up from his
insteps. "And I wish I'd never met one."

"I mean to say, it's obvious that she must have spotted you in those
bushes and was simply talking to score off you. There you were, I mean,
if you follow the psychology, and she saw you, and in that impulsive way
girls have, she seized the opportunity of ribbing you a bit--just told
you a few home truths, I mean to say."

"Home truths?"

"That's right."

He snorted once more, causing me to feel rather like royalty receiving a
twenty-one gun salute from the fleet. I can't remember ever having met a
better right-and-left-hand snorter.

"What do you mean, 'home truths'? I'm not fat."

"No, no."

"And what's wrong with the colour of my hair?"

"Quite in order, Tuppy, old man. The hair, I mean."

"And I'm not a bit thin on the top.... What the dickens are you grinning
about?"

"Not grinning. Just smiling slightly. I was conjuring up a sort of
vision, if you know what I mean, of you as seen through Angela's eyes.
Fat in the middle and thin on the top. Rather funny."

"You think it funny, do you?"

"Not a bit."

"You'd better not."

"Quite."

It seemed to me that the conversation was becoming difficult again. I
wished it could be terminated. And so it was. For at this moment
something came shimmering through the laurels in the quiet evenfall, and
I perceived that it was Angela.

She was looking sweet and saintlike, and she had a plate of sandwiches in
her hand. Ham, I was to discover later.

"If you see Mr. Glossop anywhere, Bertie," she said, her eyes resting
dreamily on Tuppy's facade, "I wish you would give him these. I'm so
afraid he may be hungry, poor fellow. It's nearly ten o'clock, and he
hasn't eaten a morsel since dinner. I'll just leave them on this bench."

She pushed off, and it seemed to me that I might as well go with her.
Nothing to keep me here, I mean. We moved towards the house, and
presently from behind us there sounded in the night the splintering crash
of a well-kicked plate of ham sandwiches, accompanied by the muffled
oaths of a strong man in his wrath.

"How still and peaceful everything is," said Angela.

-16-

Sunshine was gilding the grounds of Brinkley Court and the ear detected a
marked twittering of birds in the ivy outside the window when I woke next
morning to a new day. But there was no corresponding sunshine in Bertram
Wooster's soul and no answering twitter in his heart as he sat up in bed,
sipping his