No; she would not go to George.  To whom, then?  The vision of Joan Valentine came to her—­of Joan as she had seen her yesterday, strong, cheerful, self-reliant, bearing herself, in spite of adversity, with a valiant jauntiness.  Yes; she would go and see Joan.  She put on her hat and stole from the house.

Curiously enough, only a quarter of an hour before, R. Jones had set out with exactly the same object in view.

* * *

At almost exactly the hour when Aline Peters set off to visit her friend, Miss Valentine, three men sat in the cozy smoking-room of Blandings Castle.

They were variously occupied.  In the big chair nearest the door the Honorable Frederick Threepwood—­Freddie to pals—­was reading.  Next to him sat a young man whose eyes, glittering through rimless spectacles, were concentrated on the upturned faces of several neat rows of playing cards—­Rupert Baxter, Lord Emsworth’s invaluable secretary, had no vices, but he sometimes relaxed his busy brain with a game of solitaire.  Beyond Baxter, a cigar in his mouth and a weak highball at his side, the Earl of Emsworth took his ease.

The book the Honorable Freddie was reading was a small paper-covered book.  Its cover was decorated with a color scheme in red, black and yellow, depicting a tense moment in the lives of a man with a black beard, a man with a yellow beard, a man without any beard at all, and a young woman who, at first sight, appeared to be all eyes and hair.  The man with the black beard, to gain some private end, had tied this young woman with ropes to a complicated system of machinery, mostly wheels and pulleys.  The man with the yellow beard was in the act of pushing or pulling a lever.  The beardless man, protruding through a trapdoor in the floor, was pointing a large revolver at the parties of the second part.

Beneath this picture were the words:  “Hands up, you scoundrels!”

Above it, in a meandering scroll across the page, was:  “Gridley Quayle, Investigator.  The Adventure of the Secret Six.  By Felix Clovelly.”

The Honorable Freddie did not so much read as gulp the adventure of the Secret Six.  His face was crimson with excitement; his hair was rumpled; his eyes bulged.  He was absorbed.

This is peculiarly an age in which each of us may, if we do but search diligently, find the literature suited to his mental powers.  Grave and earnest men, at Eton and elsewhere, had tried Freddie Threepwood with Greek, with Latin and with English; and the sheeplike stolidity with which he declined to be interested in the masterpieces of all three tongues had left them with the conviction that he would never read anything.

And then, years afterward, he had suddenly blossomed out as a student—­only, it is true, a student of the Adventures of Gridley Quayle; but still a student.  His was a dull life and Gridley Quayle was the only person who brought romance into it.  Existence for the Honorable Freddie was simply a sort of desert, punctuated with monthly oases in the shape of new Quayle adventures.  It was his ambition to meet the man who wrote them.