rinkley Court--I mean to say, the place
being loaded down above the Plimsoll mark with aching hearts and standing
room only as regarded tortured souls--I hadn't expected the evening meal
to be particularly effervescent. Nor was it. Silent. Sombre. The whole
thing more than a bit like Christmas dinner on Devil's Island.

I was glad when it was over.

What with having, on top of her other troubles, to rein herself back from
the trough, Aunt Dahlia was a total loss as far as anything in the shape
of brilliant badinage was concerned. The fact that he was fifty quid in
the red and expecting Civilisation to take a toss at any moment had
caused Uncle Tom, who always looked a bit like a pterodactyl with a
secret sorrow, to take on a deeper melancholy. The Bassett was a silent
bread crumbler. Angela might have been hewn from the living rock. Tuppy
had the air of a condemned murderer refusing to make the usual hearty
breakfast before tooling off to the execution shed.

And as for Gussie Fink-Nottle, many an experienced undertaker would have
been deceived by his appearance and started embalming him on sight.

This was the first glimpse I had had of Gussie since we parted at my
flat, and I must say his demeanour disappointed me. I had been expecting
something a great deal more sparkling.

At my flat, on the occasion alluded to, he had, if you recall,
practically given me a signed guarantee that all he needed to touch him
off was a rural setting. Yet in this aspect now I could detect no
indication whatsoever that he was about to round into mid-season form. He
still looked like a cat in an adage, and it did not take me long to
realise that my very first act on escaping from this morgue must be to
draw him aside and give him a pep talk.

If ever a chap wanted the clarion note, it looked as if it was this
Fink-Nottle.

In the general exodus of mourners, however, I lost sight of him, and,
owing to the fact that Aunt Dahlia roped me in for a game of backgammon,
it was not immediately that I was able to institute a search. But after
we had been playing for a while, the butler came in and asked her if she
would speak to Anatole, so I managed to get away. And some ten minutes
later, having failed to find scent in the house, I started to throw out
the drag-net through the grounds, and flushed him in the rose garden.

He was smelling a rose at the moment in a limp sort of way, but removed
the beak as I approached.

"Well, Gussie," I