“Miss Mariner will be here, too. A foursome. Tell Mrs Parker to pull up her socks and give us something pretty ripe. Soup, fish, all that sort of thing. She knows. And let’s have a stoup of malvoisie from the oldest bin. This is a special occasion!” 

 “Her ladyship will be meeting Miss Mariner for the first time, sir?” 

 “You’ve put your finger on it! Absolutely the first time on this or any stage! We must all rally round and make the thing a success.” 

 “I am sure Mrs Parker will strain every nerve, sir.” Parker moved to the door, carrying the rejected egg, and stepped aside to allow a tall, well-built man of about thirty to enter. “Good morning, Sir Derek.” 

 “Morning, Parker.” 

 Parker slid softly from the room. Derek Underhill sat down at the table. He was a strikingly handsome man, with a strong, forceful face, dark, lean and cleanly shaven. He was one of those men whom a stranger would instinctively pick out of a crowd as worthy of note. His only defect was that his heavy eyebrows gave him at times an expression which was a little forbidding. Women, however, had never been repelled by it. He was very popular with women, not quite so popular with men—always excepting Freddie Rooke, who worshipped him. They had been at school together, though Freddie was the younger by several years. 

 “Finished, Freddie?” asked Derek. 

 Freddie smiled wanly, 

 “We are not breakfasting this morning,” he replied. “The spirit was willing, but the jolly old flesh would have none of it. To be perfectly frank, the Last of the Rookes has a bit of a head.” 

 “Ass!” said Derek. 

 “A bit of sympathy,” said Freddie, pained, “would not be out of place. We are far from well. Some person unknown has put a threshing-machine inside the old bean and substituted a piece of brown paper for our tongue. Things look dark and yellow and wobbly!” 

 “You shouldn’t have overdone it last night.” 

 “It was Algy Martyn’s birthday,” pleaded Freddie. 

 “If I were an ass like Algy Martyn,” said Derek, “I wouldn’t go about advertising the fact that I’d been born. I’d hush it up!” 

 He helped himself 

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