gone through Lord Shortlands like a knife through butter.

"No," said Mike, proceeding, "it's no use my trying to pretend that I am hep. I am not hep. What is all this Rossiter stuff?"

Terry clicked her tongue impatiently, like a worried schoolmistress with a child of slow intelligence.

"Weren't you listening when Adela said that to Stanwood at dinner?"

"Said what?"

"About the album."

"I'm sorry. I missed it."

"Well, Spink is pretending that the album was given him by the son of some Americans named Rossiter who took the castle last summer—"

"The viper!" interpolated Lord Shortlands.

"—and somehow, I can't imagine how, he has got Stanwood to say he is Mr. Rossiter. And when Adela asked him if had given Spink the album, he said he had. Now do you see?"

Mike whistled. Lord Shortlands, whose nervous system had been greatly impaired by the night's happenings, asked him not to whistle, and Mike said that he would endeavour not to do so in future but that this particular whistle had been forced from him by the intense stickiness of the situation.

"I should say I do see," he said. "Has Spink got the stamp, then?"

"No, not yet. He came to the drawing room after dinner and asked for it, but Adela said that it would be much better for her to keep it till Desborough was well enough to go to London. She said he would be able to get a better price than Spink could, because he knows the right people to go to."

"Very shrewd."

"Spink argued a bit, but Adela squashed him."

"Good for her. Well, this is fine. This gives us a respite."

Lord Shortlands was not to be comforted.

"What's the good of a respite? What the dickens does it matter if the fellow gets the thing tonight or the day after tomorrow?"

"The delay, my dear Shorty, is of the utmost importance. It means everything. I have a plan."

"He has a plan," said Terry.

"I have a plan," said Mike. "No need to be surprised. You know my lightning brain. In the interval which elapses before Desborough Topping's lumbago slackens its grip and he is able to travel, we will act. Boys and girls, we are going to pinch this stamp."

"What!"

"Pinch it," said Mike firmly. "Swipe it. Obtain possession of it by strong-arm tactics. Up against this dark and subtle butler, we cannot afford to be too nice in our methods. He has raised the banner with the strange device 'Anything goes.' Let that slogan be ours."

Terry was a girl who believed in giving praise where praise was due, even though there was the risk that such praise might increase the tendency of its recipient to get above himself.

"What a splendid idea. How nice it is to come across someone with a really criminal mind. I suppose this is one of those hidden depths of yours that you were speaking of?"

"That's right. I'm full of them."

Lord Shortlands' conscience appeared to be less elastic than his daughter's. Where she had applauded, he fingered the chin dubiously.

"But I can't go about pinching things."

"Why not?" ' "Well, dash it."

"Oh, Shorty."

"No, he's quite right," said Mike. "I see what he means. He shrinks from smirching the old escutcheon, and I honor him for his scruples. But have no qualms, my dear Shorty. In pinching this stamp you will simply be restoring it to its rightful owner. That album belongs to Terry."

Terry shook her head.

"Well meant, but no good. Shorty knows I haven't collected stamps since I was in the schoolroom."

"It was in the schoolroom that you collected this one. I was on the point of mentioning it when we were getting out of the car the day I arrived, only Shorty was so sure the thing was his that I had hadn't the heart to. Throw your mind back. A rainy afternoon eight years ago. You were sitting at the schoolroom table, covered with glue, poring over your childish collection. I entered and said 'Hello, looking at your stamps?' You came clean. Yes, you said, you were looking at your stamps. 'You don't seem to have many,' I said. 'Would you like mine?', adding that I had recently been given an album full of the dam' things as a birthday present by an uncle who wasn't abreast of affairs and didn't know that it was considered bad form at the dear old school to collect stamps. A pastime only fit for kids."

"Oh, golly. Yes, I remember now."

"I thought you would. So I wrote for it and presented it to you."

"Little knowing that it was a gold mine."

"It would have made no difference if I had known. We Cardinals are like that. Lavish to those we love. You can imagine what excellent husbands we make."

"Well, we Cobbolds have scruples about accepting gifts worth hundreds of pounds from young men who look like Caesar Romero."

"I don't look in the least like Caesar Romero. And I don't see what you can do about it. You took it."

"I can give it back."

"A happy way out of the difficulty would be to turn it over to Shorty."

"That's a wonderful idea. Yes, I'll do that. So you see the stamp does belong to you, Shorty," said Terry. "Thank the gentleman, dear."

"Thanks," said Lord Shortlands dazedly. Things were happening a little too rapidly tonight for his orderly mind, and he had the sense of having been caught up in a cyclone. He was also conscious of a lurking feeling that there was a catch somewhere, if only he could pin it down.

"You are now able," said Mike, pointing out the happy ending, "to tie a can to your spiritual struggles. Your conscience, satisfied that it is being asked to do nothing raw, can spit on its hands and charge ahead without a tremor. Or don't you agree with me?"

"Oh, quite. Oh, certainly. But—"

"Now what?"

"Well, dash it, this stamp's worth fifteen hundred pounds, Desborough says. I can't take fifteen hundred pounds from you, Terry." This was not actually the catch which Lord Shortlands was trying to pin down—that still eluded him—but it was a point that needed to be touched on. "If you could let me have two hundred as a loan—"

"Nonsense, darling. What's mine is yours."

"Well, it's extremely kind of you, my dear. I hardly know what to say."

"Mike's the one you ought to be grateful to."

"I am. His generosity is princely."

"Yes," said Mike. "What an extraordinarily fine fellow this chap Cardinal is turning out to be. But let's stick to business. The proposal before the meeting is that we pinch this stamp before Spink can get his hooks on it. Carried, unanimously, I fancy? Yes, carried unanimously. It only remains, therefore, to decide on the best means to that end. It should not be difficult. A little cunning questioning of Desborough Topping will inform us where Lady Adela is keeping the things. No doubt in the drawer of her escritoire or somewhere. Having ascertained this, we procure a stout chisel and go to it."

"But—"

"Now, don't make difficulties, Shorty darling," said Terry maternally. "You must see that this is the only way. I'll go and question Desborough cunningly."

She went out, and Lord Shortlands continued to exhibit evidence of the cold foot and the sagging spine. Mike looked at him solicitously.

"I still note a faint shadow on your brow, Shorty," he said. "What seems to be the trouble? Not the conscience again?"

Lord Shortlands had found the catch.

"But, my dear fellow, if Adela finds the drawer of her escritoire broken open and the stamp gone, she'll suspect me."

"Well, what do you care? You'll simply laugh at her. 'What are you going to do about it?' you will say, adding or not adding 'Huh?' according to taste. And she will bite her lip in silence."

"Silence?" said Lord Shortlands dubiously.

"She won't have a thing to say. What can she say?"

"H'm," said Lord Shortlands, and so joyless was his manner that Mike felt constrained to pat him on the back.

"Tails up," he urged.

Lord Shortlands' manner continued joyless.

"It's all very well to say 'Tails up.' I don't like it. Apart from anything else, I don't believe I could ever bring myself to break open an escritoire drawer with a chisel. Anybody's escritoire drawer."

"My dear Shorty, is that what's worrying you? I shall attend to that, of course."

"You will?"

"Naturally. It's young man's work."

"Well, I'm very much obliged to you."

"Not at all."

"I wish to goodness Terry would marry you. She'll never get a better husband."

"Keep telling her that. It's exactly what I've always felt. Has she given you any inkling as to what seems to be the difficulty?"

"Not the slightest."

The door opened. Terry had returned. She sat down, and Mike noticed that her manner, which had been one of radiant confidence, was now subdued. Lord Shortlands would have noticed it, too, had he been in better condition tonight for noticing things.

"Well?" said Mike.

"Well?" said Lord Shortlands.

"Well," said Terry, "I saw Desborough."

"Did you find out what you wanted?"

"I found out something I didn't want."

"Less of the mysterious stuff."

Terry sighed.

"I was only trying to break it gently. If you must have it, Desborough suspects Stanwood."

"Suspects him?" cried Lord Shortlands.

"What of?" said Mike.

"Of not being Rossiter."

"But Spink has given him the okay."

"Yes, and that has made Desborough suspect Spink, too. He thinks it's a plot. 'After all,' he said, 'what do we really know of Spink?', and he quoted authorities to show that in nine cases out of ten the butler at a country house turns out to be one of the Black Onion gang or something. I wish he hadn't read so many detective stories."

"But what on earth has made him suspect Stanwood?"

"He took him off after dinner to talk stamps, and of course Stanwood knew nothing about stamps and gave it away in the first minute. The way Desborough has figured it out is that Stanwood and Spink are working together to loot the house. What a pity it is that Stanwood looks so like something out of a crook play. I never saw anything so obviously criminal as his face during dinner."

"So what steps is he planning to take?"

"I don't know. But a step he has taken is to put the stamp in an envelope and lock it up in the safe."

There was a silence.

"In the safe?" said Mike at length.

"Yes."

"Is there a safe?"

"Yes. In the library."

"Of all silly things to have in a house! Well, this, I admit, is a development which I had not foreseen. I shall have to leave you for a while and ponder apart. You will find me in my room, if you want me. Safes, forsooth!" said Mike bitterly, and went out with knitted brow.

It was clear to him that he had here one of those brain-teasers which Sherlock Holmes used to call three-pipe problems, and he made his way to the Blue Room to get his smoking materials.

As he entered, the vast form of Stanwood Cobbold rose from the easy chair.

14

Stanwood was not looking his best. Dinner, with its enforced propinquity to a hostess who had scared the daylights out of him at first sight, and the subsequent tete-a-tete with Desborough Topping had taken their toll. There had been moments in his life when, with representatives of Notre Dame and Minnesota walking about on his face or pressing the more jagged parts of their persons into his stomach, Stanwood Cobbold had experienced a certain discomfort, but nothing in his career to date had ever reduced him to such a ruin of a fine young man as the ordeal which had been thrust upon him tonight. Gazing at him, you would have said that his soul had passed through the furnace, and you would have been perfectly correct. Mike's first act, before asking any questions, was to hurry to the chest of drawers, take out a flask and press it upon his friend.

"Thanks," said Stanwood, handing it back empty. "Gosh, I needed that. I've had one hell of a time, Mike."

Mike, having satisfied the humane side of his nature, was now prepared to be stern.

"Well, you asked for it."

"Who's the little guy with the nose glasses?"

"Desborough Topping, your hostess's husband."

"He's been talking stamps to me," said Stanwood with a reminiscent shudder.

"Well, what did you think he would do? If you horn into a house pretending to be a stamp collector and that house contains another stamp collector, you must expect to be talked stamps at."

"It's the darnedest thing. I don't believe I ever met anyone before who collected stamps. I thought only sissies did. And now I don't seem to meet anyone who doesn't. Kind of a loony setup, don't you think?"

Mike was not to be diverted into an academic discussion of the looniness of the conditions prevailing at Beevor Castle.

"What the devil did you come here for? I told you to stay at the inn till you heard from me."

"Sure, I know. But I had a feeling that you weren't going to deliver. Seemed to me you had lost your grip. So when Spink came along with his proposition, I was ready to do business."

"How did you meet Spink?"

"He blew in just after you had left, and we got together. We had known each other before. We used to be buddies over on the other side. He was Father's butler."

"So he told me."

"Well, I gave him the low-down about the cable and the photographs and asked him if he had anything to suggest, and he said it was a pipe. All I had to do was to say I was this bozo Rossiter, and I was set. I would have the run of the joint, and we could fix up the photographs any time that suited me. Naturally I said Check, and he went to the phone and called Her Nibs up, and she told him to tell me to come along and join the gang."

"What did he say about the album?"

"Nothing much. Just that he wanted it."

"You bet he wanted it. There's a stamp in it worth fifteen hundred pounds."

"Gosh! Really?"

"Which belongs to Terry. Of course she can't prove it, and of course Spink, now that you've gone and butted in, can. What you've done, you poor mutt, is to chisel that unhappy child out of fifteen hundred smackers. A girl who has eaten your salt."

"I don't get this."

"I'll explain it in words of one syllable," said Mike, and proceeded to do so. When he had finished, it was plain that Stanwood was feeling the bitter twinges of remorse. You could see the iron twisting about in his soul.

"Why the hell didn't you wise me up about this before?" he said, aggrieved.

"How was I to know you were going to go haywire and come to the castle?"

"Let's get this straight. If Spink has this stamp old Shortlands won't be able to marry that cook of his."

"No."

"Spink will buy her with his gold."

"Yes."

Stanwood wagged his head disapprovingly.

"No nice cook ought to marry a man like Spink. Funny I never got on to him. I always thought him a swell guy. I used to go to his pantry, dying of thirst, and he would dish out the lifesaver. How was I to know he was a fiend in human shape? If a fellow's a fiend in human shape," said Stanwood, with a good deal of justice, "he ought to act like one. Well, it's pretty clear what your next move is, Mike, old man. Only rough stuff will meet the situation. You want to chuck all the lessons you learned at mother's knee into the ash can and get tough. You'll have to swipe that stamp."

"Yes, I thought of that. But it's locked up in a safe."

"Then bust the safe."

"How?"

"Why, get Augustus Robb to do it, of course."

Mike started. An awed look had come into his face; the sort of look which members of garrisons beleaguered by savages give one another when somebody says "Here come the United States Marines."

"Good Lord! I'd clean forgotten that Augustus used to be a burglar."

"It'll be pie to him."

"Did you bring him with you?"

"Sure."

"Stanwood, old man," said Mike in a quivering voice, "I take back all the things I said about you. Forget that I called you a dish-faced moron."

"You didn't."

"Well, I meant to. You may have started badly, but you've certainly come through nicely at the finish. Augustus Robb! Of course. The hour has produced the man. It always does. Excuse me a moment. I must go and tell the boys in the back room about this."

But as he reached the door it opened, and Terry came in, followed by Lord Shortlands.

"We couldn't wait any longer. We had to come and see if you had ... Oh, hullo, Stanwood."

"Hello, Terry. Hiya, Lord Shortlands."

Terry's eye was cold and reproachful.

"You've made a nice mess of things, Stanwood."

"Yay. Mike's been telling me. I'm sorry."

"Too late to be sorry now," said Lord Shortlands sepulchrally.

His despondency was so marked that Mike thought it only kind to do something to raise his spirits. The method he chose was to utter a piercing "Whoopee!" It caused Lord Shortlands to leap like a gaffed salmon and Terry to quiver all over.

"Good news," he said. "Tidings of great joy. The problem is solved."

"What!"

"I have everything taped out. It turns out, after all, to be extraordinarily simple. We bust the safe."

Terry closed her eyes. She seemed in pain.

"You see, Shorty. He always finds the way. We bust the safe."

Lord Shortlands was feeling unequal to the intellectual pressure of the conversation.

"Can you—er—bust safes?"

"Myself, no. But I have influential friends. We send for Augustus Robb."

"Augustus Robb?"

"Who is this mysterious Augustus Robb you're always talking about?" asked Terry.

"My man," said Stanwood. "He's downstairs with the rest of the help."

"And before he got converted at a revival meeting," said Mike, "he used to be a burglar."

Terry's face had lost its drawn look. It had become bright and animated.

"How absolutely marvellous! Was he a good burglar?"

"One of the very best. There was a time, he gave me to understand, when the name of Robb was one to conjure with in the underworld."

"Rather a good name for a burglar, Robb."

"I told him that myself, and I thought it very quick and clever of me. Very quick and clever of you, too. If you're as good as that, we shall have many a lively duel of wit over the fireside. According to Augustus, the same crack has been made by fifty-six other people, but I don't see that that matters. You and I can't expect to be the only ones in the world with minds like rapiers."

"But if he's got religion, he'll probably have a conscience."

"We shall be able to overcome it. He will see the justice of our cause, which, of course, sticks out like a sore thumb, and, apart from that, he's a snob. He will be quite incapable of resisting an earl's appeal. Have you a coronet, Shorty?"

"Eh? Coronet? Oh yes, somewhere about."

"Then stick it on when you're negotiating with him, with a rakish tilt over one eye, and I don't think we shall have any trouble."

But there was no time to secure this adventitious aid. He had scarcely finished speaking when a hearty fist banged on the door, a hearty voice cried "Hoy!", and the man whom the hour had produced appeared in person.

"Well, cocky. I just came to see how you were getting al— Why, 'ullo," said Augustus Robb, pausing on the threshold and surveying the mob scene before him. "I didn't know you had company, chum. Excuse me."

He made as if to withdraw, but Mike, leaping forward, seized his coat in a firm grip.

"Don't be coy, Augustus. Come right in. You're just the fellow we want. Your name was on our lips at that very moment, and we were on the point of sending the bloodhounds out in search of you. So you've got to Beevor Castle, after all?"

"Yus, though it went against my conscience." Augustus Robb drew Mike aside and spoke in a hoarse whisper. "Do they know about it?"

"Oh yes. All pals here."

"That's all right, then. Wouldn't have wanted to make a bloomer of any description. Nice little place you've got here," said Augustus Robb, speaking less guardedly. "Done you proud, ain't they? Where does that window look out on? The rose garden? Coo! Got a rose garden, 'ave they? Every luxury, as you might say. Well, enjoy it while you can, chum. It won't be long before you're bunged out on your blinkin' ear."

"Why do you strike this morbid note?"

"Just a feeling I 'ave. The wicked may flourish like a ruddy bay tree, as the Good Book says, but they always cop it in the end."

"You rank me among the wicked?"

"Well, you're practisin' deceit, ain't you? Living a lie, I call it. There's a tract I'd like you to read, bearing on that, only coming away in a hurry, I left me tracts behind." Augustus Robb cocked an appreciative eye at Terry and, placing a tactful hand before his mouth, spoke out of the corner of the latter in his original hoarse whisper. "Who's the little bit of fluff?" he asked.

"You recall me to my duties as a host, Augustus," said Mike. "Come and get acquainted. Stanwood, of course, you know. But I don't think you have met Lord Shortlands."

"How do you do, Mr. Robb?"

"Pip-pip, m'lord," said Augustus Robb, visibly moved.

"Welcome—ah—to Beevor Castle."

"Thanks, m'lord. Seems funny bein' inside here, m'lord. Only seen the place from the outside before, m'lord. Cycled here one Bank Holiday, when I was a lad. Took sandwiches."

"It must have seemed strange, too," said Mike, "coming in by the door. Your natural impulse, I imagine, would have been to climb through the scullery window."

Augustus Robb, displeased, pleaded for a little tact, and Mike apologized.

"Sorry. But it's a subject we shall be leading up to before long. And this is Lord Shortlands' daughter, Lady Teresa Cobbold, whose name will be familiar to you from my correspondence. Thank you, Augustus," said Mike, acknowledging the other's wink and upward jerk of the thumbs. "I'm glad you approve. Do sit down. You will find this chair comfortable."

"Have a cushion, Mr. Robb," said Terry.

"A cigar?" said Lord Shortlands.

"I'd offer you a drink," said Mike, "but Stanwood has cleaned me out."

Too late, he saw that he had said the wrong thing. Augustus Robb, the ecstasy of finding himself in such distinguished company having induced in him a state of mind comparable to the nirvana of the Buddhists, had been leaning back in his chair with a soft, contented smile on his lips. This statement brought him up with a jerk, his face hard.

"Ho! So you've been drinking again, have you?" he observed austerely, giving Stanwood a stern look. "After all I said. All right, I wash me 'ands of you. If you want a 'obnailed liver, carry on, cocky. And if eventually you kick the bucket, what of it? I don't care. It's a matter of complete in-bleedin'-difference to me."

This generous outburst brought about one of those awkward pauses. Mike looked at Lord Shortlands. Terry looked at Stanwood. She also frowned significantly, and Stanwood took the hint. His was not a very high I.Q., but even he had realized the vital necessity of conciliating this man.

"Gee, Augustus, I'm sorry."

Augustus Robb sucked his front tooth.

"I'm sure he won't do it again, Mr. Robb."

Augustus Robb preserved an icy silence.

"Augustus," said Mike gently, "Lady Teresa Cobbold is speaking to you. She is, of course, the daughter of the fifth Earl of Shortlands, connected on her mother's side with the Byng-Brown-Byngs and the Foster-Frenches. The Sussex Foster-Frenches, not the Devonshire lot."

It was as if Augustus Robb had come out of a swoon and was saying "Where am I?" He blinked at Terry through his horn-rimmed spectacles, seeming to drink in her Byng-Brown-Byngness, and looked for a moment as if he were about to rise and bow. The cold sternness died out of his eyes, and he inclined his head forgivingly.

"Right ho. Say no more about it."

"That's the way to talk. Everything hotsy-totsy once more? Fine. Sure you're quite comfortable, Augustus?"

"Another cushion, Mr.Robb?" said Terry.

"How's the cigar?" said Lord Shortlands.

And Stanwood, showing an almost human intelligence, muttered something about how he had long thought of taking the pledge and would start looking into the matter tomorrow.

"Well, Augustus," said Mike, satisfied with the success of the preliminary operations and feeling that brass tacks could now be got down to, "as I was saying, you couldn't have come at a more fortunate moment. I did mention that his name was on our lips, didn't I?"

"You betcher," said Stanwood.

"You betcher," said Lord Shortlands.

"We were saying such nice things about you, Mr. Robb," said Terry. She knew she was being kittenish, but there are moments when a girl must not spare the kitten.

Augustus Robb choked on his cigar. His head was swimming a little.

"The fact is, Augustus, we are in a spot, and only you can get us out of it. When I say 'us,' I allude primarily to the fifth Earl of Shortlands, whose family, as you probably know, came over with the Conqueror. You have it in your power to do the fifth Earl of Shortlands a signal service, and one which he will never forget. Years hence, when he drops in at the House of Lords, he will find himself chatting with other earls—and no doubt a few dukes—and the subject of selfless devotion will come up. Stories will be swapped, here an earl speaking of some splendid secretary or estate agent, there a duke eulogizing his faithful dog Ponto, and then Lord Shortlands will top the lot with his tale of you. 'Let me tell you about Augustus Robb,' he will say, and the dukes and earls will listen spellbound. 'Coo!' they will cry, when he has finished. 'Some fellow, that Augustus Robb. I'd like to meet him.'"

Augustus Robb took off his horn-rimmed spectacles and polished them. His head was swimming more than ever, and his chest had begun to heave. His was a life passed mainly in the society of men who spoke what came into their simple minds, and the things that came into their simple minds were nearly always rude. It was not often that he was able to listen to this sort of thing.

"In a nutshell," said Mike, "Lord Shortlands is being beset by butlers. Have you met the butler here, the man Spink?"

A shudder ran through Augustus Robb.

"Yus," he said. "Have you?"

"I have indeed."

"And prayed for him?"

"No, I haven't got around to that yet."

"I'm surprised to hear it. I wouldn't have thought you could have been in his presence five minutes without being moved to Christian pity."

"You find him a hard nut?"

"A lost scoffer," said Augustus Robb severely, "whose words are as barbed arrows winged with sinfulness. If ever there was an emissary of Satan with side whiskers, it's him."

He had got what is called in Parliamentary circles the feeling of the House. It would scarcely have been possible for these words to have gone better. Lord Shortlands snorted rapturously. Stanwood said " 'At's the stuff!" Terry lit up the speaker's system with a dazzling smile, and Mike patted him on the back.

"That's great," said Mike. "If that's the way you feel, we can get down to cases."

In Augustus Robb's demeanour, as he listened to the story of the stamp, there exhibited itself at first only a growing horror. Three times in the course of the narrative he said "Coo!" and each time, as the inkiness of the butler's soul became more and more plain to him, with a greater intensity of repulsion. There seemed no question that Mike was holding his audience, and had its sympathy.

But when, passing from his preamble, he went on to outline what it was that Augustus Robb was expected to do, the other's aspect changed. It was still instinct with horror, but a horror directed now not at Mervyn Spink but at one whom it was evident that he had mentally labelled as The Tempter. He rose, swelling formidably.

"What! You're asking me to bust a pete?"

"A safe," corrected Lord Shortlands deferentially.

"Well, a pete is a safe, ain't it?"

"Is it?"

"Of course it is," said Mike. "Safes are always called petes in the best circles. Yes, that's the scheme, Augustus. How about it?"

"No!"

Mike blinked. The monosyllable, spoken at the fullest extent of a good man's lungs, had seemed to strike him like a projectile.

"Did you say No?"

"Yus, no."

"But it'll only take a few minutes of your time."

"No, I tell you. A thousand times no."

"Not even to oblige an earl?"

"Not even to oblige a dozen ruddy earls."

Mike blinked again. He glanced round at his colleagues, and drew little comfort from their deportment. Lord Shortlands was looking crushed and desolate. Terry's eyes were round with dismay. Stanwood Cobbold seemed to be grinding his teeth, which of course is never much use in a crisis of this sort.

"I had not expected this, Augustus," said Mike reproachfully.

"You knew I was saved, didn't you?"

"Yes, but can't you understand that this is a far, far better thing that we are asking you to do than you have ever done? Consider the righteousness of our cause."

"Busting a pete is busting a pete, and you can't get away from it."

"You aren't forgetting that Lord Shortlands' ancestors came over with the Conqueror?"

For an instant Augustus Robb seemed to waver.

"This won't please the Foster-Frenches."

The weakness passed. Augustus Robb was himself again.

"That's enough of that. Stop tempting me. Get thou behind me, Satan, and look slippy about it. Why don't you get behind me?" asked Augustus Robb peevishly.

"And how about the Byng-Brown-Byngs?" said Mike.

Stanwood exploded like a bomb. For some moments he had been muttering to himself, and it had been plain that he was not in sympathy with the conscientious objector.

"What's the good of talking to the fellow? Kick him!"

Mike started. It was a thought.

"Egad, Stanwood, I believe you've got something there."

"Grab him by the scruff of the neck and bend him over and leave the rest to me."

"Wait," said Mike. "Not in thin evening shoes. Go and put on your thick boots. And you, Terry, had better be leaving us. The situation is one which strong men must thresh out face to face. Or, perhaps, not face to face exactly—"

Augustus Robb had paled. He was essentially a man of peace.

"If there's going to be verlence—"

"There is."

It was Stanwood who had spoken. In his manner there was no trace now of his former meek obsequiousness. It had all the poised authority which had been wont to mark it in the days when, crouched and menacing, he had waited to plunge against the opposing line.

"You belcher there's going to be verlance. I'll give you two seconds to change your mind."

Augustus Robb changed it in one.

"Well, right ho," he said hastily. "If you put it that way, chum, I suppose I've no option."

"That's the way to talk."

"Well spoken, Augustus."

"But you're overlooking something. It's years since I bust a pete."

"No doubt the old skill still lingers."

"As to that, I wouldn't say it didn't. But what you've omitted to take into account, cockles," said Augustus Robb with gloomy triumph, "is me nervous system. I'm not the man I was. I wouldn't 'ave the nerve to do a job nowadays without I took a gargle first. And I can't take a gargle, because gargling's sinful. So there you are. It's an am-parce."

Terry smiled that winning smile of hers.

"You wouldn't mind taking a tiny little gargle to oblige me, Mr. Robb?"

"Yus, I would. And it wouldn't be tiny, either. I'd need a bucketful."

"Then take a bucketful," said Lord Shortlands.

It was a good, practical suggestion, but Augustus Robb shook his head.

"Those boots, Stanwood," said Mike. "Be as quick as you can."

Augustus Robb capitulated. He had never actually seen Stanwood on the football field, but his imagination was good and he could picture him punting.

"Well, all right. 'Ave it your own way, chums. But no good's going to come of this."

"Splendid, Augustus," said Mike. "We knew you wouldn't fail us. How about tools?"

"I'll have to go to London and fetch 'em, I suppose."

"You still have the dear old things, then?"

"Yus. I 'adn't the 'eart to get rid of 'em. They're with a gentleman friend of mine that lives in Seven Dials. I'll go and get 'em. More trouble," said Augustus Robb, and, moving broodingly to the door, was gone.

"Stanwood!" cried Terry. "You're marvellous! How did you think of it?"

"Oh, it just came to me," said Stanwood modestly.

"In these delicate negotiations," explained Mike, "it often happens that where skilled masters of the spoken word fail to bring home the bacon, success is achieved by some plain, blunt, practical man who ignores the niceties of diplomacy and goes straight to the root of the matter. The question now arises, How do we procure the needful? We can't very well raid the cellar. It seems to me that the best plan will be for me to run up to London tomorrow with Augustus and lay in supplies."

"Get plenty," advised Stanwood.

"I will."

"And of all varieties," added Lord Shortlands, who in matters like this was a farseeing man. "There's no telling what the chap will prefer. Many people, for instance, dislike the taste of whiskey. I have never been able to see eye to eye with them, but it is an undoubted fact. Get a good representative mixed assortment, my boy, and put it in my room. He will need a quiet place in which to prepare himself. And anything that's left over," said Lord Short-lands, a sudden brightness coming into his eyes, "I can use myself."

15

In every human enterprise, if success is to be achieved, there must always be behind the operations the directing brain. In the matter of breaking open the library safe at Beevor Castle and abstracting the Spanish 1851 dos reales stamp, blue unused, it was Mike who had framed the plan of campaign and issued the divisional orders.

These were as follows:

1. Zero hour to be 1.30 a.m.

Start the attack earlier, Mike had pointed out, and it might find members of the household awake. Start it later, and it cut into one's night too much. He wanted his sleep, he said, and Lord Shortlands said he wanted his, too.

2. All units to assemble in the study at one-fifteen.

Because they had to assemble somewhere, and it would be wisest if

Augustus Robb, before repairing to the library, were to remove a pane of glass from the study window and make a few chisel marks on the woodwork, thus conveying the suggestion that the job had been an outside one. This ruse was strongly approved of by Lord Shortlands, who did not conceal his opinion that the more outside the job could be made to look, the better.

3. Lord Shortlands to be O. C. Robbs.

His task was to smuggle Augustus Robb into his bedroom and there ply him with drink until in his, Augustus's, opinion his nerve was back in the midseason form of the old days. He would then conduct him to the study, reporting there at one-fifteen. This would allow five minutes for a pep talk from the general in charge of operations, eight minutes for the breaking of the window and the chisel marks and two for getting upstairs. A margin would also be left for kicking Augustus Robb, should he render this necessary by ringing in that conscience of his again.

4. Stanwood was to go to bed.

And darned well stay there. Because, though it was impossible to say offhand just how, if permitted to be present, he would gum the game, that he would somehow find a way of doing so was certain.

5. Terry was to go to bed, too.

Because in moments of excitement she had the extraordinary habit of squeaking like a basketful of puppies, and in any case in an enterprise of this kind girls were in the way. (Seconded by Lord Shortlands, who said that in the mystery thriller which Desborough Topping had given him for his birthday the detective had been seriously hampered in his activities by the adhesiveness of a girl named Mabel, who had hair the color of ripe wheat.)

6. Terry was to stop arguing and do as she was told.

Discussion on this point threatened for a time to become acrimonious, but on Mike challenging her to deny that her hair was the color of ripe wheat she had been obliged to yield.

Nevertheless, as the clock over the stable struck the hour of one, Terry was lying on the sofa in the study, reading the second of the three volumes of a novel entitled Percy's Promise, by Marcia Huddlestone (Popgood and Grooly, 1869). She had found it lying on the table and had picked it up for want of anything better. She was looking charming in pajamas, a kimono and mules.

At three minutes past the hour Lord Shortlands entered, looking charming in pajamas, a dressing gown and slippers. His eyes, as always in times of emotion, were protruding, and at the sight of his daughter they protruded still further.

"Good Lord, Terry! What are you doing here?"

"Just reading, darling, to while away the time."

"But Cardinal said you were to go to bed."

"So he did, didn't he? Bless my soul, what a nerve that young man has, to be sure. Bed, indeed! Well, you certainly have got a frightful collection of books, Shorty. There wasn't anything in your shelves published later than 1870."

"Eh? Oh, those aren't mine," said Lord Shortlands. He spoke absently. While he deplored his child's presence, it had just occurred to him what an admirable opportunity this was for speaking that word in season. "My old uncle's."

"Did he like Victorian novels?"

"I suppose so."

"I believe you do, too. This one was lying on the table, obviously recently perused."

"Young Cardinal borrowed it, and returned it this afternoon. He said it had given him food for thought. I don't know what he meant. Terry," said Lord Shortlands, welcoming the cue, "I've been thinking about young Cardinal."

"Have you, angel? He rather thrusts himself on the attention, doesn't he?"

"He's a smart chap."

"Yes. I suppose he would admit that himself."

"Look at the way he baffled Spink."

"Very adroit."

"Brave as a lion, too. Faces Adela without a tremor."

"What's all this leading up to, darling?"

"Well, I was—er—wondering if by any chance you might be beginning to change your mind about him."

"Oh, I see."

"Are you?"

"No."

"Ho," said Lord Shortlands, damped.

There was a pause. The thing was not going quite so well as the fifth earl had hoped.

"Why not?"

"There's a reason."

"I'm dashed it I can see what it is. I should have thought he would have been just the chap for you. Rich. Good-looking. Amusing. And loves you like the dickens. You can tell that by the way he looks at you. Its's a sort of—how shall I describe it?"

"A sort of melting look?"

"That's right. You've got it first shot. A sort of melting look."

"And your complaint is that it doesn't melt me?"

"Exactly."

"Well, I'll tell you something, Shorty. I am by no means insensible, as the heroine of Percy's Promise would say, to this look you mention. It may interest you to know that it goes through me like a burning dart."

"It does?" cried Lord Shortlands, greatly encouraged. This was more the sort of stuff he wanted to hear.

"It seems to pump me full of vitamines. It makes me feel as if the sun was shining and my hat was right and my shoes right and my frock was right and my stockings were right and somebody had just left me ten thousand a year."

"Well, then."

"Not so fast, my pet. Wait for the epilog. But all the same I'm not going to let myself fall in love with him. I don't feel that I have exclusive rights in that look of his."

"I don't follow you."

"I fancy I have to share it with a good many other girls."

"You mean you think he's one of these—er—flippertygibbets?"

"Yes, if a flippertygibbet is a man who can't help making love to every girl he meets who's reasonably pretty."

"But he says he's loved you since you were fifteen or whatever it was."

"He has to say something, to keep the conversation going."

"But what makes you feel like that about him?"

"Instinct. I think young Mike Cardinal is a butterfly, Shorty; the kind that flits from flower to flower and sips. I strongly suspect him of having been flitting and sipping this afternoon. Did you see him when he came back from the great city?"

"No. I was giving Whiskers his run."

"Well, I did. We had quite a chat. And the air for yards about him was heavy with some strange, exotic scent, as if he had been having his coat sleeve pawed at for hours by some mysterious, exotic female. I'm not blaming him, mind you. It's not his fault that he looks like a Greek god. And if women chuck themselves at his feet, it's only natural that he should pick them up. Still, you can understand my being a little wary. He thrills me, Shorty, but all the time there's a prudent side of me, a sort of Terry Cobbold in spectacles and mittens, that whispers that no good ever comes of getting entangled with Greek gods. I mistrust men who are too good-looking. In short, my heart inclines to Mike Cardinal, but my head restrains me. I suppose I feel about him pretty much as Mrs. Punter feels about Spink."

Lord Shortlands puffed unhappily.

"Well, I think you're making a great mistake."

"So do I—sometimes."

"About that scent. He probably rubbed up against some woman."

"That is what I fear."

"You ought to marry him."

"Why do you want me to so much?"

"Well, dash it, I like the chap."

"So do I."

"And have you considered what's going to happen after this fellow Robb has got that stamp? I get married and go off and leave you here alone with Adela—if, as you say, and I think you're right, Clare's going to collar Blair. You'll hate it. You'll be miserable, old girl. Why don't you marry the chap?"

The picture he had drawn of a Shorty-less Beevor Castle had not failed to make its impression on Terry. It was something she had not thought of. She was considering it with a frown, when the door opened and Mike came in.

Mike was looking tense and solemn. He was a young man abundantly equipped with what he called sang-froid and people who did not like him usually alluded to as gall, but tonight's operations were making him feel like a nervous impresario just before an opening. In another quarter of an hour the curtain would be going up, and the sense of his responsibility for the success of the venture weighed upon him. At the sight of Terry and of a Lord Shortlands unaccompanied by Augustus Robb he started visibly.

"What are you doing here?" he demanded sternly. "You're supposed to be in bed."

"I know. I got up. I want to watch. I've never seen a pete busted before."

"One wishes to keep the women out of this."

"Well, one won't."

"Now I know what the papers mean when they talk about the headstrong modern girl."

"Avid for sensation."

"Avid, as you say, for sensation. Well, it's lucky you're going to get an indulgent husband."

"Am I?"

"I think so. I've got a new system. Where's Augustus?"

"Up in Shorty's room, I suppose."

"Then why aren't you with him, Shorty? Staff work, staff work. We must have staff work."

Lord Shortlands spoke plaintively.

"He told me to go away. I didn't want to, but he said my watching him made him nervous. He seems a very high-strung sort of chap."

"How was he getting on?"

"All right, it seemed to me."

"Well, you had better go and fetch him."

"Can't you?"

"No. I want to have a word with Terry."

Lord Shortlands, on whom the strain was beginning to tell, ran a fevered hand through his grizzled hair, and whispered something about wishing he could have a drink.

This surprised Mike.

"Haven't you had one? Didn't you share Augustus's plenty?"

"He wouldn't let me. He said it was sinful. And when I pressed the point, he threatened to bounce a bottle on my head. I would give," said Lord Shortlands spaciously, "a million pounds for a drink."

"I can do you one cheaper than that," said Mike. "Skim up to my room, feel at the back of the top right-hand drawer of the chest of drawers, and you will find a flask full of what you need. Help yourself and leave twopence on the mantelpiece."

He went to the door and closed it after his rapidly departing host.

"Alone at last," he said.

Terry's gentle heart had been touched by a father's distress.

"Poor old Shorty!"

"Yes."

"He really isn't fit for this sort of thing."

"No."

"His high blood pressure—"

Mike took her gently by the elbow and led her to a chair. He deposited her lovingly in its depths and seated himself on the arm.

"When I said 'Alone at last,' " he explained, "I didn't mean that now was our chance to discuss Shorty's blood pressure. The time to do that will be later on, when we are sitting side by side before the fire in our little home. 'Let's have a long talk about Shorty's blood pressure,' you will say, and I shall reply 'Oh, goody! Yes, let's.' But for the moment there are weightier matters on the agenda paper. When I came into the room just now, I overheard your father make a very pregnant remark."

"Eavesdropping, eh?"

"I see no harm in dropping a few eaves from time to time. People do it behind screens on the stage, and are highly thought of. He was saying 'Why don't you marry the chap, you miserable little fathead?'"

"He didn't call me a fathead."

"He should have done. Was he alluding to me?"

"He was."

"What a pal! How did the subject come up?"

"He had been asking me why I wouldn't marry you."

"Now, there's a thing I've been trying to figure out for weeks, and I believe I've got it. I see you've been reading Percy's Promise. I skimmed through it last night, and it has given me food for thought. It has suggested to me this new system of which I spoke just now. I see now that I have not been handling my wooing the right way."

"No?"

"No. I have been too flip. Amusing, yes. Entertaining, true. But too flip. They did these things better in 1869. Have you got to the part where Lord Percy proposes to the girl in the conservatory?"

"Not yet."

"I will read it to you. Try to imagine that it is I who am speaking, because he puts in beautiful words just what I want to say. Ready?"

"If you are."

"Then here we go. 'It has been with a loving eye, dearest of all girls, that I have watched you grow from infancy to womanhood. I saw how your natural graces developed, and how by the sweetness of your disposition you were possessing yourself of a manner in which I, who have seen courts, must be allowed to pronounce perfect. It is not too much to say that I am asking a gift which any man, of whatever exalted rank, would be proud to have; that there is no position, however lofty, which you would not grace; and that I yield to no one in the resolution to make that home happy which it is in your power to give me. Your slightest wish shall be gratified, your most trifling want shall be anticipated.' How's that?"

"It's good."

"Let's try some more. 'Dearest, you are breaking a heart that beats only for you. I know that I am not one for whom nature has made a royal road to the hearts of women. You would feel for me if you knew the envy with which I regard those who are so favored. If I do not look, if I do not speak as a lover ought to do, it is not, heaven knows, because love is wanting. The pitcher may be full of good wine, but for that very reason it flows with difficulty. It is hard indeed that eloquence should be denied to one who is pleading for his very life. I love you, I love you, I love you. Dearest, can you never love me?' I don't know why he beefed about not being eloquent. Some steam there. How's it coming? Are you moved?"

"Not much."

"Odd. Percy's girl was. It was at that point that he swung the deal. 'You do not answer,' he cried, drawing her close to him, 'but your silence speaks for you as sweetly as any words. May I take my happiness for granted, love? Your cheek is white, but I will change that lily to a rose.' So saying, he pressed his lips to hers and she, with a low, soft cry, half sigh, half sob, returned his kiss. And thus they plighted troth. You can't get around a definite statement like that. Boy got girl. No question about it. But in my case Boy doesn't?"

"No."

"You didn't give a low, soft cry, half sigh, half sob, without my noticing it?"

"No."

"Then I think I see where the trouble lies. Percy, according to the author, had 'a flowing beard,' which he appears to have acquired—honestly, one hopes—at the early age of twenty-four. We shall have to wait till I have a flowing beard. It would seem to be an essential. I'll start growing one tomorrow."

"I wouldn't. Shall I tell you why I'm not moved?"

"It's about time you made some official pronouncement."

"Well... Have you got to sit on the arm of this chair?"

"Not necessarily. I just wanted to be handy, in case the moment arrived for changing that lily to a rose. However, I will move across the way. Now, then."

Terry hesitated.

"Proceed," said Mike encouragingly.

"It's going to sound rather crazy, I'm afraid."

"Never mind. Start gibbering. Why won't you marry me?"

"Well, if you really want to know, because you're too frightfully good-looking."

"Too-what?"

"Too dazzlingly handsome. I told you it was going to sound crazy."

There was a long silence. Mike seemed stunned.

"Crazy?" he said at length. "It's cuckoo. Girls have been slapped into padded cells for less. You wouldn't call me handsome?"

"You're like something out of a super-film. Haven't you noticed it yourself?"

"Never. Just a good, serviceable face, I should have said."

"The face that launched a thousand ships. Go and look in the glass."

Mike did so. He closed one eye, peered intently and shook his head.

"I don't get it. It's a nice face. A kind face. A face that makes you feel how thoroughly trustworthy and reliable I am. But nothing more."

"It's the profile that stuns. Look at yourself sideways."

"What do you think I am? A contortionist?" Mike moved away from the mirror. His air was still that of a man who is out of his depth. "And that's really why you won't marry me?"

"Yes."

"Well, I was expecting something pretty unbalanced, but nothing on this stupendous scale. You surpass yourself, my young breath-taker. I think I see what must have happened. Leaning out of that schoolroom window during your formative years, you overbalanced and fell on your fat little head."

"It's nice of you to try to find excuses."

"It's the only possible explanation. My child, you're non compos."

"It isn't non composness. It's prudence."

"But what have you got against good-looking men?"

"I mistrust them."

"Including me?"

"Including you."

"Then you're a misguided little chump."

"All right, I'm a misguided little chump."

"My nature is pure gold, clear through."

"That's your story?"

"And I stick to it. You won't change your mind?"

"No."

Mike breathed a little stertorously.

"I suppose it would be a breach of hospitality if I socked my hostess's sister in the eye?"

"The county would purse its lips."

"Darn these hidebound conventions. Well, how much of a gargoyle has a man got to be before you will consider him as a mate? If I looked like Stanwood—"

"Ah!"

"Well, I don't suppose I shall ever touch that supreme height. But if I pursue the hobby of amateur boxing, to which I am greatly addicted, it is possible that some kindly fist may someday bestow on me a cauliflower ear or leave my nose just that half inch out of the straight which makes all the difference. If I come to you later with the old beezer pointing sou'-sou'west, will you reconsider?"

"I'll give the matter thought."

"We'll leave it at that, then. All this won't make any difference to my devotion, of course. I shall continue to love you."

"Thanks."

"Quite all right. A pleasure. But I do think Shorty ought to kick in three guineas and have your head examined by some good specialist. It would be money well spent. Ah, Shorty," said Mike, as the fifth earl entered, looking much refreshed. "Glad to see you once more, my dear old stag at eve. Do you know what your daughter Teresa has just been telling me? She says she won't marry me because I'm too good-looking."

"No!"

"Those were her very words, spoken with a sort of imbecile glitter in her eyes. The whole thing is extraordinarily sad. But why are you still alone? What have you done with Augustus?"

"I can't find him."

"Wasn't he in your room?"

"No. He's gone."

"Perhaps he went to the library," suggested Terry.

Mike frowned.

"I guess he did. I never saw such an undisciplined rabble in all my life. I wish people would stick to their instructions and not start acting on their own initiative."

"Too bad, Sergeant-Major."

"Well, what's the good of me organizing you, if you won't stay organized? Let's go to the library and look."

Terry's theory was proved correct. The missing man was in the library. He was tacking to and fro across the floor with a bottle of creme de menthe in his hand.

He greeted them, as they entered, with a rollicking "Hoy!"

16

"Rollicking," indeed, was the only adjective to describe Augustus Robb's whole deportment at this critical moment in his career. That, or its French equivalent, was the word which would have leaped to the mind of the stylist Flaubert, always so careful in his search for the mot juste. His face was a vivid scarlet, his eyes gleaming, his smile broad and benevolent. It needed but a glance to see that he was full to the brim of good will to all men. "Come in, cockies," he bellowed, waving the bottle spaciously, and the generous timbre of his voice sent a chill of apprehension through his audience. In the silent night it had seemed to blare out like the Last Trump.

"Sh!" said Mike.

"Sh!" said Lord Shortlands.

"Sh!" said Terry.

A look of courteous surprise came into the vermilion face of the star of the night's performance.

"'Ow do you mean, Sh?" he asked, puzzled.

"Not so loud, Augustus. It's half-past one."

"What about it?"

"You'll go waking people."

"Coo! That's right. Never thought of that," said Augustus Robb. He put the bottle to his lips, and drank a deep draft. "Peppermint, this tastes of," he said. This was the first time he had come in contact with creme de menthe, and he wished to share his discoveries with his little group of friends. "Yus, pep-hic-ermint."

It had become apparent to Mike that in framing his plans he had omitted to guard against all the contingencies which might lead to those plans going awry. He had budgeted for an Augustus Robb primed to the sticking point. That the other, having reached his objective, might decide to push on further he had not foreseen. And it was only too manifest that he had done so. Augustus Robb, if not actually plastered, was beyond a question oiled, and he endeavoured to check the mischief before it could spread.

"Better give me that bottle, Augustus."

"Why?"

"I think you've had enough."

"Enough?" Augustus Robb seemed amazed. "Why, I've only just started."

"Come on, old friend. Hand it over."

A menacing look came into Augustus Robb's eyes.

"You lay a finger on it, cocky, just as much as a ruddy finger, and I'll bounce it on your head." He drank again. "Yus, peppermint," he said. "Nice taste. Wholesome, too. I always liked peppermints as a nipper. My old uncle Fred used to give me them to stop me reciting 'Oh, what a tangled web we weave, when first we practised to deceive!' Which is what you're doing, chum," said Augustus Robb, regarding Mike reproachfully. "Acting a lie, that's what it amounts to. Ananias and Sapphira."

Lord Shortlands plucked at Mike's elbow. His manner was anxious.

"Cardinal."

"Hullo?"

"Do you notice anything?"

"Eh?"

"I believe the fellow's blotto."

"I believe he is."

"What shall we do?"

"Start operations without delay, before he gets worse. Augustus."

'"ULLO?"

"Sh," said Mike.

"Sh," said Lord Shortlands.

"Sh," said Terry.

Their well-meant warnings piqued Augustus Robb. That menacing look came into his eyes again.

"What you saying Sh for?" he demanded, aggrieved. "You keep on saying Sh. Everybody says Sh. I've 'ad to speak of this before."

"Sorry, Augustus," said Mike pacifically. "It shan't occur again. How about making a start?"

"Start? What at?"

"That safe."

"What safe?"

"The safe you've come to open."

"Oh, that one?" said Augustus Robb, enlightened. "All right, cocky, let's go. 'Ullo."

"What's the matter?"

'"Where's me tools?"

"Haven't you got them?"

"Don't seem to see 'em nowhere about."

"You can't have lost them."

Augustus Robb could not concede this.

"Why can't I have lost them? Plumbers lose their tools, don't they? Well, then. Try to talk sense, chum."

"Perhaps you left them in Shorty's room, Mr. Robb," suggested Terry.

"No, don't you go making silly remarks, ducky. I've never been there."

"My father's room."

Augustus Robb turned to the fifth earl, surprised.

"Is your name Shorty?"

"Shorty is short for Shortlands," Mike explained.

"Shorty short for Shortlands," murmured Augustus Robb. Then, as the full humour of the thing began to penetrate, he repeated the words with an appreciative chuckle rather more loudly; so loudly, indeed, that the fifth earl rose a full six inches in the direction of the ceiling and, having descended, clutched at Mike's arm.

"Can't you stop him making such a noise?"

"I'll try."

"Adela is not a heavy sleeper."

Mike saw that he had overlooked something else in framing his plans. Lady Adela Toppping should have been given a Micky Finn in her bedtime glass of warm milk. It is just these small details that escape an organizer's notice.

"I think he's subsiding," he said. And indeed Augustus Robb, who had been striding about the room with an odd, lurching movement, as if he were having leg trouble, had navigated to a chair and was sitting there, looking benevolent and murmuring "Shorty short for Shortlands" in a meditative undertone, like a parrot under a green baize cloth. "Rush along and see if those tools are in your room."

Lord Shortlands rushed along, and a strange silence fell upon the library. Augustus Robb had stopped his soliloquy, and was sitting with bowed head. As he raised it for a moment in order to refresh himself from the bottle, Terry touched Mike's arm.

"Mike."

"Yes, love?"

"Look," whispered Terry, and there was womanly commiseration in her voice. "He's crying!"

Mike looked. It was even as she had said. A tear was stealing down behind the horn-rimmed spectacles.

"Something the matter, Augustus?" he asked.

Augustus Robb wiped away the pearly drop.

"Just thinking of 'Er, cocky," he said huskily.

'"Er?"

"The woman I lost, chum."

Mike felt profoundly relieved.

"It's all right," he whispered to Terry. "The quiet, sentimental stage."

"Oh, is that it?"

"That's it. Let us hope it persists, because the next one in rotation is the violent. I didn't know you'd lost a woman, Augustus. Where did you see her last?"

"I didn't. She wasn't there."

"Where?"

"At the blinking registry office. I suppose it's never occurred to you, cocky, to ask yourself why I'm a solitary chip drifting down the river of life, as the saying is. Well, I'll tell you. I was once going to marry a good woman, but she didn't turn up."

"That was tough."

"You may well say it was tough."

"What a shame, Mr. Robb."

"And you may well say 'What a shame, Mr. Robb,' ducky. No, she didn't turn up. I'd confessed my past to her the night before, and she had seemed to forgive, but she must have slep' on it and changed her mind, because the fact remains that I waited a couple of hours at the Beak Street registry office and not a sign of her."

"An unpleasant experience. What did you do?"

"I went and had a sarsaparilla and a ham sandwich and tried to forget. Not that I ever 'ave forgot. The memory of her sweet face still gnaws my bosom like a flock of perishing rats."

Mike nodded sympathetically.

"Women are like that."

The slur on the sex offended Augustus Robb's chivalry.

"No, they aren't. Unless they are, of course," he added, for he was a man who could look at things from every angle. "And yet sometimes," he said, finishing the creme de menthe thoughtfully, "I wonder if maybe she wasn't a mere tool of Fate, as the expression is. You see, there's a Beak Street registry office and a Meek Street registry ofice and a Greek Street registry office, and who knows but what she may have gone and got confused? What I mean, how am I to know that all the time I was waiting at Beak Street she mayn't have been waiting at Meek Street?"

"Or Greek Street."

"R. It's the sort of thing might easily happen."

"Didn't you think of asking her?"

"Yus. But too late. The possibility of there having been some such what you might call misunderstanding didn't occur to me till a week or two later, and when I nipped round to her lodging she'd gorn, leaving no address. And a couple of days after that I had to go to America with an American gentleman who I'd took service with, so there we were, sundered by the seas. Sundered by the ruddy seas," he added, to make his meaning clearer. "And I've never seen her since."

A silence fell. Mike and Terry, disinclined for chatter after the stark human story to which they had been listening, sat gazing at Augustus Robb in mute sympathy, and Augustus Robb, except for an occasional soft hiccough, might have been a statue of himself, erected by a few friends and admirers.

Presently he came to life, like a male Galatea.

"Broke my blinking 'eart, that did," he said. "If I was to tell you how that woman could cook steak and kidney pudding, you wouldn't believe me. Melted in the mouth."

"It's a tragedy," said Terry.

"You're right, ducky. It's a tragedy."

"You ought to have told it to Shakespeare," said Mike. "He could have made a play out of it."

"R.," said Augustus Robb moodily. He removed his horn-rimmed spectacles in order to wipe away another tear, and, replacing them, looked at his young companions mournfully. "Yus, it's a tragedy right enough. Lots of aching 'earts you see around you these days. Something chronic. Which reminds me. 'Ow's your business coming along, Mr. Cardinal? You and this little party. Thought quite a bit about that, I 'ave. Ever tried kissing her? I've known that to answer."

Terry started, and there came into her face a flush which Mike found himself comparing, to the latter's disadvantage, to the first faint glow of pink in some lovely summer sky. He asked himself what Lord Percy would have done at such a moment. The answer came readily. He would have spared the loved one's blushes, turning that rose back again to a lily.

"Let's talk about something else," he suggested.

Augustus Robb's brow darkened. He twitched his chin petulantly.

"I won't talk about something else. I don't want any pie-faced young Gawd-'elp-uses tellin' me what to talk about."

"Read any good books lately, Augustus?"

"Whippersnappers," said Augustus Robb, after a pause, as if, like Flaubert, he had been hunting for the mot juste, and was about to dilate on the theme when Lord Shortlands re-entered, announcing that he had been unable to find the tools.

Augustus Robb turned a cold eye upon him.

"What tools?"

"Your tools."

Augustus Robb stiffened. It was plain that that last unfortunate dip into the creme de menthe bottle had eased him imperceptibly from the sentimental to the peevish stage of intoxication, accentuating his natural touchiness to a dangerous degree.

He directed at Lord Shortlands a misty, but penetrating, stare.

"You let me catch you messing about with my tools, and I'll twist your head off and make you swallow it."

"But you told me to go and look for them," pleaded Lord Shortlands.

"I never!"

"Well, he did," said Lord Shortlands.

Augustus Robb transferred his morose gaze to Mike.

"What's it got to do with him, may I ask?"

"I thought it wisest to start hunting around, Augustus. We want those tools."

"Well, we've got 'em, ain't we? They're under the sofa, where I put 'em, ain't they? Fust thing I done on enterin' this room was to place my tools neatly under the sofa."

"I see. Just a little misunderstanding."

"I don't like little misunderstandings."

"Here you are. All present and correct."

Augustus Robb took the bag of tools absently. He was glaring at Lord Shortlands again. For some reason he seemed to have taken a sudden dislike to that inoffensive peer.

"Earls!" he said disparagingly, and it was plain that by some process not easily understandable the creme de menthe had turned this once staunch supporter of England's aristocracy into a republican with strong leanings towards the extreme left. "Earls aren't everything. They make me sick."

"Earls are all right, Augustus," said Mike, trying to check the drift to Moscow.

"No, they ain't," retorted Augustus Robb hotly. "Swanking about and taking the bread out of the mouths of the widow and the orphan. And, what's more, I don't believe he's a ruddy earl at all."

"Yes, he is. He'll show you his coronet tomorrow, and you can play with it, Augustus."

"Mr. Robb."

"I'm sorry."

"You well may be. Augustus, indeed! If there's one thing I don't 'old with, it's familiarity. I've had to speak to young Cobbold about that. I may not be an earl, but I have my self-respect."

"Quite right, Mr. Robb," said Terry.

"R.," said Augustus Robb.

Lord Shortlands, as if feeling that it had taken an embarrassing turn, changed the conversation.

"I stopped outside Adela's door and listened," he said to Mike. "She seemed to be asleep."

"Good."

"Who's Adela?" asked Augustus Robb.

"My daughter."

Augustus Robb frowned. He knew that for some reason his mind was slightly under a cloud, but he could detect an obvious misstatement when he heard one.

"No, she ain't. This little bit is your daughter."

"There are three of us, Mr. Robb," explained Terry. "Three little bits."

"Ho," said Augustus Robb in the manner of one who, though unconvinced, is too chivalrous to contradict a lady. "Well, let's all go up and 'ave a talk with Adela."

"Later, don't you think?" suggested Mike, touched by Lord Shortlands' almost animal cry of agony. "After you've attended to the safe. It's over by the window."

"To the right of the window," said Terry.

"Over there by the window, slightly to the right," said Lord Shortlands, clarifying the combined message beyond the possibility of mistake.

"R.," said Augustus Robb, comprehending. "If you'd told me that before, we shouldn't have wasted all this ... OUCH!"

His three supporters leaped like one supporter.

"Sh!" said Mike.

"Sh!" said Lord Shortlands.

"Sh!" said Terry.

Augustus Robb glared balefully.

"You say 'Sh' again, and I'll know what to do about it. Touch of cramp, that was," he explained. "Ketches me sometimes."

He heaved himself from his chair, the bag of tools in his hand. After doing a few simple calisthenics to prevent a recurrence of the touch of cramp, he approached the safe and tapped it with an experimental forefinger. Then he sneered at it openly.

"Call this a safe?"

The loftiness of his tone encouraged his supporters greatly. Theirs was the lay outlook, and to them the safe appeared quite a toughish sort of safe. It was stimulating to hear this expert speak of it with so airy a contempt.

"You think you'll be able to bust it?" said Mike. Augustus Robb gave a short, amused laugh.

"Bust it? I could do it with a sardine opener. Go and get me a sardine opener," he said, jerking an authoritative thumb at Lord Shortlands, whom he seemed to have come to regard as a sort of plumber's mate. "No, 'arf a mo'." He scrutinized the despised object more closely. "No, it ain't sporting. Gimme a hairpin."

Lord Shortlands, frankly unequal to the situation, had withdrawn to the sofa, and was sitting on it with his head between his hands. Mike, too, was at a loss for words. It was left to Terry to try to reason with the man of the hour.

"Don't you think you had better use your tools, Mr. Robb?" she said, smiling that winning smile of hers. "It seems a pity not to, after you went to all the trouble of going to London for them."

Augustus Robb, though normally clay in the hands of pleading Beauty, shook his head.

"Gimme a hairpin," he repeated firmly.

There came to Mike the realization of the blunder he had made in not permitting Stanwood Cobbold to take part in these operations. With his direct, forceful methods, Stanwood was just the man this crisis called for. He endeavoured to play an understudy's role, though conscious of being but a poor substitute.

"That'll be all of that," he said crisply and authoritatively. "We don't want any more of this nonsense. Cut the comedy, and get busy."

It was an error in tactics. The honeyed word might have softened Augustus Robb. The harsh tone offended him. He drew himself up haughtily.

"So that's the way you talk, is it? Well, just for that I'm going to chuck the ruddy tools out of the ruddy window."

He turned and raised the hand that held the bag. He started swinging it.

"Mike!" cried Terry.

"Stop him!" cried Lord Shortlands.

Mike sprang forward to do so. Then suddenly he paused.

The reason he paused was that he had heard from the corridor outside a female voice, uttering the words "Who is there?" and it had chilled him to the marrow. But it was an unfortunate thing to have done, for it left him within the orbit of the swinging bag. Full of hard instruments with sharp edges, it struck him on the side of the face, and he reeled back. The next moment there was a crash, sounding in many of its essentials like the end of the world. Augustus Robb had released the bag, and it had passed through the window with a rending noise of broken glass. A distant splash told that it had fallen into the moat.

"Coo!" said Augustus Robb, sobered.

Terry gave a cry.

"Oh, Mike! Are you hurt?"

But Mike had bounded from the room, banging the door behind him.

17

To the little group he had left in the library this abrupt departure seemed inexplicable. Intent on their own affairs, they had heard no female voice in the corridor, and for some moments they gazed at each other in silent bewilderment.

Lord Shortlands was the first to speak. More and more during the recent proceedings he had been wishing himself elsewhere, and now that the chief executive had created a deadlock by recklessly disposing of his tools there seemed nothing to keep him.

"I'm going to bed," he announced.

"But what made him rush off like that?" asked Terry.

Augustus Robb had found a theory that seemed to cover the facts.

"Went to bathe his eye, ducky. Nasty one he stopped. Only natural his first impulse would be to redooce the swelling. Coo! I wouldn't have had a thing like that happen for a hundred quid."

"Oh, Shorty, do you think he's hurt?"

Lord Shortlands declined to be drawn into a discussion of Mike's injuries. He liked Mike, and in normal circumstances would have been the first to sympathize, but there had just come to him the stimulating thought that, even after Augustus Robb had had his fill, there must still be quite a bit of the right stuff in his room, and he yearned for it as the hart yearns for the waterbrooks. With the golden prospect of a couple of quick ones before him, it is difficult for an elderly gentleman with high blood pressure, who has been through what the fifth Earl of Shortlands had so recently been through, to allow his mind to dwell on the black eyes of young men who are more acquaintances than friends.

"Good night," he said, and left them.

Augustus Robb continued to suffer the pangs of remorse.

"No, not for a thousand million pounds would I 'ave 'ad a thing like that 'appen," he said regretfully. "When I think of all the blokes there are that I'd enjoy dotting in the eye, it do seem a bit 'ard that it 'ad to be Mr. Cardinal who copped it. A gentleman that I 'ave the highest respect for."

Terry turned on him like a leopardess.

"You might have killed him!"

"I wouldn't go so far as to say that, ducky," Augustus Robb demurred. "Just a simple slosh in the eye, such as so often occurs. 'Owever, I'm glad to see you takin' it to 'eart so much, because it shows that love has awakened in your bosom."

Terry's indignation had waned. Her sense of humour was seldom dormant for long.

"Does it, Mr. Robb?"

"Sure sign, ducky. You've been acting silly, trying to 'arden your heart to Mr. Cardinal like Pharaoh in the Good Book when all those frogs come along." He raised the creme de menthe to his lips and lowered it disappointedly. " 'Ullo, none left."

"What a shame."

"Peppermint," said Augustus Robb, sniffing. "Takes me back, that does. Years ago, before you were born or thought of, my old uncle Fred—"

"Yes, you told me."

"Did I? Ho. Well, what was we talking about?"

"Frogs."

"We wasn't, neither. I simply 'appened to mention frogs in passing, like. We was talking about 'ardening 'earts, and I was saying that love had awakened in your bosom. And 'igh time, too. Why don't you go after Mr. Cardinal and give him a nice big kiss?"

"That would be a good idea, you think?"

"Only possible course to pursue. He loves you, ducky."

"What a lot you seem to know about it all. Did he confide in you? Oh, I was forgetting. You read that letter of his."

"That's right. Found it lying on his desk."

"Do you always read people's private letters?"

"Why, yus, when I get the chanst. I like to keep abreast of what's going on around me. And I take a particular interest in Mr. Cardinal's affairs. There's a gentleman that any young woman ought to be proud to hitch up with. A fine feller, Mr. Cardinal is. What they call in America an ace."

"Did you like America, Mr. Robb?"

"Why, yus, America's all right. Ever tasted corn-beef hash?"

"No."

"You get that in America. And waffles."

"Tell me all about waffles."

"I won't tell you all about waffles. I'm telling you about Mr. Cardinal. The whitest man I know."

"Do you know many white men?"

Augustus Robb fell into a brief reverie.

"And planked shad," he said, coming out of it. "You get that in America, too. And chicken Maryland. R., and strorberry shortcake."

"You seem very fond of food."

"And I'm very fond of Mr. Cardinal," said Augustus Robb, not to be diverted from his theme. "I keep tellin' young Cobbold he ought to try and be more like 'im. Great anxiety that young Cobbold is to me. His pop put him in my charge, and I look upon him as a sacred trust. And what 'appens? 'Arf the time he's off somewhere getting a skinful, and the other 'arf he's going about allowing butlers to persuade him to say his name's Rossiter."

"I didn't know Stanwood drank so very much."

"Absorbs the stuff like a thirsty flower absorbs the summer rain, ducky. Different from Mr. Cardinal. Always moderate 'e is. You could let Mr. Cardinal loose in a distillery with a bucket in 'is hand, and he'd come out clear-eyed and rosy-cheeked and be able to say 'British Constitution' without 'esitation. Yus, a splendid feller. And that's what makes it seem so strange that a little peanut like you keeps giving him the push."

"Aren't you getting rather rude, Mr. Robb?"

"Only for your own good, ducky. I want to see you 'appy."

"Oh? I beg your pardon."

"Granted. You'd be very 'appy with Mr. Cardinal. Nice disposition he's got."

"Yes."

"Always merry and bright."

"Yes."

"Plays the ukulele."

"You're making my mouth water."

"And kind to animals. I've known Mr. Cardinal pick up a pore lorst dog in the street and press it to his bosom, like Abraham—muddy day it was, too—and fetch it along to young Cobbold's apartment and give it young Cobbold's dinner. Touched me, that did," said Augustus Robb, wiping away another tear. "Thinkin' of bein' kind to dorgs reminds me of 'Er," he said, in explanation of this weakness. "She was always very kind to dorgs. And now 'ow about going after him and giving him that kiss and telling him you'll be his?"

"I don't think I will, Mr. Robb."

"Aren't you going to be his?"

"No."

"Now, don't you be a little muttonhead, ducky. You just 'op along and ... Oh, 'ullo, Mr. Cardinal."

Terry gave a cry.

"Oh, Mike!"

And Augustus Robb, with a sharp "Coo!", stared aghast at his handiwork. Mike's left eye was closed, and a bruise had begun to spread over the side of his face, giving him the appearance of a man who has been stung by bees.

"Coo, Mr. Cardinal, I'm sorry."

Mike waved aside his apologies.

"Quite all right, Augustus. Sort of thing that might have happened to anyone. Where's Shorty?"

"Gone to bed," said Terry. She was still staring at his battered face, conscious of strange emotions stirring within her. "Why did you rush off like that?"

"I heard your sister Adela out in the corridor."

"Oh, my goodness!"

"It's all right. I steered her off."

"What did you say to her?"

"Well, I had to think quick, of course. She was headed for the scene of disturbance, and moving well. She asked me what went on, and, as I told you, I had to think quick. You say Shorty's gone to bed? I'm glad. Let him be happy while he can. Poor old Shorty. The heart bleeds."

"Do go on. What did you say?"

"I'll tell you. I mentioned, I believe, that I had to think quick?"

"Yes, twice."

"No, only once, but then, like lightning. Well, what happened was this. It seemed to me, thinking quick, that the only way of solving the am-parce was to sacrifice Shorty. Like Russian peasants with their children, you know, when they are pursued by wolves and it becomes imperative to lighten the sledge. It would never have done for your sister to come in here and find Augustus, so I told her that Shorty was in the library, as tight as an owl and breaking windows. 'Look what he's done to my eye,' I said. I begged her to leave the thing to me. I said I would get him to bed all right. She was very grateful. She thanked me, and said what a comfort I was, and pushed off. You don't seem very elated."

"I'm thinking of Shorty."

"Yes, he is a little on my mind, too. I told you that my heart bled for him. Still, into each life some rain must fall. That's one of Spink's gags. Another is that you cannot make an omelette without breaking eggs."

"I suppose not. And, of course, you had to think quick."

"Very quick. I feel sure that Shorty, when informed of all the circumstances, will applaud."

"If not too heartily."

"If, as you say, not too heartily. He will see that I acted for the best."

"Let's hope that that will comfort him when he meets Adela tomorrow. And now what do we do for that eye of yours?"

"I was about to take it to bed."

"It wants bathing in warm water."

"It wants 'avin' a bit of steak put on it," said Augustus Robb with decision. His had been a life into which at one time injured eyes had entered rather largely. "You trot along to the larder, ducky, and get a nice piece of raw steak. Have him fixed up in no time."

"I think you're right," said Mike.

"I know I'm right. You can't beat steak."

"Cruel Sports of the Past—Beating the Steak. I hate to give you all this trouble."

"No trouble," said Terry, and departed on her errand of mercy.

Augustus Robb surveyed the eye, and delivered an expert's verdict.

"That's a shiner, all right, chum."

"It is, indeed, Augustus. I feel as if I'd got mumps."

"Pity it 'ad to come at a time like this."

"You consider the moment ill chosen?"

"Well, use your intelligence, cocky. You want to look your best before 'Er, don't you? Women don't like seein' a feller with a bunged-up eye. Puts them off of him. May awake pity, per'aps, but not love. I could tell by the way the little bit of fluff was talkin' just now—"

"By 'little bit of fluff' you mean—"

"Why, 'Er."

"I see. Would it be possible for you, Augustus, in speaking of Lady Teresa Cobbold, not to describe her as a little bit of fluff?"

"Well, if you're so particular. So what was I saying? Ho, yus. When 1 suggested to her that she should ... Coo! That eye's getting worse. Deepenin' in colour. Reminds me of one a feller give me in our debating society once, when I was speaking in the Conservative interest, him being of Socialistic views... Where was I?"

"I don't know."

"I do. I was starting to tell you the advice I give that little bit of fluff."

"Augustus!"

"Mind you, I can fully understand your being took with 'er. Now I've seen 'er, I can appreciate those sentiments of yours in that letter. She's a cuddly little piece."

Mike sighed. He had hoped to be able to get through the evening without recourse to Stanwood Cobbold methods, but it was plain that only these methods would serve here.

"Augustus," he said gently.

"'Ullo?"

"Doing anything at the moment?"

"No."

"Then just turn around, will you?"

"Why?"

"Never mind why. I ask this as a favor. Turn around, and bend over a little."

"Like this?"

"That's exactly right. There!" said Mike, and kicked the inviting target with a vigour and crispness of follow-through which would have caused even Stanwood to nod approvingly.

"Hoy!" cried Augustus Robb.

He had drawn himself to his full height, and would probably have spoken further, but at this moment Terry came in, carrying a bowl of warm water and a plate with a piece of steak on it.

"Here we are," she said. "You look very serious, Mr. Robb."

Augustus Robb did not reply. His feelings had been wounded to the quick, and he was full of thoughts too deep for utterance. Adjusting his hornrimmed spectacles and giving Mike another long, silent, reproachful look, he strode from the room. Terry gazed after him, perplexed.

"What's the matter with Mr. Robb?"

"I have just been obliged to kick him."

"Kick him? Why?"

"He spoke lightly of a woman's name."

"No!"

"I assure you."

"How is he as a light speaker?"

"In the first rank. He sullied my ears by describing you as a cuddly little piece."

"But aren't I?"

"That is not the point. If we are to be saved from the disruptive forces that wrecked Rome and Babylon, we cannot have retired porch climbers speaking in this lax manner of girls who are more like angels than anything. It strikes at the very root of everything that makes for sane and stabilized government. 'Cuddly little piece,' indeed!"

"Bend your head down," said Terry. She dabbed at his eye with the sponge. "You know, you're going to be sorry for this."

"Not unless you drip the water down my neck."

"For kicking poor Mr. Robb, I mean. He's your staunchest friend and firmest supporter. Before you came in, he was urging me to marry you."

"What!"

"I told you you would be sorry."

"I'm gnawed by remorse. How can I ever atone? Tell me more,"

"He was very emphatic. He said you were the whitest man he knew, and expressed himself as amazed that a little peanut like me should spurn your suit."

"God bless him! To think that foot of mine should have jolted that golden-hearted trouser seat. I will abase myself before him tomorrow. But isn't it extraordinary—"

"Don't wiggle. The water's going down your neck."

"I like it. But isn't it extraordinary how everyone seems to want you to marry me? First Shorty, and now Augustus. It's what the papers call a widespread popular demand. Don't you think you ought to listen to the Voice of the People?"

"Now the steak. I'll tie it up with your handkerchief."

Mike sighed sentimentally.

"How little I thought in those lonely days in Hollywood that a time would come when I would be sitting in your home, with you sticking steak on my eye!"

"Were you lonely in Hollywood?"

"Achingly lonely."

"Odd."

"Not at all. You were not there."

"I mean, that isn't Stanwood's story. He said you were never to be seen without dozens of girls around you, like the hero of a musical comedy."

Mike started.

"Did Stanwood tell you that?"

"Yes. He said that watching you flit through the night life of Hollywood always brought to his mind that old song 'Hullo, hullo, hullo, it's a different girl again!'"

There came to Mike, not for the first time, the thought that Stanwood Cobbold ought to be in some kind of home.

"Wasn't he right? Didn't you ever go out with girls?"

It is difficult to look dignified with a piece of steak on your left eye, but Mike did his best.

"I may occasionally have relaxed in feminine society. One does in those parts. But what of it?"

"Oh, nothing. I just mentioned it."

"Hollywood is not a monastery."

"No, so I've heard."

"It's a place where women are, as it were, rather thrust upon you. And one has to be civil."

"There. That's the best I can do. How does it feel?"

"Awful. Like some kind of loathsome growth."

"I wish you could see yourself in the glass."

"You're always wanting me to see myself in the glass. Do I look bad?"

"Repulsive. Like a wounded gangster after a beer war."

"Then now is obviously the moment to renew my suit. You said, if you remember, that if ever there came a time when my fatal beauty took a toss—"

"It's only temporary, I'm afraid. Tomorrow, if you keep the steak on, you'll be just as dazzling as ever. I'll say good night."

"You would say some silly thing like that at a moment like this. I'm going to keep you here till breakfast time, unless you're sensible."

"In what way sensible?"

"You know in what way sensible. Terry, you little mutt, will you marry me?"

"No."

"But why not?"

"I told you why not."

"I wrote that off as pure delirium. Girls don't turn a man down just because he has regular features."

"This one does."

"But you know I love you." "Do I?"

"You ought to by this time. You're the only girl in the world, as far as I'm concerned."

"Not according to Stanwood. He was most explicit on the point. Dozens of them, he told me, night after night, each lovelier than the last and all of them squealing 'Oh, Mike, darling!'"

"Curse Stanwood! The sort of man who ought to be horsewhipped on the steps of his club."

"The only trouble is that if you horsewhipped Stanwood on the steps of his club, he would horsewhip you on the steps of yours."

"I know. That's the catch. It's all wrong that fellows who talk the way Stanwood Cobbold does should be constructed so large and muscular. It doesn't give the righteous a chance."

"Tell me about these girls."

"There's nothing to tell. I used to go dancing with them."

"Ah!"

"You needn't say 'Ah!' If you want to dance, you've got to provide yourself with a girl, haven't you? How long do you think it would take the management at the Trocadero to bounce a fellow who started pirouetting all over the floor by himself? They're extraordinarily strict about that sort of thing."

"What's the Trocadero?"

"A Hollywood haunt of pleasure."

"Where you took your harem?"

"Don't call them my harem! They were mere acquaintances; some merer than others, of course, but all of them very mere. I wish you would expunge Stanwood's whole story from your mind."

"Well, I can't. I think perhaps I had better tell you something."

"More delirium?"

"No, not this time. It's something that may make you understand why I'm like this. You asked me yesterday what I had got against men who were too good-looking, and I said I mistrusted them. I will now tell you why. I was once engaged to one."

"Good Lord! When?"

"Not so long ago. When I was in that musical comedy. He was the juvenile. Geoffrey Harvest."

Mike uttered a revolted cry.

"My God! That heel? That worm? That oleaginous louse? Whenever I went to the show, I used to long to leap across the footlights and crown him."

"You can't deny that he was handsome."

"In a certain ghastly, greasy, nausea-promoting way, perhaps."

"Well, that's the point I'm trying to make. I thought him wonderful."

"You ought to be ashamed of yourself."

"I am."

"A juvenile! You fell for a juvenile! And not one of those song-and-hoofing juveniles, whom you can respect, but the kind that looks noble and sings tenor. I am shocked and horrified, young Terry. Whatever made you go and do a fatheaded thing like that?"

"I told you. His beauty ensnared me. But the scales fell from my eyes. He turned out to be a flippertygibbet."

"A what was that once again?"

"Shorty's word, not mine."

"Where does Shorty pick up these expressions?"

"It means a man who can't resist a pretty face. After I had caught him not resisting a few, I broke off the engagement. And I made up my mind that I would never, never, never let myself be swept off my feet by good looks again. So now you understand."

Mike was struggling with complex emotions.

"But what earthly right have you coolly to assume that I'm like that?"

"Just a woman's intuition."

"You're all wrong."

"Perhaps. But there it is. I can't risk it. I couldn't go through it all again. I simply couldn't. You've no idea how a girl feels when she falls in love with a man who lets her down. It's horrible. You surfer torments, and all the while you're calling yourself a fool for minding. It's like being skinned alive in front of an amused audience."

"I wouldn't let you down."

"I wonder."

"Terry! Come on. Take a chance."

"You speak as if it were a sort of game. I'm afraid I'm rather Victorian and earnest about marriage. I don't look on it as just a lark."

"Nor do I."

"You seem to."

"Why do you say that?"

"Well, don't you think yourself that your attitude all through has been a little on the flippant side?"

Mike beat his breast, like the Wedding Guest.

"There you are! That's it! I felt all along that that was the trouble. You think I'm not sincere, because I clown. I knew it. All the time I was saying to myself 'Lay off it, you poor sap! Change the record,' but I couldn't. I had to clown. It was a kind of protective armour against shyness."

"You aren't telling me you're shy?"

"Of course I'm shy. Every man's shy when he's really in love. For God's sake don't think I'm not serious. I love you. I've always loved you. I loved you the first time I saw you. Terry, darling, do please believe me. This is life and death."

Terry's heart gave a leap. Her citadel of defence was crumbling.

"If you had talked like that before—"

"Well, it's not too late, is it? Terry, say it's not too late. Because it will be, if you turn me down now. This is my last chance."

"What do you mean?"

"I've got to go."

"Go?"

"Back to Hollywood."

A cold hand seemed to clutch at Terry's heart. She stared at him dumbly. He had been striding about the room, but now he was at her side, bending over her.

"Oh, Mike," she whispered.

"Next week at the latest. I found a cable waiting for me in London this afternoon. They want me at the office. The head man's ill, and I've got to go back at once. We shall be six thousand miles apart, and not a chance of ever getting together again."

"Oh, Mike," said Terry.

Into Mike's mind there flashed a recent remark of Augustus Robb's. Turning the conversation to the affairs of him, Mike, and what he described as "this little party," Augustus Robb had asked the pertinent question "Ever tried kissing her?", adding the words "I've known that to answer."

True, Augustus Robb had been considerably more than one over the eight when he had thrown out this obiter dictum, but that did not in any way detract from the value of the pronouncement. Many a man's brain gives of its best and most constructive only when it has been pepped up with creme de menthe, and something seemed to tell Mike that in so speaking the fellow had been right.

"Terry, darling!"

He took Terry in his arms and kissed her, and it was even as Augustus Robb had said.

It answered.