t awful thing you ever saw. Everybody was talking about it!" She
beamed round the table, and there was a note of fresh girlish gaiety in
her voice. "This man got up to do an imitation of somebody--nobody knows
to this day who it was meant to be--and he came into the saloon and
directly he saw the audience he got stage fright. He just stood there
gurgling and not saying a word, and then suddenly his nerve failed him
altogether and he turned and tore out of the room like a rabbit. He
absolutely ran! And he hadn't said a word! It was the most ridiculous
exhibition I've ever seen!"

The anecdote went well. Of course there will always be a small minority
in any audience which does not appreciate a funny story, and there was
one in the present case. But the bulk of the company roared with
laughter.

"Do you mean," cried Sir Mallaby, choking, "the poor idiot just stood
there dumb?"

"Well, he made a sort of yammering noise," said Billie, "but that only
made him look sillier."

"Deuced good!" chuckled Sir Mallaby.

"Funniest thing I ever heard in my life!" gurgled Mr. Bennett,
swallowing a digestive capsule.

"May have been half-witted," suggested Mr. Mortimer.

Sam leaned across the table with a stern set face. He meant to change
the conversation if he had to do it with a crowbar.

"I hear you have taken a house in the country, Mr. Mortimer," he said.

"Yes," said Mr. Mortimer. He turned to Sir Mallaby. "We have at last
succeeded in persuading your sister, Mrs. Hignett, to let us rent her
house for the summer."

Sir Mallaby gasped.

"Windles! You don't mean to tell me that my sister has let you have
Windles!"

Mr. Mortimer nodded triumphantly.

"Yes. I had completely resigned myself to the prospect of spending the
summer in some other house, when yesterday I happened to run into your
nephew, young Eustace Hignett, on the street, and he said he was just
coming round to see me about that very thing. To cut a long story short,
he said that it would be all right and that we could have the house."
Mr. Mortimer took a sip of burgundy. "He's a curious boy, young
Hignett. Very nervous in his manner."

"Chronic dyspepsia," said Mr. Bennett authoritatively, "I can tell it at
a glance."

"Is Windles a very lovely place, Sir Mallaby?" asked Billie.

"Charming. Quite charming. Not large, of course, as country houses go.
Not a castle, I mean, with hundreds of acres of park land. But nice and
compact and comfortable and