“Mr. Beach,” said Ashe, “I wonder whether you would take me to see Lord Emsworth’s museum?”

Mr. Beach regarded him heavily.

“I shall be pleased to take you to see his lordship’s museum,” he replied.

* * *

One can attribute only to the nervous mental condition following the interview he had had with Ashe in his bedroom the rash act Mr. Peters attempted shortly after dinner.

Mr. Peters, shortly after dinner, was in a dangerous and reckless mood.  He had had a wretched time all through the meal.  The Blandings chef had extended himself in honor of the house party, and had produced a succession of dishes, which in happier days Mr. Peters would have devoured eagerly.  To be compelled by considerations of health to pass these by was enough to damp the liveliest optimist.  Mr. Peters had suffered terribly.  Occasions of feasting and revelry like the present were for him so many battlefields, on which greed fought with prudence.

All through dinner he brooded on Ashe’s defiance and the horrors which were to result from that defiance.  One of Mr. Peters’ most painful memories was of a two weeks’ visit he had once paid to Mr. Muldoon in his celebrated establishment at White Plains.  He had been persuaded to go there by a brother millionaire whom, until then, he had always regarded as a friend.  The memory of Mr. Muldoon’s cold shower baths and brisk system of physical exercise still lingered.

The thought that under Ashe’s rule he was to go through privately very much what he had gone through in the company of a gang of other unfortunates at Muldoon’s froze him with horror.  He knew those health cranks who believed that all mortal ailments could be cured by cold showers and brisk walks.  They were all alike and they nearly killed you.  His worst nightmare was the one where he dreamed he was back at Muldoon’s, leading his horse up that endless hill outside the village.

He would not stand it!  He would be hanged if he’d stand it!  He would defy Ashe.  But if he defied Ashe, Ashe would go away; and then whom could he find to recover his lost scarab?

Mr. Peters began to appreciate the true meaning of the phrase about the horns of a dilemma.  The horns of this dilemma occupied his attention until the end of the dinner.  He shifted uneasily from one to the other and back again.  He rose from the table in a thoroughly overwrought condition of mind.  And then, somehow, in the course of the evening, he found himself alone in the hall, not a dozen feet from the unlocked museum door.

It was not immediately that he appreciated the significance of this fact.  He had come to the hall because its solitude suited his mood.  It was only after he had finished a cigar—­Ashe could not stop his smoking after dinner—­that it suddenly flashed on him that he had ready at hand a solution of all his troubles.  A brief minute’s resolute action and the scarab would be his again, and the menace of Ashe a thing of the past.  He glanced about him.  Yes; he was alone.