“No, I know what you mean, but what I mean to say is he looked just like your twin brother would have looked if you had had a twin brother.  Well, I had a word or two with this chappie, and after a brief conversation it was borne in upon me that I was up to the gills.  Alice was with me at the time, and noticed it too.  Now you’d have thought that that would have put a girl off a fellow, and all that.  But no.  Nobody could have been more sympathetic.  And she has confided to me since that it was seeing me in my oiled condition that really turned the scale.  What I mean is, she made up her mind to save me from myself.  You know how some girls are.  Angels absolutely!  Always on the look out to pluck brands from the burning, and what not.  You may take it from me that the good seed was definitely sown that night.”

“Is that your recipe, then?  You would advise the would-be bridegroom to buy a case of champagne and a wedding licence and get to work?  After that it would be all over except sending out the invitations?”

Reggie shook his head.

“Not at all.  You need a lot more than that.  That’s only the start.  You’ve got to follow up the good work, you see.  That’s where a number of chappies would slip up, and I’m pretty certain I should have slipped up myself, but for another singularly rummy occurrence.  Have you ever had a what-do-you-call it?  What’s the word I want?  One of those things fellows get sometimes.”

“Headaches?” hazarded George.

“No, no.  Nothing like that.  I don’t mean anything you get—­I mean something you get, if you know what I mean.”

“Measles?”

“Anonymous letter.  That’s what I was trying to say.  It’s a most extraordinary thing, and I can’t understand even now where the deuce they came from, but just about then I started to get a whole bunch of anonymous letters from some chappie unknown who didn’t sign his name.”

“What you mean is that the letters were anonymous,” said George.

“Absolutely.  I used to get two or three a day sometimes.  Whenever I went up to my room, I’d find another waiting for me on the dressing-table.”

“Offensive?”

“Eh?”

“Were the letters offensive?  Anonymous letters usually are.”

“These weren’t.  Not at all, and quite the reverse.  They contained a series of perfectly topping tips on how a fellow should proceed who wants to get hold of a girl.”

“It sounds as though somebody had been teaching you ju-jitsu by post.”

“They were great!  Real red-hot stuff straight from the stable.  Priceless tips like ’Make yourself indispensable to her in little ways’, ‘Study her tastes’, and so on and so forth.  I tell you, laddie, I pretty soon stopped worrying about who was sending them to me, and concentrated the old bean on acting on them.  They worked like magic.  The last one came yesterday morning, and it was a topper!  It was all about how a chappie