done. Couldn't leave the poor female staggering about the place with
squads of flies wedged in her eyeball. Nevertheless--

"Rotten thing getting a fly in your eye," he hazarded at length. "Dashed
awkward, I mean."

"Or convenient."

"Eh?"

"Well, it's a very good way of dispensing with an introduction."

"Oh, I say! You don't mean you think--"

"She's a horrid woman!"

"Absolutely! Can't think what people see in her."

"Well, you seemed to enjoy fussing over her!"

"No, no! Nothing of the kind! She inspired me with absolute
what-d'you-call-it--the sort of thing chappies do get inspired with, you
know."

"You were beaming all over your face."

"I wasn't. I was just screwing up my face because the sun was in my
eye."

"All sorts of things seem to be in people's eyes this morning!"

Archie was saddened. That this sort of misunderstanding should have
occurred on such a topping day and at a moment when they were to be torn
asunder for about thirty-six hours made him feel--well, it gave him the
pip. He had an idea that there were words which would have straightened
everything out, but he was not an eloquent young man and could not find
them. He felt aggrieved. Lucille, he considered, ought to have
known that he was immune as regarded females with flashing eyes and
experimentally-coloured hair. Why, dash it, he could have extracted
flies from the eyes of Cleopatra with one hand and Helen of Troy with
the other, simultaneously, without giving them a second thought. It was
in depressed mood that he played a listless nine holes; nor had life
brightened for him when he came back to the hotel two hours later, after
seeing Lucille off in the train to New York. Never till now had they had
anything remotely resembling a quarrel. Life, Archie felt, was a bit of
a wash-out. He was disturbed and jumpy, and the sight of Miss Silverton,
talking to somebody on a settee in the corner of the hotel lobby, sent
him shooting off at right angles and brought him up with a bump against
the desk behind which the room-clerk sat.

The room-clerk, always of a chatty disposition, was saying something to
him, but Archie did not listen. He nodded mechanically. It was something
about his room. He caught the word "satisfactory."

"Oh, rather, quite!" said Archie.

A fussy devil, the room-clerk! He knew perfectly well that Archie found
his room satisfactory. These chappies gassed on like this so as to try
to make you feel that the mana