“Those dogs belong to my aunt. I pinched them when she chucked me out!”

Inside the cottage the Pekingese were still yapping industriously.

“Upon my Sam,” said Ukridge, “it’s a little hard.”

I think he would have said more, but at this point a voice spoke with a sudden and awful abruptness from the interior of the cottage. It was a woman’s voice, a quiet, steely voice, a voice, it seemed to me, that suggested cold eyes, a beaky nose, and hair like gun-metal.

“Stanley!”

That was all it said, but it was enough. Ukridge’s eye met mine in a wild surmise. He seemed to shrink into his mackintosh like a snail surprised while eating lettuce.

“Stanley!”

“Yes, Aunt Julia?” quavered Ukridge.

“Come here. I wish to speak to you.”

“Yes, Aunt Julia.”

I sidled out into the road. Inside the cottage the yapping of the Pekingese had become quite hysterical. I found myself trotting, and then—though it was a warm day—running quite rapidly. I could have stayed if I had wanted to, but somehow I did not want to. Something seemed to tell me that on this holy domestic scene I should be an intruder.

What it was that gave me that impression I do not know—probably vision or the big, broad, flexible outlook.

  CHAPTER II 

“Half a minute, laddie,” said Ukridge. And, gripping my arm, he brought me to a halt on the outskirts of the little crowd which had collected about the church door.

It was a crowd such as may be seen any morning during the London mating-season outside any of the churches which nestle in the quiet squares between Hyde Park and the King’s Road, Chelsea.

It consisted of five women of cooklike aspect, four nurse-maids, half a dozen men of the non-producing class who had torn themselves away for the moment from their normal task of propping up the wall of the Bunch of Grapes public-house on the corner, a costermonger with a barrow of vegetables, divers small boys, eleven dogs, and two or 

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