The Return of Jeeves

Jeeves undertook the burden of explanation.

"A house such as Rowcester Abbey in these days is not an asset, sir, it is a liability.

I fear that your long residence in the East has rendered you not quite abreast of the changed conditions prevailing in your native land. Socialistic legislation has sadly depleted the resources of England's hereditary aristocracy. We are living now in what is known as the Welfare State, which means—broadly—that everybody is completely destitute."

It would have seemed incredible to any of the native boys, hippopotami, rhinoceri, pumas, zebras, alligators and buffaloes with whom he had come in contact in the course of his long career in the wilds that Captain Biggar's strong jaw was capable of falling like an unsupported stick of asparagus, but it had fallen now in precisely that manner. There was something almost piteous in the way his blue eyes, round and dismayed, searched the faces of the two men before him.

"You mean he can't brass up?"

"You have put it in a nutshell, sir. Who steals his lordship's purse steals trash."

Captain Biggar, his iron self-control gone, became a human semaphore. He might have been a White Hunter doing his daily dozen.

"But I must have the money, and I must have it before noon tomorrow." His voice rose in what in a lesser man would have been a wail. "Listen.

I'll have to let you in on something that's vitally secret, and if you breathe a word to a soul I'll rip you both asunder with my bare hands, shred you up into small pieces and jump on the remains with hobnailed boots. Is that understood?"

Bill considered.

"Yes, that seems pretty clear. Eh, Jeeves?"

"Most straightforward, m'lord."

"Carry on, Captain."

Captain Biggar lowered his voice to a rasping whisper.

"You remember that telephone call I made after dinner? It was to those pals of mine, the chaps who gave me my winning double this afternoon. Well, when I say winning double," said Captain Biggar, raising his voice a little, "that's what it would have been but for the degraded chiselling of a dastardly, lop-eared—"

"Quite, quite," said Bill hurriedly. "You telephoned to your friends, you were saying?"

"I was anxious to know if it was all settled."

"If all what was settled?"

Captain Biggar lowered his voice again, this time so far that his words sounded like gas escaping from a pipe.

"There's something cooking. As Shakespeare says, we have an enterprise of great importance."

Jeeves winced. ""Enter-prises of great pith and moment" is the exact quotation, sir."

"These chaps have a big S.p. job on for the Derby tomorrow. It's the biggest cert in the history of the race. The Irish horse, Ballymore."

Jeeves raised his eyebrows.

"Not generally fancied, sir."

"Well, Lucy Glitters and Whistler's Mother weren't generally fancied, were they? That's what makes this job so stupendous. Ballymore's a long-priced outsider. Nobody knows anything about him. He's been kept darker than a black cat on a moonless night. But let me tell you that he has had two secret trial gallops over the Epsom course and broke the record both times."

Despite his agitation, Bill whistled.

"You're sure of that?"

"Beyond all possibility of doubt. I've watched the animal run with my own eyes, and it's like a streak of lightning. All you see is a sort of brown blur. We're putting our money on at the last moment, carefully distributed among a dozen different bookies so as not to upset the price. And now," cried Captain Biggar, his voice rising once more, "you're telling me that I shan't have any money to put on."

His agony touched Bill. He did not think, from what little he had seen of him, that Captain Biggar was a man with whom he could ever form one of those beautiful friendships you read about, the kind that existed between Damon and Pythias, David and Jonathan, or Swan and Edgar, but he could understand and sympathize with his grief.

"Too bad, I agree," he said, giving the fermenting hunter a kindly, brotherly look and almost, but not quite, patting him on the shoulder. "The whole situation is most regrettable, and you wouldn't be far out in saying that the spectacle of your anguish gashes me like a knife. But I'm afraid the best I can manage is a series of monthly payments, starting say about six weeks from now."

"That's won't do me any good."

"Nor me," said Bill frankly. "It'll knock the stuffing out of my budget and mean cutting down the necessities of life to the barest minimum. I doubt if I shall be able to afford another square meal till about 1954.

Farewell, a long farewell ... to what, Jeeves?"

"To all your greatness, m'lord. This is the state of man: today he puts forth the tender leaves of hopes; tomorrow blossoms, and bears his blushing honours thick upon him. The third day comes a frost, a killing frost, and when he thinks, good easy man, full surely his greatness is a-ripening, nips his roots."

"Thank you, Jeeves."

"Not at all, m'lord."

Bill looked at him and sighed.

"You'll have to go, you know, to start with. I can't possibly pay your salary."

"I should be delighted to serve your lordship without emolument."

"That's dashed good of you, Jeeves, and I appreciate it. About as nifty a display of the feudal spirit as I ever struck. But how," asked Bill keenly, "could I keep you in fish?"

Captain Biggar interrupted these courteous exchanges. For some moments he had been chafing, if chafing is the right word to describe a White Hunter who is within an ace of frothing at the mouth. He said something so forceful about Jeeves's fish that speech was wiped from Bill's lips and he stood goggling with the dumb consternation of a man who has been unexpectedly struck by a thunderbolt.

"I've got to have that money!"

"His lordship has already informed you that, owing to the circumstance of his being fiscally crippled, that is impossible."

"Why can't he borrow it?"

Bill recovered the use of his vocal cords.

"Who from?" he demanded peevishly. "You talk as if borrowing money was as simple as falling off a log."

"The point his lordship is endeavouring to establish," explained Jeeves, "is the almost universal tendency of gentlemen to prove unco-operative when an attempt is made to float a loan at their expense."

"Especially if what you're trying to get into their ribs for is a whacking great sum like three thousand and five pounds two and six."

"Precisely, m'lord. Confronted by such figures, they become like the deaf adder that hearkens not to the voice of the charmer, charming never so wisely."

"So putting the bite on my social circle is off," said Bill. "It can't be done. I'm sorry."

Captain Biggar seemed to blow flame through his nostrils.

"You'll be sorrier," he said, "and I'll tell you when. When you and this precious clerk of yours are standing in the dock at the Old Bailey, with the Judge looking at you over his bifocals and me in the well of the court making faces at you.

Then's the time when you'll be sorry ... then and shortly afterwards, when the Judge pronounces sentence, accompanied by some strong remarks from the bench, and they lead you off to Wormwood Scrubs to start doing your two years hard or whatever it is."

Bill gaped.

"Oh, dash it!" he protested. "You wouldn't proceed to that ... what, Jeeves?"

"Awful extreme, m'lord."

"You surely wouldn't proceed to that awful extreme?"

"Wouldn't I!"

"One doesn't want unpleasantness."

"What one wants and what one is going to get are two different things," said Captain Biggar, and went out, grinding his teeth, to cool off in the garden.

He left behind him one of those silences often called pregnant. Bill was the first to speak.

"We're in the soup, Jeeves."

"Certainly a somewhat sharp crisis in our affairs would appear to have been precipitated, m'lord."

"He wants his pound of flesh."

"Yes, m'lord."

"And we haven't any flesh."

"No, m'lord. It is a most disagreeable state of affairs."

"He's a tough egg, that Biggar. He looks like a gorilla with stomach-ache."

"There is, perhaps, a resemblance to such an animal, afflicted as your lordship suggests."

"Did you notice him at dinner?"

"To which aspect of his demeanour during the meal does your lordship allude?"

"I was thinking of the sinister way he tucked into the roast duck. He flung himself on it like a tiger on its prey. He gave me the impression of a man without ruth or pity."

"Unquestionably a gentleman lacking in the softer emotions, m'lord."

"There's a word that just describes him. Begins with a V. Not vapid. Not vermicelli.

Vindictive. The chap's vindictive. I can understand him being sore about not getting his money, but what good will it do him to ruin me?"

"No doubt he will derive a certain moody satisfaction from it, m'lord."

Bill brooded.

"I suppose there really is nobody one could borrow a bit of cash from?"

"Nobody who springs immediately to the mind, m'lord."

"How about that financier fellow, who lives out Ditchingham way—Sir Somebody Something?"

"Sir Oscar Wopple, m'lord? He shot himself last Friday."

"Oh, then we won't bother him."

Jeeves coughed.

"If I might make a suggestion, m'lord?"

"Yes, Jeeves?"

A faint ray of hope had stolen into Bill's sombre eyes. His voice, while still scarcely to be described as animated, no longer resembled that of a corpse speaking from the tomb.

"It occurred to me as a passing thought, m'lord, that were we to possess ourselves of Captain Biggar's ticket, our position would be noticeably stabilized."

Bill shook his head.

"I don't get you, Jeeves. Ticket?

What ticket? You speak as if this were a railway station."

"I refer to the ticket which, in my capacity of your lordship's clerk, I handed to the gentleman as a record of his wager on Lucy Glitters and Whistler's Mother, m'lord."

"Oh, you mean his ticket?" said Bill, enlightened.

"Precisely, m'lord. As he left the racecourse so abruptly, it must still be upon his person, and it is the only evidence that exists that the wager was ever made. Once we had deprived him of it, your lordship would be in a position to make payment at your lordship's leisure."

"I see. Yes, that would be nice. So we get the ticket from him, do we?"

"Yes, m'lord."

"May I say one word, Jeeves?"

"Certainly, m'lord."

"How?"

"By what I might describe as direct action, m'lord."

Bill stared. This opened up a new line of thought.

"Set on him, you mean? Scrag him?

Choke it out of him?"

"Your lordship has interpreted my meaning exactly."

Bill continued to stare.

"But, Jeeves, have you seen him? That bulging chest, those rippling muscles?"

"I agree that Captain Biggar is well-nourished, m'lord, but we would have the advantage of surprise. The gentleman went out into the garden. When he returns, one may assume that it will be by way of the French window by which he made his egress. If I draw the curtains, it will be necessary for him to enter through them.

We will see him fumbling, and in that moment a sharp tug will cause the curtains to descend upon him, enmeshing him, as it were."

Bill was impressed, as who would not have been.

"By Jove, Jeeves! Now you're talking.

You think it would work?"

"Unquestionably, m'lord. The method is that of the Roman retiarius, with whose technique your lordship is no doubt familiar."

"That was the bird who fought with net and trident?"

"Precisely, m'lord. So if your lordship approves—"

"You bet I approve."

"Very good, m'lord. Then I will draw the curtains now, and we will take up our stations on either side of them."

It was with deep satisfaction that Bill surveyed the completed preparations. After a rocky start, the sun was coming through the cloud wrack.

"It's in the bag, Jeeves!"

"A very apt image, m'lord."

"If he yells, we will stifle his cries with the ... what do you call this stuff?"

"Velours, m'lord."

"We will stifle his cries with the velours. And while he's grovelling on the ground, I shall get a chance to give him a good kick in the tailpiece."

"There is that added attraction, m'lord. For blessings ever wait on virtuous deeds, as the playwright Congreve informs us."

Bill breathed heavily.

"Were you in the first world war, Jeeves?"

"I dabbled in it to a certain extent, m'lord."

"I missed that one because I wasn't born, but I was in the Commandos in this last one. This is rather like waiting for zero hour, isn't it?"

"The sensation is not dissimilar, m'lord."

"He should be coming soon."

"Yes, m'lord."

"On your toes, Jeeves!"

"Yes, m'lord."

"All set?"

"Yes, m'lord."

"Hi!" said Captain Biggar in their immediate rear. "I want to have another word with you two."

A lifetime of braving the snares and perils of the wilds develops in those White Hunters over the years a sort of sixth sense warning them of lurking danger. Where the ordinary man, happening upon a tiger trap in the jungle, would fall in base over apex, your White Hunter, saved by his sixth sense, walks round it.

With fiendish cunning, Captain Biggar, instead of entering, as expected, through the French window, had circled the house and come in by the front door.

Although the actual time which had elapsed between Captain Biggar's departure and return had been only about five minutes, scarcely long enough for him to take half a dozen turns up and down the lawn, pausing in the course of one of them to kick petulantly at a passing frog, it had been ample for his purposes. If you had said to him as he was going through the French window "Have you any ideas, Captain?"' he would have been forced to reply "No more than a rabbit". But now his eye was bright and his manner jaunty. He had seen the way.

On occasions of intense spiritual turmoil the brain works quickly. Thwarted passion stimulates the little grey cells, and that painful scene on the rustic seat, when love had collided so disastrously with the code that governs the actions of the men who live on the frontiers of Empire, had stirred up those of Captain Biggar till, if you had X-rayed his skull, you would have seen them leaping and dancing like rice in a saucepan. Not thirty seconds after the frog, rubbing its head, had gone off to warn the other frogs to watch out for atom bombs, he was rewarded with what he recognized immediately as an inspiration.

Here was his position in a nutshell. He loved. Right. He would go further, he loved like the dickens. And unless he had placed a totally wrong construction on her words, her manner and the light in her eyes, the object of his passion loved him. A woman, he meant to say, does not go out of her way to bring the conversation round to the dear old days when a feller used to whack her over the top-knot with clubs and drag her into caves, unless she intends to convey a certain impression. True, a couple of minutes later she had been laughing and giggling with the frightful Rowcester excrescence, but that, it seemed to him now that he had had time to simmer down, had been merely a guest's conventional civility to a host. He dismissed the Rowcester gumboil as negligible.

He was convinced that, if one went by the form book, he had but to lay his heart at her feet, and she would pick it up.

So far, so good. But here the thing began to get more complicated. She was rich and he was poor. That was the hitch. That was the snag. That was what was putting the good old sand in the bally machinery.

The thought that seared his soul and lent additional vigour to the kick he had directed at the frog was that, but for the deplorable financial methods of that black-hearted bookmaker, Honest Patch Rowcester, it would all have been so simple.

Three thousand pounds deposited on the nose of Ballymore at the current odds of fifty to one would have meant a return of a hundred and fifty thousand, just like finding it: and surely even Tubby Frobisher and the Subahdar, rigid though their views were, could scarcely accuse a chap of not playing with the straight bat if he married a woman, however wealthy, while himself in possession of a hundred and fifty thousand of the best and brightest.

He groaned in spirit. A sorrow's crown of sorrow is remembering happier things, and he proceeded to torture himself with the recollection of how her neck had felt beneath his fingers as he fastened her pen—

Captain Biggar uttered a short, sharp exclamation. It was in Swahili, a language which always came most readily to his lips in moments of emotion, but its meaning was as clear as if it had been the "Eureka!" of Archimedes.

Her pendant! Yes, now he saw daylight.

Now he could start handling the situation as it should be handled.

Two minutes later, he was at the front door. Two minutes and twenty-five seconds later, he was in the living-room, eyeing the backs of Honest Patch Rowcester and his clerk as they stood—for some silly reason known only to themselves —crouching beside the curtains which they had pulled across the French window.

"Hi!" he cried. "I want to have another word with you two."

The effect of the observation on his audience was immediate and impressive. It is always disconcerting, when you are expecting a man from the north-east, to have him suddenly bark at you from the south-west, especially if he does so in a manner that recalls feeding-time in a dog hospital, and Bill went into his quaking and leaping routine with the smoothness that comes from steady practice. Even Jeeves, though his features did not lose their customary impassivity, appeared—if one could judge by the fact that his left eyebrow flickered for a moment as if about to rise—to have been stirred to quite a considerable extent.

"And don't stand there looking like a dying duck," said the Captain, addressing Bill, who, one is compelled to admit, was giving a rather close impersonation of such a bird in articulo mortis. "Since I saw you two beauties last," he continued, helping himself to another whisky and soda, "I have been thinking over the situation, and I have now got it all taped out. It suddenly came to me, quick as a flash. I said to myself "The pendant!""

Bill blinked feebly. His heart, which had crashed against the back of his front teeth, was slowly returning to its base, but it seemed to him that the shock which he had just sustained must have left his hearing impaired. It had sounded exactly as if the Captain had said "The pendant!" which, of course, made no sense whatever.

"The pendant?" he echoed, groping.

"Mrs. Spottsworth is wearing a diamond pendant, m'lord," said Jeeves. "It is to this, no doubt, that the gentleman alludes."

It was specious, but Bill found himself still far from convinced.

"You think so?"

"Yes, m'lord."

"He alludes to that, in your opinion?"

"Yes, m'lord."

"But why does he allude to it, Jeeves?"

"That, one is disposed to imagine, m'lord, one will ascertain when the gentleman has resumed his remarks."

"Gone on speaking, you mean?"

"Precisely, m'lord."

"Well, if you say so," said Bill doubtfully. "But it seems a ... what's the expression you're always using?"

"Remote contingency, m'lord?"

"That's right. It seems a very remote contingency."

Captain Biggar had been fuming silently.

He now spoke with not a little asperity.

"If you have quite finished babbling, Patch Rowcester—"

"Was I babbling?"

"Certainly you were babbling. You were babbling like a ... like a ... well, like whatever the dashed things are that babble."

"Brooks," said Jeeves helpfully, "are sometimes described as doing so, sir. In his widely-read poem of that name, the late Lord Tennyson puts the words "Oh, brook, oh, babbling brook" into the mouth of the character Edmund, and later describes the rivulet, speaking in its own person, as observing "I chatter over stony ways in little sharps and trebles, I bubble into eddying bays, I babble on the pebbles"."

Captain Biggar frowned.

"Ai deng hahp kamoo for the late Lord Tennyson," he said impatiently. "What I'm interested in is this pendant."

Bill looked at him with a touch of hope.

"Are you going to explain about that pendant? Throw light upon it, as it were?"

"I am. It's worth close on three thousand quid, and," said Captain Biggar, throwing out the observation almost casually "you're going to pinch it, Patch Rowcester."

Bill gaped.

"Pinch it?"

"This very night."

It is always difficult for a man who is feeling as if he has just been struck over the occiput by a blunt instrument to draw himself to his full height and stare at someone censoriously, but Bill contrived to do so.

"What!" he cried, shocked to the core. "Are you, a bulwark of the Empire, a man who goes about setting an example to Dyaks seriously suggesting that I rob one of my guests?"

"Well, I'm one of your guests, and you robbed me."

"Only temporarily."

"And you'll be robbing Mrs. Spottsworth only temporarily. I shouldn't have used the word "pinch". All I want you to do is borrow that pendant till tomorrow afternoon, when it will be returned."

Bill clutched his hair.

"Jeeves!"

"M'lord?"

"Rally round, Jeeves. My brain's tottering. Can you make any sense of what this rhinoceros-biffer is saying?"

"Yes, m'lord."

"You can? Then you're a better man than I am, Gunga Din."

"Captain Biggar's thought-processes seem to me reasonably clear, m'lord. The gentleman is urgently in need of money with which to back the horse Ballymore in tomorrow's Derby, and his proposal, as I take it, is that the pendant shall be abstracted and pawned and the proceeds employed for that purpose. Have I outlined your suggestion correctly, sir?"

"You have."

"At the conclusion of the race, one presumes, the object in question would be redeemed, brought back to the house, discovered, possibly by myself, in some spot where the lady might be supposed to have dropped it, and duly returned to her. Do I err in advancing this theory, sir?"

"You do not."

"Then, could one be certain beyond the peradventure of a doubt that Ballymore will win—"

"He'll win all right. I told you he had twice broken the course record."

"That is official, sir?"

"Straight from the feed-box."

"Then I must confess, m'lord, I see little or no objection to the scheme."

Bill shook his head, unconvinced.

"I still call it stealing."

Captain Biggar clicked his tongue.

"It isn't anything of the sort, and I'll tell you why. In a way, you might say that that pendant was really mine."

"Really ... what was that last word?"

"Mine. Let me," said Captain Biggar, "tell you a little story."

He sat musing for a while. Coming out of his reverie and discovering with a start that his glass was empty, he refilled it. His attitude was that of a man, who, even if nothing came of the business transaction which he had proposed, intended to save something from the wreck by drinking as much as possible of his host's whisky. When the refreshing draught had finished its journey down the hatch, he wiped his lips on the back of his hand, and began.

"Do either of you chaps know the Long Bar at Shanghai? No? Well, it's the Caf`e de la Paix of the East. They always say that if you sit outside the Caf`e de la Paix in Paris long enough, you're sure sooner or later to meet all your pals, and it's the same with the Long Bar. A few years ago, chancing to be in Shanghai, I had dropped in there, never dreaming that Tubby Frobisher and the Subahdar were within a thousand miles of the place, and I'm dashed if the first thing I saw wasn't the two old bounders sitting on a couple of stools as large as life. "Hullo, there, Bwana, old boy," they said when I rolled up, and I said, "Hullo, there, Tubby! Hullo there, Subahdar, old chap," and Tubby said "What'll you have, old boy?"' and I said "What are you boys having?"' and they said stingahs, so I said that would do me all right, so Tubby ordered a round of stingahs, and we started talking about chowluangs and nai bahn rot fais and where we had all met last and whatever became of the poogni at Lampang and all that sort of thing. And when the stingahs were finished, I said "The next are on me. What for you, Tubby, old boy?"' and he said he'd stick to stingahs. "And for you, Subahdar, old boy?"' I said, and the Subahdar said he'd stick to stingahs, too, so I wig-wagged the barman and ordered stingahs all round, and, to cut a long story short, the stingahs came, a stingah for Tubby, a stingah for the Subahdar, and a stingah for me. "Luck, old boys!" said Tubby.

"Luck, old boys!" said the Subahdar.

"Cheerio, old boys!" I said, and we drank the stingahs."

Jeeves coughed. It was a respectful cough, but firm.

"Excuse me, sir."

"Eh?"

"I am reluctant to interrupt the flow of your narrative, but is this leading somewhere?"

Captain Biggar flushed. A man who is telling a crisp, well-knit story does not like to be asked if it is leading somewhere.

"Leading somewhere? What do you mean, is it leading somewhere? Of course it's leading somewhere. I'm coming to the nub of the thing now. Scarcely had we finished this second round of stingahs, when in through the door, sneaking along like a chap that expects at any moment to be slung out on his fanny, came this fellow in the tattered shirt and dungarees."

The introduction of a new and unexpected character took Bill by surprise.

"Which fellow in the tattered shirt and dungarees?"

"This fellow I'm telling you about."

"Who was he?"

"You may well ask. Didn't know him from Adam, and I could see Tubby Frobisher didn't know him from Adam. Nor did the Subahdar. But he came sidling up to us and the first thing he said, addressing me, was "Hullo, Bimbo, old boy", and I stared and said "Who on earth are you, old boy?"' because I hadn't been called Bimbo since I left school.

Everybody called me that there, God knows why, but out East it's been "Bwana" for as long as I can remember. And he said "Don't you know me, old boy? I'm Sycamore, old boy". And I stared again, and I said "What's that, old boy? Sycamore? Sycamore? Not Beau Sycamore that was in the Army Class at Uppingham with me, old boy?"' and he said "That's right, old boy. Only it's Hobo Sycamore now"."

The memory of that distressing encounter unmanned Captain Biggar for a moment. He was obliged to refill his glass with Bill's whisky before he could proceed.

"You could have knocked me down with a feather," he said, resuming. "This chap Sycamore had been the smartest, most dapper chap that ever adorned an Army Class, even at Uppingham."

Bill was following the narrative closely now.

"They're dapper in the Army Class at Uppingham, are they?"

"Very dapper, and this chap Sycamore, as I say, the most dapper of the lot. His dapperness was a byword. And here he was in a tattered shirt and dungarees, not even wearing a school tie."

Captain Biggar sighed. "I saw at once what must have happened. It was the old, old story.

Morale can crumble very easily out East.

Drink, women and unpd gambling debts ..."

"Yes, yes," said Bill. "He'd gone under, had he?"

"Right under. It was pitiful. The chap was nothing but a bally beachcomber."

"I remember a story of Maugham's about a fellow like that."

"I'll bet your friend Maugham, whoever he may be, never met such a derelict as Sycamore. He had touched bottom, and the problem was what was to be done about it. Tubby Frobisher and the Subahdar, of course, not having been introduced, were looking the other way and taking no part in the conversation, so it was up to me. Well, there isn't much you can do for these chaps who have let the East crumble their morale except give them something to buy a couple of drinks with, and I was just starting to feel in my pocket for a baht or a tical, when from under that tattered shirt of his this chap Sycamore produced something that brought a gasp to my lips. Even Tubby Frobisher and the Subahdar, though they hadn't been introduced, had to stop trying to pretend there wasn't anybody there and sit up and take notice.

"Sabatga!" said Tubby. "Pom bahoo!" said the Subahdar. And I don't wonder they were surprised. It was this pendant which you have seen tonight on the neck ..." Captain Biggar faltered for a moment. He was remembering how that neck had felt beneath his fingers. "... on the neck," he proceeded, calling all his manhood to his aid, "of Mrs.

Spottsworth."

"Golly!" said Bill, and even Jeeves, from the fact that the muscle at the side of his mouth twitched briefly, seemed to be feeling that after a slow start the story had begun to move. One saw now that all that stingah stuff had been merely the artful establishing of atmosphere, the setting of the stage for the big scene.

""I suppose you wouldn't care to buy this, Bimbo, old boy?"' this chap Sycamore said, waggling the thing to make it glitter. And I said "Fry me in olive oil, Beau, old boy, where did you get that?"'."

"That's just what I was going to ask," said Bill, all agog. "Where did he?"

"God knows. I ought not to have inquired. It was dashed bad form. That's one thing you learn very early out East of Suez. Never ask questions. No doubt there was some dark history behind the thing ... robbery ... possibly murder. I didn't ask.

All I said was "How much?"' and he named a price far beyond the resources of my purse, and it looked as though the thing was going to be a washout. But fortunately Tubby Frobisher and the Subahdar—

I'd introduced them by this time—offered to chip in, and between us we met his figure and he went off, back into the murk and shadows from which he had emerged.

Sad thing, very sad. I remember seeing this chap Sycamore make a hundred and forty-six in a house cricket match at school before being caught low down in the gully off a googly that dipped and swung away late. On a sticky wicket, too," said Captain Biggar, and was silent for awhile, his thoughts in the past.

He came back into the present.

"So there you are," he said, with the air of one who has told a well-rounded tale.

"But how did you get it?" said Bill.

"Eh?"

"The pendant. You said it was yours, and the way I see it is that it passed into the possession of a syndicate."

"Oh, ah, yes, I didn't tell you that, did I? We shook dice for it and I won.

Tubby was never lucky with the bones. Nor was the Subahdar."

"And how did Mrs. Spottsworth get it?"

"I gave it her."

"You gave it her?"

"Why not? The dashed thing was no use to me, and I had received many kindnesses from Mrs.

Spottsworth and her husband. Poor chap was killed by a lion and what was left of him shipped off to Nairobi, and when Mrs. Spottsworth was leaving the camp on the following day I thought it would be a civil thing to give her something as a memento and all that, so I lugged out the pendant and asked her if she'd care to have it. She said she would, so I slipped it to her, and she went off with it. That's what I meant when I said you might say that the bally thing was really mine," said Captain Biggar, and helped himself to another whisky.

Bill was impressed.

"This puts a different complexion on things, Jeeves."

"Distinctly, m'lord."

"After all, as Pop Biggar says, the pendant practically belongs to him, and he merely wants to borrow it for an hour or two."

"Precisely, m'lord."

Bill turned to the Captain. His mind was made up.

"It's a deal," he said.

"You'll do it?"

"I'll have a shot."

"Stout fellow!"

"Let's hope it comes off."

"It'll come off all right. The clasp is loose."

"I meant I hoped nothing would go wrong."

Captain Biggar scouted the idea. He was all buoyancy and optimism.

"Go wrong? What can possibly go wrong?

You'll be able to think of a hundred ways of getting the dashed thing, two brainy fellers like you.

Well," said the Captain, finishing his whisky, "I'll be going out and doing my exercises."

"At this time of night?"

"Breathing exercises," explained Captain Biggar. "Yoga. And with it, of course, communion with the Jivatma or soul. Toodle-oo, chaps."

He pushed the curtains aside, and passed through the French window.

A long and thoughtful silence followed his departure. The room seemed very still, as rooms always did when Captain Biggar went out of them. Bill was sitting with his chin supported by his hand, like Rodin's Penseur. Then he looked at Jeeves and, having looked, shook his head.

"No, Jeeves," he said.

"M'lord?"

"I can see that feudal gleam in your eye, Jeeves. You are straining at the leash, all eagerness to lend the young master a helping hand. Am I right?"

"I was certainly feeling, m'lord, that in view of our relationship of thane and vassal it was my duty to afford your lordship all the assistance that lay within my power."

Bill shook his head again.

"No, Jeeves, that's out. Nothing will induce me to allow you to go getting yourself mixed up in an enterprise which, should things not pan out as planned, may quite possibly culminate in a five-year stretch at one of our popular prisons. I shall handle this binge alone, and I want no back-chat about it."

"But, m'lord—"

"No back-chat, I said, Jeeves."

"Very good, m'lord."

"All I require from you is advice and counsel. Let us review the position of affairs. We have here a diamond pendant which at the moment of going to press is on the person of Mrs. Spottsworth. The task confronting me —I said me, Jeeves—is somehow to detach this pendant from this person and nip away with it unobserved. Any suggestions?"

"The problem is undoubtedly one that presents certain points of interest, m'lord."

"Yes, I'd got as far as that myself."

"One rules out anything in the nature of violence, I presume, placing reliance wholly on stealth and finesse."

"One certainly does. Dismiss any idea that I propose to swat Mrs. Spottsworth on the napper with a blackjack."

"Then I would be inclined to say, m'lord, that the best results would probably be obtained from what I might term the spider sequence."

"I don't get you, Jeeves."

"If I might explain, m'lord. Your lordship will be joining the lady in the garden?"

"Probably on a rustic seat."

"Then, as I see it, m'lord, conditions will be admirably adapted to the plan I advocate. If shortly after entering into conversation with Mrs. Spottsworth, your lordship were to affect to observe a spider on her hair, the spider sequence would follow as doth the night the day. It would be natural for your lordship to offer to brush the insect off. This would enable your lordship to operate with your lordship's fingers in the neighbourhood of the lady's neck. And if the clasp, as Captain Biggar assures us, is loose, it will be a simple matter to unfasten the pendant and cause it to fall to the ground. Do I make myself clear, m'lord?"

"All straight so far. But wouldn't she pick it up?"

"No, m'lord, because in actual fact it would be in your lordship's pocket. Your lordship would institute a search in the surrounding grass, but without avail, and eventually the search would be abandoned until the following day. The object would finally be discovered late tomorrow evening."

"After Biggar gets back?"

"Precisely, m'lord."

"Nestling under a bush?"

"Or on the turf some little distance away. It had rolled."

"Do pendants roll?"

"This pendant would have done so, m'lord."

Bill chewed his lower lip thoughtfully.

"So that's the spider sequence?"

"That is the spider sequence, m'lord."

"Not a bad scheme at all."

"It has the merit of simplicity, m'lord. And if your lordship is experiencing any uneasiness at the thought of opening cold, as the theatrical expression is, I would suggest our having what in stage parlance is called a quick run through."

"A rehearsal, you mean?"

"Precisely, m'lord. It would enable your lordship to perfect yourself in lines and business. In the Broadway section of New York, where the theatre industry of the United States of America is centred, I am told that this is known as ironing out the bugs."

"Ironing out the spiders."

"Ha, ha, m'lord. But, if I may venture to say so, it is unwise to waste the precious moments in verbal pleasantries."

"Time is of the essence?"

"Precisely, m'lord. Would your lordship like to walk the scene?"

"Yes, I think I would, if you say it's going to steady the nervous system. I feel as if a troupe of performing fleas were practising buck-and-wing steps up and down my spine."

"I have heard Mr. Wooster complain of a similar malaise in moments of stress and trial, m'lord. It will pass."

"When?"

"As soon as your lordship has got the feel of the part. A rustic seat, your lordship said?"

"That's where she was last time."

"Scene, A rustic seat," murmured Jeeves. "Time, A night in summer.

Discovered at rise, Mrs. Spottsworth.

Enter Lord Rowcester. I will portray Mrs.

Spottsworth, m'lord. We open with a few lines of dialogue to establish atmosphere, then bridge into the spider sequence. Your lordship speaks."

Bill marshalled his thoughts.

"Er—Tell me, Rosie—"

"Rosie, m'lord?"

"Yes, Rosie, blast it. Any objection?"

"None whatever, m'lord."

"I used to know her at Cannes."

"Indeed, m'lord? I was not aware. You were saying, m'lord?"

"Tell me, Rosie, are you afraid of spiders?"

"Why does your lordship ask?"

"There's rather an outsize specimen crawling on the back of your hair." Bill sprang about six inches in the direction of the ceiling. "What on earth did you do that for?" he demanded irritably.

Jeeves preserved his calm.

"My reason for screaming, m'lord, was merely to add verisimilitude. I supposed that that was how a delicately nurtured lady would be inclined to react on receipt of such a piece of information."

"Well, I wish you hadn't. The top of my head nearly came off."

"I am sorry, m'lord. But it was how I saw the scene. I felt it, felt it here," said Jeeves, tapping the left side of his waistcoat. "If your lordship would be good enough to throw me the line once more."

"There's rather an outsize specimen crawling on the back of your hair."

"I would be grateful if your lordship would be so kind as to knock it off."

"I can't see it now. Ah, there it goes.

On your neck."

"And that," said Jeeves, rising from the settee on which in his role of Mrs. Spottsworth he had seated himself, "is cue for business, m'lord.

Your lordship will admit that it is really quite simple."

"I suppose it is."

"I am sure that after this try-out the performing fleas to which your lordship alluded a moment ago will have substantially modified their activities."

"They've slowed up a bit, yes. But I'm still nervous."

"Inevitable on the eve of an opening performance, m'lord. I think your lordship should be starting as soon as possible. If 'twere done, then 'twere well 'twere done quickly. Our arrangements have been made with a view to a garden set, and it would be disconcerting were Mrs. Spottsworth to return to the house, compelling your lordship to adapt your technique to an interior."

Bill nodded.

"I see what you mean. Right ho, Jeeves.

Good-bye."

"Good-bye, m'lord."

"If anything goes wrong—"

"Nothing will go wrong, m'lord."

"But if it does ... You'll write to me in Dartmoor occasionally, Jeeves? Just a chatty letter from time to time, giving me the latest news from the outer world?"

"Certainly, m'lord."

"It'll cheer me up as I crack my daily rock. They tell me conditions are much better in these modern prisons than they used to be in the old days."

"So I understand, m'lord."

"I might find Dartmoor a regular home from home. Solid comfort, I mean to say."

"Quite conceivably, m'lord."

"Still, we'll hope it won't come to that."

"Yes, m'lord."

"Yes ... Well, good-bye once again, Jeeves."

"Good-bye, m'lord."

Bill squared his shoulders and strode out, a gallant figure. He had summoned the pride of the Rowcesters to his aid, and it buoyed him up. With just this quiet courage had a Rowcester of the seventeenth century mounted the scaffold at Tower Hill, nodding affably to the headsman and waving to friends and relations in the audience. When the test comes, blood will tell.

He had been gone a few moments, when Jill came in.

It seemed to Jeeves that in the course of the past few hours the young master's betrothed had lost a good deal of the animation which rendered her as a rule so attractive, and he was right. Her recent interview with Captain Biggar had left Jill pensive and inclined to lower the corners of the mouth and stare mournfully. She was staring mournfully now.

"Have you seen Lord Rowcester, Jeeves?"

"His lordship has just stepped into the garden, miss."

"Where are the others?"

"Sir Roderick and her ladyship are still in the library, miss."

"And Mrs. Spottsworth?"

"She stepped into the garden shortly before his lordship."

Jill stiffened.

"Oh?" she said, and went into the library to join Monica and Rory. The corners of her mouth were drooping more than ever, and her stare had increased in mournfulness some twenty per cent. She looked like a girl who is thinking the worst, and that was precisely the sort of girl she was.

Two minutes later, Captain Biggar came bustling in with a song on his lips. Yoga and communion with the Jivatma or soul seemed to have done him good. His eyes were bright and his manner alert. It is when the time for action has come that you always catch these White Hunters at their best.

"Pale hands I loved beside the Shalimar, where are you now, where are you now?" sang Captain Biggar. "I ... how does the dashed thing go ...

I sink beneath your spell. La, la, la ...

La, la, la, la. Where are you now? Where are you now? For they're hanging Danny Deever in the morning," he carolled, changing the subject.

He saw Jeeves, and suspended the painful performance.

"Hullo," he said. "Quai hai, my man. How are things?"

"Things are in a reasonably satisfactory state, sir."

"Where's Patch Rowcester?"

"His lordship is in the garden, sir."

"With Mrs. Spottsworth?"

"Yes, sir. Putting his fate to the test, to win or lose it all."

"You thought of something, then?"

"Yes, sir. The spider sequence."

"The how much?"

Captain Biggar listened attentively as Jeeves outlined the spider sequence, and when he had finished paid him a stately compliment.

"You'd do well out East, my boy."

"It is extremely kind of you to say so, sir."

"That is to say if that scheme was your own."

"It was, sir."

"Then you'd be just the sort of fellow we want in Kuala Lumpur. We need chaps like you, chaps who can use their brains. Can't leave brains all to the Dyaks. Makes the blighters get above themselves."

"The Dyaks are exceptionally intelligent, sir?"

"Are they! Let me tell you of something that happened to Tubby Frobisher and me one day when we—" He broke off, and the world was deprived of another excellent story. Bill was coming through the French window.

A striking change had taken place in the ninth Earl in the few minutes since he had gone out through that window, a young man of spirit setting forth on a high adventure. His shoulders, as we have indicated, had then been square. Now they sagged like those of one who bears a heavy weight. His eyes were dull, his brow furrowed. The pride of the Rowcesters appeared to have packed up and withdrawn its support. No longer was there in his bearing any suggestion of that seventeenth-century ancestor who had infused so much of the party spirit into his decapitation on Tower Hill. The ancestor he most closely resembled now was the one who was caught cheating at cards by Charles James Fox at Wattier's in 1782.

"Well?" cried Captain Biggar.

Bill gave him a long, silent mournful look, and turned to Jeeves.

"Jeeves!"

"M'lord?"

"That spider sequence."

"Yes, m'lord?"

"I tried it."

"Yes, m'lord?"

"And things looked good for a moment. I detached the pendant."

"Yes, m'lord?"

"Captain Biggar was right. The clasp was loose. It came off."

Captain Biggar uttered a pleased exclamation in Swahili.

"Gimme," he said.

"I haven't got it. It slipped out of my hand."

"And fell?"

"And fell."

"You mean it's lying in the grass?"

"No," said Bill, with a sombre shake of the head. "It isn't lying in any ruddy grass.

It went down the front of Mrs.

Spottsworth's dress, and is now somewhere in the recesses of her costume."

It is not often that one sees three good men struck all of a heap simultaneously, but anybody who had chanced to stroll into the living-room of Rowcester Abbey at this moment would have been able to observe that spectacle. To say that Bill's bulletin had had a shattering effect on his companions would be, if anything, to understate it. Captain Biggar was expressing his concern by pacing the room with whirling arms, while the fact that two of the hairs of his right eyebrow distinctly quivered showed how deeply Jeeves had been moved. Bill himself, crushed at last by the blows of Fate, appeared formally to have given up the struggle. He had slumped into a chair, and was sitting there looking boneless and despairing. All he needed was a long white beard, and the resemblance to King Lear on one of his bad mornings would have been complete.

Jeeves was the first to speak.

"Most disturbing, m'lord."

"Yes," said Bill dully. "Quite a nuisance, isn't it? You don't happen to have any little-known Asiatic poison on you, do you, Jeeves?"

"No, m'lord."

"A pity," said Bill. "I could have used it."

His young employer's distress pained Jeeves, and as it had always been his view that there was no anodyne for the human spirit, when bruised, like a spot of Marcus Aurelius, he searched in his mind for some suitable quotation from the Emperor's works. And he was just hesitating between "Whatever may befall thee, it was preordained for thee from everlasting" and "Nothing happens to any man which he is not fitted by nature to bear", both excellent, when Captain Biggar, who had been pouring out a rapid fire of ejaculations in some native dialect, suddenly reverted to English.

"Doi wieng lek!" he cried. "I've got it! Fricassee me with stewed mushrooms on the side, I see what you must do."

Bill looked up. His eyes were glazed, his manner listless.

"Do?" he said. "Me?"

"Yes, you."

"I'm sorry," said Bill. "I'm in no condition to do anything except possibly expire, regretted by all."

Captain Biggar snorted, and having snorted uttered a tchah, a pah and a bah.

"Mun py nawn lap lao!" he said impatiently. "You can dance, can't you?"

"Dance?"

"Preferably the Charleston. That's all I'm asking of you, a few simple steps of the Charleston."

Bill stirred slightly, like a corpse moving in its winding sheet. It was an acute spasm of generous indignation that caused him to do so. He was filled with what, in his opinion, was a justifiable resentment. Here he was, in the soup and going down for the third time? and this man came inviting him to dance before him as David danced before Saul. Assuming this to be merely the thin end of the wedge, one received the impression that in next to no time the White Hunter, if encouraged, would be calling for comic songs and conjuring tricks and imitations of footlight favourites who are familiar to you all. What, he asked himself bitterly, did the fellow think this was? The revival of Vaudeville? A village concert in aid of the church organ restoration fund?

Groping for words with which to express these thoughts, he found that the Captain was beginning to tell another of his stories. Like Marcus Aurelius, Kuala Lumpur's favourite son always seemed to have up his sleeve something apposite to the matter in hand, whatever that matter might be. But where the Roman Emperor, a sort of primitive Bob Hope or Groucho Marx, had contented himself with throwing off wisecracks, Captain Biggar preferred the narrative form.

"Yes, the Charleston," said Captain Biggar, "and I'll tell you why. I am thinking of the episode of Tubby Frobisher and the wife of the Greek consul. The recollection of it suddenly flashed upon me like a gleam of light from above."

He paused. A sense of something omitted, something left undone, was nagging at him. Then he saw why this was so. The whisky. He moved to the table and filled his glass.

"Whether it was Smyrna or Joppa or Stamboul where Tubby was stationed at the time of which I speak," he said, draining half the contents of his glass and coming back with the rest, "I'm afraid I can't tell you. As one grows older, one tends to forget these details. It may even have been Baghdad or half a dozen other places.

I admit frankly that I have forgotten. But the point is that he was at some place somewhere and one night he attended a reception or a soir@ee or whatever they call these binges at one of the embassies. You know the sort of thing I mean.

Fair women and brave men, all dolled up and dancing their ruddy heads off. And in due season it came to pass that Tubby found himself doing the Charleston with the wife of the Greek consul as his partner. I don't know if either of you have ever seen Tubby Frobisher dance the Charleston?"

"Neither his lordship nor myself have had the privilege of meeting Mr. Frobisher, sir,"

Jeeves reminded him courteously.

Captain Biggar stiffened.

"Major Frobisher, damn it."

"I beg your pardon, sir. Major Frobisher. Owing to our never having met him, the Major's technique when performing the Charleston is a sealed book to us."

"Oh?" Captain Biggar refilled his glass. "Well, his technique, as you call it, is vigorous. He does not spare himself. He is what in the old days would have been described as a three-collar man. By the time Tubby Frobisher has finished dancing the Charleston, his partner knows she has been in a fight, all right.

And it was so on this occasion. He hooked on to the wife of the Greek consul and he jumped her up and he jumped her down, he whirled her about and he spun her round, he swung her here and he swung her there, and all of a sudden what do you think happened?"

"The lady had heart failure, sir?"

"No, the lady didn't have heart failure, but what occurred was enough to give it to all present at that gay affair. For, believe me or believe me not, there was a tinkling sound, and from inside her dress there began to descend to the floor silver forks, silver spoons and, Tubby assures me, a complete toilet set in tortoiseshell. It turned out that the female was a confirmed kleptomaniac and had been using the space between her dress and whatever she was wearing under her dress—I'm not a married man myself, so can't go into particulars—as a safe deposit."

"Embarrassing for Major Frobisher, sir."

Captain Biggar stared.

"For Tubby? Why? He hadn't been pinching the things, he was merely the instrument for their recovery.

But don't tell me you've missed the whole point of my story, which is that I am convinced that if Patch Rowcester here were to dance the Charleston with Mrs. Spottsworth with one tithe of Tubby Frobisher's determination and will to win, we'd soon rout that pendant out of its retreat. Tubby would have had it in the open before the band had played a dozen bars. And talking of that, we shall need music.

Ah, I see a gramophone over there in the corner. Excellent. Well? Do you grasp the scheme?"

"Perfectly, sir. His lordship dances with Mrs. Spottsworth, and in due course the pendant droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven upon the place beneath."

"Exactly. What do you think of the idea?"

Jeeves referred the question to a higher court.

"What does your lordship think of it?" he asked deferentially.

"Eh?" said Bill. "What?"

Captain Biggar barked sharply.

"You mean you haven't been listening? Well, of all the—"

Jeeves intervened.

"In the circumstances, sir, his lordship may, I think, be excused for being distrait," he said reprovingly. "You can see from his lordship's lack-lustre eye that the native hue of his resolution is sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought. Captain Biggar's suggestion is, m'lord, that your lordship shall invite Mrs. Spottsworth to join you in performing the dance known as the Charleston. This, if your lordship infuses sufficient vigour into the steps, will result in the pendant becoming dislodged and falling to the ground, whence it can readily be recovered and placed in your lordship's pocket."

It was perhaps a quarter of a minute before the gist of these remarks penetrated to Bill's numbed mind, but when it did, the effect was electric. His eyes brightened, his spine stiffened. It was plain that hope had dawned, and was working away once more at the old stand. As he rose from his chair, jauntily andwiththe air of a man who is ready for anything, he might have been that debonair ancestor of his who in the days of the Restoration had by his dash and gallantry won from the ladies of King Charles the Second's Court the affectionate sobriquet of Tabasco Rowcester.

"Lead me to her!" he said, and his voice rang out clear and resonant. "Lead me to her, that is all I ask, and leave the rest to me."

But it was not necessary, as it turned out, to lead him to Mrs. Spottsworth, for at this moment she came in through the French window with her Pekinese dog Pomona in her arms.

Pomona, on seeing the assembled company, gave vent to a series of piercing shrieks. It sounded as if she were being torn asunder by red-hot pincers, but actually this was her method of expressing joy. In moments of ecstasy she always screamed partly like a lost soul and partly like a scalded cat.

Jill came running out of the library, and Mrs. Spottsworth calmed her fears.

"It's nothing, dear," she said. "She's just excited. But I wish you would put her in my room, if you are going upstairs. Would it be troubling you too much?"

"Not at all," said Jill aloofly.

She went out, carrying Pomona, and Bill advanced on Mrs. Spottsworth.

"Shall we dance?" he said.

Mrs. Spottsworth was surprised.

On the rustic seat just now, especially in the moments following the disappearance of her pendant, she had found her host's mood markedly on the Byronic side. She could not readily adjust herself to this new spirit of gaiety.

"You want to dance?"

"Yes, with you," said Bill, infusing into his manner a wealth of Restoration gallantry.

"It'll be like the old days at Cannes."

Mrs. Spottsworth was a shrewd woman.

She had not failed to observe Captain Biggar lurking in the background, and it seemed to her that an admirable opportunity had presented itself of rousing the fiend that slept in him ... far too soundly, in her opinion. What it was that was slowing up the White Hunter in his capacity of wooer, she did not know: but what she did know was that there is nothing that so lights a fire under a laggard lover as the spectacle of the woman he loves treading the measure in the arms of another man, particularly another man as good-looking as William, Earl of Rowcester.

"Yes, won't it!" she said, all sparkle and enthusiasm. "How well I remember those days!

Lord Rowcester dances so wonderfully," she added, addressing Captain Biggar and imparting to him a piece of first-hand information which, of course, he would have been sorry to have missed. "I love dancing.

The one unpunished rapture left on earth."

"What ho!" said Bill, concurring. "The old Charleston ... do you remember it?"

"You bet I do."

"Put a Charleston record on the gramophone. Jeeves."

"Very good, m'lord."

When Jill returned from depositing Pomona in Mrs. Spottsworth's sleeping quarters, only Jeeves, Bill and Mrs.

Spottsworth were present in the living-room, for at the very outset of the proceedings Captain Biggar, unable to bear the sight before him, had plunged through the French window into the silent night.

The fact that it was he himself who had suggested this distressing exhibition, recalling, as it did in his opinion the worst excesses of the Carmagnole of the French Revolution combined with some of the more risqu`e features of native dances he had seen in Equatorial Africa, did nothing to assuage the darkness of his mood. The frogs on the lawn, which he was now pacing with a black scowl on his face, were beginning to get the illusion that it was raining number eleven boots.

His opinion of the Charleston, as rendered by his host and the woman he loved, was one which Jill found herself sharing. As she stood watching from the doorway, she was conscious of much the same rising feeling of nausea which had affected the White Hunter when listening to the exchanges on the rustic seat.

Possibly there was nothing in the way in which Bill was comporting himself that rendered him actually liable to arrest, but she felt very strongly that some form of action should have been taken by the police. It was her view that there ought to have been a law.

Nothing is more difficult than to describe in words a Charleston danced by, on the one hand, a woman who loves dancing Charlestons and throws herself right into the spirit of them, and, on the other hand, by a man desirous of leaving no stone unturned in order to dislodge from some part of his associate's anatomy a diamond pendant which has lodged there. It will be enough, perhaps, to say that if Major Frobisher had happened to walk into the room at this moment, he would instantly have been reminded of old days in Smyrna or Joppa or Stamboul or possibly Baghdad. Mrs. Spottsworth he would have compared favourably with the wife of the Greek consul, while Bill he would have patted on the back, recognizing his work as fully equal, if not superior, to his own.

Rory and Monica, coming out of the library, were frankly amazed.

"Good heavens!" said Monica.

"The old boy cuts quite a rug, does he not?" said Rory. "Come, girl, let us join the revels."

He put his arm about Monica's waist, and the action became general. Jill, unable to bear the degrading spectacle any longer, turned and went out. As she made her way to her room, she was thinking unpleasant thoughts of her betrothed. It is never agreeable for an idealistic girl to discover that she has linked her lot with a libertine, and it was plain to her now that William, Earl of Rowcester, was a debauchee whose correspondence course might have been taken with advantage by Casanova, Don Juan and the rowdier Roman Emperors.

"When I dance," said Mrs. Spottsworth, cutting, like her partner, quite a rug, "I don't know I've got feet."

Monica winced.

"If you danced with Rory, you'd know you've got feet. It's the way he jumps on and off that gets you down."

"Ouch!" said Mrs. Spottsworth suddenly.

Bill had just lifted her and brought her down with a bump which would have excited Tubby Frobisher's generous admiration, and she was now standing rubbing her leg. "I've twisted something," she said, hobbling to a chair.

"I'm not surprised," said Monica, "the way Bill was dancing."

"Oh, gee, I hope it is just a twist and not my sciatica come back. I suffer so terribly from sciatica, especially if I'm in a place that's at all damp."

Incredible as it may seem, Rory did not say "Like Rowcester Abbey, what?"' and go on to speak of the garden which, in the winter months, was at the bottom of the river. He was peering down at an object lying on the floor.

"Hullo," he said. "What's this? Isn't this pendant yours, Mrs. Spottsworth?"

"Oh, thank you," said Mrs. Spottsworth.

"Yes, it's mine. It must have ... Ouch!" she said, breaking off, and writhed in agony once more.

Monica was all concern.

"You must get straight to bed, Rosalinda."

"I guess I should."

"With a nice hot-water bottle."

"Yes."

"Rory will help you upstairs."

"Charmed," said Rory. "But why do people always speak of a "nice" hot-water bottle? We at Harrige's say "nasty" hot-water bottle. Our electric pads have rendered the hot-water bottle obsolete. Three speeds ... Autumn Glow, Spring Warmth and Mae West."

They moved to the door, Mrs. Spottsworth leaning heavily on his arm. They passed out, and Bill, who had followed them with a bulging eye, threw up his hands in a wide gesture of despair.

"Jeeves!"

"M'lord?"

"This is the end!"

"Yes, m'lord."

"She's gone to ground."

"Yes, m'lord."

"Accompanied by the pendant."

"Yes, m'lord."

"So unless you have any suggestions for getting her out of that room, we're sunk. Have you any suggestions?"

"Not at the moment, m'lord."

"I didn't think you would have. After all, you're human, and the problem is one which is not within ... what, Jeeves?"

"The scope of human power, m'lord."

"Exactly. Do you know what I am going to do?"

"No, m'lord?"

"Go to bed, Jeeves. Go to bed and try to sleep and forget. Not that I have the remotest chance of getting to sleep, with every nerve in my body sticking out a couple of inches and curling at the ends."

"Possibly if your lordship were to count sheep—"

"You think that would work?"

"It is a widely recognized specific, m'lord."

"H'm." Bill considered. "Well, no harm in trying it. Good night, Jeeves."

"Good night, m'lord."

Except for the squeaking of mice behind the wainscoting and an occasional rustling sound as one of the bats in the chimney stirred uneasily in its sleep, Rowcester Abbey lay hushed and still.

'Twas now the very witching time of night, and in the Blue Room Rory and Monica, pleasantly fatigued after the activities of the day, slumbered peacefully. In the Queen Elizabeth Room Mrs. Spottsworth, Pomona in her basket at her side, had also dropped off. In the Anne Boleyn Room Captain Biggar, the good man taking his rest, was dreaming of old days on the Me Wang river, which, we need scarcely inform our public, is a tributary of the larger and more crocodile-infested Wang Me.

Jill, in the Clock Room, was still awake, staring at the ceiling with hot eyes, and Bill, counting sheep in the Henry the Eighth Room, had also failed to find oblivion. The specific recommended by Jeeves might be widely recognized but so far it had done nothing toward enabling him to knit up the ravelled sleeve of care.

"Eight hundred and twenty-two," murmured Bill. "Eight hundred and twenty-three.

Eight hundred and—"

He broke off, leaving the eight hundred and twenty-fourth sheep, an animal with a more than usually vacuous expression on its face, suspended in the air into which it had been conjured up.

Someone had knocked on the door, a knock so soft and deferential that it could have proceeded from the knuckle of only one man. It was consequently without surprise that a moment later he perceived Jeeves entering.

"Your lordship will excuse me," said Jeeves courteously. "I would not have disturbed your lordship, had I not, listening at the door, gathered from your lordship's remarks that the stratagem which I proposed had proved unsuccessful."

"No, it hasn't worked yet," said Bill, "but come in, Jeeves, come in." He would have been glad to see anything that was not a sheep.

"Don't tell me," he said, starting as he noted the gleam of intelligence in his visitor's eye, "that you've thought of something?"

"Yes, m'lord, I am happy to say that I fancy I have found a solution to the problem which confronted us."

"Jeeves, you're a marvel!"

"Thank you very much, m'lord."

"I remember Bertie Wooster saying to me once that there was no crisis which you were unable to handle."

"Mr. Wooster has always been far too flattering, m'lord."

"Nonsense. Not nearly flattering enough. If you have really put your finger on a way of overcoming the superhuman difficulties in our path—"

"I feel convinced that I have, m'lord."

Bill quivered inside his mauve pyjama jacket.

"Think well, Jeeves," he urged.

"Somehow or other we have got to get Mrs.

Spottsworth out of her room for a lapse of time sufficient to enable me to bound in, find that pendant, scoop it up and bound out again, all this without a human eye resting upon me. Unless I have completely misinterpreted your words owing to having suffered a nervous breakdown from counting sheep, you seem to be suggesting that you can do this. How?

That is the question that springs to the lips. With mirrors?"

Jeeves did not speak for a moment. A pained look had come into his finely-chiselled face.

It was as though he had suddenly seen some sight which was occasioning his distress.

"Excuse me, m'lord. I am reluctant to take what is possibly a liberty on my part—"

"Carry on, Jeeves. You have our ear. What is biting you?"

"It is your pyjamas, m'lord. Had I been aware that your lordship was in the habit of sleeping in mauve pyjamas, I would have advised against it.

Mauve does not become your lordship. I was once compelled, in his best interests, to speak in a similar vein to Mr. Wooster, who at that time was also a mauve-pyjama addict."

Bill found himself at a loss.

"How have we got on to the subject of pyjamas?" he asked, wonderingly.

"They thrust themselves on the notice, m'lord. That very aggressive purple. If your lordship would be guided by me and substitute a quiet blue or possibly a light pistachio green—"

"Jeeves!"

"M'lord?"

"This is no time to be prattling of pyjamas."

"Very good m'lord."

"As a matter of fact, I rather fancy myself in mauve. But that, as I say, is neither here nor there. Let us postpone the discussion to a more suitable moment. I will, however, tell you this. If you really have something to suggest with reference to that pendant and that something brings home the bacon, you may take these mauve pyjamas and raze them to the ground and sow salt on the foundations."

"Thank you very much, m'lord."

"It will be a small price to pay for your services. Well, now that you've got me all worked up, tell me more. What's the good news?

What is this scheme of yours?"

"A quite simple one, m'lord. It is based on—"

Bill uttered a cry.

"Don't tell me. Let me guess. The psychology of the individual?"

"Precisely, m'lord."

Bill drew in his breath sharply.

"I thought as much. Something told me that was it. Many a time and oft, exchanging dry Martinis with Bertie Wooster in the bar of the Drones Club, I have listened to him, rapt, as he spoke of you and the psychology of the individual. He said that, once you get your teeth into the psychology of the individual, it's all over except chucking one's hat in the air and doing Spring dances. Proceed, Jeeves. You interest me strangely. The individual whose psychology you have been brooding on at the present juncture is, I take it, Mrs.

Spottsworth? Am I right or wrong, Jeeves?"

"Perfectly correct, m'lord. Has it occurred to your lordship what is Mrs.

Spottsworth's principal interest, the thing uppermost in the lady's mind?"

Bill gaped.

"You haven't come here at two in the morning to suggest that I dance the Charleston with her again?"

"Oh, no, m'lord."

"Well, when you spoke of her principal interest—"

"There is another facet of Mrs.

Spottsworth's character which you have overlooked, m'lord.

I concede that she is an enthusiastic Charleston performer, but what principally occupies her thoughts is psychical research. Since her arrival at the Abbey, she has not ceased to express a hope that she may be granted the experience of seeing the spectre of Lady Agatha. It was that that I had in mind when I informed your lordship that I had formulated a scheme for obtaining the pendant, based on the psychology of the individual."

Bill sank back on the pillows, a disappointed man.

"No, Jeeves," he said. "I won't do it."

"M'lord?"

"I see where you're heading. You want me to dress up in a farthingale and wimple and sneak into Mrs. Spottsworth's room, your contention being that if she wakes and sees me, she will simply say "Ah, the ghost of Lady Adela", and go to sleep again. It can't be done, Jeeves. Nothing will induce me to dress up in women's clothes, not even in such a deserving cause as this one. I might stretch a point and put on the old moustache and black patch."

"I would not advocate it, m'lord.

Even on the racecourse I have observed clients, on seeing your lordship, start back with visible concern. A lady, discovering such an apparition in her room, might quite conceivably utter a piercing scream."

Bill threw his hands up with a despondent groan.

"Well, there you are, then. The thing's off. Your scheme falls to the ground and becomes null and void."

"No, m'lord. Your lordship has not, if I may say so, grasped the substance of the plan I am putting forward. The essential at which one aims is the inducing of Mrs. Spottsworth to leave her room thus rendering it possible for your lordship to enter and secure the pendant. I propose now, with your lordship's approval, to knock on Mrs. Spottsworth's door and request the loan of a bottle of smelling salts."

Bill clutched at his hair.

"You said, Jeeves?"

"Smelling salts, m'lord."

Bill shook his head.

"Counting those sheep has done something to me," he said. My hearing has become affected. It sounded to me just as if you had said "Smelling salts"."

"I did, m'lord. I would explain that I required them in order to restore your lordship to consciousness."

"There again. I could have sworn that I heard you say "restore your lordship to consciousness"."

"Precisely, m'lord. Your lordship has sustained a severe shock. Happening to be in the vicinity of the ruined chapel at about the hour of midnight, your lordship observed the wraith of Lady Agatha and was much overcome. How your lordship contrived to totter back to your room, your lordship will never know, but I found your lordship there in a what appeared to be a coma and immediately applied to Mrs. Spottsworth for the loan of her smelling salts."

Bill was still at a loss.

"I don't get the gist, Jeeves."

"If I might elucidate my meaning still further, m'lord. The thought I had in mind was that, learning that Lady Agatha was, if I may so term it, on the wing, Mrs. Spottsworth's immediate reaction would be an intense desire to hasten to the ruined chapel in order to observe the manifestation for herself. I would offer to escort her thither, and during her absence ..."

It is never immediately that the ordinary man, stunned by some revelation of genius, is able to find words with which to express his emotion. When Alexander Graham Bell, meeting a friend one morning in the year 1876, said "Oh, hullo, George, heard the latest? I invented the telephone yesterday", it is probable that the friend merely shuffled his feet in silence. It was the same with Bill now. He could not speak. He lay there dumbly, while remorse flooded over him that he could ever have doubted this man. It was just as Bertie Wooster had so often said. Let this fish-fed mastermind get his teeth into the psychology of the individual, and it was all over except chucking your hat in the air and doing Spring dances.

"Jeeves," he began, at length finding speech, but Jeeves was shimmering through the door.

"Your smelling salts, m'lord," he said, turning his head on the threshold. "If your lordship will excuse me."

It was perhaps two minutes, though to Bill it seemed longer, before he returned, bearing a small bottle.

"Well?" said Bill eagerly.

"Everything has gone according to plan, m'lord. The lady's reactions were substantially as I had anticipated. Mrs. Spottsworth, on receiving my communication, displayed immediate interest. Is your lordship familiar with the expression "Jiminy Christmas!"?"

"No, I don't think I ever heard it. You don't mean "Merry Christmas"?"

"No, m'lord. "Jiminy Christmas!" It was what Mrs. Spottsworth observed on receiving the information that the phantasm of Lady Agatha was to be seen in the ruined chapel. The words, I gathered, were intended to convey surprise and elation.

She assured me that it would take her but a brief time to hop into a dressing-gown and that at the conclusion of that period she would be with me with, I understood her to say, her hair in a braid. I am to return in a moment and accompany her to the scene of the manifestation. I will leave the door open a few inches, so that your lordship, by applying your lordship's eye to the crack, may be able to see us depart. As soon as we have descended the staircase, I would advocate instant action, for I need scarcely remind your lordship that time is—"

"Of the essence? No, you certainly don't have to tell me that. You remember what you were saying about cheetahs?"

"With reference to their speed of foot, m'lord?"

"That's right. Half a mile in forty-five seconds, I think you said?"

"Yes, m'lord."

"Well, the way I shall move would leave the nippiest cheetah standing at the post."

"That will be highly satisfactory, m'lord.

I, on my side, may mention that on the dressing-table in Mrs. Spottsworth's room I observed a small jewel-case, which I have no doubt contains the pendant. The dressing-table is immediately beneath the window. Your lordship will have no difficulty in locating it."

He was right, as always. It was the first thing that Bill saw when, having watched the little procession of two out of sight down the stairs, he hastened along the corridor to the Queen Elizabeth Room. There, as Jeeves had stated, was the dressing-table. On it was the small jewel-case of which he had spoken. And in that jewel-case, as he opened it with shaking hands, Bill saw the pendant. Hastily he slipped it into the pocket of his pyjamas, and was turning to leave, when the silence, which had been complete but for his heavy breathing, was shattered by a series of dreadful screams.

Reference has been made earlier to the practice of the dog Pomona of shrieking loudly to express the ecstasy she always felt on beholding a friend or even what looked to her like a congenial stranger. It was ecstasy that was animating her now. In the course of that session on the rustic seat, when Bill had done his cooing, she had taken an immediate fancy to her host, as all dogs did. Meeting him now in this informal fashion, just at a moment when she had been trying to reconcile herself to the solitude which she so disliked, she made no attempt to place any bounds on her self-expression.

Screams sufficient in number and volume to have equipped a dozen Baronets stabbed in the back in libraries burst from her lips and their effect on Bill was devastating. The author of The Hunting Of The Snark says of one of his protagonists in a powerful passage:

"So great was his fright That his waistcoat turned white"

and the experience through which he was passing nearly caused Bill's mauve pyjamas to do the same.

Though fond of Pomona, he did not linger to fraternize. He shot out of the door at a speed which would have had the most athletic cheetah shrugging its shoulders helplessly, and arrived in the corridor just as Jill, roused from sleep by those awful cries, came out of the Clock Room.

She watched him steal softly into the Henry the Eighth Room, and thought in bitter mood that a more suitable spot for him could scarcely have been found.

It was some quarter of an hour later, as Bill, lying in bed, was murmuring "Nine hundred and ninety-eight ... Nine hundred and ninety-nine ... One thousand ..." that Jeeves entered.

He was carrying a salver.

On that salver was a ring.

"I encountered Miss Wyvern in the corridor a few moments ago, m'lord," he said. "She desired me to give this to your lordship."

Wyvern Hall, the residence of Colonel Aubrey Wyvern, father of Jill and Chief Constable of the county of Southmoltonshire, lay across the river from Rowcester Abbey, and on the following afternoon Colonel Wyvern, having worked his way scowlingly through a most inferior lunch, stumped out of the dining room and went to his study and rang for his butler. And in due course the butler entered, tripping over the rug with a muffled "Whoops!", his invariable practice when crossing any threshold.

Colonel Wyvern was short and stout, and this annoyed him, for he would have preferred to be tall and slender. But if his personal appearance gave him pangs of discomfort from time to time, they were as nothing compared to the pangs the personal appearance of his butler gave him. In England today the householder in the country has to take what he can get in the way of domestic help, and all Colonel Wyvern had been able to get was the scrapings and scourings of the local parish school.

Bulstrode, the major-domo of Wyvern Hall, was a skinny stripling of some sixteen summers, on whom Nature in her bounty had bestowed so many pimples that there was scarcely room on his face for the vacant grin which habitually adorned it.

He was grinning now, and once again, as always happened at these staff conferences, his overlord was struck by the closeness of the lad's resemblance to a half-witted goldfish peering out of a bowl.

"Bulstrode," he said, with a parade-ground rasp in his voice.

"Yus?" replied the butler affably.

At another moment, Colonel Wyvern would have had something to say on the subject of this unconventional verbal approach but today he was after bigger game. His stomach was still sending up complaints to the front office about the lunch, and he wanted to see the cook.

"Bulstrode," he said, "bring the cook to me."

The cook, conducted into the presence, proved also to be one of the younger set. Her age was fifteen.

She bustled in, her pigtails swinging behind her, and Colonel Wyvern gave her an unpleasant look.

"Trelawny!" he said.

"Yus?" said the cook.

This time there was no reticence on the part of the Chief Constable. The Wyverns did not as a rule war upon women, but there are times when chivalry is impossible.

"Don't say "Yus?"', you piefaced little excrescence," he thundered. "Say "Yes, sir?"', and say it in a respectful and soldierly manner, coming smartly to attention with the thumbs on the seam of the trousers. Trelawny, that lunch you had the temerity to serve up today was an insult to me and a disgrace to anyone daring to call herself a cook, and I have sent for you to inform you that if there is any more of this spirit of slackness and laissez faire on your part ..." Colonel Wyvern paused. The "I'll tell your mother", with which he had been about to conclude his sentence, seemed to him to lack a certain something. "You'll hear of it," he said and, feeling that even this was not as good as he could have wished, infused such vigour and venom into his description of underdone chicken, watery brussels sprouts and potatoes you couldn't get a fork into that a weaker girl might well have wilted.

But the Trelawnys were made of tough stuff. They did not quail in the hour of peril.

The child met his eye with iron resolution, and came back strongly.

"Hitler!" she said, putting out her tongue.

The Chief Constable started.

"Did you call me Hitler?"

"Yus, I did."

"Well, don't do it again," said Colonel Wyvern sternly. "You may go, Trelawny."

Trelawny went, with her nose in the air, and Colonel Wyvern addressed himself to Bulstrode.

A proud man is never left unruffled when worsted in a verbal duel with a cook, especially a cook aged fifteen with pigtails, and in the Chief Constable's manner as he turned on his butler there was more than a suggestion of a rogue elephant at the height of its fever. For some minutes he spoke well and forcefully, with particular reference to the other's habit of chewing his sweet ration while waiting at table, and when at length he was permitted to follow Evangeline Trelawny to the lower regions in which they had their being, Bulstrode, if not actually shaking in every limb, was at any rate subdued enough to omit to utter his customary "Whoops!" when tripping over the rug.

He left the Chief Constable, though feeling a little better after having cleansed his bosom of the perilous stuff that weighs upon the soul, still definitely despondent. "Ichabod", he was saying to himself, and he meant it. In the golden age before the social revolution, he was thinking, a gaping, pimpled tripper over rugs like this Bulstrode would have been a lowly hall-boy, if that. It revolted a Tory of the old school's finer feelings to have to regard such a blot on the Southmoltonshire scene in the sacred light of a butler.

He thought nostalgically of his young manhood in London at the turn of the century and of the vintage butlers he had been wont to encounter in those brave days ... butlers who weighed two hundred and fifty pounds on the hoof, butlers with three chins and bulging abdomens, butlers with large, gooseberry eyes and that austere, supercilious, butlerine manner which has passed away so completely from the degenerate world of the nineteen-fifties. Butlers had been butlers then in the deepest and holiest sense of the word. Now they were mere chinless boys who sucked toffee and said "Yus?"' when you spoke to them.

It was almost inevitable that a man living so near to Rowcester Abbey and starting to brood on butlers should find his thoughts turning in the direction of the Abbey's principal ornament, and it was with a warm glow that Colonel Wyvern now began to think of Jeeves. Jeeves had made a profound impression on him. Jeeves, in his opinion, was the goods. Young Rowcester himself was a fellow the Colonel, never very fond of his juniors, could take or leave alone, but this man of his, this Jeeves, he had recognized from their first meeting as something special. Out of the night that covered the Chief Constable, black as the pit—after that disturbing scene with Evangeline Trelawny—from pole to pole, there shone a sudden gleam of light.

He himself might have his Bulstrode, but at least he could console himself with the thought that his daughter was marrying a man with a butler in the fine old tradition on his payroll. It put heart into him. It made him feel that this was not such a bad little old world, after all.

He mentioned this to Jill when she came in a moment later, looking cold and proud, and Jill tilted her chin and looked colder and prouder. She might have been a Snow Queen or something of that sort.

"I am not going to marry Lord Rowcester," she said curtly.

It seemed to Colonel Wyvern that his child must be suffering from some form of amnesia, and he set himself to jog her memory.

"Yes, you are," he reminded her. "It was in The Times. I saw it with my own eyes. The engagement is announced between—"

"I have broken off the engagement."

That little gleam of light of which we were speaking a moment ago, the one we showed illuminating Colonel Wyvern's darkness, went out with a pop, like a stage moon that has blown a fuse. He stared incredulously.

"Broken off the engagement?"

"I am never going to speak to Lord Rowcester again."

"Don't be an ass," said Colonel Wyvern. "Of course you are. Not going to speak to him again? I never heard such nonsense. I suppose what's happened is that you've had one of these lovers' tiffs."

Jill did not intend to allow without protest what was probably the world's greatest tragedy since the days of Romeo and Juliet to be described in this inadequate fashion. One really must take a little trouble to find the mot juste.

"It was not a lovers' tiff," she said, all the woman in her flashing from her eyes. "If you want to know why I broke off the engagement, it was because of the abominable way he has been behaving with Mrs. Spottsworth."

Colonel Wyvern put a finger to his brow.

"Spottsworth? Spottsworth? Ah, yes.

That's the American woman you were telling me about."

"The American trollop," corrected Jill coldly.

"Trollop?" said Colonel Wyvern, intrigued.

"That was what I said."

"Why do you call her that? Did you catch them— er—trolloping?"

"Yes, I did."

"Good gracious!"

Jill swallowed once or twice, as if something jagged in her throat was troubling her.

"It all seems to have started," she said, speaking in that toneless voice which had made such a painful impression on Bill, "in Cannes some years ago. Apparently she and Lord Rowcester used to swim together at Eden Roc and go for long drives in the moonlight. And you know what that sort of thing leads to."

"I do indeed," said Colonel Wyvern with animation, and was about to embark on an anecdote of his interesting past, when Jill went on, still speaking in that same strange, toneless voice.

"She arrived at the Abbey yesterday. The story that has been put out is that Monica Carmoyle met her in New York and invited her to stay, but I have no doubt that the whole thing was arranged between her and Lord Rowcester, because it was obvious how matters stood between them. No sooner had she appeared than he was all over her ... making love to her in the garden, dancing with her like a cat on hot bricks, and," said Jill nonchalantly, wearing the mask like the Mrs.

Fish who had so diverted Captain Biggar by doing the can-can in her step-ins in Kenya, "coming out of her room at two o'clock in the morning in mauve pyjamas."

Colonel Wyvern choked. He had been about to try to heal the rift by saying that it was quite possible for a man to exchange a few civil remarks with a woman in a garden and while away the long evening by partnering her in the dance and still not be in any way culpable, but this statement wiped the words from his lips.

"Coming out of her room in mauve pyjamas?"

"Yes."

"Mauve pyjamas?"

"Bright mauve."

"God bless my soul!"

A club acquaintance, annoyed by the eccentricity of the other's bridge game, had once told Colonel Wyvern that he looked like a retired member of Sanger's troupe of midgets who for years had been doing himself too well on the starchy foods, and this was in a measure true. He was, as we have said, short and stout.

But when the call to action came, he could triumph over his brevity of stature and rotundity of waistcoat and become a figure of dignity and menace. It was an impressive Chief Constable who strode across the room and rang the bell for Bulstrode.

"Yus?" said Bulstrode.

Colonel Wyvern choked down the burning words he would have liked to utter. He told himself that he must conserve his energies.

"Bulstrode," he said, "bring me my horsewhip."

Down in the forest of pimples on the butler's face something stirred. It was a look of guilt.

"It's gorn," he mumbled.

Colonel Wyvern stared.

"Gone? What do you mean, gone? Gone where?"

Bulstrode choked. He had been hoping that this investigation might have been avoided. Something had told him that it would prove embarrassing.

"To the mender's. To be mended. It got cracked."

"Cracked?"

"Yus," said Bulstrode, in his emotion adding the unusual word "Sir". "I was cracking it in the stable yard, and it cracked. So I took it to the mender's."

Colonel Wyvern pointed an awful finger at the door.

"Get out, you foul blot," he said.

"I'll talk to you later." Seating himself at his desk, as he always did when he wished to think, he drummed his fingers on the arm of his chair. "I'll have to borrow young Rowcester's," he said at length, clicking his tongue in evident annoyance.

"Infernally awkward, calling on a fellow you're going to horsewhip and having to ask him for the loan of his horsewhip to do it with. Still, there it is," said Colonel Wyvern philosophically. "That's how it goes."

He was a man who could always adjust himself to circumstances.

Lunch at Rowcester Abbey had been a much more agreeable function than lunch at Wyvern Hall, on a different plane altogether. Where Colonel Wyvern had been compelled to cope with the distressing efforts of a pigtailed incompetent apparently under the impression that she was catering for a covey of buzzards in the Gobi Desert, the revellers at the Abbey had been ministered to by an expert. Earlier in this chronicle passing reference was made to the virtuosity of Bill's O.c. Kitchen, the richly gifted Mrs.

Piggott, and in dishing up the midday meal today she had in no way fallen short of her high ideals.

Three of the four celebrants at the table had found the food melting in their mouths and had downed it with cries of appreciation.

The exception was the host himself, in whose mouth it had turned to ashes. What with one thing and another— the instability of his financial affairs, last night's burglarious interlude and its devastating sequel, the shattering of his romance—Bill was far from being the gayest of all that gay company. In happier days he had sometimes read novels in which characters were described as pushing their food away untasted, and had often wondered, being a man who enjoyed getting his calories, how they could have brought themselves to do it. But at the meal which was now coming to an end he had been doing it himself, and, as we say, what little nourishment he had contrived to take had turned to ashes in his mouth. He had filled in the time mostly by crumbling bread, staring wildly and jumping like a galvanized frog when spoken to.

A cat in a strange alley would have been more at its ease.

Nor had the conversation at the table done anything to restore his equanimity. Mrs.

Spottsworth would keep bringing it round to the subject of Captain Biggar, regretting his absence from the feast, and each mention of the White Hunter's name had had a seismic effect on his sensitive conscience. She did it again now.

"Captain Biggar was telling me—" she began, and Rory uttered one of his jolly laughs.

"He was, was he?" he said in his tactful way. "Well, I hope you didn't believe him."

Mrs. Spottsworth stiffened. She sensed a slur on the man she loved.

"I beg your pardon?"

"Awful liar, that chap."

"Why do you say that, Sir Roderick?"

"I was thinking of those yarns of his at dinner last night."

"They were perfectly true."

"Not a bit of it," said Rory buoyantly.

"Don't you let him pull your leg, my dear Mrs. Dogsbody. All these fellows from out East are the most frightful liars. It's due, I believe, to the ultra-violet rays of the sun in those parts. They go out without their solar topees, and it does something to them. I have this from an authoritative source. One of them used to come to headquarters a lot when I was in the Guns, Pistols and Ammunition, and we became matey.

And one night, when in his cups, he warned me not to swallow a single word any of them said. "Look at me", he reasoned. "Did you ever hear a chap tell the ghastly lies I do? Why, I haven't spoken the truth since I was so high.

And so low are standards east of Suez that my nickname out there is George Washington"."

"Coffee is served in the living-room, m'lord," said Jeeves, intervening in his polished way and averting what promised, judging from the manner in which Mrs. Spottsworth's eyes had begun to glitter, to develop into an ugly brawl.

Following his guests into the living-room, Bill was conscious of a growing sense of uneasiness and alarm. He had not supposed that anything could have increased his mental discomfort, but Rory's words had done so a hundredfold. As he lowered himself into a chair, accepted a cup of coffee and spilled it over his trousers, one more vulture had added itself to the little group already gnawing at his bosom. For the first time he had begun to question the veracity of Captain Biggar's story of the pendant, and at the thought of what he had let himself in for if that story had not been true his imagination boggled.

Dimly he was aware that Rory and Monica had collected all the morning papers and were sitting surrounded by them their faces grave and tense. The sands were running out. Less than an hour from now the Derby would be run, and soon, if ever, they must decide how their wagers were to be placed.

"Racing News," said Monica, calling the meeting to order. "What does the Racing News say, Rory?"

Rory studied that sheet in his slow, thorough way.

"Lot of stuff about the Guineas form. Perfect rot, all of it. You can't go by the Guineas. Too many unknowns. If you want my considered opinion, there's nothing in sight to beat Taj Mahal. The Aga has the mares, and that's what counts. The sires don't begin to matter compared with the mares."

"I'm glad to hear you pay this belated tribute to my sex."

"Yes, I think for my two quid it's Taj Mahal on the nose."

"That settles Taj Mahal for me. Whenever you bet on them, they start running backwards.

Remember that dog-race."

Rory was obliged to yield this point.

"I admit my nominee let the side down on that occasion," he said. "But when a real rabbit gets loose on a dog track, it's bound to cause a bit of confusion. Taj Mahal gets my two o'goblins."

"I thought your money was going on Oratory."

"Oratory is my outsider bet, ten bob each way."

"Well, here's another hunch for you.

Escalator."

"Escalator?"

"Wasn't H's the first store to have escalators?"

"By jove, yes. We've got the cup, you know. Our safety-landing device has enabled us to clip three seconds off the record. The Oxford Street boys are livid. I must look into this Escalator matter."

"Lester Piggott is riding it."

"That settles it. L. Piggott is the name of the chap stationed in the Trunks, Bags and Suit-cases, as fine a man as ever punched a time-clock. I admit his L stands for Lancelot, but that's a good enough omen for me."

Monica looked across at Mrs.

Spottsworth.

"I suppose you think we're crazy, Rosalinda?"

Mrs. Spottsworth smiled indulgently.

"Of course not, dear. This brings back the old days with Mr. Bessemer. Racing was all he ever thought of. We spent our honeymoon at Sheepshead Bay. It's the Derby, is it, you're so interested in?"

"Just our silly little annual flutter. We don't bet high. Can't afford to. We have to watch the pennies."

"Rigidly," said Rory. He chuckled amusedly, struck by a whimsical idea. "I was just thinking," he went on in explanation of his mirth, "that the smart thing for me to have done would have been to stick to that pendant of yours I picked up last night and go off to London with it and pawn it, thus raising a bit of ... Yes, old man?"

Bill swallowed.

"I didn't speak."

"I thought you did."

"No, just a hiccup."

"To which," Rory conceded, "you were fully entitled. If a man can't hiccup in his own house, in whose house can he hiccup? Well, summing up, Taj Mahal two quid.

Escalator ten bob each way. I'll go and send off my wire." He paused. "But wait.

Is it not rash to commit oneself without consulting Jeeves?"

"Why Jeeves?"

"My dear Moke, what that man doesn't know about form isn't worth knowing. You should have heard him yesterday when I asked him if he had any views on the respective contestants in England's premier classic race. He just stood there rattling off horses and times and records as if he were the Archbishop of Canterbury."

Monica was impressed.

"I didn't know he was as hot as that.

Are there no limits to the powers of this wonder man? We'll go and confer with him at once."

They hurried out, and Bill, having cleared his throat, said "Er".

Mrs. Spottsworth looked up inquiringly.

"Er, Rosie. That pendant of yours. The one Rory was speaking of."

"Yes?"

"I was admiring it last night."

"It's nice, isn't it?"

"Beautiful. You didn't have it at Cannes, did you?"

"No. I hadn't met Mr. Spottsworth then. It was a present from him."

Bill leaped. His worst suspicions had been confirmed.

"A present from Mr. Sp—?" he gasped.

Mrs. Spottsworth laughed.

"It's too funny," she said. "I was talking to Captain Biggar about it last night, and I told him one of my husbands gave it to me, but I couldn't remember which. It was Mr.

Spottsworth, of course. So silly of me to have forgotten."

Bill gulped.

"Are you sure?"

"Oh, quite."

"It ... it wasn't given to you by some fellow on one of those hunting expeditions ... as a ... as a sort of memento?"

Mrs. Spottsworth stared.

"What do you mean?"

"Well, I thought ... fellow grateful for kindnesses ... saying good-bye ... might have said "Won't you accept this as a little memento ... and all that sort of thing"."

The suggestion plainly offended Mrs.

Spottsworth.

"Do you imagine that I accept diamond pendants from "fellows", as you call them?"

"Well, I—"

"I wouldn't dream of such a thing. Mr.

Spottsworth bought that pendant when we were in Bombay. I can remember it as if it were yesterday. A funny little shop with a very fat Chinaman behind the counter, and Mr. Spottsworth would insist on trying to speak Chinese. And just as he was bargaining, there was an earthquake. Not a bad one, but everything was all red dust for about ten minutes, and when it cleared, Mr.

Spottsworth said "Let's get out of here!" and paid what the man was asking and grabbed the pendant and we raced out and never stopped running till we had got back to the hotel."

A dull despair had Bill in its grip.

He heaved himself painfully to his feet.

"I wonder if you would excuse me," he said.

"I have to see Jeeves about something."

"Well, ring for Jeeves."

Bill shook his head.

"No, I think, if you don't mind, I'll go and see him in his pantry."

It had occurred to him that in Jeeves's pantry there would be a drop of port, and a drop of port or some similar restorative was what his stricken soul craved.

When Rory and Monica entered Jeeves's pantry, they found its proprietor reading a letter. His fine face, always grave, seemed a little graver than usual, as if the letter's contents had disturbed him.

"Sorry to interrupt you, Jeeves," said Monica.

"Not at all, m'lady."

"Finish your reading."

"I had already done so, m'lady. A communication from Mr. Wooster."

"Oh?" said Rory. "Bertie Wooster, eh?

How is the old bounder? Robust?"

"Mr. Wooster says nothing to indicate the contrary, sir."

"Good. Rosy cheeks, eh? Eating his spinach, no doubt? Capital. Couldn't be better. Still, be that as it may," said Rory, "what do you think of Taj Mahal for this afternoon's beano at Epsom Downs? I thought of slapping my two quid on its nose, with your approval."

"And Moke the Second," said Monica.

"That's my fancy."

Jeeves considered.

"I see no objection to a small wager on the animal you have named sir, nor on yours, m'lady. One must bear in mind, however, that the Derby is always an extremely open race."

"Don't I know it!"

"It would be advisable, therefore, if the funds are sufficient, to endeavour to save your stake by means of a bet each way on some other horse."

"Rory thought of Escalator. I'm hesitating."

Jeeves coughed.

"Has your ladyship considered the Irish horse, Ballymore?"

"Oh, Jeeves, for heaven's sake. None of the nibs even mention it. No, not Ballymore, Jeeves. I'll have to think of something."

"Very good, m'lady. Would there be anything further?"

"Yes," said Rory. "Now that we're all here together, cheek by jowl as it were, a word from our sponsor on a personal matter, Jeeves.

What was all that that Mrs. Dogsbody was saying at lunch about you and her being out on the tiles last night?"

"Sir?"

"Weren't you in the room when she was talking about it?"

"No, m'lady."

"She said you bowled off together in the small hours to the ruined chapel."

"Ah, yes, m'lady. I apprehend Sir Roderick's meaning now. Mrs. Spottsworth did desire me to escort her to the ruined chapel last night. She was hoping to see the wraith of Lady Agatha, she informed me."

"Any luck?"

"No, m'lady."

"She says Bill saw the old girl."

"Yes, m'lady."

Rory uttered the gratified exclamation of one who has solved a mystery.

"So that's why Bill's looking like a piece of cheese today. It must have scared him stiff."

"I believe Lord Rowcester was somewhat moved by the experience, Sir Roderick. But I fancy that if, as you say, there is a resemblance between his lordship and a portion of cheese, it is occasioned more by the circumstance of his lordship's matrimonial plans having been cancelled than by any manifestation from the spirit world."

Monica squeaked excitedly.

"You don't mean Bill's engagement is off?"

"That is what I was endeavouring to convey, m'lady. Miss Wyvern handed me the ring in person, to return to his lordship. "Am I to infer, miss," I ventured to inquire, "that there is a symbolical significance attached to this gesture?"' and Miss Wyvern replied in the affirmative."

"Well, I'll be blowed. Poor old Bill!"

"Yes, m'lady."

"The heart bleeds."

"Yes, Sir Roderick."

It was at this moment that Bill came charging in.

Seeing his sister and her husband, he stopped.

"Oh, hullo, Rory," he said. "Hullo, Moke. I'd forgotten you were here."

Rory advanced with outstretched hand. The dullest eye could have seen he was registering compassion. He clasped Bill's right hand in his own, and with his left hand kneaded Bill's shoulder.

A man, he knew, wants sympathy at a time like this. It is in such a crisis in his affairs that he thanks heaven that he has an understanding brother-in-law, a brother-in-law who knows how to give a pep talk.

"We are not only here, old man," he said, "but we have just heard from Jeeves a bit of news that has frozen our blood. He says the girl Jill has returned you to store. Correct?

I see it is. Too bad, too bad. But don't let it get you down, boy. You must ... how would you put it, Jeeves?"

"Stiffen the sinews, summon up the blood, Sir Roderick."

"Precisely. You want to take the big, broad, spacious view, Bill. You are a fianc@ee short, let's face it, and your immediate reaction is, no doubt, a disposition to rend the garments and scatter ashes on the head. But you've got to look at these things from every angle, Bill, old man. Remember what Shakespeare said: "A woman is only a woman, but a good cigar is a smoke.""

Jeeves winced.

"Kipling, Sir Roderick."

"And here's another profound truth. I don't know who said this one. All cats are grey in the dark."

Monica spoke. Her lips, as she listened, had been compressed. There was a strange light in her eyes.

"Splendid. Go on."

Rory stopped kneading Bill's shoulder and patted it.

"At the moment," he resumed, "you are reeling from the shock, and very naturally, too. You feel you've lost something valuable, and of course I suppose one might say you have, for Jill's a nice enough kid, no disputing that. But don't be too depressed about it. Look for the silver lining, whenever clouds appear in the blue, as I have frequently sung in my bath and you, I imagine, in yours. Don't forget you are back in circulation again. Personally, I think it's an extremely nice slice of luck for you that this has happened. A bachelor's life is the only happy one, old man. When it comes to love, there's a lot to be said for the "@a la carte" as opposed to the "table d'h@ote"."

"Jeeves," said Monica.

"M'lady?"

"What was the name of the woman who drove a spike into her husband's head? It's in the Bible somewhere."

"I fancy your ladyship is thinking of the story of Jael. But she and the gentleman into whose head she drove the spike were not married, merely good friends."

"Still, her ideas were basically sound."

"It was generally considered so in her circle of acquaintance, m'lady."

"Have you a medium-sized spike, Jeeves?

No? I must look in at the ironmonger's," said Monica. "Good-bye, Table d'h@ote."

She walked out, and Rory watched her go, concerned. His was not a very quick mind, but he seemed to sense something wrong.

"I say! She's miffed. Eh, Jeeves?"

"I received that impression, Sir Roderick."

"Dash it all, I was only saying that stuff about marriage to cheer you up, Bill. Jeeves, where can I get some flowers? And don't say "At the flower shop", because I simply can't sweat all the way to the town. Would there be flowers in the garden?"

"In some profusion, Sir Roderick."

"I'll go and pluck her a bouquet. That's a thing you'll find it useful to remember, Bill, if ever you get married, not that you're likely to, of course, the way things are shaping. Always remember that when the gentler sex get miffed, flowers will bring them round every time."

The door closed. Jeeves turned to Bill.

"Your lordship wished to see me about something?" he said courteously.

Bill passed a hand over his throbbing brow.

"Jeeves," he said, "I hardly know how to begin. Have you an aspirin about you?"

"Certainly, m'lord. I have just been taking one myself."

He produced a small tin box, and held it out.

"Thank you, Jeeves. Don't slam the lid."

"No, m'lord."

"And now," said Bill, "to tell you all."

Jeeves listened with gratifyingly close attention while he poured out his tale. There was no need for Bill at its conclusion to ask him if he had got the gist. It was plain from the gravity of his "Most disturbing, m'lord" that he had got it nicely. Jeeves always got gists.

"If ever a man was in the soup," said Bill, summing up, "I am. I have been played up and made a sucker of. What are those things people get used as, Jeeves?"

"Cat's-paws, m'lord?"

"That's right. Cat's-paws. This blighted Biggar has used me as a cat's-paw. He told me the tale. Like an ass, I believed him. I pinched the pendant, swallowing that whole story of his about it practically belonging to him and he only wanted to borrow it for a few hours, and off he went to London with it, and I don't suppose we shall ever see him again. Do you?"

"It would appear improbable, m'lord."

"One of those remote contingencies, what?"

"Extremely remote, I fear, m'lord."

"You wouldn't care to kick me, Jeeves?"

"No, m'lord."

"I've been trying to kick myself, but it's so dashed difficult if you aren't a contortionist.

All that stuff about stingahs and long bars and the chap Sycamore! We ought to have seen through it in an instant."

"We ought, indeed, m'lord."

"I suppose that when a man has a face as red as that, one tends to feel that he must be telling the truth."

"Very possibly, m'lord."

"And his eyes were so bright and blue. Well, there it is," said Bill. "Whether it was the red face or the blue eyes that did it, one cannot say, but the fact remains that as a result of the general colour scheme I allowed myself to be used as a cat's-paw and pinched an expensive pendant which the hellhound Biggar has gone off to London with, thus rendering myself liable to an extended sojourn in the cooler ... unless—"

"M'lord?"

"I was going to say "Unless you have something to suggest". Silly of me," said Bill, with a hollow laugh. "How could you possibly have anything to suggest?"

"I have, m'lord."

Bill stared.

"You wouldn't try to be funny at a time like this, Jeeves?"

"Certainly not, m'lord."

"You really have a life-belt to throw me before the gumbo closes over my head?"

"Yes, m'lord. In the first place, I would point out to your lordship that there is little or no likelihood of your lordship becoming suspect of the theft of Mrs. Spottsworth's ornament. It has disappeared. Captain Biggar has disappeared. The authorities will put two and two together, m'lord, and automatically credit him with the crime."

"Something in that."

"It would seem impossible, m'lord, for them to fall into any other train of thought."

Bill brightened a little, but only a little.

"Well, that's all to the good, I agree, but it doesn't let me out. You've overlooked something, Jeeves."

"M'lord?"

"The honour of the Rowcesters. That is the snag we come up against. I can't go through life feeling that under my own roof—leaky, but still a roof—I have swiped a valuable pendant from a guest filled to the eyebrows with my salt. How am I to reimburse La Spottsworth? That is the problem to which we have to bend our brains."

"I was about to touch on that point, m'lord. Your lordship will recall that in speaking of suspicion falling upon Captain Biggar I said "In the first place". In the second place, I was about to add, restitution can readily be made to Mrs.

Spottsworth, possibly in the form of notes to the correct amount dispatched anonymously to her address, if the lady can be persuaded to purchase Rowcester Abbey."

"Great Scott, Jeeves!"

"M'lord?"

"The reason I used the expression "Great Scott!"" said Bill, his emotion still causing him to quiver from head to foot, "was that in the rush and swirl of recent events I had absolutely forgotten all about selling the house. Of course!

That would fix up everything, wouldn't it?"

"Unquestionably, m'lord. Even a sale at a sacrifice price would enable your lordship to do—"

"The square thing?"

"Precisely, m'lord. I may add that while on our way to the ruined chapel last night, Mrs. Spottsworth spoke in high terms of the charms of Rowcester Abbey and was equally cordial in her remarks as we were returning. All in all, m'lord, I would say that the prospects were distinctly favourable, and if I might offer the suggestion, I think that your lordship should now withdraw to the library and obtain material for what is termed a sales talk by skimming through the advertisements in Country Life, in which, as your lordship is possibly aware, virtually every large house which has been refused as a gift by the National Trust is offered for sale. The language is extremely persuasive."

"Yes, I know the sort of thing. "This lordly demesne, with its avenues of historic oaks, its tumbling streams alive with trout and tench, its breath-taking vistas lined with flowering shrubs ...'

Yes, I'll bone up."

"It might possibly assist your lordship if I were to bring a small bottle of champagne to the library."

"You think of everything, Jeeves."

"Your lordship is too kind."

"Half a bot should do the trick."

"I think so, m'lord, if adequately iced."

It was some minutes later, as Jeeves was passing through the living-room with the brain-restorer on a small tray, that Jill came in through the French window.

It is a characteristic of women as a sex, and one that does credit to their gentle hearts, that—unless they are gangster's molls or something of that kind— they shrink from the thought of violence. Even when love is dead, they dislike the idea of the man to whom they were once betrothed receiving a series of juicy ones from a horsewhip in the competent hands of an elderly, but still muscular, Chief Constable of a county. When they hear such a Chief Constable sketching out plans for an operation of this nature, their instinct is to hurry to the prospective victim's residence and warn him of his peril by outlining the shape of things to come.

It was to apprise Bill of her father's hopes and dreams that Jill had come to Rowcester Abbey and, not being on speaking terms with her former fianc`e, she had been wondering a little how the information she was bringing could be conveyed to him. The sight of Jeeves cleared up this point. A few words of explanation to Jeeves, coupled with the suggestion that he should advise Bill to lie low till the old gentleman had blown over, would accomplish what she had in mind, and she could then go home again, her duty done and the whole unpleasant affair disposed of.

"Oh, Jeeves," she said.

Jeeves had turned, and was regarding her with respectful benevolence.

"Good afternoon, miss. You will find his lordship in the library."

Jill stiffened haughtily. There was not much of her, but what there was she drew to its full height.

"No, I won't," she replied in a voice straight from the frigidaire, "because I'm jolly well not going there. I haven't the slightest wish to speak to Lord Rowcester. I want you to give him a message."

"Very good, miss."

"Tell him my father is coming here to borrow his horsewhip to horsewhip him with."

"Miss?"

"It's quite simple, isn't it? You know my father?"

"Yes, miss."

"And you know what a horsewhip is?"

"Yes, miss."

"Well, tell Lord Rowcester the combination is on its way over."

"And if his lordship should express curiosity as to the reason for Colonel Wyvern's annoyance?"

"You may say it's because I told him about what happened last night. Or this morning, to be absolutely accurate. At two o'clock this morning. He'll understand."

"At two o'clock this morning, miss? That would have been at about the hour when I was escorting Mrs.

Spottsworth to the ruined chapel. The lady had expressed a wish to establish contact with the apparition of Lady Agatha. The wife of Sir Caradoc the Crusader, miss, who did well, I believe, at the Battle of Joppa. She is reputed to haunt the ruined chapel."

Jill collapsed into a chair. A sudden wild hope, surging through the cracks in her broken heart, had shaken her from stem to stern, making her feel boneless.

"What ... what did you say?"

Jeeves was a kindly man, and not only a kindly man but a man who could open a bottle of champagne as quick as a flash. It was in something of the spirit of the Sir Philip Sidney who gave the water to the stretcher case that he now whisked the cork from the bottle he was carrying. Jill's need, he felt, was greater than Bill's.

"Permit me, miss."

Jill drank gratefully. Her eyes had widened, and the colour was returning to her face.

"Jeeves, this is a matter of life and death," she said. "At two o'clock this morning I saw Lord Rowcester coming out of Mrs.

Spottsworth's room looking perfectly frightful in mauve pyjamas. Are you telling me that Mrs. Spottsworth was not there?"

"Precisely, miss. She was with me in the ruined chapel, holding me spellbound with her account of recent investigations of the Society of Psychical Research."

"Then what was Lord Rowcester doing in her room?"

"Purloining the lady's pendant, miss."

It was unfortunate that as he said these words Jill should have been taking a sip of champagne, for she choked. And as her companion would have considered it a liberty to slap her on the back, it was some moments before she was able to speak.

"Purloining Mrs. Spottsworth's pendant?"

"Yes, miss. It is a long and somewhat intricate story, but if you would care for me to run through the salient points, I should be delighted to do so. Would it interest you to hear the inside history of his lordship's recent activities, culminating, as I have indicated, in the abstracting of Mrs.

Spottsworth's ornament?"

Jill drew in her breath with a hiss.

"Yes, Jeeves, it would."

"Very good, miss. Then must I speak of one who loved not wisely but too well, of one whose subdued eyes, albeit unused to the melting mood, drop tears as fast as the Arabian trees their medicinal gum."

"Jeeves!"

"Miss?"

"What on earth are you talking about?"

Jeeves looked a little hurt.

"I was endeavouring to explain that it was for love of you, miss, that his lordship became a Silver Ring bookmaker."

"A what?"

"Having plighted his troth to you, miss, his lordship felt—rightly, in my opinion—that in order to support a wife he would require a considerably larger income than he had been enjoying up to that moment. After weighing and rejecting the claims of other professions, he decided to embark on the career of a bookmaker in the Silver Ring, trading under the name of Honest Patch Perkins. I officiated as his lordship's clerk. We wore false moustaches."

Jill opened her mouth, then, as if feeling that any form of speech would be inadequate, closed it again.

"For a time the venture paid very handsomely. In three days at Doncaster we were so fortunate as to amass no less a sum than four hundred and twenty pounds, and it was in optimistic mood that we proceeded to Epsom for the Oaks. But disaster was lurking in wait for his lordship. To use the metaphor that the tide turned would be inaccurate.

What smote his lordship was not so much the tide as a single tidal wave. Captain Biggar, miss.

He won a double at his lordship's expense— five pounds on Lucy Glitters at a hundred to six, all to come on Whistler's Mother, S.p."

Jill spoke faintly.

"What was the S.p.?"

"I deeply regret to say, miss, thirty-three to one. And as he had rashly refused to lay the wager off, this cataclysm left his lordship in the unfortunate position of owing Captain Biggar in excess of three thousand pounds, with no assets with which to meet his obligations."

"Golly!"

"Yes, miss. His lordship was compelled to make a somewhat hurried departure from the course, followed by Captain Biggar, shouting "Welsher!", but when we were able to shake off our pursuer's challenge some ten miles from the Abbey, we were hoping that the episode was concluded and that to Captain Biggar his lordship would remain merely a vague, unidentified figure in a moustache by Clarkson. But it was not to be, miss.

The Captain tracked his lordship here, penetrated his incognito and demanded an immediate settlement."

"But Bill had no money."

"Precisely, miss. His lordship did not omit to stress that point. And it was then that Captain Biggar proposed that his lordship should secure possession of Mrs. Spottsworth's pendant, asserting, when met with a nolle prosequi on his lordship's part, that the object in question had been given by him to the lady some years ago, so that he was morally entitled to borrow it.

The story, on reflection, seems somewhat thin, but it was told with so great a wealth of corroborative detail that it convinced us at the time, and his lordship, who had been vowing that he would ne'er consent, consented. Do I make myself clear, miss?"

"Quite clear. You don't mind my head swimming?"

"Not at all, miss. The question then arose of how the operation was to be carried through, and eventually it was arranged that I should lure Mrs. Spottsworth from her room on the pretext that Lady Agatha had been seen in the ruined chapel, and during her absence his lordship should enter and obtain the trinket.

This ruse proved successful. The pendant was duly handed to Captain Biggar, who has taken it to London with the purpose of pawning it and investing the proceeds on the Irish horse, Ballymore, concerning whose chances he is extremely sanguine.

As regards his lordship's mauve pyjamas, to which you made a derogatory allusion a short while back, I am hoping to convince his lordship that a quiet blue or a pistachio green—"

But Jill was not interested in the Rowcester pyjamas and the steps which were being taken to correct their mauveness. She was hammering on the library door.

"Bill! Bill!" she cried, like a woman wailing for her demon lover, and Bill, hearing that voice, came out with the promptitude of a cork extracted by Jeeves from a bottle.

"Oh, Bill!" said Jill, flinging herself into his arms. "Jeeves has told me everything!"

Over the head that rested on his chest Bill shot an anxious glance at Jeeves.

"When you say everything, do you mean everything?"

"Yes, m'lord. I deemed it advisable."

"I know all about Honest Patch Perkins and your moustache and Captain Biggar and Whistler's Mother and Mrs. Spottsworth and the pendant," said Jill, nestling closely.

It seemed so odd to Bill that a girl who knew all this should be nestling closely that he was obliged to release her for a moment and step across and take a sip of champagne.

"And you really mean," he said, returning and folding her in his embrace once more, "that you don't recoil from me in horror?"

"Of course I don't recoil from you in horror. Do I look as if I were recoiling from you in horror?"

"Well, no," said Bill, having considered this. He kissed her lips, her forehead, her ears and the top of her head. "But the trouble is that you might just as well recoil from me in horror, because I don't see how the dickens we're ever going to get married. I haven't a bean, and I've somehow got to raise a small fortune to pay Mrs. Spottsworth for her pendant.

Noblesse oblige, if you follow my drift. So if I don't sell her the house—"

"Of course you'll sell her the house."

"Shall I? I wonder—I'll certainly try.

Where on earth's she disappeared to? She was in here when I came through into the library just now. I wish she'd show up. I'm all full of that Country Life stuff, and if she doesn't come soon, it will evaporate."

"Excuse me, m'lord," said Jeeves, who during the recent exchanges had withdrawn discreetly to the window. "Mrs. Spottsworth and her ladyship are at this moment crossing the lawn."

With a courteous gesture he stepped to one side, and Mrs. Spottsworth entered, followed by Monica.

"Jill!" cried Monica, halting, amazed. "Good heavens!"

"Oh, it's all right," said Jill. "There's been a change in the situation. Sweethearts still."

"Well, that's fine. I've been showing Rosalinda round the place—"

"—with its avenues of historic oaks, its tumbling streams alive with trout and tench, and its breath-taking vistas lined with flowering shrubs ...

How did you like it?" said Bill.

Mrs. Spottsworth clasped her hands and closed her eyes in an ecstasy.

"It's wonderful, wonderful!" she said. "I can't understand how you can bring yourself to part with it, Billiken."

Bill gulped. "Am I going to part with it?"

"You certainly are," said Mrs.

Spottsworth emphatically, "if I have anything to say about it. This is the house of my dreams.

How much do you want for it—lock, stock and barrel?"

"You've taken my breath away."

"Well, that's me. I never could endure beating about the bush. If I want a thing, I say so and write a note. I'll tell you what let's do. Suppose I pay you a deposit of two thousand, and we can decide on the purchase price later?"

"You couldn't make it three thousand?"

"Sure." Mrs. Spottsworth unscrewed her fountain pen and having unscrewed it, paused.

"There's just one thing, though, before I sign on the dotted line. This place isn't damp, is it?"

"Damp?" said Monica. "Why, of course not."

"You're sure?"

"Dry as a bone."

"That's swell. Damp is death to me.

Fibrositis and sciatica."

Rory came in through the French window, laden with roses.

"A nosegay for you, Moke, old girl, with comps. of R. Carmoyle," he said, pressing the blooms into Monica's hands. "I say, Bill, it's starting to rain."

"What of it?"

"What of it?" echoed Rory, surprised.

"My dear old boy, you know what happens in this house when it rains. Water through the roof, water through the walls, water, water everywhere.

I was merely about to suggest in a kindly Boy Scout sort of spirit that you had better put buckets under the upstairs skylight. Very damp house, this," he said, addressing Mrs.

Spottsworth in his genial, confidential way.

"So near the river, you know. I often say that whereas in the summer months the river is at the bottom of the garden, in the winter months the garden is at the bottom of the—"

"Excuse me, m'lady," said the housemaid Ellen, appearing in the doorway. "Could I speak to Mrs. Spottsworth, m'lady?"

Mrs. Spottsworth, who had been staring, aghast, at Rory, turned, pen in hand.

"Yes?"

"Moddom," said Ellen, "your pendant's been pinched."

She had never been a girl for breaking things gently.

With considerable gratification Ellen found herself the centre of attraction. All eyes were focused upon her, and most of them were bulging. Bill's, in particular, struck her as being on the point of leaving their sockets.

"Yes," she proceeded, far too refined to employ the Bulstrode-Trelawny "Yus", "I was laying out your clothes for the evening, moddom, and I said to myself that you'd probably be wishing to wear the pendant again tonight, so I ventured to look in the little box, and it wasn't there, moddom. It's been stolen."

Mrs. Spottsworth drew a quick breath. The trinket in question was of little intrinsic worth—it could not, as she had said to Captain Biggar, have cost more than ten thousand dollars—but, as she had also said to Captain Biggar, it had a sentimental value for her. She was about to express her concern in words, but Bill broke in.

"What do you mean, it's been stolen?" he demanded hotly. You could see that the suggestion outraged him. "You probably didn't look properly."

Ellen was respectful, but firm.

"It's gone, m'lord."

"You may have dropped it somewhere, Mrs.

Spottsworth," said Jill. "Was the clasp loose?"

"Why, yes," said Mrs. Spottsworth.

"The clasp was loose. But I distinctly remember putting it in its case last night."

"Not there now, moddom," said Ellen, rubbing it in.

"Let's go up and have a thorough search," said Monica.

"We will," said Mrs. Spottsworth. "But I'm afraid ... very much afraid—"

She followed Ellen out of the room. Monica, pausing at the door, eyed Rory balefully for an instant.

"Well, Bill," she said, "so you don't sell the house, after all. And if Big Mouth there hadn't come barging in prattling about water and buckets, that cheque would have been signed."

She swept out, and Rory looked at Bill, surprised.

"I say, did I drop a brick?"

Bill laughed hackingly.

"If one followed you about for a month, one would have enough bricks to build a house."

"In re this pendant. Anything I can do?"

"Yes, keep out of it."

"I could nip off in the car and fetch some of the local constabulary."

"Keep right out of it." Bill looked at his watch. "The Derby will be starting in a few minutes. Go in there and get the television working."

"Right," said Rory. "But if I'm needed, give me a shout."

He disappeared into the library, and Bill turned to Jeeves, who had once again effaced himself. In times of domestic crisis, Jeeves had the gift, possessed by all good butlers, of creating the illusion that he was not there. He was standing now at the extreme end of the room, looking stuffed.

"Jeeves!"

"M'lord?" said Jeeves, coming to life like a male Galatea.

"Any suggestions?"

"None of practical value, m'lord. But a thought has just occurred which enables me to take a somewhat brighter view of the situation. We were speaking not long since of Captain Biggar as a gentleman who had removed himself permanently from our midst. Does it not seem likely to your lordship that in the event of Ballymore emerging victorious the Captain, finding himself in possession of ample funds, will carry out his original plan of redeeming the pendant, bringing it back and affecting to discover it on the premises?"

Bill chewed his lip.

"You think so?"

"It would be the prudent course for him to pursue, m'lord. Suspicion, as I say, must inevitably rest upon him, and failure to return the ornament would place him in the disagreeable position of becoming a hunted man in hourly danger of being apprehended by the authorities. I am convinced that if Ballymore wins, we shall see Captain Biggar again."

"If Ballymore wins."

"Precisely, m'lord."

"Then one's whole future hangs on whether it does."

"That is how matters stand, m'lord."

Jill uttered a passionate cry.

"I'm going to start praying!"

"Yes, do," said Bill. "Pray that Ballymore will run as he has never run before.

Pray like billy-o. Pray all over the house.

Pray—"

Monica and Mrs. Spottsworth came back.

"Well," said Monica, "it's gone. There's no doubt about that.

I've just phoned for the police."

Bill reeled.

"What!"

"Yes. Rosalinda didn't want me to, but I insisted. I told her you wouldn't dream of not doing everything you could to catch the thief."

"You ... You think the thing's been stolen?"

"It's the only possible explanation."

Mrs. Spottsworth sighed.

"Oh, dear! I really am sorry to have started all this trouble."

"Nonsense, Rosalinda. Bill doesn't mind. All Bill wants is to see the crook caught and bunged into the cooler. Isn't it, Bill?"

"Yes, sir!" said Bill.

"For a good long stretch, too, let's hope."

"We mustn't be vindictive."

"No," said Mrs. Spottsworth. "You're quite right. Justice, but not vengeance."

"Well, one thing's certain," said Monica. "It's an inside job."

Bill stirred uneasily.

"Oh, do you think so?"

"Yes, and I've got a pretty shrewd idea who the guilty party is."

"Who?"

"Someone who was in a terrible state of nerves this morning."

"Oh?"

"His cup and saucer were rattling like castanets."

"When was this?"

"At breakfast. Do you want me to name names?"

"Go ahead."

"Captain Biggar!"

Mrs. Spottsworth started.

"What!"

"You weren't down, Rosalinda, or I'm sure you would have noticed it, too. He was as nervous as a treeful of elephants."

"Oh, no, no! Captain Biggar? That I can't and won't believe. If Captain Biggar were guilty, I should lose my faith in human nature. And that would be a far worse blow than losing the pendant."

"The pendant is gone, and he's gone. It adds up, don't you think? Oh, well," said Monica, "we shall soon know."

"What makes you so sure of that?"

"Why, the jewel-case, of course. The police will take it away and test it for fingerprints. What on earth's the matter, Bill?"

"Nothing's the matter," said Bill, who had leaped some eighteen inches into the air but saw no reason for revealing the sudden agonized thought which had motivated this adagio exhibition. "Er, Jeeves."

"M'lord?"

"Lady Carmoyle is speaking of Mrs.

Spottsworth's jewel-case."

"Yes, m'lord?"

"She threw out the interesting suggestion that the miscreant might have forgotten to wear gloves, in which event the bally thing would be covered with his fingerprints. That would be lucky, wouldn't it?"

"Extremely fortunate, m'lord."

"I'll bet he's wishing he hadn't been such an ass."

"Yes, m'lord."

"And that he could wipe them off."

"Yes, m'lord."

"You might go and get the thing, so as to have it ready for the police when they arrive."

"Very good, m'lord."

"Hold it by the edges, Jeeves. You don't want to disturb those fingerprints."

"I will exercise the greatest care, m'lord," said Jeeves, and went out, and almost simultaneously Colonel Wyvern came in through the French window.

At the moment of his entry Jill, knowing that when a man is in a state of extreme agitation there is nothing he needs more than a woman's gentle sympathy, had put her arms round Bill's neck and was kissing him tenderly. The spectacle brought the Colonel to a halt. It confused him.

With this sort of thing going on, it was difficult to lead up to the subject of horsewhips.

"Ha, hrr'mph!" he said, and Monica spun round, astounded.

"My goodness!" she said. "You have been quick.

It's only five minutes since I phoned."

"Eh?"

"Hullo, father," said Jill. "We were just waiting for you to show up. Have you brought your bloodhounds and magnifying glass?"

"What the dickens are you talking about?"

Monica was perplexed.

"Didn't you come in answer to my phone call, Colonel?"

"You keep talking about a phone call. What phone call? I came to see Lord Rowcester on a personal matter. What's all this about a phone call?"

"Mrs. Spottsworth's diamond pendant has been stolen, father."

"What? What? What?"

"This is Mrs. Spottsworth," said Monica. "Colonel Wyvern, Rosalinda, our Chief Constable."

"Charmed," said Colonel Wyvern, bowing gallantly, but an instant later he was the keen, remorseless police officer again. "Had your pendant stolen, eh? Bad show, bad show." He took out a note-book and a pencil. "An inside job, was it?"

"That's what we think."

"Then I'll have to have a list of everybody in the house."

Jill stepped forward, her hands extended.

"Wyvern, Jill," she said. "Slip on the bracelets, officer. I'll come quietly."

"Oh, don't be an ass," said Colonel Wyvern.

Something struck the door gently. It might have been a foot. Bill opened the door, revealing Jeeves. He was carrying the jewel-case, a handkerchief at its extreme edges.

"Thank you, m'lord," he said.

He advanced to the table and lowered the case on to it very carefully.

"Here is the case the pendant was in," said Mrs. Spottsworth.

"Good." Colonel Wyvern eyed Jeeves with approval. "Glad to see you were careful about handling it, my man."

"Oh, trust Jeeves for that," said Bill.

"And now," said Colonel Wyvern, "for the names."

As he spoke, the library door burst open, and Rory came dashing out, horror written on his every feature.

"I say, chaps," said Rory, "the most appalling thing has happened!"

Monica moaned.

"Not something more?"

"This is the absolute frozen limit. The Derby is just starting—"

"Rory, the Chief Constable is here."

"—andthe television set has gone on the blink. Oh, it's my fault, I suppose.

I was trying to get a perfect adjustment, and I must have twiddled the wrong thingummy."

"Rory, this is Colonel Wyvern, the Chief Constable."

"How are you, Chief C.? Do you know anything about television?"

The Colonel drew himself up.

"I do not!"

"You couldn't fix a set?" said Rory wistfully. "Not that there's time, of course. The race will be over. What about the radio?"

"In the corner, Sir Roderick," said Jeeves.

"Oh, thank Heaven!" cried Rory, galloping to it. "Come on and give me a hand, Jeeves."

The Chief Constable spoke coldly.

"Who is this gentleman?"

"Such as he is," said Monica apologetically, "my husband, Sir Roderick Carmoyle."

Colonel Wyvern advanced on Rory as majestically as his lack of inches permitted, and addressed the seat of his trousers, the only portion of him visible as he bent over the radio.

"Sir Roderick, I am conducting an investigation."

"But you'll hold it up to listen to the Derby?"

"When on duty, Sir Roderick, I allow nothing to interfere. I want a list—"

The radio, suddenly blaring forth, gave him one.

"... Taj Mahal, Sweet William, Garniture, Moke the Second, Voleur ... Quite an impressive list, isn't it?" said the radio. "There goes Gordon Richards.

Lots of people think this will be his lucky day. I don't see Bellwether ... Oh, yes, he's turning round now and walking back to the gate ...

They should be off in just a moment ... Sorry, no.

Two more have turned round. One of them is being very temperamental. It looks like Simple Simon.

No, it's the Irish outsider, Ballymore."

The Chief Constable frowned. "Really, I must ask—"

"Okay. I'll turn it down," said Rory, and immediately, being Rory, turned it up.

"They're in line now," yelled the radio, like a costermonger calling attention to his blood oranges, "all twenty-six of them ...

They're OFF ... Ballymore is left at the post."

Jill screamed shrilly. "Oh, no!"

"Vaurien," proceeded the radio, now, owing to Rory's ministrations, speaking in an almost inaudible whisper, like an invalid uttering a few last words from a sick-bed, "is in front, the Boussac pacemaker." Its voice strengthened a little. "Taj Mahal is just behind. I see Escalator. Escalator's going very strong.

I see Sweet William. I see Moke the Second. I see ..." Here the wasting sickness set in again, and the rest was lost in a sort of mouselike squeak.

The Chief Constable drew a relieved breath.

"Ha! At last! Now then, Lord Rowcester.

What servants have you here?"

Bill did not answer. Like a mechanical figure he was moving toward the radio, as if drawn by some invisible force.

"There's a cook," said Monica.

"A widow, sir," said Jeeves. "Mary Jane Piggott."

Rory looked round.

"Piggott? Who said Piggott?"

"A housemaid," said Monica, as Jill, like Bill, was drawn toward the radio as if in a trance. "Her name's Ellen. Ellen what, Jeeves?"

"French, m'lady. Ellen Tallulah French."

"The French horse," bellowed the radio, suddenly acquiring a new access of strength, "is still in front, then Moke the Second, Escalator, Taj Mahal ..."

"What about the gardener?"

"No, not Gardener," said Rory. "You mean Garniture."

"... Sweet William, Oratory ...

Vaurien's falling back, and Garniture—"

"You see?" said Rory.

"—and Moke the Second moving up."

"That's mine," said Monica, andwitha strange, set look on her face began to move toward the radio.

"Looks quite as though Gordon Richards might be going to win the Derby at last. They're down the hill and turning Tattenham Corner, Moke the Second in front, with Gordon up. Only three and a half furlongs to go ..."

"Yes, sir," said Jeeves, completely unmoved, "there is a gardener, an old man named Percy Wellbeloved."

The radio suddenly broke into a frenzy of excitement.

"Oo! ... Oo! ... There's a horse coming up on the outside. It's coming like an express train. I can't identify ..."

"Gee, this is exciting, isn't it!" said Mrs. Spottsworth.

She went to the radio. Jeeves alone remained at the Chief Constable's side.

Colonel Wyvern was writing laboriously in his note-book.

"It's Ballymore. The horse on the outside is Ballymore. He's challenging the Moke.

Hear that crowd roaring "Come on, Gordon!"."

"Moke ... The Moke ... Gordon," wrote Colonel Wyvern.

"Come on, Gordon!" shouted Monica.

The radio was now becoming incoherent.

"It's Ballymore ... No, it's the Moke ... No, Ballymore ... No, the Moke ...

No ..."

"Make up your mind," advised Rory.

For some moments Colonel Wyvern had been standing motionless, his note-book frozen in his hand.

Now a sort of shudder passed through him, and his eyes grew wide and wild. Brandishing his pencil, he leaped toward the radio.

"Come on, Gordon!" he roared. "COME ON, GORDON!!!"

"Come on, Ballymore," said Jeeves with quiet dignity.

The radio had now given up all thoughts of gentlemanly restraint. It was as though on honeydew it had fed and drunk the milk of Paradise.

"Photo finish!" it shrieked. "Photo finish! Photo finish! First time in the history of the Derby. Photo finish. Escalator in third place."

Rather sheepishly the Chief Constable turned away and came back to Jeeves.

"The gardener's name you said was what? Clarence Wilberforce, was it?"

"Percy Wellbeloved, sir."

"Odd name."

"Shropshire, I believe, sir."

"Ah? Percy Wellbeloved. Does that complete the roster of the staff?"

"Yes, sir, except for myself."

Rory came away from the radio, mopping his forehead.

"Well, that Taj Mahal let me down with a bang," he said bitterly. "Why is it one can never pick a winner in this bally race?"

""The Moke" didn't suggest a winner to you?" said Monica.

"Eh? No. Why? Why should it?" "God bless you, Roderick Carmoyle."

Colonel Wyvern was himself again now.

"I would like," he said, in a curt, official voice, "to inspect the scene of the robbery."

"I will take you there," said Mrs.

Spottsworth. "Will you come too, Monica?"

"Yes, yes, of course," said Monica.

"Listen in, some of you, will you, and see what that photo shows."

"And I'll send this down to the station," said Colonel Wyvern, picking up the jewel-case by one corner, "and find out what it shows."

They went out, and Rory moved to the door of the library.

"I'll go and see if I really have damaged that T.v. set," he said. "All I did was twiddle a thingummy." He stretched himself with a yawn. "Dam dull Derby," he said. "Even if Moke the Second wins, the old girl's only got ten bob on it at eights."

The library door closed behind him.

"Jeeves," said Bill, "I've got to have a drink."

"I will bring it immediately, m'lord."

"No, don't bring it. I'll come to your pantry."

"And I'll come with you," said Jill. "But we must wait to hear that result. Let's hope Ballymore had sense enough to stick out his tongue."

"Ha!" cried Bill.

The radio had begun to speak.

"Hundreds of thousands of pounds hang on what that photograph decides," it was saying in the rather subdued voice of a man recovering from a hangover. It seemed to be a little ashamed of its recent emotion. "The number should be going up at any moment. Yes, here it is ..."

"Come on, Ballymore!" cried Jill.

"Come on, Ballymore!" shouted Bill.

"Come on, Ballymore," said Jeeves reservedly.

"Moke the Second wins," said the radio.

"Hard luck on Ballymore. He ran a wonderful race. If it hadn't been for that bad start, he would have won in a canter. His defeat saves the bookies a tremendous loss. A huge sum was bet on the Irish horse ten minutes before starting time, obviously one of those S.p. jobs which are so ..."

Dully, with something of the air of a man laying a wreath on the tomb of an old friend, Bill turned the radio off.

"Come on," he said. "After all, there's still champagne."

Mrs. Spottsworth came slowly down the stairs. Monica and the Chief Constable were still conducting their examination of the scene of the crime, but they had been speaking freely of Captain Biggar, and the trend of their remarks had been such as to make her feel that knives were being driven through her heart. When a woman loves a man with every fibre of a generous nature, it can never be pleasant for her to hear this man alluded to as a red-faced thug (monica) and as a scoundrel who can't possibly get away but must inevitably ere long be caught and slapped into the jug (colonel Wyvern). It was her intention to make for that rustic seat and there sit and think of what might have been.

The rustic seat stood at a junction of two moss-grown paths facing the river which lay—though only, as we have seen, during the summer months— at the bottom of the garden. Flowering bushes masked it from the eye of one approaching, and it was not till she had turned the last corner that Mrs.

Spottsworth was able to perceive that it already had an occupant. At the sight of that occupant she stood for a moment transfixed. Then there burst from her lips a cry so like that of a zebu calling to its mate that Captain Biggar, who had been sitting in a deep reverie, staring at a snail, had the momentary illusion that he was back in Africa.

He sprang to his feet, and for a long instant they stood there motionless, gazing at each other wide-eyed while the various birds, bees, wasps, gnats and other insects operating in the vicinity went about their business as if nothing at all sensational had happened. The snail, in particular, seemed completely unmoved.

Mrs. Spottsworth did not share its detached aloofness. She was stirred to her depths.

"You!" she cried. "Oh, I knew you would come. They said you wouldn't, but I knew."

Captain Biggar was hanging his head. The man seemed crushed, incapable of movement. A rhinoceros, seeing him now, would have plucked up heart and charged on him without a tremor, feeling that this was going to be easy.

"I couldn't do it," he muttered.

"I got to thinking of you and of the chaps at the club, and I couldn't do it."

"The club?"

"The old Anglo-Malay Club in Kuala Lumpur, where men are white and honesty goes for granted. Yes, I thought of the chaps. I thought of Tubby Frobisher. Would I ever be able to look him again in that one good eye of his? And then I thought that you had trusted me because ... because I was an Englishman. And I said to myself, it isn't only the old Anglo-Malay and Tubby and the Subahdar and Doc and Squiffy, Cuthbert Biggar—you're letting down the whole British Empire."

Mrs. Spottsworth choked.

"Did ... did you take it?"

Captain Biggar threw up his chin and squared his shoulders. He was so nearly himself again, now that he had spoken those brave words, that the rhinoceros, taking a look at him, would have changed its mind and decided to remember an appointment elsewhere.

"I took it, and I brought it back," he said in a firm, resonant voice, producing the pendant from his hip pocket. "The idea was merely to borrow it for the day, as security for a gamble. But I couldn't do it. It might have meant a fortune, but I couldn't do it."

Mrs. Spottsworth bent her head.

"Put it round my neck, Cuthbert," she whispered.

Captain Biggar stared incredulously at her back hair.

"You want me to? You don't mind if I touch you?"

"Put it round my neck," repeated Mrs.

Spottsworth.

Reverently the Captain did so, and there was a pause.

"Yes," said the Captain, "I might have made a fortune, and shall I tell you why I wanted a fortune? Don't run away with the idea that I'm a man who values money. Ask any of the chaps out East, and they'll say "Give Bwana Biggar his .505 Gibbs, his eland steak of a night, let him breathe God's clean air and turn his face up to God's good sun and he asks nothing more". But it was imperative that I should lay my hands on a bit of the stuff so that I might feel myself in a position to speak my love. Rosie ... I heard them calling you that, and I must use that name ...

Rosie, I love you. I loved you from that first moment in Kenya when you stepped out of the car and I said "Ah, the memsahib". All these years I have dreamed of you, and on this very seat last night it was all I could do to keep myself from pouring out my heart. It doesn't matter now. I can speak now because we are parting for ever. Soon I shall be wandering out into the sunset ... alone."

He paused, and Mrs. Spottsworth spoke. There was a certain sharpness in her voice.

"You won't be wandering out into any old sunset alone," she said. "Jiminy Christmas! What do you want to wander out into sunsets alone for?"

Captain Biggar smiled a faint, sad smile.

"I don't want to wander out into sunsets alone, dear lady. It's the code. The code that says a poor man must not propose marriage to a rich woman, for if he does, he loses his self-respect and ceases to play with a straight bat."

"I never heard such nonsense in my life.

Who started all this apple-sauce?"

Captain Biggar stiffened a little.

"I cannot say who started it, but it is the rule that guides the lives of men like Squiffy and Doc and the Subahdar and Augustus Frobisher."

Mrs. Spottsworth uttered an exclamation.

"Augustus Frobisher? For Pete's sake! I've been thinking all along that there was something familiar about that name Frobisher, and now you say Augustus ... This friend of yours, this Frobisher. Is he a fellow with a red face?"

"We all have red faces east of Suez."

"And a small, bristly moustache?"

"Small, bristly moustaches, too."

"Does he stammer slightly? Has he a small mole on the left cheek? Is one of his eyes green and the other glass?"

Captain Biggar was amazed.

"Good God! That's Tubby. You've met him?"

"Met him? You bet I've met him. It was only a week before I left the States that I was singing "Oh, perfect love" at his wedding."

Captain Biggar's eyes widened.

"Howki wa hoo!" he exclaimed.

"Tubby is married?"

"He certainly is. And do you know who he's married to? Cora Rita Rockmetteller, widow of the late Sigsbee Rockmetteller, the Sardine King, a woman with a darned sight more money than I've got myself.

Now you see how much your old code amounts to.

When Augustus Frobisher met Cora and heard that she had fifty million smackers hidden away behind the brick in the fireplace, did he wander out into any sunset alone? No, sir! He bought a clean collar and a gardenia for his buttonhole and snapped into it."

Captain Biggar had lowered himself on to the rustic seat and was breathing heavily through the nostrils.

"You have shaken me, Rosie!"

"And you needed shaking, talking all that malarkey. You and your old code!"

"I can't take it in."

"You will, if you sit and think it over for a while.

You stay here and get used to the idea of waLking down the aisle with me, and I'll go in and phone the papers that a marriage has been arranged and will shortly take place between Cuthbert ... have you any other names, my precious lamb?"

"Gervase," said the Captain in a low voice. "And it's Brabazon-Biggar. With a hyphen."

"... between Cuthbert Gervase Brabazon-Biggar and Rosalinda Bessemer Spottsworth. It's a pity it isn't Sir Cuthbert. Say!" said Mrs. Spottsworth, struck with an idea. "What's wrong with buying you a knighthood? I wonder how much they cost these days. I'll have to ask Sir Roderick. I might be able to get it at Harrige's. Well, good-bye for the moment, my wonder man. Don't go wandering off into any sunsets."

Humming gaily, for her heart was light, Mrs. Spottsworth tripped down the moss-grown path, tripped across the lawn and tripped through the French window into the living-room.

Jeeves was there. He had left Bill and Jill trying mournfully to console each other in his pantry, and had returned to the living-room to collect the coffee-cups. At the sight of the pendant encircling Mrs. Spottsworth's neck, no fewer than three hairs of his left eyebrow quivered for an instant, showing how deeply he had been moved by the spectacle.

"You're looking at the pendant, I see," said Mrs. Spottsworth, beaming happily. "I don't wonder you're surprised. Captain Biggar found it just now in the grass by that rustic seat where we were sitting last night."

It would be too much to say that Jeeves stared, but his eyes enlarged, the merest fraction, a thing they did only on special occasions.

"Has Captain Biggar returned, madam?"

"He got back a few minutes ago. Oh, Jeeves, do you know the telephone number of The Times?"

"No, madam, but I could ascertain."

"I want to announce my engagement to Captain Biggar."

Four hairs of Jeeves's right eyebrow stirred slightly, as if a passing breeze had disturbed them.

"Indeed, madam? May I wish you every happiness?"

"Thank you, Jeeves."

"Shall I telephone The Times, madam?"

"If you will, and the Telegraph and Mail and Express. Any others?"

"I think not, madam. Those you have mentioned should be quite sufficient for an announcement of this nature."

"Perhaps you're right. Just those, then."

"Very good, madam. Might I venture to ask, madam, if you and Captain Biggar will be taking up your residence at the Abbey?"

Mrs. Spottsworth sighed.

"No, Jeeves, I wish I could buy it ... I love the place ... but it's damp. This English climate!"

"Our English summers are severe."

"And the winters worse."

Jeeves coughed.

"I wonder if I might make a suggestion, madam, which I think should be satisfactory to all parties."

"What's that?"

"Buy the house, madam, take it down stone by stone and ship it to California."

"And put it up there?" Mrs. Spottsworth beamed. "Why, what a brilliant idea!"

"Thank you, madam."

"William Randolph Hearst used to do it, didn't he? I remember visiting at San Simeon once, and there was a whole French Abbey lying on the grass near the gates. I'll do it, Jeeves. You've solved everything. Oh, Lord Rowcester," said Mrs.

Spottsworth. "Just the man I wanted to see."

Bill had come in with Jill, walking with slow, despondent steps. As he saw the pendant, despondency fell from him like a garment. Unable to speak, he stood pointing a trembling finger.

"It was discovered in the grass adjoining a rustic seat in the garden, m'lord, by Mrs.

Spottsworth's fianc`e, Captain Biggar," said Jeeves.

Bill found speech, though with difficulty.

"Biggar's back?"

"Yes, m'lord."

"And he found the pendant?"

"Yes, m'lord."

"And he's engaged to Mrs. Spottsworth?"

"Yes, m'lord. And Mrs. Spottsworth has decided to purchase the Abbey."

"What!"

"Yes, m'lord."

"I do believe in fairies!" said Bill, and Jill said she did, too.

"Yes, Billiken," said Mrs.

Spottsworth. "I'm going to buy the Abbey.

I don't care what you're asking for it. I want it, and I'll write you a cheque the moment I come back from apologizing to that nice Chief Constable. I left him very abruptly just now, and I'm afraid he may be feeling offended. Is he still up in my room, Jeeves?"

"I believe so, madam. He rang for me not long ago to ask if I could provide him with a magnifying glass."

"I'll go and see him," said Mrs.

Spottsworth. "I'm taking the Abbey with me to America, Billiken. It was Jeeves's idea."

She went out, and Jill hurled herself into Bill's arms.

"Oh, Bill! Oh, Bill! Oh, Bill!" she cried. "Though I don't know why I'm kissing you," she said. "I ought to be kissing Jeeves. Shall I kiss you, Jeeves?"

"No, miss."

"Just think, Jeeves. You'll have to buy that fish slice after all."

"It will be a pleasure and a privilege, miss."

"Of course, Jeeves," said Bill, "you must never leave us, wherever we go, whatever we do."

Jeeves sighed apologetically.

"I am very sorry, m'lord, but I fear I cannot avail myself of your kindness. Indeed, I fear I am compelled to hand in my notice."

"Oh, Jeeves!"

"With the deepest regret, miss, I need scarcely say. But Mr. Wooster needs me.

I received a letter from him this morning."

"Has he left that school of his, then?"

Jeeves sighed again. "Expelled, m'lord."

"Good heavens!"

"It is all most unfortunate, m'lord. Mr.

Wooster was awarded the prize for sock-darning.

Two pairs of his socks were actually exhibited on Speech Day. It was then discovered that he had used a crib ... an old woman whom he smuggled into his study at night."

"Poor old Bertie!"

"Yes, m'lord. I gather from the tone of his communication that the scandal has affected him deeply. I feel that my place is at his side."

Rory came in from the library, looking moody.

"I can't fix it," he said.

"Rory," said Bill, "do you know what's happened?"

"Yes, old boy, I've bust the television set."

"Mrs. Spottsworth is going to marry Captain Biggar, and she's buying the Abbey."

"Oh?" said Rory. His manner was listless.

"Well, as I was saying, I can't fix the bally thing, and I don't believe any of the local yokels can, either, so the only thing to do is to go to the fountain head." He went to the telephone.

"Give me Square one two three four," he said.

Captain Biggar came bustling through the French window, humming a Swahili wedding march.

"Where's my Rosie?" he asked.

"Upstairs," said Bill. "She'll be down in a minute. She's just been telling us the news.

Congratulations, Captain."

"Thank you, thank you."

"I say," said Rory, the receiver at his ear, "I've just remembered another one. Which is bigger, Captain Biggar or Mrs.

Biggar? Mrs. Biggar, because she became Biggar.

Ha, ha. Ha, ha, ha! Meanwhile, I'm trying to get—"

His number came through.

"Oh, hullo," he said. "Harrige's?"

THE END