he grass, he had better make all the necessary
arrangements at his favourite nursing-home without delay, because I am
going to be very rough with him. I propose, if and when found, to take
him by his beastly neck, shake him till he froths, and pull him inside
out and make him swallow himself."

With which words he biffed off; and I, having given him a minute or two
to get out of the way, rose and made for the drawing-room. The tendency
of females to roost in drawing-rooms after dinner being well marked, I
expected to find Angela there. It was my intention to have a word with
Angela.

To Tuppy's theory that some insinuating bird had stolen the girl's heart
from him at Cannes I had given, as I have indicated, little credence,
considering it the mere unbalanced apple sauce of a bereaved man. It was,
of course, the shark, and nothing but the shark, that had caused love's
young dream to go temporarily off the boil, and I was convinced that a
word or two with the cousin at this juncture would set everything right.

For, frankly, I thought it incredible that a girl of her natural
sweetness and tender-heartedness should not have been moved to her
foundations by what she had seen at dinner that night. Even Seppings,
Aunt Dahlia's butler, a cold, unemotional man, had gasped and practically
reeled when Tuppy waved aside those _nonnettes de poulet Agnes Sorel_,
while the footman, standing by with the potatoes, had stared like one
seeing a vision. I simply refused to consider the possibility of the
significance of the thing having been lost on a nice girl like Angela. I
fully expected to find her in the drawing-room with her heart bleeding
freely, all ripe for an immediate reconciliation.

In the drawing-room, however, when I entered, only Aunt Dahlia met the
eye. It seemed to me that she gave me rather a jaundiced look as I hove
in sight, but this, having so recently beheld Tuppy in his agony, I
attributed to the fact that she, like him, had been going light on the
menu. You can't expect an empty aunt to beam like a full aunt.

"Oh, it's you, is it?" she said.

Well, it was, of course.

"Where's Angela?" I asked.

"Gone to bed."

"Already?"

"She said she had a headache."

"H'm."

I wasn't so sure that I liked the sound of that so much. A girl who has
observed the sundered lover sensationally off his feed does not go to bed
with headaches if love has been reborn in her heart. She sticks around
and gives him the swif