Mr. Morle repeated his remark.

“Pass it on to the next table,” commanded Mrs. Mentieth-Mendlesohnn.  “It’s too good to be lost.”

At the next table however, a grave impressive voice was dwelling at length on a topic remote from the event of the evening.  Lady Peach considered that all social gatherings, of whatever nature, were intended for the recital of minor domestic tragedies.  She lost no time in regaling the company around her with the detailed history of an interrupted week-end in a Norfolk cottage.

“The most charming and delightful old-world spot that you could imagine, clean and quite comfortable, just a nice distance from the sea and within an easy walk of the Broads.  The very place for the children.  We’d brought everything for a four days’ stay and meant to have a really delightful time.  And then on Sunday morning we found that some one had left the springhead, where our only supply of drinking water came from, uncovered, and a dead bird was floating in it; it had fallen in somehow and got drowned.  Of course we couldn’t use the water that a dead body had been floating in, and there was no other supply for miles round, so we had to come away then and there.  Now what do you say to that?”

“‘Ah, that a linnet should die in the Spring,’” quoted Tony Luton with intense feeling.

There was an immediate outburst of hilarity where Lady Peach had confidently looked for expressions of concern and sympathy.

“Isn’t Tony just perfectly cute?  Isn’t he?” exclaimed a young American woman, with an enthusiasm to which Lady Peach entirely failed to respond.  She had intended following up her story with the account of another tragedy of a similar nature that had befallen her three years ago in Argyllshire, and now the opportunity had gone.  She turned morosely to the consolations of a tongue salad.

At the centre table the excellent von Tolb led a chorus of congratulation and compliment, to which Gorla listened with an air of polite detachment, much as the Sheikh Ul Islam might receive the homage of a Wesleyan Conference.  To a close observer it would have seemed probable that her attitude of fatigued indifference to the flattering remarks that were showered on her had been as carefully studied and rehearsed as any of her postures on the stage.

“It is something that one will appreciate more and more fully every time one sees it . . .  One cannot see it too often . . .  I could have sat and watched it for hours . . .  Do you know, I am just looking forward to to-morrow evening, when I can see it again. . . .  I knew it was going to be good, but I had no idea—­” so chimed the chorus, between mouthfuls of quail and bites of asparagus.

“Weren’t the performing wolves wonderful?” exclaimed Joan in her fresh joyous voice, that rang round the room like laughter of the woodpecker.

If there is one thing that disturbs the complacency of a great artist of the Halls it is the consciousness of sharing his or her triumphs with performing birds and animals, but of course Joan was not to be expected to know that.  She pursued her subject with the assurance of one who has hit on a particularly acceptable topic.