“Not I,” was the cheerful reply.  “Go right ahead.”

“You’re sure that Phipps hasn’t drawn you into this?  He’s a perfect devil for cunning, that man, and he’s simply been waiting for your coming.  I think it was the disappointment of his life when you first came down to the City and left him alone.  You’ve shown wonderful restraint, old chap.  You’re sure you haven’t been goaded into this?”

Wingate smiled.

“Don’t you worry about me, Ken,” he begged.  “Of course, in a manner of speaking, this is a duel between Phipps and myself, and if you were to ask my advice which to back, I don’t know that I should care to take the responsibility of giving it.  At the same time, I’m out to break Phipps and I rather think this time I’m going to do it.—­Come along to the Milan, later on, and lunch.  Lady Amesbury and Sarah Baldwin and a few others are coming.”

“Lady Dredlinton, by any chance?” Kendrick asked.

“Lady Dredlinton, certainly.”

“I’ll turn up soon after one.  And, Wingate.”

“Well?”

“Don’t think I’m a croaker, but I know Peter Phipps.  There isn’t a man on this earth I’d fear more as an enemy.  He’s unscrupulous, untrustworthy, and an unflinching hater.  You and he are hard up against one another, I know, and I suppose you realise that your growing friendship with Josephine Dredlinton is simply hell for him.”

“I imagine you know that his attentions to her have been entirely unwelcome,” Wingate said calmly.

“I will answer for it that she has never encouraged him for a moment,” Kendrick assented, “yet Phipps is one of those men who never take ‘no’ for an answer, who simply don’t know what it is to despair of a thing.  I’ve been watching that menage for the last twelve months, and I’ve watched Peter Phipps fighting his grim battle.  I think I was one of the party when he first met her.  Since then, though the fellow has any amount of tact, his pursuit of her must have been a persecution.  He put Dredlinton on the Board of the B. & I., solely to buy his way into the household.  He sent him home one day in a new car—­a present to his wife.  She has never ridden in it and she made her husband return it.”

“I know,” Wingate muttered.  “I’ve heard a little of this, and seen it, too.”

“Well, there you are,” Kendrick concluded.  “You know Phipps.  You know what it must seem like to him to have another man step in, just as he may have been flattering himself that he was gaining ground.  He hated you before.  He’d give his soul, if he had one to break you now.”

“He’ll do what he can, Ken,” said Wingate, with a smile, as he left the office, “but you may take it that the odds are a trifle on us.—­Not later than one-thirty, then.”

“There is no doubt,” he remarked a moment later, as he stepped into his car, where Josephine was waiting for him, “that we are at war.”

She laughed quietly.  The excitement of those last few minutes in the offices of the British and Imperial Granaries had acted like a stimulant.  She had lost entirely her tense and depressed air.  The colour of her eyes was newly discovered in the light that played there.