“Oh, Bertie, you are funny!” she said. And even in that moment there seemed to me something sinister in the words. She had never called me anything except “Mr. Wooster” before. “How wet you are!”

“Yes, I am wet.”

“You had better hurry into the house and change.”

“Yes.”

I wrung a gallon or two of water out of my clothes.

“You are funny!” she said again. “First proposing in that extraordinary roundabout way, and then pushing poor little Oswald into the lake so as to impress me by saving him.”

I managed to get the water out of my throat sufficiently to try to correct this fearful impression.

“No, no!”

“He said you pushed him in, and I saw you do it. Oh, I’m not angry, Bertie. I think it was too sweet of you. But I’m quite sure it’s time that I took you in hand. You certainly want someone to look after you. You’ve been seeing too many moving-pictures. I suppose the next thing you would have done would have been to set the house on fire so as to rescue me.” She looked at me in a proprietary sort of way. “I think,” she said, “I shall be able to make something of you, Bertie. It is true yours has been a wasted life up to the present, but you are still young, and there is a lot of good in you.”

“No, really there isn’t.”

“Oh, yes, there is. It simply wants bringing out. Now you run straight up to the house and change your wet clothes, or you will catch cold.”

And, if you know what I mean, there was a sort of motherly note in her voice which seemed to tell me, even more than her actual words, that I was for it.

*    *    *    *    *

As I was coming downstairs after changing, I ran into young Bingo, looking festive to a degree.

“Bertie!” he said. “Just the man I wanted to see. Bertie, a wonderful thing has happened.”

“You blighter!” I cried. “What became of you? Do you know——?”

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