,' Logan interrupted, 'what a dab at disentangling Lumley would
have been if he had not got that Professorship of Toxicology at
Edinburgh, and been able to marry Miss Wingan at last!'

'Yes, and Miss Wingan would have been useful. What a lively girl, ready
for everything,' Merton replied.

'But these we can still get at,' Logan asked: 'how are you to be sure
that they are--vaccinated?'

'The inquiry is delicate,' Merton admitted, 'but the fact may be almost
taken for granted. We must give a dinner (a preliminary expense) to
promising collaborators, and champagne is a great promoter of success in
delicate inquiries. _In vino veritas_.'

'I don't know if there is money in it, but there is a kind of larkiness,'
Logan admitted.

'Yes, I think there will be larks.'

'About the dinner? We are not to have Johnnies disguised as hansom
cabbies driving about, and picking up men and women that look the right
sort, in the streets, and compelling them to come in?'

'Oh no, _that_ expense we can cut. It would not do with the women,
obviously: heavens, what queer fishes that net would catch! The flag of
the Disentanglers shall never be stained by--anything. You know some
likely agents: I know some likely agents. They will suggest others, as
our field of usefulness widens. Of course there is the oath of secrecy:
we shall administer that after dinner to each guest apart.'

'Jolly difficult for those that are mixed up with the press to keep an
oath of secrecy!' Logan spoke as a press man.

'We shall only have to do with gentlemen and ladies. The oath is not
going to sanction itself with religious terrors. Good form--we shall
appeal to a "sense of form"--now so widely diffused by University
Extension Lectures on the Beautiful, the Fitting, the--'

'Oh shut up!' cried Logan. 'You always haver after midnight. For, look
here, here is an objection; this precious plan of yours, parents and
others could work it for themselves. I dare say they do. When they see
the affections of a son, or a daughter, or a bereaved father beginning to
stray towards A., they probably invite B. to come and stay and act as a
lightning conductor. They don't need us.'

'Oh, don't they? They seldom have an eligible and satisfactory lightning
conductor at hand, somebody to whom they can trust their dear one. Or,
if they have, the dear one has already been bored with the intended
lightning conductor (who is old, or plain, or stupid, or fami