At the fourth reading of the letter I stopped short at these words.  God’s good angel, indeed!  Could anything have been more calculated to put a man into a frenzy?  I seized my hat and stick and went in search of the nearest public telephone office.  In less than ten minutes I had arranged an immediate interview with Eleanor Faversham at my sister Agatha’s, and in less than half an hour I was pacing up and down Agatha’s sitting-room waiting for her.  God’s good angel!  The sound of the words made me choke with wrath.  There are times when angelic interference in human destinies is entirely unwarrantable.  I stamped and I fumed, and I composed a speech in which I told Eleanor exactly what I thought of angels.

As I had to wait a considerable time, however, before Eleanor appeared, the raging violence of my wrath abated, and when she did enter the room smiling and fresh, with the spring in her clear eyes and a flush on her cheek, I just said:  “How d’ye do, Eleanor?” in the most commonplace way, and offered her a chair.

“I’ve come, you see.  You were rather peremptory, so I thought it must be a matter of great importance.”

“It is,” said I.  “You went to see Madame Brandt.”

“I did,” she replied, looking at me steadily, “and I have tried to write to you, but it is more difficult than I thought.”

“Well,” said I, “it’s no use writing now, for you’ve managed to drive her out of the country.”

She half rose in her chair and regarded me with wide-blue eyes.

“I’ve driven her out of the country?”

“Yes; with her maid and her belongings and Anastasius Papadopoulos’s troupe of performing cats, and Anastasius Papadopoulos’s late pupil and assistant Quast.  She has given up her comfortable home in London and now proposes to be a wanderer among the music-halls of Europe.”

“But that’s not my fault!  Indeed, it isn’t.”

“She says in a letter I received this morning bearing no address, that if you hadn’t come to her like God’s good angel, she would have remained in London.”

Eleanor looked bewildered.  “I thought I had made it perfectly clear to her.”

“Made what clear?”

She blushed a furious red.  “Can’t you guess?  You must be as stupid as she is.  And, of course, you’re wildly angry with me.  Aren’t you?”

“I certainly wish you hadn’t gone to see her.”

“Was it merely to tell me this that you ordered me to come here?” she asked, with a touch of anger in her voice, for however much like God’s good angels young women may be, they generally have a spirit of their own.

I felt I had been wanting in tact; also that I had put myself—­through an impetuosity foreign to what I had thought to be my character—­in a foolish position.  If I replied affirmatively to her question, she would have served me perfectly right by tossing her head in the air and marching indignantly out of the room.  I temporised.