to
do with the affair? What is the matter with him? You dined with him,
Basil."

"No," said Grant, "I didn't."

"Didn't you go to Mrs Thornton's dinner-party?" I asked, staring. "Why
not?"

"Well," said Basil, with a slow and singular smile, "the fact is I was
detained by a visitor. I have him, as a point of fact, in my bedroom."

"In your bedroom?" I repeated; but my imagination had reached that point
when he might have said in his coal scuttle or his waistcoat pocket.

Grant stepped to the door of an inner room, flung it open and walked in.
Then he came out again with the last of the bodily wonders of that wild
night. He introduced into the sitting-room, in an apologetic manner,
and by the nape of the neck, a limp clergyman with a bald head, white
whiskers and a plaid shawl.

"Sit down, gentlemen," cried Grant, striking his hands heartily. "Sit
down all of you and have a glass of wine. As you say, there is no harm
in it, and if Captain Fraser had simply dropped me a hint I could have
saved him from dropping a good sum of money. Not that you would have
liked that, eh?"

The two duplicate clergymen, who were sipping their Burgundy with two
duplicate grins, laughed heartily at this, and one of them carelessly
pulled off his whiskers and laid them on the table.

"Basil," I said, "if you are my friend, save me. What is all this?"

He laughed again.

"Only another addition, Cherub, to your collection of Queer Trades.
These two gentlemen (whose health I have now the pleasure of drinking)
are Professional Detainers."

"And what on earth's that?" I asked.

"It's really very simple, Mr Swinburne," began he who had once been
the Rev. Ellis Shorter, of Chuntsey, in Essex; and it gave me a shock
indescribable to hear out of that pompous and familiar form come no
longer its own pompous and familiar voice, but the brisk sharp tones of
a young city man. "It is really nothing very important. We are paid by
our clients to detain in conversation, on some harmless pretext, people
whom they want out of the way for a few hours. And Captain Fraser--" and
with that he hesitated and smiled.

Basil smiled also. He intervened.

"The fact is that Captain Fraser, who is one of my best friends, wanted
us both out of the way very much. He is sailing tonight for East Africa,
and the lady with whom we were all to have dined is--er--what is I
believe described as 'the romance of his life'. He wanted that two hours
with her, and empl