Kenny's old peasant in wrinkled
apple-faced cheer smiled broadly from the wall, listening to the click
of billiard balls with his painted eyes upon the doorway.

The hum and clatter at the Round Table stopped as Kenny entered. It
was followed by an immediate scraping of chairs, pushed back, and a
hearty chorus of greeting but Kenny knew, intuitively, that the talk
had been of him.

He ate but little and went back to the studio to play dummy bridge with
Mac and Whitaker. A loud thump on the studio door and a Morse dot and
dash announcement of identity on the bell just as he had pieced a pack
of cards together, filled him with intense resentment.

"Max Kreiling!" he said with a sniff. And a little later: "Caesare!"
He thought perhaps, feeling as he did in a mood for murder, he wouldn't
let them in, abuse the door panel and the bell as they would. Whitaker
did it for him.

"They'll come in and play music on my piano," he insisted sulkily, "and
sing notes into my air and I repeat I'm in no mood for music."

But Kreiling, big, blond and Teutonic, was already striding in with
Caesare at his heels. They filled the air with joyous greetings,
thumped upon the intervening wall for Garry and unloaded their pockets
and an institutional leather bag.

"Cheese," rumbled Kreiling, "jam, coffee and mince pies."

Caesare unsheathed his fiddle and played a preposterous rag-time
interpretation of the Valkyrie's battle-cry. It evoked an instant
response from the telephone.

"It's Mac," said Whitaker. "He says he'll be down in a jiffy and bring
Jan with him."

"Tell him," grumbled Kenny, "to bring beer instead. No fault of mine,
Max," he added, "if Jan comes down here and eats your cheese. He's a
cheese lunatic. Blame Tony. He comes into my studio, does a Pied
Piper stunt on his fiddle and the whole building appears."

To Whitaker's amusement nobody heeded Kenny's petulance. Caesare was
already building a wood-fire in the fireplace, complaining of the
chill. Max Kreiling was furiously hunting missing sheets from a ragged
stack of music on the piano and grumbling in German about his host's
habits. The fire flared. Caesare's dark face, always tense, relaxed
into smiles. When Garry appeared the wood-fire was blazing and Caesare
was plucking in nervous pizzicato at the strings of his fiddle. Later
Mac arrived with beer, a loaf of rye bread and Jan, who gravitated at
once by permanent instinct to the cheese.

Kenny