we should return to the villa and inquire whether we had
indeed been expected the day before, he assented with disconcerting
alacrity. As we passed into the restaurant--

"And I'll do the interrogating," he concluded. "I don't want any of
your leading questions. 'I quite expect we were expected yesterday,
weren't we?' All sweet and slimy, with a five-franc note in the middle
distance."

"How dare you?" said Daphne. "Besides, I'd be only too relieved to
find it was their mistake."

"Blow your relief," replied her husband. "What about my bleeding
heart?"

"I'm not much of a physician," said I, "but there's some cold stuffed
venison on the sideboard. I don't know whether that, judiciously
administered...."

Berry shook his head.

"I doubt it," he said mournfully. "I doubt it very much....
Still"--he looked round hungrily--"we can always try."

We were at the villa again within the hour.

Almost immediately we elicited the information that Major and Mrs.
Swetecote had spent the previous day at San Sebastian.

Turning a withering and glassy eye in our direction, my brother-in-law
explained the position and desired permission to enter and write a
note. This was granted forthwith.

My sister and I followed him into a pleasant salon meekly enough. When
he had written his letter, he read it to us with the air of a cardinal.

_DEAR EVELYN,_

"LEST WE FORGET."

_Yes, I know. But you should be more careful. Old friends like us,
too. Disgraceful, I call it. To have been unprepared to receive us
would have been bad enough, but to be actually absent from home....
Well, as Wordsworth says, that's bent it._

_When I tell you that, in the belief that she was to enjoy a free
lunch, my beloved yoke-fellow, who is just now very hot upon economy,
forewent her breakfast and arrived upon your threshold faint and
ravening, you will conceive the emotion with which she hailed the
realization that that same hunger which she had encouraged could only
be appeased at an expensive hotel._

_But that is nothing._

_To bless your married life, I have hustled a valuable internal
combustion engine over one of the vilest roads in Europe, twice risked
a life, the loss of which would, as you know, lower half the flags in
Bethnal Green, and postponed many urgent and far more deserving calls
upon my electric personality. I was, for instance, to have had my hair
cut._

_Worse._

_Upon hearing of your absence, the unna