‘Now this is what I call literary conversation,’ said Logan.  ’It is like reading The British Weekly Bookman.  Did you get the threepence? if the inquiry is not indelicate.’

‘I got twopence.  But, you see, there are so many of us.’

‘Tell me more.  Are you serialising anything else?’

’Serialising is the right word.  I see you know a great deal about literature.  Yes, I am serialising a featured tale.’

‘A featured tale?’

’You don’t know what that is?  You do not know everything yet!  It is called Myself.’

‘Why Myself?’

’Oh, because the narrator did it—­the murder.  A stranger is found in a wood, hung to a tree.  Nobody knows who he is.  But he and the narrator had met in Paraguay.  He, the murdered man, came home, visited the narrator, and fell in love with the beautiful being to whom the narrator was engaged.  So the narrator lassoed him in a wood.’

‘Why?’

‘Oh, the old stock reason.  He knew too much.’

‘What did he know?’

’Why, that the narrator was living on a treasure originally robbed from a church in South America.’

‘But, if it was a treasure, who would care?’

‘The girl was a Catholic.  And the murdered man knew more.’

‘How much more?’

’This:  to find out about the treasure, the narrator had taken priest’s orders, and, of course, could not marry.  And the other man, being in love with the girl, threatened to tell, and so the lasso came in handy.  It is a Protestant story and instructive.’

’Jolly instructive!  But, Miss Martin, you are the Guy Boothby of your sex!’

At this supreme tribute the girl blushed like dawn upon the hills.

‘My word, she is pretty!’ thought Logan; but what he said was, ’You know Mr. Tierney, your neighbour?  Out of a job as a composition master.  Almost reduced to University Extension Lectures on the didactic Drama.’

Tierney was talking eagerly to his neighbour, a fascinating lady laundress, la belle blanchisseuse, about starch.

Further off a lady instructress in cookery, Miss Frere, was conversing with a tutor of bridge.

‘Tierney,’ said Logan, in a pause, ‘may I present you to Miss Martin?’ Then he turned to Miss Markham, formerly known at St. Ursula’s as Milo.  She had been a teacher of golf, hockey, cricket, fencing, and gymnastics, at a very large school for girls, in a very small town.  Here she became society to such an alarming extent (no party being complete without her, while the colonels and majors never left her in peace), that her connection with education was abruptly terminated.  At present raiment was draped on her magnificent shoulders at Madame Claudine’s.  Logan, as he had told Merton, ‘occasionally met her,’ and Logan had the strongest reasons for personal conviction that she was absolutely proof against infection, in the trying circumstances to which a Disentangler is professionally exposed.  Indeed she alone of the women present knew from Logan the purpose of the gathering.