The Amateur Crime

by

A. B. Cox

Contents

to

my sister

Prologue

The young man waved his arms violently. “You’re a cabbage!” he shouted. “A turnip! A vegetable marrow! A—” He paused. “A snail!” he concluded, relinquishing this horticultural catalogue.

Mr. Matthew Priestley blinked at him mildly through his glasses. “Am I, Pat?” he asked, not without surprise.

“Yes, you are.” From his stand upon the hearthrug the young man contemplated his host with extreme severity. “How old are you, Priestley?” he demanded at length.

“Thirty-six,” apologised Mr. Priestley.

“Thirty-six!” repeated the young man with remarkable scorn. “And what do you think people would take you for?”

“Thirty-five?” hazarded Mr. Priestley optimistically.

“Certainly not!” said the young man sharply. “Sixty-five, more like.”

“Oh, no, Pat,” protested Mr. Priestley, pained.

“At least sixty-five,” rejoined the young man firmly. “And no wonder. Do you know what you are, Priestley?”

“Well, yes,” said Mr. Priestley, a little doubtfully, “I’m a cabbage, and a vegetable-marrow, and a snail, and——”

“You’re a limpet!”

“A limpet as well?” said Mr. Priestley, with distress. “Now, what makes you say that, Pat?”

“Well, look at you!” observed the young man shortly.

Mr. Priestley obeyed. “I seem much the same as usual,” he ventured.

“That’s the whole point!” the young man said with force. “You’re always much the same as usual. Always!”

“I wear a different suit nearly every day,” Mr. Priestley protested wistfully.

“You know what I mean. Look at you—thirty-six, and as set and unenterprising as a man of sixty! Why don’t you move out of your rotten little rut, man? Move about! See life! Have adventures!” The young man ran a sensitive hand through his rather long black hair.

Mr. Priestley looked round the cosy bachelor room in the cosy bachelor flat; if it was a rut, it was a remarkably pleasant one. “It’s curious how restless love seems to make a man,” he observed mildly.

The young man stamped violently several times up and down the room. “I’m not restless!” he exclaimed loudly. “I’m happy!”

“I see,” replied Mr. Priestley with humility. “Have another drink, won’t you?”

The young man manipulated the decanter and siphon. “I do hate to see a man vegetating,” he growled into his glass.

“I suppose it’s the result of getting engaged,” Mr. Priestley meditated. “That sort of thing must be upsetting, no doubt.”

“It makes a fellow so happy, he wants to make his friends happy, too,” the young man condescended to explain.

“But I am happy, Pat! Remarkably happy.”

“You’re nothing of the sort,” snapped the young man.

“Aren’t I?” queried Mr. Priestley in surprise. “Well, I certainly thought I was.”

“Oh, yes,” said the young man with remarkable bitterness. “You think you are, of course. But you’re nothing of the sort. How can you be? Is a cabbage happy? Why don’t you live, man? Get about! Fall in love! Have adventures!”

“But adventures don’t happen to me.”

“Of course they don’t. Because you never let them. If you saw an adventure coming, you’d shut both eyes and wrap your head up in a rug. You’re turning into a regular hermit, Priestley: that’s what’s the matter with you. And hermits have a habit of becoming most confoundedly dull.”

Soon after that the young man took his leave; and quite time, too.

After his departure Mr. Priestley sat for a few moments turning over in his mind what had been said. Was it true that he was getting into a rut? Was he a turnip? Was he in danger of becoming a hermit, and a confoundedly dull hermit at that? He looked round his comfortable room again and sighed gently. Certainly most of his interests were concentrated in the flat—his books, for instance, and his china, and his collection of snuff-boxes. It was equally certain that, with a comfortable income which precluded his having to work for his living, and a valet who looked after him better than a nurse, he found himself very much more comfortable in his home than out of it. But did that necessarily mean that he was a snail?

“Poof!” observed Mr. Priestley with mild decision. “Ridiculous! Pat has just become engaged, to, as I understand, a charming and beautiful girl, and his whole world is upset. Out of the exuberance of his spirits he wants to upset everybody else’s world as well. Hermit, indeed.”

And he reached happily for his Theocritus.

Thus, regardless of his doom, the little victim played.

Chapter I.
The Nesbitt Combination

On a certain soft evening in early April, Guy Nesbitt of Dell Cottage, Duffley, Oxfordshire, was engaged in wrestling with his dress-tie.

Dress-ties did not take kindly to Guy. When a dress-tie found itself encircling a collar belonging to Guy a devil entered into it. All dress-ties were like this with Guy. They knew he had met his master, and they became as wax in his hands. They melted, they drooped, they languished, they slid, and the means they employed to prevent the ends of their bows from ever coming even were a manifestation of the triumph of matter over mind. A South African negro, seeing a dress-tie pursuing its eel-like antics in Guy’s impotent hands would have had no hesitation in falling down on his knees and worshipping it on the spot, and quite rightly; one of Guy’s dress-ties could have given pounds to any of the ju-ju’s of his native land and disposed of him in half a round.

Giving up the unequal struggle, Guy dashed the victorious excrescence to the floor, where it lay chortling gently, whipped another out of the open drawer in front of him and strode to the door which separated his dressing-room from his wife’s bedroom, muttering naughtily to himself as he went. At the risk of becoming tedious, he must try to give some idea of his appearance during the second-and-a-half occupied by his journey.

Guy Nesbitt was a thin, tall man, almost an attenuated tall man, and he carried himself just about as badly as a man can. His rather narrow shoulders were invariably bowed like those of Atlas, and between them his small, half-bald head shot forward at such an angle that, although he was nearly always taller than his interlocutor, he gave the impression of peering up at anybody he happened to be addressing over his rimless pince-nez. In spite of the ribald observations of one of his wife’s friends, Guy was not old; a mere thirty-one. But he had looked exactly as he did now (which was forty-five) for the last five years, and would probably continue to do so for the next twenty. The other part of the candid friend’s remark was not inapt; he did look exactly like a vulture, but a thoroughly benign and good-tempered old vulture at that. Guy had never lost his temper in his life, a matter which had caused his parents (he was an only son) considerable satisfaction —for parents are notoriously short-sighted folk—and his old nurse an equal perturbation.

For the rest he was delicate, but refused to admit it; possessed of a private income with which he was generous beyond reason or logic; not so much of a recluse as might have been expected, considering the scholarly nature of his chief hobby, which was the minor poets of the seventeenth century; and he wielded a nifty brassie and a surprisingly ferocious tennis-racket. His manner was as much of a contradiction as most of his other attributes; at times he was as prim and precise as the maiden aunt of a Dean, at others he verged on the Rabelaisian. He had a pretty wit, and he could make up his mind quickly.

“Blessed were the Picts and Scots, Cynthia,” he observed wistfully, closing the door meticulously behind him. “They may have had trouble at times with their sporrans, perhaps, but what is a mere sporran?”

Cynthia, seated in a kimono before her dressing-table, smiled at him over her shoulder; she had a particularly sweet smile. She was a tall, graceful girl of twenty-three, who bore every promise of turning later into that most delightful of creatures, a charmingly gracious woman. Gracious women are of two widely opposite kinds, one the most adorable and one the most fell of their sex, and it is the presence or absence of charm which makes or mars them. There was no fear of Cynthia falling into the latter category.

Guy and Cynthia had been married for two years, which period had been passed during the winters at Guy’s old home in Lincolnshire and in the summers at their riverside cottage in Duffley, a quiet little village on the Thames nearly mid-way between Oxford and Abingdon (it was called a “cottage”). To outward appearances they were as incompatible as a couple may well be, and they were extremely happy together. That shows the value of outward appearances.

“A sporran, darling?” Cynthia repeated. “Don’t try to make me answer that; you know how I hate admitting ignorance. All my life I’ve wondered what a sporran is, and never had the courage to ask. It seemed to be a thing that any decently educated person ought to know, like French verbs, or what Edward the Somethingth said to the lady whose garter he picked up, and that sort of thing. What is a sporran, Guy?”

Her husband stroked his chin reflectively. “Isn’t it something you wear in your bonnet?” he hazarded.

“No, dear,” Cynthia told him gently. “That’s a bee. Well, never mind about sporrans. Let’s get this grim piece of work over.” She pushed back her chair and stood up. “I’ve been expecting you for the last ten minutes.”

“I nearly did it myself to-night,” Guy said ruefully, handing her the strip of black devilry, which instantly ceased to be diabolical at all and, assuming an air of almost offensive rectitude, permitted Cynthia to do with it as she would. “I must have got the ends within an inch of each other at least half-a-dozen times.”

“There!” Cynthia stepped back and regarded her handiwork complacently. “Not so bad for a first shot, I fancy. You are a ridiculous old butterfingers, aren’t you?” She kissed the ridiculous old butterfingers lightly on the end of his long nose and resumed her seat.

“Well, well,” said the old butterfingers, and moved towards the door. “Thank you, my dear.”

“Oh, don’t go, Guy. You’re practically ready, and there’s heaps of time. Sit down and smoke a cigarette and watch me make myself beautiful; there are some cigarettes in the box on the mantelpiece.”

“Sure you don’t mind, in here?”

Cynthia smiled at her husband again. If good manners never won fair lady, they must have often come very near it. It warmed Cynthia’s heart to reflect that this husband of hers was just as courteous to her now, after two years of marriage, as on the very first day he ever met her; how many women could say the same?

“As a very great treat, I think you might be allowed to, for once,” she said, in a tender little voice that matched her smile, feeling like a mother, and a wife, and a lover, and a sister, and all sorts of other things as well towards this adorably helpless person, so infinitely inferior to herself and at exactly the same time so infinitely superior, whom she had elected to marry. “Now watch, and I’ll show you what happens to sandy eyebrows when they get into my toils. It’s supposed to be hopelessly bad policy, I know, but I have no secrets from you, darling; not even toilet ones.”

“I won’t have my wife’s eyebrows insulted,” Guy retorted, dropping his long, lean frame into an arm-chair. “They’re not sandy, they never have been sandy, and they never will be sandy.”

“My dear old Guy,” laughed Cynthia, taking effective steps to clear the brows in question of any lingering imputations of sandiness, “you’d never notice if they were, so don’t pretend you would. Why, I don’t believe you could even say off-hand what colour my eyes are.”

“My dear!” exclaimed her husband, with righteous indignation.

“Well—what colour are they then?”

Guy shifted a trifle uneasily in his chair. “A—a sort of greeny-brown,” he said, somewhat defiantly.

“Commonly called hazel. Is that what you mean?”

“Hazel,” Guy nodded with some relief. “Yes.”

“Guy, you’re hopeless!” Cynthia laughed. “What sort of a husband do you think you are? Really! Not to have the faintest idea of the colour of his own wife’s eyes! Well, you might have said blue and been complimentary at any rate.”

“Do you mean to say they’re not hazel?” her husband inquired.

Cynthia nodded with emphasis. “I should hope I do! They’re gray, my poor child. If you don’t believe me, ask George to-night. I shouldn’t call George a particularly observant man, but I think his powers will probably have carried him that far. Guy, I think you’d better begin rather hurriedly to talk about the weather.”

Guy began to laugh instead. He had a curious and rather fascinating laugh. He laughed with a kind of guilty air, as if he knew he were doing something he shouldn’t, but for the life of him could not help it. His laughter was subdued but hearty, and reminded one irresistibly of a small boy stealing jam.

“I meant gray,” said Mr. Guy Nesbitt, stealing jam.

Cynthia became engrossed in the intricacies of her beautifying operations and the conversation languished.

Guy was the first to break the silence. “Looking forward to this evening, darling?” he asked.

“Mps,” Cynthia murmured absently, busy with her comb. “Quite. I want to meet Dora’s fiancé. I’d like to see her married, I must say; though when it’s going to happen, goodness knows. In her last letter, she said quite cheerfully that Pat couldn’t even raise the money for their furniture yet, and apparently she saw little chance of his ever doing so. Are you?”

“Very much. If Laura is anything like Dora (and being her sister I take it she will be) we ought to have an amusing evening. This fellow Pat Doyle sounds quite an entertaining sort of chap, too. I’ve never met a journalist before, least of all an Irish journalist. The combination ought to prove remarkable.”

Cynthia turned round to look at her husband. “You are a funny old thing, you know,” she observed with a smile.

“So you frequently tell me, my dear. Why particularly in this instance?”

“Well, you’re so unexpected. I should have expected you to hate meeting strangers, but you positively revel in it.”

“Of course I do! I collect strangers. What you never seem to realise, my otherwise admirable Cynthia, is that I am profoundly interested in the human animal. I like to observe his little squirmings and watch his reactions to all the ordinary, and still more to the extraordinary things of life. And the more strangers I meet, the more I recognise what a lot there is still to learn.”

“I’m glad I’m not a psychologist,” Cynthia returned. “It must be awfully uphill work.”

“All women are psychologists,” retorted her husband sententiously. “They may not know it, but applied psychology is part of their stock-in-trade.”

“Humph!” Cynthia did not encourage her husband to air his views upon women, about whom she considered he knew less than nothing. She allowed him to call himself a psychologist because she was a kind and tactful girl, but her own word for him so far as her sex was concerned would have been idealist; and she had enough sex-loyalty not to wish to shatter his illusions. “Well,” she went on, changing the subject brightly, “hold the magnifying glass over Mr. Doyle as much as you like, but I’ll just give you one word of advice before it’s too late; beware of Laura, and beware of Dora, but above all, beware of Laura and Dora!”

“And now,” said Guy, throwing the end of his cigarette carefully out of the window, “explain that somewhat cryptic remark.”

“Well, you know Dora, don’t you?”

“Fairly well, I thought. She’s stayed with us—what was it?—three times during the last two years.”

“Well, you know how demure and soulful she always looks, as if butter wouldn’t melt in her mouth, when all the time it would disappear just as fast as you could put it in with a shovel?”

“I know that Dora’s appearance is a little deceptive, yes,” gravely agreed Guy, who knew all about his wife’s ideas regarding his own views on her sex but would not have let her guess so for the world.

“Dora, if she wants to, can be a little demon,” amplified Cynthia frankly. “Well, Laura is a worse edition of Dora, that’s all. Apart, they’re demons, but together they’re positively diabolical. I warn you.”

“Query,” Guy murmured, “when is a demon not diabolical? When it’s apart.”

“And when should a purist cease to be pure?” smiled Cynthia. “In his wife’s bedroom, I should have thought, at least.”

“Mrs. Nesbitt, you shock me,” Guy cackled in high glee. Cynthia’s occasional lapses into pleasant vulgarity he privately considered one of the most delightful things about her. He uncurled his length from the chair. “Well, thank you for warning me. I’ll be on my guard against this diabolical pair. Let us hope that the presence of her fiancé will be a restraining influence upon Dora’s demoniacal tendencies.”

“What a lot of long words my husband does know,” confided Cynthia to her hair-brush. “Where are you off to now? They’re not due for another twenty minutes.”

“I must see about the wine,” Guy replied reverently, and retired. Wine and his wife were about the only two things in this world which Guy really respected.

Chapter II.
From Cocktails to Criminology

It has been said, no doubt with truth, that to make her mark in these overcrowded days a girl must adopt a line and stick to it like grim death. She may be languid, she may be sporting, she may be offensively rude, she may be appealing and doll-like, and she will find success, but she must never be purely and simply herself; that is the fundamental mistake. Such criticism could not be applied to the Misses Howard.

Our semi-civilised conventions have their disadvantages. In a more enlightened age the Misses Howard might have been compelled to go through life wearing horns and a barbed tail and a passable imitation of cloven hooves, as a timely warning to unsuspecting strangers not to take these two innocent-looking maidens at their face-value, charming as that was. Dissimulation, as practised by the Misses Howard, was more than a fine art; it was a hobby. The unsuspecting stranger (of the male sex, of course; female strangers are never unsuspecting, and the more strange they are the more they suspect), catching sight of one of the Miss Howards would swell his manly chest and pat his manly back, and say to himself in his manly tones: “Here is a poor, frightened little thing who looks at me as if I were a god. Who knows? Perhaps I am a god. I am very much inclined, when this helpless and pretty little thing looks at me like that, to think that I am. Out with the lance and armour! Are there any dragons about? Or, failing dragons, mice? At any rate, it is palpably up to me to protect this delectably timid small person from something, and that pretty quickly.”

And twenty minutes later, if he had interested the timid little thing enough, he would be wondering ruefully if certain words of hers really meant what they had implied, or whether they were intended to convey something quite different and impossibly puncturing to the gallant balloon of manly self-esteem. If he did not interest her enough, he would be wondering still more ruefully how he could ever have imagined such a frigid block of sarcastic ice to be incapable in any conceivable way of looking after, not merely herself, but the entire universe as well. The Misses Howard may perhaps most politely be described as “stimulating.”

Nevertheless, the family of Howard had done one good thing—it had brought Guy and Cynthia together. George Howard, the brother of the two demons, a large, solid person, as unlike his sisters as the elephant is unlike the mosquito, had been Guy’s worshipping disciple at school and at Oxford; Dora and Cynthia had been “best friends.” George had now taken for the summer the cottage at Duffley whose garden adjoined Guy’s. He had moved in only three days before this story opens, and the fate of Duffley still hung in the balance.

Laura, younger than her sister by a couple of years, had shouldered the responsibilities of her lot and the family’s orphanhood by accompanying her brother George about wherever he went and insisting upon keeping his house for him, much to that simple soul’s sorrow; on the whole, George would rather have had his house kept for him by a combination of Catherine of Medici and Lucretia Borgia than by either of his sisters. George was the sort of person who likes to know where he is at any given moment, and has a rooted distaste for dwelling upon a volcano. Laura, therefore, was now wasting her gifts upon the rustic life of Duffley. Dora, investing her talents to better purpose, had gone on the stage, where she had confidently expected to multiply them sevenfold.

The British stage is a mass of curious contradictions. It lives upon humbug, it exploits humbug, and it is itself more taken in by humbug than any other institution. If a penniless actress lays out her last ten shillings in a pair of new gloves and a taxi-fare to the stage-door, the stage will say to itself as often as not: “Ha! Trixie Two-shoes is going about everywhere in taxis now, is she? She must be getting on, that girl. There is evidently more in her than I thought. I must have her for my next show, at double the salary she’s getting now. Good!” The stage then buys four cigars at five times the price it usually pays, in order to impress the financial magnate after lunch with the strength of its own position.

But when humbug was offered to it of such rare and golden quality that its exploitation should have been repaid a hundred times over, the stage would have none of it. Dora had been unable to penetrate further into the legitimate drama which she felt herself called upon to enrich, than the stage-door-keeper’s box. Refusing to be beaten (she had no need of the money, but she was determined by hook or by crook to get on that elusive stage), Dora had abandoned the idea of legitimate drama for the time being and expressed her willingness to adorn the chorus of a revue, comforting herself with the reflection that not a few great stars have risen from the musical ranks to legitimate heights. She had at once obtained the position to which her face and figure entitled her and, after a year in the provinces, had for the last six months been adorning the front row of the Mammoth Chorus at the Palladeum. She was now rehearsing a production which was to open the following week, and so was at liberty to present herself, with her fiancé, at a Saturday to Monday housewarming for George.

Only once had either of the Miss Howards met their match, and that was when a certain Mr. Doyle irritably besought Dora five months ago, within twenty minutes of the opening of their acquaintance, “for Heaven’s sake not to try and pull that moon-eyed, baby-voiced stuff on him. He wasn’t born yesterday, and he didn’t like it. In short, her artless behaviour left Mr. Doyle not only cold but weary.” Dora was so taken aback that for the first time in her life she became perfectly natural with a complete stranger.

The sequel was inevitable. When four days later the volatile Mr. Doyle, touched apparently by this complimentary change of front, besought her hand in marriage, she kept her whirling head long enough to accept him on the spot; she felt she had at last met her master, and the sensation though novel was by no means disagreeable. Since then they had remained engaged, in spite of all expectations to the contrary, their own included; indeed, Mr. Doyle had gone so far as to inform his fiancée with engaging candour that this was the longest period he had ever been engaged to any one girl. They were now even beginning to think quite seriously of the possibility of really getting married some day if Mr. Doyle could scrape together the capital on which to do so.

In spite of Cynthia’s assurances, Guy Nesbitt was not on hand when the quartet arrived. With a face like a high priest’s he was performing solemn rites in the dining-room over a bottle of port and a decanter, and Cynthia had to welcome her guests in the drawing-room alone.

She cast a somewhat anxious eye at the sisters as they marched decorously into the room on the heels of the maid’s announcement, their faces both ornamented with the same shy smile. Although she had known them most of her life and Dora was her closest friend, Cynthia never felt she knew quite where she was with them. In their rear walked Mr. Doyle, and behind him George Howard. Where Cynthia cast one anxious eye, George cast two. In spite of his elder years George knew even less where he was with his sisters than Cynthia did.

“Hallo, Lawks!” smiled their hostess. “Hallo, Dawks!” To be admitted to the circle of those permitted to address them by these pseudonyms, which George had invented with simple pride at the age of eight, was the highest privilege the two had to bestow. The number so allowed was, for each sister, twelve, and no one fresh could be received within the magic circle until a suitable vacancy occurred. Cynthia did not know Laura nearly so well as her sister (the two had, very wisely, been despatched to different schools), but was permitted the honour in view of her position as Dora’s Best Friend.

Laura smiled her greeting, and Dora motioned Mr. Doyle forward. “This is my appendage, Cynthia,” she remarked frankly.

“He isn’t much to look at perhaps,” Laura amplified, “but his heart’s in the right place; at least Dora says it is, we haven’t had him vetted yet. His name’s Henry Aloysius Frederick Doyle, but never mind about that; he answers much better to the name of Pat. He’s Irish.”

Mr. Doyle, a slightly-built, clean-shaven young man with black hair, turned in the act of bowing to Cynthia. “I’m not!” he said indignantly.

“Yes, you are,” his future sister-in-law contradicted him. “How could you help being, with a name like Pat Doyle?”

“But my name isn’t Pat Doyle. It’s Henry Doyle. Pat’s a nickname, goodness knows why. I’ve told you a hundred——”

“Stop arguing and shake hands with the lady,” the younger Miss Howard interrupted. “Goodness knows your manners are bad enough at the best of times without making them worse. And we did want you to shine a little to-night. That’s why I told you not to speak with your mouth full, like you usually do, and not to wave your fork in the air when you argue. Of course you’re Irish!”

With a somewhat heightened colour, which told Cynthia that these candid remarks were not without their substratum of truth, Mr. Doyle completed his greeting of his hostess. George, trying hard to look as if he had heard nothing, took Cynthia’s slim hand in his huge paw and told her, with remarkable earnestness, that it had been a topping day; he also expressed his hopes that it would be as topping a day to-morrow. One gathered that George was being what he considered tactful.

Cynthia embarked upon her share of the unnatural conversation that takes place between intimate friends before a rather formal dinner.

Glancing surreptitiously at Dora from time to time, Cynthia decided that the engagement had done her friend good. Dora seemed quieter. Not subdued, or anything like that, but tasting her enjoyment of life with a rather more detached, almost a lazy air. In contrast with the more bounding spirits of Laura, Dora seemed far older than the two years between them would have suggested. Cynthia was conscious of a certain relief.

Five minutes later Guy came hurrying in and paused for a moment in the doorway, blinking benignly round through his glasses. “Sorry I’m so late,” he apologised. “Hallo, Dawks. Good-evening, Laura. The bottles were disgustingly dirty, and I had to go and wash again.”

“Never mind washing, in a good cause,” murmured Mr. Doyle, and came forward to be introduced.

The cocktails which Guy then proceeded to dispense played their usual helpful part (what would civilisation be without its cocktails?) and the little gathering moved into the dining-room. Dora seemed, for such a self-possessed young woman, acutely conscious of the presence of her fiancé, on trial, as it were, before the Best Friend, and was in consequence refreshingly innocuous; Laura, who was only meeting Guy for the third time and was not yet quite sure what to make of him, was equally tentative. Cynthia was able to take her seat at the bottom of the table with the happy confidence that her party was going to be a success. Cynthia was more right than she imagined.

The dinner proceeded much in the way of all dinners, and the ice, to which the cocktails had already dealt a sound blow, was gradually smashed into diminishing smithereens.

As the port was placed before him and the maid withdrew, Guy glanced with satisfaction round his dinner-table, on whose polished mahogany the candles in their heavy silver stands gleamed softly. The meal had gone off well, the guests had been exceedingly cheerful, and Cynthia, in a black velvet gown which admirably enhanced the white beauty of her arms and shoulders, was looking her very best. The host in Guy was full of content, the husband no less so. He poured himself out a glass of port as the decanter reached him from Dora, and beamed round once more.

The young man Doyle had pleased Guy particularly. He had shown signs of a tendency towards argument which was most gratifying; rather voluble, perhaps, and occasionally a little excitable, but good, sound argument; and if there was one form of mental exercise which Guy’s soul loved beyond all others it was argument. In the dreamy contentment that follows a perfectly good dinner he listened to Cynthia rolling the conversational ball at her end of the table and meditated on a new subject to attract Doyle’s attention from his fiancée.

“By the way,” Cynthia was remarking to George, “Monica and Alan are coming to stay with us the week after next for a few days, George. We must get up a river picnic for them.”

“Thank goodness,” Laura took it on herself to reply. “We’ve only been in Duffley three days, but I’m bored stiff with the place already. I feel wasted here. There are possibilities in a river picnic.”

“Oh, rather,” George murmured dutifully, concealing his blenches in his port-glass.

As Cynthia’s brother and sister, and consequently Guy’s brother and sister-in-law, Alan and Monica undoubtedly had every claim upon him; but he was not unduly elated at Cynthia’s news. Duffley was a nice, peaceful place, where one could get a tolerably good game of golf and smoke a quiet pipe or two in the country round. It seemed a pity to have it turned upside down, even for a few days.

George had met Alan and Monica before; the meeting had taken place two years ago, but George would never forget it. “Oh, rather,” he repeated sadly, wondering whether there were many frogs in the neighbourhood of Duffley. The last time they had met, Alan had done his best to endear himself by putting a frog in George’s bed. Neither George nor the frog had altogether appreciated the jest. George had had something of a fellow-feeling for frogs ever since.

Cynthia turned to her other neighbour. “Will you still be here, Pat?” “Mr. Doyle,” had been dropped, on command of the sisters, before the champagne had been round twice.

“I doubt it,” observed Laura darkly, from the other side of the table. It appeared that Laura had taken it upon herself to entertain the gravest doubts as to the engagement lasting for more than a few hours in the immediate future, and to give voice to those doubts upon every possible occasion. When she was not doing this, she was trying to correct, with an air of patient despondency, certain faults which she professed to see in her future brother-in-law’s manners. “For,” as she told her indignant sister, “you may be going to marry him, but I’ve got to be a sister to him; and I never could be a sister to a man who eats and drinks at the same time.”

“No, Cynthia,” said Mr. Doyle with emphasis. “I shall certainly not be here then. Why?”

“What a pity! I couldn’t help thinking you’d be so useful,” Cynthia smiled. “I mean, anybody who can manage to engage himself to Dawks—well, Monica ought to be child’s-play to him.”

“Are you meaning,” inquired Mr. Doyle carefully, “that you want me to get engaged to your sister as well as Dawks? I’m a very obliging man, and I do my best to be kind to my friends, but the trouble is that I’ve never been properly trained as a bigamist. Besides, don’t you think Dawks might have something to say about it?”

“She will,” interposed that young lady’s sister promptly. “She’ll say, ‘Get to it, my lad, and step briskly!’ That’ll be all right, Cynthia. He’ll be free for Monica days before she comes.”

Cynthia laughed tactfully and proceeded with her exposition. “No, I wasn’t meaning that you need go so far as to get engaged to her; what I did think, though, was that you might be able to—well, what is known as handle her, perhaps.”

“Man-handle her, more like,” put in the faithful Greek chorus.

George stifled another groan in his wine-glass. The last time he had encountered her, Monica had handled him, with a hose-pipe, causing him to dance at her commands as madly as any dervish on the front lawn of her house half an hour before the ceremony, on pain of having his wedding garments drenched, what time the wedding-guests stood about in the background feebly beating their breasts; and all because he had bestowed a brotherly tug at the thick plait which hung down her back—a thing to George’s ideas that was almost inevitable etiquette in the presence of a flapper. George had singularly few pleasant recollections of Monica.

Mr. Doyle seemed to have caught something of the spirit of George’s apprehensions. He groaned faintly and ran a hand through his long black hair. “You don’t mean—you don’t mean that your sister is anything like——?” He paused. “Oh, no!” he said with decision. “You must put her off. Remember, Dawks might come down for another week-end, and then there’d be three in the place at a time. Duffley couldn’t stand it. The whole village would vanish in a cloud of blue smoke, and we with it. You must put her off, Cynthia.”

“Are we,” Laura inquired carefully of her sister, “are we, do you think, being insulted, Dawks? Are we being insulted by this wretched Sein Feiner you’re trying to smuggle into the family?”

An apprehensive look appeared on Cynthia’s face. She loved the sisters, and she loved to see them ragging; but she did not love the idea of their ragging across her dining-room table.

Help came from an unexpected quarter. Dora, who had been unwontedly silent during the last half-hour, smiled lazily at her sister. “When are you going to grow up, Lawks?” she asked gently.

Nobody but herself could have posed such a question and retired unscathed. As it was, Laura was half out of her chair before she sank back feebly, turning incredulous eyes up to the ceiling.

“The woman’s nerve’s all gone,” she murmured in a faint voice. “She’s got soft. It’s young love, I suppose. She’ll be asking people to call her Miss Howard soon. Well, Heaven preserve me from ever getting engaged, that’s all!”

“On behalf of the sex,” remarked Mr. Doyle piously, “which I so unworthily represent, Amen!”

Laura’s pose altered abruptly, and her eyes sparkled with battle, but before she could translate her feelings into action, Guy, catching a frantic signal from his wife’s eyes, interposed with a change of subject. “Cheer up, George,” he said hastily. “What’s the matter? You look as if you’d committed a murder, and couldn’t decide what to do with the body.”

“I think he’s just seen a ghost, and is being tactful about it,” said Laura, her attention successfully diverted.

George, roused abruptly from his meditations concerning frogs and hose-pipes, smiled wanly. “Me? I’m all right,” he muttered.

“I think you’ve guessed it, Nesbitt,” remarked Doyle, regarding his future brother-in-law closely. “He has committed a murder. How awkward for him! Now I come to look at him, he has got a criminal face, hasn’t he? I wonder what type he belongs to. The Palmer, would you say? He has that look of chubby innocence. But no, he’s too big and massive. Now, who…? Smith, perhaps? Smith was always the gent, wasn’t he?” He prattled on happily. Thus great events from causes small do spring.

In Guy’s eyes an eager light had appeared, the light that must have gleamed in Stanley’s eyes when he pretended to greet Livingstone so nonchalantly. “I say, Doyle,” he said in hushed tones, “you’re not—you’re not interested in criminology, are you?”

The light leaped into Doyle’s eyes. He looked at his host with reverence and awe. “Are you?” he asked, in the same cathedral-like voice.

“Yes. I’ve never met any one else who was before.”

“Neither have I!”

They gazed at each other in ecstasy.

“What’s your real opinion of the Thompson case?” Guy managed to whisper.

“I heard an awfully interesting theory about the Mahon case,” whispered Doyle at the same moment.

Cynthia coughed gently, “Have I caught your eye, Dawks? This, I think, is where we three gracefully retire.”

They did so.

“Do you think Seddon ought to have been convicted?” murmured Doyle, closing the door as absently as he had opened it.

“Have you read the MacLachlan trial?” murmured Guy absently, producing cigars. “The character of old Fleming is most absorbing. Of course he did it.”

They opened the flood-gates of their hobby and the long pent tide poured forth.

For a time George listened with interest, for murders, dash it, are interesting, say what you like. Then he listened with less interest, for murders, hang it, are a bit what-you-might-call boring, taken in the mass; a good juicy mystery with his morning-paper George enjoyed as much as any one, but one, in George’s opinion, was enough at a time. Besides, after a fellow had done some one in and been well and truly hanged for it, what on earth was there to go on yapping about? George listened with growing boredom.

“What about a foursome to-morrow morning, Guy?” said George. “We can get Dawks to make up the four. She doesn’t play at all too badly.”

“When are your sister and brother-in-law coming, Guy?” said George.

“I say, hadn’t we better be getting into the drawing-room?” said George. “They’ll be wondering what’s happened to us.”

He might have saved himself the trouble; for when two or three criminologists are gathered together, then is for them neither time nor space, sweetheart nor wife, necessity nor law.

They talked on.

“I say,” said George, nerving himself for a supreme effort, “I’m getting a bit fed up with all this chat about murder.”

Never once before in all his life had George so much as hinted that anything his elder and superior did, came to him the least little bit amiss; never before had the disciple ventured to criticise the master. At school where there were three years between them (and three years at school is an eternity) the small but beefy George, a stolid boy in those days, had worshipped, humbly adoring, at the shrine of Guy, the Head of his House. When Guy, who had only just scraped his second fifteen cap, came down as an old boy to find George captain of the school fifteen and runner-up for the captaincy of the cricket eleven, George had all but wept for joy to hear himself addressed almost on equal terms.

At Oxford, where Guy was a fourth-year man, the time of George’s fresherhood had been brightened and sanctified by the presence in the same town of his divinity. Had not George been permitted to be the humble instrument for bringing about Guy’s marriage with the only woman in this world remotely approaching worthiness, and had he not been rewarded beyond rubies by being allowed to be the great one’s best man—an honour he valued far more than the note from his captain announcing that he had been awarded a blue for rugger? Yet, after all that, here he was, red in the face and not unconscious of his epoch-making action, saying gruffly that he was getting fed up with all that chat about murder! Murder has turned people into revolutionaries before George.

The two ghouls paused in their banquet and turned glazed eyes upon George. Had they heard aright?

“Fed up?” demanded Doyle incredulously.

“Yes,” replied the mutinous George. “Too much of a good thing.”

“Too much?” repeated Mr. Doyle. He exchanged pitying glances with Guy.

“My dear chap,” that gentleman took up the tale, rather in the tones of one addressing a small and particularly foolish infant (thus do all criminologists address on this particular subject those who are not of their own persuasion, which accounts largely for their unpopularity.) “My dear chap, you’ve got hold of the wrong end of the stick. It isn’t the mere act of murder which interests us, it’s the state of mind of the murderer. The particular psychology, in fact, which finds its culmination in murder. The motives, the amount of premeditation, the lack of premeditation even more, the psychology of the victim, the network of circumstance, and a hundred other things—those are what makes murder the most absorbing of all psychological studies.”

“Oh!” said George. But he was impressed. George had never realised that murder had a psychology at all. George was learning things.

Guy saw that the faithful hound was beginning to think of coming once more to heel, and carried on with the good work.

He leaned back in his chair, joined his finger-tips and regarded his now uneasy disciple over his glasses with some severity.

“Let me put it in this way,” he said, striving conscientiously to speak in words of not more than one syllable. “Suppose you committed a murder, George. Suppose you were playing with the vicar, and he foozled his tee-shot to the last green and the whole match, and half-a-crown, depended on it; and suppose, unable to live in the same world with such bungling incompetence, you smote him on the head with one of your clubs, so that he died. Are you supposing all that?”

“Ye-es,” said George, supposing manfully.

“Well, what would interest us is not whether you smote him with your mashie or your niblick, or how much he bled, or whether his death-agonies removed any divots from the fairway. Nothing like that at all, George. Simply the state of your mind which showed you in one moment of blinding revelation that nothing short of murder was demanded by the situation.”

“But I’m not a murderer,” said George, putting his finger on the weak spot.

“No, George, at present you’re not; at least, so we hope. But if you ever happened to murder anybody, then you, yes, even you, George Howard, would be a murderer; and we should be studying the intricate psychology which caused you to snatch at your niblick and lay the vicar low just as eagerly as we now discuss the singular mentality of Mr. George Joseph Smith, who drowned a woman in her bath one minute and strummed on the organ in his sitting-room the next.”

“What he means,” Mr. Doyle chimed in, “is that the really interesting thing is the reactions of the ordinary person to the idea of murder. What he feels like,” he amplified kindly, “after he’s done it, in fact.”

“And before,” Guy amended.

“And before,” Mr. Doyle agreed. “Look, in short, upon this picture and on that. Mr. Howard before murder, same gent after murder. The cross marks the spot where the body was found.”

“So now do you understand, George?” Guy inquired.

“I think so,” George responded, trying to look as if he did. “You mean, you like probing into the mind of a chap who’s committed a murder?”

“In a nutshell!” approved Mr. Doyle.

“But unfortunately we have to do our probing at second-hand,” Guy lamented. “Or rather, we have to let others do the probing for us and then try to draw our own deductions. What wouldn’t you give, Doyle, for the chance to probe yourself? To psycho-analyse a murderer before the law got hold of him and messed his mind up?”

“Oh, don’t!”

“To have him under observation right from the time of the crime,” Guy gloated wistfully. “To know exactly what he thought and felt and did.”

“Don’t tempt me, Nesbitt! I’ll be getting George to murder you in a minute, if you go on like this. I promise I wouldn’t give you away, George, if you’d only let me psycho-analyse you afterwards.”

“That’s right,” Guy said. “George is just the person, of course. The ordinary man is far more interesting than your sordid murderer for gain or your mentally kinked. The reactions of the ordinary man to murder! That’s the crux of the whole thing. And so few murderers are ordinary men, unfortunately. What do you imagine he’d do, Doyle? I believe the ordinary decent man would go straight to the nearest police-station and give himself up.”

The light of argument kindled in Doyle’s eye. George’s heart sank.

“That depends on the circumstances. You must postulate those first. Do you mean, if the murder was a more or less unpremeditated one, and without witnesses?”

“Yes, certainly. Any circumstances you like. Your ordinary decent man’s impulse would be to give himself up at once.”

“Not he!” retorted Mr. Doyle with much scorn. “If there are no witnesses and no evidence against him, he’s going to make one arrow-flight for home and safety.”

“I don’t agree with you,” Guy hunched his head between his shoulders till he looked more like an ill-omened bird of prey than ever. His glasses and the top of his head shone with enjoyment. “I don’t agree with you. He wouldn’t stop to consider whether there was evidence or not. He’d assume that there must be; he’d take it for granted that he’d be found out. He’d give himself up, without hesitation. In a way, you see, it’s a shelving of responsibility, and the ordinary decent man avoids responsibility like the plague. Besides, he’d have too great a respect for the law.”

“Your ordinary decent man sounds to me uncommonly like a spineless worm,” retorted Mr. Doyle. “Now this is what he probably would do….”

The argument raged delectably.

It continued to rage.

It developed heat.

George’s heart sank till it could sink no further. He poured himself out another glass of port and recklessly consumed it side by side with his cigar, an action that would have caused Guy in his saner moments the utmost pain and distress; as it was he never even noticed it. George squirmed, he wriggled, he writhed. Seven times he said, “I say!” and seven times said no more.

“I say!” said George loudly for the eighth time. “I say, if you’re so jolly keen on knowing what the wretched chap would do, why on earth don’t you stage a murder and find out?”

George had a large voice. In spite of their preoccupation his words penetrated into the minds of the other two. They actually stopped arguing to look at him.

“Do what?” said Mr. Doyle.

“What do you mean?” asked Guy.

So far as he knew, George had not meant anything, except a desperate endeavour somehow to break the thick cord of this interminable argument, but desperation sharpens the wits and George saw in a flash what he must have been meaning. “Why,” he explained modestly, “carry out an experiment, of course. A psychological experiment,” he added with pride. “Not a real murder, of course. Just fix things so that a chap thinks he’s committed a murder, you see. Oughtn’t to be so difficult. You could hammer out half a dozen different ways of working it, Guy, with your gumption.”

They stared at him in respectful silence. George, who was by way of sharing their respect, stared back.

“By jove!” exclaimed Mr. Doyle softly. One gathered that the idea appealed to him. He looked at George with new eyes.

That gentleman obliged with another brain-wave. “Do you remember that time when you wondered what a Dean would do if he found a girl in his rooms after the coll. gates were locked, under the impression that she’d been invited to stay till morning, so to speak, Guy? Well, something like that.”

Guy, remembering his innocent curiosity on that point and the means he had taken to gratify it, began to laugh silently, stealing jam with every appearance of joyful guilt. Across his delighted vision strayed the germs of three separate and distinct plans for making an innocent citizen imagine that he had murdered a fellow. “The ordinary man’s reactions to murder, eh?” he chuckled. “It could be done. Upon my soul, it could! What do you say, Doyle?”

What Mr. Doyle should have said is: “Nesbitt, your cocktails were good, your champagne better, your port superlative. Of all have we drunk, and in consequence we are not a little elated. Let us realise the fact, and not toy with fascinating impossibilities.” He said nothing of the sort. What he did say, tersely, was: “Every time! Let’s!”

Guy jumped to his feet, grinning madly. “I think—yes, I think I see it! I shall want a female accomplice. Let’s go and hear what the others have got to say about it.”

They joined the ladies.

There, five minutes later, Guy was being accorded the highest honours, as an enlivener of the tedium of Duffley’s daily round, amid hearty shrieks which effectively drowned the one half-hearted dissentient voice in the room.

“Guy, I hand it to you,” Laura was shrieking. “And to mark the occasion I’m going to create a precedent. I’ve got no vacancy in my inner circle, but I must do something. I’m going to create an entirely extra place for you and make a baker’s dozen of it. Henceforth I am Lawks to you, and Lawks only!”

“Lawks it is!” beamed the gratified Guy, and winked broadly at his wife. “Thank you.”

That lady, watching his narrow back as he drew up chairs for the conference, had no difficulty in correctly interpreting the wink. It said quite plainly: “What price my ideas about feminine psychology now?”

With much ceremony and clinking of glasses (a bottle of Benedictine was specially opened for the occasion and ruthlessly carried into the drawing-room in defiance of all decent convention) Guy was sealed of the tribe of Howard.

“Oh!”

An exclamation from Mr. Doyle caused all heads to turn in his direction. He was smiting the back of a chair with clenched fist.

“I know the man for us!” cried Mr. Doyle. “The very fellow! As ordinary and decent as you like, and the sort of man whose reactions it’s almost impossible to predict. And it’d do him all the good in the world, too. He wants shaking up badly. It might be the saving of him to imagine for twenty-four hours that he’d killed a man. A fellow called Priestley….”

Chapter III.
Mr. Priestley Is Adventurous

To say that Mr. Priestley had been seriously perturbed by the vegetable accusations that had been hurled against him, would be to overstate the case; to say that he dismissed them immediately with complacent assurance from his mind, would be to trifle with the truth. During the few days that followed the young man’s visit Mr. Priestley was at some pains to prove to himself over and over again that he could not, by any stretch of imagination, be truthfully termed a turnip. The outburst he explained with complete satisfaction as the spasmodic attempt of a nervous mentality, disordered by love, to convert the whole world to its own way of thinking and being; and he put the whole thing out of his mind as unworthy of serious consideration, exactly forty-eight separate times.

Yet these baseless insinuations of our friends, dismiss, explain or shelve them as we will, have a habit of rankling. We know that they are baseless, because of course they are; but they rankle—perhaps out of their own sheer baselessness. It is extraordinarily annoying of them.

Without his quite realising the fact, a spirit of restlessness began to pervade the ordered round of Mr. Priestley’s daily life. He did things he had never done before. He snapped at his perfectly good man; he sniffed the spring air, while vague and foolish aspirations filled his bosom; several times he looked almost with distaste at the unoccupied chair on the other side of his hearth, instead of congratulating himself as usual on its emptiness; he conceived something approaching dislike for the pleasantly impossible idealism of Theocritus, and substituted the cynical Theophrastes as his bedside book.

On Saturday evening things reached a climax. Shattering into small fragments the record of years, Mr. Priestley shook the dust of his flat off his feet (or performed the motions of shaking dust off feet, in the total absence of the commodity itself) and went out to dine at a restaurant! No snail, Mr. Priestley felt sure, ever forsakes its house to dine at a restaurant. His vindication was surely complete.

The restaurant Mr. Priestley chose as the scene of this epoch-making meal was in Jermyn Street, a quiet, pretentious place, where the high-priestlike demeanour of the head-waiter amply justified the length of the bill. High-priestlike head-waiters are worth their weight in extras. Mr. Priestley, with a wisdom beyond his experience, allowed the high-priest to choose his dinner for him and his half-bottle of burgundy.

Now, Mr. Priestley did know something about burgundy, and his knowledge told him that this was very excellent burgundy indeed. So impressed was Mr. Priestley with the excellence of this admirable burgundy that he readily agreed to the high-priest’s suggestion that one paltry half-bottle was not enough for a man of palate. He had another half-bottle.

The high-priest was delighted with Mr. Priestley’s palate. He mentioned at the end of dinner, in the tones of one chanting a solemn anthem, that there was some Very Special Brandy in the cellars which even such a palate as Mr. Priestley’s would receive with awe and wonder. It was a Chance, the high-priest intimated, which would Not Occur Again. Mr. Priestley, now as mellow and glowing as an October sunset, fell in with the idea at once. He gave his palate its chance. The high-priest then chose Mr. Priestley a cigar, superintended the seven underlings who helped him into his overcoat, pocketed his remuneration with the air of one accepting alms for the deserving rich, and turned Mr. Priestley out into the night.

His very expensive cigar between his teeth, Mr. Priestley ambled down Jermyn Street, at peace with the world. His case was proved for the forty-ninth time, and now without a shadow of doubt; he was not a vegetable-marrow. Do vegetable-marrows dine alone in expensive restaurants, knowingly discuss palates with high-priests, and smoke the best cigars procurable? They do not.

“And neither, confound it!” observed Mr. Priestley aloud with sudden vehemence, “do snails!” And he winked surprisingly at a passing respectable matron. He was shocked at his action the next moment, but he was also guiltily pleased with it. Even Pat would admit that a hermit practically never winks at respectable ladies, even of safely mature years.

Mr. Priestley ambled on, feeling something like a cross between the devil and the deep blue sea.

The entrance to the tube station attracted his attention and he turned into it. It would be pleasant, he thought, to stroll through and have a look at the lights of Piccadilly Circus. For some reason obscure to him Mr. Priestley felt that he wanted lights, and plenty of them. He might even linger for a few minutes in Piccadilly Circus. It was a mildly devilish thing to do, he knew.

He took up his stand at the Circus entrance of the station and gazed benevolently out upon the scene, crowded with hurrying late-comers to the neighbouring theatres.

A lady with a very white nose and very red lips looked at him and diagnosed the two half-bottles under his waistcoat.

“Hullo, dear!” said the lady, with a winning smile.

Mr. Priestley started violently and plunged back into the station behind him like a rabbit into its burrow. The lady, diagnosing this time that she had failed to please, passed on. Mr. Priestley emerged again, properly ashamed of himself.

“That,” observed Mr. Priestley to himself, with considerable severity, “was the action of a snail. I ought to have returned that woman’s greeting and taken her off to some place of refreshment. A glass of port would probably have purchased her story, and I should have undergone an interesting and unprecedented experience. I should, in fact, as Pat counselled me, have had an Adventure. Never mind, the opportunity will probably occur again.” Which, as Mr. Priestley was communing with himself in the Piccadilly entrance of the Underground Railway, was no less than the truth.

As even Mr. Priestley had surmised, he had not long to wait. Almost the next moment a voice spoke at his elbow—a pleasantly modulated feminine voice this time, though not altogether free from irritation.

“Well, here you are at last!” said the voice. “I was beginning to think you never were coming. I’ve been waiting round about here for nearly twenty minutes.”

This time Mr. Priestley had better command of himself. He did not start violently, he did not bolt for the lift like a mole for its hill, he did not even pause to reflect upon what he was doing. He just turned round and gazed with interest at the pretty, flower-like face that was upturned to his and the innocent blue eyes, just clouded with what must have been pardonable exasperation. Then he smiled benignly.

Some sage has already put it upon record that circumstances alter cases. He did not add that some circumstances can take a case, jump on it, turn it inside out, roll it out flat and then build it up backwards; yet this is what his own circumstances were doing for Mr. Priestley’s case. A week ago Mr. Priestley would have raised his hat, turned a bright brick-red and stammered out to the owner of the trusting, flower-like face the error of her ways. As it was he descended blithely to such depths of duplicity as at that remote time he would have deemed incredible. This was his chance! This was to the life-stories of improper ladies over glasses of port as that burgundy had been to red ink! This was an ADVENTURE not merely with a capital “A” but in block letters a mile high! This was Heaven-sent Opportunity!

Wherein Mr. Priestley erred. It was not Heaven who had sent him the opportunity, but a much more unscrupulous agency.

“I’m exceedingly sorry I’m so late,” replied the adventurous Mr. Priestley, and continued to beam. Limpet indeed!

If this answer brought a tinge of astonishment into the girl’s eyes, if she lifted one cheek out of the fur in which it nestled as if incredulous that she had heard aright and wanted the remark repeated, if she then involuntarily stepped back half a pace and scrutinised Mr. Priestley’s face with something not unlike acute misgiving, if her delicately slender form finally quivered slightly and she bit her lip as one making violent and drastic efforts to control the muscles of her face—if these things happened, I say, then Mr. Priestley was far too occupied in admiring his own devilishness to notice them. He was the sort of person to shut both eyes and wrap his head up in a rug if he saw an adventure approaching him, was he? Huh!

By an impartial observer the girl might have been thought to pull herself together with an effort. “Well, now you are here,” she said, and her voice expressed nothing but asperity, “where can we talk?”

Mr. Priestley looked at the face of his unexpected companion and found that it was good. He looked round at the lights of Piccadilly and found that they were good. He bestowed a casual glance on the world in general, and found that it was good, too. “Talk?” he said. “I should think we might talk anywhere.” He looked round Piccadilly Circus again and his surmise was confirmed; it was simply full of places where this charming person and he might talk.

“We don’t want to be overheard, you know,” the charming person reminded him, with a touch of austerity.

Mr. Priestley was in entire agreement. “Oh, no. Of course not. Good gracious, no!” While he was still speaking he knew vaguely there was something he wanted to ask; the next moment he realised what it was. Why, after all, did they not want to be overheard?

“What about the lounge of the Piccadilly Palace?” suggested the girl, before he could frame the question.

“Admirable!” said Mr. Priestley with enthusiasm, his question completely forgotten before his interest in the particularly delightful way in which his companion’s brows just did not meet as she frowned her perplexity over this serious matter. The thought occurred to him that for all he knew the world might have been full of feminine brows that delightfully just did not meet when their owners were charmingly perplexed, and he had never noticed this remarkable phenomenon. The next moment he knew for a certainty that there was only one possible pair of brows that could behave like that and his life hitherto had not been really wasted after all.

The next coherent thing that Mr. Priestley knew was that he was sitting before a small table in the Piccadilly Palace lounge and ordering coffee. To the waiter’s bland assumption that liqueurs would be required as well the girl shook her head in a decided negative; and Mr. Priestley, who detested platitudes almost as much as false quantities, reminded himself that enough was as good as a feast, and shook his head in a decided negative too.

The breathing space before the coffee arrived gave Mr. Priestley time to collect his hitherto somewhat scattered wits and conquer the dream-like state of his mind. This was not an illusion, he pointed out to himself half-incredulously during his companion’s fortuitous silence; he really was sitting in the lounge of the Piccadilly Palace with a particularly charming young woman who was labouring under the impression that he was some one else. Whom she had mistaken him for, or what she wanted to talk to him about, he could neither imagine nor very much cared; for once in his life he was living only in the present. The explanations which must inevitably come later, would be awkward no doubt, but they could take care of themselves; in the meantime he was going to take unscrupulous advantage of the situation for just as long as he possibly could. Did somebody once mention the word “limpet”?

The coffee, which arrived with singular promptitude, helped Mr. Priestley to dispel the slight mistiness from his brain. Glancing covertly at his companion, he now consciously perceived what had before been an unconscious impression, that her prettiness had a quality of wistful charm which was particularly appealing. One saw at once that her dainty fragility was not fitted to cope with the harsh realities of this world. She needed looking after. Somebody, Mr. Priestley decided with mild indignation, ought to be looking after her; it was extremely remiss of somebody not to be looking after her. A feeling that was not exactly paternal, not at all brotherly, and perhaps not so entirely disinterested as its owner imagined, took possession of him: he would look after this eminently protectable small person. The feeling was, in fact, that of the prowling knight-errant who comes across the prepossessing maiden who has been stripped and tied to the tree by robbers; he rescues her with eager zest, but he does not look upon her like a father.

At present the distressed maiden’s childlike features wore an expression of stern resolve which sat upon them, Mr. Priestley thought, with pathetic incongruity. She was quietly, but even to his uninitiated eyes, expensively dressed, in pleasant contrast with his late encounter, whose clothes had cleverly combined the maximum of loudness with the minimum of cost. Hitherto, except for a few murmured commonplaces regarding sugar and milk and such trifles, she had not spoken since they entered the place. Mr. Priestley awaited her next words with ill-suppressed eagerness.

She sipped at her coffee, set down the cup and turned to look at him fairly and squarely. “You know,” she said with a certain charming diffidence, “you’re not quite the sort of person I expected.”

“No?” beamed Mr. Priestley warily, drawing rapid deductions.

“In fact, if it hadn’t been for the carnation, I should certainly never have recognised you.”

Mr. Priestley threw a surprised glance towards his buttonhole. Certainly there was a carnation in it, of a rather uncommon mauve hue; equally certainly there had been none when he left his own carnationless abode. Evidently the high-priest must have set it there, as a floral tribute of respect to such an uncommon palate. Mr. Priestley’s heart warmed still more towards that dignitary.

“What sort of person did you expect, then?” he ventured, greatly daring.

The girl laughed a little awkwardly. “Oh, well, you understand, surely. I mean, we needn’t really have met there after all. I wouldn’t mind being seen with you anywhere.”

“Thank you,” murmured the mystified Mr. Priestley. The tone was that of a compliment, but it seemed to him that the words might have been better chosen.

“You see you’re not—well, not very like the description you gave me in your letter, are you?”

Mr. Priestley affected to consider the point. “Well, not very much, no,” he admitted.

“I shouldn’t call you sturdy and powerful-looking, six-foot high and forty round the chest,” pursued the girl with innocent candour.

“Did I say that?” murmured Mr. Priestley, aghast.

“You know you did,” said his companion with gentle severity. “Why?”

Mr. Priestley hesitated. This was becoming very difficult; very difficult indeed. “Well,” he floundered, “because I thought—because it seemed more likely that—because I hoped——” He drew his handkerchief from his sleeve and mopped his brow.

“You mean, because you thought I should be more likely to give you a favourable reply in those circumstances?”

“Exactly!” Mr. Priestley said with relief. “Yes, that was it. Exactly.”

“It wasn’t very straight of you,” the girl commented in severe tones, but there was just a suspicion of a smile at the corners of her mouth.

Mr. Priestley caught sight of the smile and took heart. “No,” he agreed contritely, drawing more deductions, “I—I’m afraid it wasn’t. I see that now.” Had the unhappy girl been answering an advertisement in a matrimonial paper, or what? Most decidedly she wanted all the looking after she could get. What were her brothers doing? Perhaps she hadn’t got any. Then what had her parents been doing not to give her some? Most certainly somebody was very much to blame.

“But after all, I suppose one could hardly expect straightness from you, could one?” surprisingly remarked the object of his solicitude.

Mr. Priestley started slightly. “No, no,” he assented, playing for safety. “No, of course not. Naturally. I quite understand that.”

There was a short pause while the girl sipped her coffee with a thoughtful air and Mr. Priestley tried hard to imagine who he was supposed to be, what the favourable reply had been about, and why one could hardly expect straightness from him. He did not succeed.

“Well, I suppose you’ll do,” remarked the girl at last. She spoke without any degree of enthusiasm. It appeared that she had been debating the point.

“Er—good,” said Mr. Priestley, also with a marked lessening of enthusiasm. It may have been that the effects of that second half-bottle were beginning to wear off, it may have been due to the unexpected complication in what had promised to be a straightforward little episode, but the truth was that the Adventure was rapidly losing its light-hearted aspect. For some reason Mr. Priestley felt sure that quite serious developments were in the wind, and he was wondering uneasily just how he was going to cope with them.

The girl turned to him with a quick movement. “Did you bring your tools with you?”

“My—my tools?” echoed Mr. Priestley in bewilderment. Surely he had not been mistaken for a plumber?

“Yes, I should love to see them. But I suppose you don’t carry them with you usually, do you?”

“Oh, very seldom,” said Mr. Priestley firmly. “Very seldom, indeed.” A dim recollection came to him. “My—er—mate, you know,” he murmured.

“What a pity! Still, it doesn’t really matter, because you won’t be wanting them to-night, as I told you. I can show you a very easy way into the house.”

Mr. Priestley’s blood, already somewhat chilled, dropped several further degrees. For a moment he stared dumbly at his pretty companion. Then he took his bull by its horns.

“Perhaps you had better tell me the—the whole story,” he said a little huskily.

The girl’s eyes widened in innocent surprise. “But I told you everything, in my letter!”

“Yes. Oh, yes,” mumbled Mr. Priestley. “Quite. But I—I think you had better tell me again, you see. Letters are never very satisfactory, are they? I mean, perhaps I should understand it all rather more clearly if you—if you told me again, you know!”

“I thought I’d made it clear enough,” said the girl in puzzled tones. “We were to meet here to discuss anything necessary, and then go down in my car to break into the house while they’re away for the week-end. What else is there you want me to tell you?”

Mr. Priestley’s blood retired a little farther into cold storage. His mild blue eyes remained fixed on his companion’s face in a horrified stare. “To—to break into the house?” he repeated faintly.

“Of course! I explained it all in my letter. Why, you’re looking quite startled.”

Mr. Priestley strove to pull himself together. “Well, it—it is a little bit startling, isn’t it?” he said with a ghastly attempt at a smile. “Just a little bit. To—to break into the house, so to speak.”

The girl’s lips twitched and she turned her head hastily away, apparently to contemplate with every sign of interest an under-developed palm-tree in an opposite corner of the lounge. When she turned back to Mr. Priestley again a moment later her face once more wore an expression of guileless bewilderment.

“But what else should I want to hire a burglar for?” she asked, reasonably enough.

Mr. Priestley swallowed. “Of course, there—there is something in that,” he conceded, endeavouring to assume the air of one debating an interesting point. “Oh, yes, I quite see that.”

He cast a hunted glance round. The Adventure was beginning to assume the aspect less of an adventure than a nightmare. Protection! There was certainly one person at their table who required all the protection that could be got, but it was not the one at his side; appearances, Mr. Priestley reflected wildly, are deceptive. The sooner, in fact, that he got away from this promising young criminal, the better. Should he make a plain bolt for it at once, or——

“Well, is there anything else you want to ask me?” the girl’s voice broke into his agonised thoughts. “Because, if not, hadn’t we better be making a move? We don’t want to be too late getting back to London, do we? I’ll pay the waiter, of course, if you will call him.” And she began to refasten the fur at her throat and collect her various impedimenta by way of a hint that was anything but mistakable.

“After all, I can tell you the details just as well in the car going down, can’t I?” she added.

Mr. Priestley moistened his dry lips. The second half-bottle was very little in evidence by this time. “Er—Miss—er—Miss—er——”

“Spettigue, I think you mean,” the girl rescued him gently. “Didn’t you get that letter I wrote you at all, Mr. Mullins?”