ood for the
nerves; and since so many of them now buy cars, and there's no man like
a doctor for looking after his own flesh and blood, I suppose they mean
what they say. All the same, I wish I'd had a doctor with me the night
I picked up Mabel Bellamy; for if his nerves had stood that and he
hadn't given himself quinine and iron for the next two months, why, I'd
have paid his fee myself.

You see, it was a rum job from the very beginning of it. I was working
for Hook-Nosed Moss at the time, and, being Lent, and half the
theatrical ladies of position doing penance down at Monte Carlo, we
weren't exactly knocking a hole in the Bank of England--nor, for that
matter, even earning our fares to Jerusalem. Moss came down to the
garage in the West End gloomier and gloomier every day; and one morning
when I saw that he'd pawned his diamond shirt-stud (the same that we
called "The Bleriot"), why then, says I, Lal Britten, keep off the
Stock Exchange and don't put your last thirty bob in Consols, wherever
else you place it.

Now this was the state of things when one morning, early in the month
of March last year, we were rung up from a public telephone call in
Bayswater, and the covered Napier was ordered for a house in the
Richmond Road, Bayswater--a locality with which I was unfamiliar, but
which Moss declared must be all right, since the gentleman who lived
there knew that we had a Napier car and therefore was in a manner
introduced to us. Half an hour later he discovered that Richmond Road
was nothing better than a mean street of lodging-houses, and, my word,
didn't he reel off his instructions to me like texts out of a copy-book.

"Dot's a shame, Britten," he said, coming round by the bonnet of the
car, which I was tuning up for the trip--"I was deceived by the dabe of
the street. We must have our modey before they have the goods. Mind
that now, you dote drive a mile unless they pay the shinies. Three
guideas id your pocket and then you drive 'em. Are you listening,
Britten?"

I managed to give him a squirt of oil out of my can--for we do love
Moss, and then I told him that Nelson on the quarter-deck of the
_Victory_ wasn't more alive to his duties.

"Three guineas cash down and then I drive 'em. Is this a round trip to
see the beauties of Surrey, Mr. Moss, or do I return to my little cot
after the ball is over? I'd like to know on account of taking my Court
suit, if you don't mind."

"Oh," says he, "you're