George, meanwhile, across the table, was also having a little difficulty in adjusting his faculties to the progress of events.  He had given up trying to imagine why he had been invited to this dinner, and was now endeavouring to find some theory which would square with the fact of Billie Dore being at the castle.  At precisely this hour Billie, by rights, should have been putting the finishing touches on her make-up in a second-floor dressing-room at the Regal.  Yet there she sat, very much at her ease in this aristocratic company, so quietly and unobtrusively dressed in some black stuff that at first he had scarcely recognized her.  She was talking to the Bishop. . .

The voice of Keggs at his elbow broke in on his reverie.

“Sherry or ’ock, sir?”

George could not have explained why this reminder of the butler’s presence should have made him feel better, but it did.  There was something solid and tranquilizing about Keggs.  He had noticed it before.  For the first time the sensation of having been smitten over the head with some blunt instrument began to abate.  It was as if Keggs by the mere intonation of his voice had said, “All this no doubt seems very strange and unusual to you, but feel no alarm!  I am here!”

George began to sit up and take notice.  A cloud seemed to have cleared from his brain.  He found himself looking on his fellow-diners as individuals rather than as a confused mass.  The prophet Daniel, after the initial embarrassment of finding himself in the society of the lions had passed away, must have experienced a somewhat similar sensation.

He began to sort these people out and label them.  There had been introductions in the drawing-room, but they had left him with a bewildered sense of having heard somebody recite a page from Burke’s peerage.  Not since that day in the free library in London, when he had dived into that fascinating volume in order to discover Maud’s identity, had he undergone such a rain of titles.  He now took stock, to ascertain how many of these people he could identify.

The stock-taking was an absolute failure.  Of all those present the only individuals he could swear to were his own personal little playmates with whom he had sported in other surroundings.  There was Lord Belpher, for instance, eyeing him with a hostility that could hardly be called veiled.  There was Lord Marshmoreton at the head of the table, listening glumly to the conversation of a stout woman with a pearl necklace, but who was that woman?  Was it Lady Jane Allenby or Lady Edith Wade-Beverly or Lady Patricia Fowles?  And who, above all, was the pie-faced fellow with the moustache talking to Maud?

He sought assistance from the girl he had taken in to dinner.  She appeared, as far as he could ascertain from a short acquaintance, to be an amiable little thing.  She was small and young and fluffy, and he had caught enough of her name at the moment of introduction to gather that she was plain “Miss” Something—­a fact which seemed to him to draw them together.