Mariner will be here, too. A foursome. Tell Mrs. Barker 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. Barker will strain every nerve, sir." Barker 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, Barker."

Barker 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 to a plentiful portion of kedgeree, Freddie watching
him with repulsion mingled with envy. When he began to eat the
spectacle became too poignant for the sufferer, and he wandered to the
window.

"What a beast of a day!"

It was an appalling day. January, that grim month, was treating London
with its usual severity. Early in the morning a bank of fog had rolled
u