And they
were so strict with it all. Only ten little minutes late on parade,
and you got it where auntie wore the gew-gaws. I lost my temper once.
To be sworn at like a golf-sphere, just because one day I couldn't find
my _Poudre d'Amour_.... And, when he'd quite finished, the Colonel
asked me what powder was for. I just looked round and gave him some of
his own back. 'To dam your pores with,' I said...."

It was past three o'clock before our departure was sped.

Comfortably weary, we reached our own villa's door to make the grisly
discovery that no one had remembered the key....

There was no knocker: a feeble electric bell signalled out distress to
a deserted basement: the servants were asleep upon the second floor.

After we had all reviled Berry and, in return, been denounced as 'a
gang of mut-jawed smoke-stacks,' accused of 'blasphemy' and compared to
'jackals and vultures about a weary bull,' we began to shout and throw
stones at the second-floor windows. Perhaps because their shutters
were closed, our labour was lost.

To complete our disgust, for some mysterious reason Nobby refused to
bark and so sound the alarm. In the ordinary way the Sealyham was used
to give tongue--whatever the hour and no matter what indignation he
might excite--upon the slightest provocation. This morning we
perambulated the curtilage of the villa, alternately yelling like
demoniacs and mewing like cats, without the slightest result.

Eventually it was decided that one of us must effect an entrance by
climbing on to the balcony of my sister's room....

Jonah had a game leg: the inflexibility of my pantaloons put any
acrobatics out of the question: Berry's action, at any rate, was more
than usually unrestricted. Moreover, it was Berry whom we had expected
to produce the key.

It became necessary to elaborate these simple facts, and to indicate
most definitely the moral which they were pointing, before my
brother-in-law was able to grasp the one or to appreciate the other.
And when it had been, as they say, borne in upon him that he was for
the high jump, another ten minutes were wasted while he made one final,
frantic, solitary endeavour to attract the servants' attention. His
feminine personality discarded, he raved about the house, barking,
screeching and braying to beat the band; he thundered upon the door
with his fists; he flung much of the drive in the direction of the
second floor. Finally, when we were weak wi