The question came in a chorus of indignant bewilderment.

“That would be telling what our characters are meant to be,” said Vera.

“Didn’t I warn you?” said Sir Nicholas tragically to his wife.

“It’s something to do with Spanish history; we don’t mind giving you that clue,” said Skatterly, helping himself cheerfully to salad, and then Bertie van Tahn broke forth into peals of joyous laughter.

“I’ve got it!  Ferdinand and Isabella deporting the Jews!  Oh, lovely!  Those two have certainly won the prize; we shan’t get anything to beat that for thoroughness.”

Lady Blonze’s Christmas party was talked about and written about to an extent that she had not anticipated in her most ambitious moments.  The letters from Waldo’s mother would alone have made it memorable.

COUSIN TERESA

Basset Harrowcluff returned to the home of his fathers, after an absence of four years, distinctly well pleased with himself.  He was only thirty-one, but he had put in some useful service in an out-of-the-way, though not unimportant, corner of the world.  He had quieted a province, kept open a trade route, enforced the tradition of respect which is worth the ransom of many kings in out-of-the-way regions, and done the whole business on rather less expenditure than would be requisite for organising a charity in the home country.  In Whitehall and places where they think, they doubtless thought well of him.  It was not inconceivable, his father allowed himself to imagine, that Basset’s name might figure in the next list of Honours.

Basset was inclined to be rather contemptuous of his half-brother, Lucas, whom he found feverishly engrossed in the same medley of elaborate futilities that had claimed his whole time and energies, such as they were, four years ago, and almost as far back before that as he could remember.  It was the contempt of the man of action for the man of activities, and it was probably reciprocated.  Lucas was an over-well nourished individual, some nine years Basset’s senior, with a colouring that would have been accepted as a sign of intensive culture in an asparagus, but probably meant in this case mere abstention from exercise.  His hair and forehead furnished a recessional note in a personality that was in all other respects obtrusive and assertive.  There was certainly no Semitic blood in Lucas’s parentage, but his appearance contrived to convey at least a suggestion of Jewish extraction.  Clovis Sangrail, who knew most of his associates by sight, said it was undoubtedly a case of protective mimicry.

Two days after Basset’s return, Lucas frisked in to lunch in a state of twittering excitement that could not be restrained even for the immediate consideration of soup, but had to be verbally discharged in spluttering competition with mouthfuls of vermicelli.

“I’ve got hold of an idea for something immense,” he babbled, “something that is simply It.”