there was nothing to it. Since then they had finished “A Red, Red Summer Rose,” “Madcap Myrtle” and “Only a Factory Girl,” and were half-way through “The Courtship of Lord Strathmorlick.”

Bingo told me all this in a husky voice over an egg beaten up in sherry. The only blot on the thing from his point of view was that it wasn’t doing a bit of good to the old vocal cords, which were beginning to show signs of cracking under the strain. He had been looking his symptoms up in a medical dictionary, and he thought he had got “clergyman’s throat.” But against this you had to set the fact that he was making an undoubted hit in the right quarter, and also that after the evening’s reading he always stayed on to dinner; and, from what he told me, the dinners turned out by old Little’s cook had to be tasted to be believed. There were tears in the old blighter’s eyes as he got on the subject of the clear soup. I suppose to a fellow who for weeks had been tackling macaroons and limado it must have been like Heaven.

Old Little wasn’t able to give any practical assistance at these banquets, but Bingo said that he came to the table and had his whack of arrowroot, and sniffed the dishes, and told stories of entrées he had had in the past, and sketched out scenarios of what he was going to do to the bill of fare in the future, when the doctor put him in shape; so I suppose he enjoyed himself, too, in a way. Anyhow, things seemed to be buzzing along quite satisfactorily, and Bingo said he had got an idea which, he thought, was going to clinch the thing. He wouldn’t tell me what it was, but he said it was a pippin.

“We make progress, Jeeves,” I said.

“That is very satisfactory, sir.”

“Mr. Little tells me that when he came to the big scene in ‘Only a Factory Girl,’ his uncle gulped like a stricken bull-pup.”

“Indeed, sir?”

“Where Lord Claude takes the girl in his arms, you know, and says——”

“I am familiar with the passage, sir. It is distinctly moving. It was a great favourite of my aunt’s.”

“I think we’re on the right track.”

“It would seem so, sir.”

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