- Everything going all right ?'

- 'In a way,' said George. He was not equal to confiding his troubles to Reggie.

I've been tuning up the old car since seven this morning, and she's sound in wind and limb, absolutely.

Gaze

on me, laddie! You sec before you old Colonel Romeo, the Man who Knows!

But the rummy thing that night was that I showed it. Up till then, I've been told by experts, I was a chappie in whom it was absolutely impossible to detect the symptoms.

On the night of the ball, however, I suppose I had been filling the radiator a trifle too enthusiastically.

It would have been impossible to deny that Lord Marshmoreton showed emotion. His mouth opened, and he clutched the tablecloth. But Just what the emotion was George was unable to say.

'It's a pity they didn't know how you were going to feel. It would have saved them a lot of anxiety. I rather gathered they supposed that the shock was apt to darken your whole life.'

... why, George is the fellow that made the dollar-bill famous. He and Rockefeller have got all there is, except the little bit they have let Andy Carnegie have for car-fare.

' I don't know what you call rich, but, keeping on the safe side, I should say that George pulls down in a good year, during the season - around five thousand dollars a week.'

And, while I'm boosting George, let me tell you another thing. He's one of the whitest men that ever happened.

'What's been the result and what I might call the upshot', said Keggs, continuing his homily, ' of all your making yourself so busy and thrusting of yourself forward and meddling in the affairs of your elders and betters ? The upshot and issue of it 'as been that you are out five shillings and nothing to show for it. Five shillings what you might have spent on some good book and improved your mind! And goodness knows it wants all the improving it can get, for of all the worthless, idle little messers it's ever been my misfortune to have dealings with, you are the champion.

In spite of himself Albert was awed. He was oppressed by the sense of struggling with a superior intellect.

Dimly, Albert had begun to perceive that years must elapse before he could become capable of matching himself in battles of wits with this master-strategist.

'Oh, go and eat coke!' said Albert bitterly. But he said it to his immortal soul, not aloud. The lad's spirit was broken.

Young people, your lordship, if I may be pardoned for employing the expression in the present case, are naturally romantic and if you keep 'cm away from a thing they sit and pity themselves and want it all the more. And in the end you may be sure they get it. There's no way of stoppin' them.

'It is not for me to presume to offer anything but the most respectful advice, your lordship, but I should most certainly advocate a similar procedure in the present instance.'

Albert capitulated. For the first time in his life he felt humble. He perceived how misguided he had been ever to suppose that he could pit his pygmy wits against this smooth-faced worker of wonders.

Plummer, at their last meeting, had stated his intention of going abroad for a bit to mend his bruised heart: and it was a little disconcerting to a sensitive girl to find her victim popping up again like this.

Life, which for several days had had all the properties now of a dream, now of a nightmare, became more unreal than ever.

Her manner, as she accompanied Plummer down the stairs, took on such a dazed sweetness that her escort felt that in coming there that night he had done the wisest act of a lifetime studded but sparsely with wise acts. It seemed to Plummer that this girl had softened towards him. Certainly something had changed her. He could not know that she was merely wondering if she was awake.

George began to sit up and take notice. A cloud seemed to have cleared from his brain. He found himself looking on his fellow-diners as individuals rather than as a confused mass. The prophet Daniel, after the initial embarrassment of finding himself in the society of the lions had passed away, must have experienced a somewhat similar sensation.

Miss Plummer was not damped. She was at the hcro-worshipping age, and George shared with the Messrs Douglas Fairbanks, Francis X. Bushman, and one or two tennis champions an imposing pedestal in her Hall of Fame.

George was an undoubted success. The majority of the company were solid for him. As far as exposing his unworthiness in the eyes of Maud was concerned, the dinner had been a ghastly failure.

The situation had come upon him unheralded by any warning, and had found him unequal to it.

As far as we two are concerned, we are exactly where we were the last time we met. It's no worse for me now than it was then to know that I'm not the man you love, and that there's somebody else you loved before you ever knew of my existence. For goodness' sake, a girl like you must be used to having men tell her that they love her and having to tell them that she can't love them in return.

It had not been an easy matter to bring her erring brother to bay. The hunt had been in progress full ten minutes before she and Lord Belpher finally cornered the poor wretch. His plea, through the keyhole of the locked door, that he was working on the family history and could not be disturbed, was ignored; and now he was face to face with the avengers.

Maud shivered. This man before her was a man in whose lexicon there should have been no such word as butter, a man who should have called for the police had some enemy endeavoured to thrust butter upon him.

The young man was not discomposed. He appeared to be used to being unpopular. He proceeded as though there had been no interruption. He produced a dingy card.

The distressed brigand showed no gratification. She had the air of one who is aloof from worldly things. All she wanted was rest and leisure - leisure to meditate upon the body upstairs.

in his bedroom at the Cariton Hotel George Bevan was packing. That is to say, he had begun packing; but for the last twenty minutes he had been sitting on the side of the bed, staring into a future which became bleaker and bleaker the f more he examined it. In the last two days he had been no stranger to these grey moods, and they had become harder and harder to dispel. Now, with the steamer-trunk before him gaping to receive its contents, he gave himself up whole-heartedly to gloom.

It was incredible that three short weeks ago he had been a happy man. Lonely, perhaps, but only in a vague, impersonal way. Not lonely with this aching loneliness that tortured him now. What was there left for him?

'How clever of you to guess. George, I want to ask you one or two things. In the first place, are you fond of butter?'

/Service with a smile/

Many people are fond of church lads, but he was not of their number, and he chafed at Connie's highhandedness in letting loose on his grounds and messuages what sometimes seemed to him about five hundred of them, all squealing simultaneously.

George Cyril might rather closely resemble someone for whom the police were spreading a drag-net in the expectation of making an arrest shortly, but nobody could deny his great gifts. He knew his pigs.

So Lord Emsworth beamed, and when he spoke did so with what, when statesmen meet for conferences, is known as the utmost cordiality.

'Her welfare shall be my constant concern, m'lord.'

She regarded the ninth earl with the cold eye of a governess of strict views who has found her young charge playing hooky.

It was the seeming impossibility of ever obtaining the capital for this venture that interfered with her sleep at night and in the daytime made her manner more than a little forbidding. Like George Cyril Wellbeloved, whose views were strongly communistic, which was how he got that broken nose, she eyed the more wealthy of her circle askance. Idle rich, she sometimes called them.

'Oh, all right, all right.' said Lord Emsworth peevishly. adding a third 'All right' for good measure. 'Always something, always something.' he muttered, and told himself once again that, of all the secretarial assistants he had had. none. not even the Efficient Baxter of evil memory, could compare in the art of taking the joy out of life with this repellent female whom Connie in her arbitrary way had insisted on engaging against his strongly expressed wishes.

He was looking for someone to talk to. and Connie, though in his opinion potty, like all women, would be better than nothing.

In Wiltshire, where he resided when not inviting himself for long visits to the homes of others, he was far from popular, his standing among his neighbours being roughly that of a shark at a bathing resort - something, that is to say. to be avoided on all occasions as nimbly as possible. A peremptory manner and an autocratic disposition combined to prevent him winning friends and influencing people.

Concealing her annoyance, not that that was necessary, for her visitor since early boyhood had never noticed when he was annoying anyone, she laid down her pen and achieved a reasonably bright smile.

'Who to?' said the Duke, never one to allow the conventions to interfere with his thirst for knowledge.

There was a paper-weight at her elbow which would have fitted her needs to a nicety. Debarred from physical self-expression by a careful upbringing at the hands of a series of ladylike governesses, she fell back on hauteur.

This interested the Duke. He had always been as inquisitive as a cat. He blew his moustache up against his nose and allowed his eyes to protrude.

'That damns him.' said the Duke. who had been at Eton and Cambridge. 'All Harrovians are the scum of the earth, ' and Oxonians are even worse. Very wise of you to remove her from his clutches.'

His nephew was employed by the Mammoth Publishing Company, that vast concern which supplies the more fatheaded of England's millions with their daily, weekly and monthly reading matter, but in so minor a capacity that he, the Duke, was still obliged to supplement his salary with an allowance. And if there was one thing that parsimonious man disliked, it was supplementing people's salaries with allowances. The prospect of getting the boy off his payroll was a glittering one, and his eyes bulged brightly as he envisaged it. 'Tell him to spare no effort.' he urged. 'Tell him to pull up his socks and leave no stone unturned. Tell him - Oh. hell!'

Every day in every way, he was convinced, association with that ghastly porker made the feller pettier and pettier. And, in the Duke's opinion, he had been quite potty enough to start with.

Myra Schoonmaker appeared, looking, except that she was not larded with sweet flowers, like Ophelia in Act Four. Scene Five, of Shakespeare's well-known play Hamlet.

The number of the man she loved was graven on her heart.

There was a momentary silence at the other end of the wire. One would have gathered that the owner of the voice had had his breath taken away. Recovering it. he said ...