“Then book the first chair for me!” said David.

“And the second for me!” joined in Robert.

“Mr. Brett,” said Margaret, “don’t you consider this competition perfectly disgraceful?”

“I am overjoyed,” he replied.  “It appears to me that the result must be personally most satisfactory.”

“In what way?”

“It is obvious that you have no resource but to accept my willing slavery, Miss Layton having monopolised the attentions of your two cousins.”

“Hello!” cried Frazer.  “This is an unexpected attack.  Miss Layton, I resign.  Have no fear.  In the darkest corridor I will warn you that my name is ‘Robert.’”

Though the words were carelessly good-humoured, they were just a trifle emphatic.  The incident passed, but they recalled it subsequently under very different circumstances.

Brett went home about ten o’clock.  Next day at noon he was arranging for the immediate delivery of a type-writer machine, sold by Mr. Numagawa Jiro to a West End exchange, when a telegram reached him: 

    “Come at once.  Urgent.—­HUME.”

He drove to the hotel, where David and Helen were sitting in the foyer awaiting his arrival.

Hume had kept his promise anent the barber.  He no longer desired to alter his appearance in any way, and had only grown a beard on account of his sensitiveness regarding his two trials at the Assizes.

But the fun of the affair had quite gone.

Helen was pale, David greatly perturbed.

“A terrible thing has happened,” he said, in a low voice, when he grasped the barrister’s hand.  “Someone tried to kill Bob an hour ago.”

The blank amazement on Brett’s face caused him to add hurriedly: 

“It is quite true.  He had the narrowest escape.  He is in bed now.  The doctor is examining him.  We have secured the next room to his, and Margaret is there with a nurse.”

The barrister made no reply, but accompanied them to Frazer’s apartment.  In the adjoining room they found Margaret, terribly scared, but listening eagerly to the doctor’s cheery optimism.

“It is nothing,” he was saying, “a severe squeeze, some slight abrasions, and a great nervous shock, quite serious in its nature, although your friend makes light of it, and wishes to get up at once.  I think, however—­”

A nurse entered.

“The patient insists upon my leaving the room,” she cried angrily.  “He is dressing.”

They heard Robert’s voice: 

“Confound it, I have been rolled on three times in one day by a bucking broncho, and thought nothing of it.  I absolutely refuse to stop in bed!”

The doctor resigned professional responsibility; and the nature of Margaret’s cheque caused him to admit that, to a man accustomed to South American ponies, unbroken, the nervous shock might not amount to much.

Indeed, Robert appeared almost immediately, and in a bad temper.