be quiet a
moment I'll tell you some."

These were some of the things:

(1) We had been to the Riviera. (Nothing could take away from that. We
had the labels on our luggage.)

(2) We had lost heavily (thirty francs) at the Tables. (This alone
justified the journey.)

(3) Myra had sat next to a Prince at lunch. (Of course she might have
done this in London, but so far there has been no great rush of Princes
to our little flat. Dukes, Mayors, Companions of St. Michael and St.
George, certainly; but, somehow, not Princes.)

(4) Simpson had done the short third hole at Mt. Agel in three. (His
first had cleverly dislodged the ball from the piled-up tee; his second,
a sudden nick, had set it rolling down the hill to the green; and the
third, an accidental putt, had sunk it.)

(5) Myra and I had seen Corsica. (Question.)

(6) And finally, and best of all, we had sat in the sun, under a blue sky
above a blue sea, and watched the oranges and lemons grow.

So, though we had been to but few of the famous beauty spots around, we
had had a delightfully lazy time; and as proof that we had not really
been at Brighton there were, as I have said, the luggage labels. But we
were to be able to show further proof. At this moment Simpson came out of
the house, his face beaming with excitement, his hands carefully
concealing something behind his back.

"Guess what I've got," he said eagerly.

"The sack," said Thomas.

"Your new bests," said Archie.

"Something that will interest us all," helped Simpson.

"I withdraw my suggestion," said Archie.

"Something we ought to have brought with us all along."

"More money," said Myra.

The tension was extreme. It was obvious that our consuming anxiety would
have to be relieved very speedily. To avoid a riot, Thomas went behind
Simpson's back and took his surprise away from him.

"A camera," he said. "Good idea."

Simpson was all over himself with bon-hommy.

"I suddenly thought of it the other night," he said, smiling round at all
of us in his happiness, "and I was just going to wake Thomas up to tell
him, when I thought I'd keep it a secret. So I wrote to a friend of mine
and asked him to send me out one, and some films and things, just as a
surprise for you."

"Samuel, you _are_ a dear," said Myra, looking at him lovingly.

"You see, I thought, Myra, you'd like to have some records of the place,
because they're so jolly to look back on, and--er, I'm not quite sure how
yo