"That will do," he said and dismissed
the waiter with a tip of sixpence. Then with the open purse still in his
hand, he spent much of his remaining strength trying to look amused and
unembarrassed, feeling all the time that with his flushed face and in
view of all the circumstances of the case he must be really looking very
silly and fluffy.

"It's really most inconvenient," he remarked.

"I never thought of the--of this. It was silly of me," said Lady Harman.

"Oh no! Oh dear no! The silliness I can assure you is all mine. I can't
tell you how entirely apologetic----Ridiculous fix. And after I had
persuaded you to come here."

"Still we were able to pay," she consoled him.

"But you have to get home!"

She hadn't so far thought of that. It brought Sir Isaac suddenly into
the picture. "By half-past five," she said with just the faintest
flavour of interrogation.

Mr. Brumley looked at his watch. It was ten minutes to five.

"Waiter," he said, "how do the trains run from here to Putney?"

"I don't _think_, sir, that we have any trains from here to Putney----"

An A.B.C. Railway Guide was found and Mr. Brumley learnt for the first
time that Putney and Hampton Court are upon two distinct and separate
and, as far as he could judge by the time-table, mutually hostile
branches of the South Western Railway, and that at the earliest they
could not get to Putney before six o'clock.

Mr. Brumley was extremely disconcerted. He perceived that he ought to
have kept his taxi. It amounted almost to a debt of honour to deliver
this lady secure and untarnished at her house within the next hour. But
this reflection did not in the least degree assist him to carry it out
and as a matter of fact Mr. Brumley became flurried and did not carry it
out. He was not used to being without money, it unnerved him, and he
gave way to a kind of hectic _savoir faire_. He demanded a taxi of the
waiter. He tried to evolve a taxi by will power alone. He went out with
Lady Harman and back towards the gates of Hampton Court to look for
taxis. Then it occurred to him that they might be losing the 5.25 up. So
they hurried over the bridge of the station.

He had a vague notion that he would be able to get tickets on credit at
the booking office if he presented his visiting card. But the clerk in
charge seemed to find something uncongenial in his proposal. He did not
seem to like what he saw of Mr. Brumley through his little square window
and Mr.