“You were beaming all over your face.”

“I wasn’t.  I was just screwing up my face because the sun was in my eye.”

“All sorts of things seem to be in people’s eyes this morning!”

Archie was saddened.  That this sort of misunderstanding should have occurred on such a topping day and at a moment when they were to be torn asunder for about thirty-six hours made him feel—­well, it gave him the pip.  He had an idea that there were words which would have straightened everything out, but he was not an eloquent young man and could not find them.  He felt aggrieved.  Lucille, he considered, ought to have known that he was immune as regarded females with flashing eyes and experimentally-coloured hair.  Why, dash it, he could have extracted flies from the eyes of Cleopatra with one hand and Helen of Troy with the other, simultaneously, without giving them a second thought.  It was in depressed mood that he played a listless nine holes; nor had life brightened for him when he came back to the hotel two hours later, after seeing Lucille off in the train to New York.  Never till now had they had anything remotely resembling a quarrel.  Life, Archie felt, was a bit of a wash-out.  He was disturbed and jumpy, and the sight of Miss Silverton, talking to somebody on a settee in the corner of the hotel lobby, sent him shooting off at right angles and brought him up with a bump against the desk behind which the room-clerk sat.

The room-clerk, always of a chatty disposition, was saying something to him, but Archie did not listen.  He nodded mechanically.  It was something about his room.  He caught the word “satisfactory.”

“Oh, rather, quite!” said Archie.

A fussy devil, the room-clerk!  He knew perfectly well that Archie found his room satisfactory.  These chappies gassed on like this so as to try to make you feel that the management took a personal interest in you.  It was part of their job.  Archie beamed absently and went in to lunch.  Lucille’s empty seat stared at him mournfully, increasing his sense of desolation.

He was half-way through his lunch, when the chair opposite ceased to be vacant.  Archie, transferring his gaze from the scenery outside the window, perceived that his friend, George Benham, the playwright, had materialised from nowhere and was now in his midst.

“Hallo!” he said.

George Benham was a grave young man whose spectacles gave him the look of a mournful owl.  He seemed to have something on his mind besides the artistically straggling mop of black hair which swept down over his brow.  He sighed wearily, and ordered fish-pie.

“I thought I saw you come through the lobby just now,” he said.

“Oh, was that you on the settee, talking to Miss Silverton?”

“She was talking to me,” said the playwright, moodily.

“What are you doing here?” asked Archie.  He could have wished Mr. Benham elsewhere, for he intruded on his gloom, but, the chappie being amongst those present, it was only civil to talk to him.  “I thought you were in New York, watching the rehearsals of your jolly old drama.”