“Very well.  I’ll go to her now.”

“And when you have seen her, go to the library and wait for me.  It’s the second room along the passage outside here.  I have promised to drive Lord Wisbeach down to his hotel in my car.  I met him outside just now and he tells me aunt Nesta has invited him to stay here, so he wants to go and get his things ready.  I shan’t be twenty minutes.  I shall come straight back.”

Jimmy found himself vaguely disquieted by this piece of information.

“Lord Wisbeach is coming to stay here?”

“Yes.  Why?”

“Oh, nothing.  Well, I’ll go and see Mrs. Pett.”

No traces of the disturbance which had temporarily ruffled the peace of the drawing-room were to be observed when Jimmy reached it.  The receiver of the telephone was back on its hook, Mrs. Pett back in her chair, the dog Aida back in her basket.  Mrs. Pett, her mind at ease now that she had taken the step of summoning Mr. Sturgis, was reading a book, one of her own, and was absorbed in it.  The dog Aida slumbered noisily.

The sight of Jimmy, however, roused Mrs. Pett from her literary calm.  To her eye, after what Lord Wisbeach had revealed there was something sinister in the very way in which he walked into the room.  He made her flesh creep.  In “A Society Thug” (Mobbs and Stifien, $1.35 net, all rights of translation reserved, including the Scandinavian) she had portrayed just such a man—­smooth, specious, and formidable.  Instinctively, as she watched Jimmy, her mind went back to the perfectly rotten behaviour of her own Marsden Tuke (it was only in the last chapter but one that they managed to foil his outrageous machinations), and it seemed to her that here was Tuke in the flesh.  She had pictured him, she remembered, as a man of agreeable exterior, the better calculated to deceive and undo the virtuous; and the fact that Jimmy was a presentable-looking young man only made him appear viler in her eyes.  In a word, she could hardly have been in less suitable frame of mind to receive graciously any kind of a request from him.  She would have suspected ulterior motives if he had asked her the time.

Jimmy did not know this.  He thought that she eyed him a trifle frostily, but he did not attribute this to any suspicion of him.  He tried to ingratiate himself by smiling pleasantly.  He could not have made a worse move.  Marsden Tuke’s pleasant smile had been his deadliest weapon.  Under its influence deluded people had trusted him alone with their jewellery and what not.

“Aunt Nesta,” said Jimmy, “I wonder if I might ask you a personal favour.”

Mrs. Pett shuddered at the glibness with which he brought out the familiar name.  This was superTuke.  Marsden himself, scoundrel as he was, could not have called her “Aunt Nesta” as smoothly as that.

“Yes?” she said at last.  She found it difficult to speak.

“I happened to meet an old friend of mine this morning.  He was very sorry for himself.  It appears that—­for excellent reasons, of course—­you had dismissed him.  I mean Jerry Mitchell.”