"Why, this is mine."
"Why should it be yours?"
"I used to collect stamps."
"I should imagine it's Tony's."
"Why should it be Tony's any more than mine?"
"I've told Desborough, and he's coming here to look through it. He knows all about stamps."
This was true. A confirmed philatelist from his early years, Desborough Topping was as much looked up to by Stanley Gibbons as by Bradstreet. Stamps and the reading of detective stories were his two great passions.
"There may be something valuable in it. If there is," said Clare, who, while she believed in supporting jumble sales in aid of indigent villagers, did not believe in overdoing it, "we can take it out."
She moved towards the door, and Lord Shortlands remembered that the vital issue was still unsettled.
"Just a minute. How about that hat? Somebody has taken my hat. I left it last night hanging on a peg in the coatroom. I go there this morning, and no hat. Hats don't run away. Hats don't leap lightly off pegs and take to the great open spaces. Have you seen my hat?"
"Have you seen Terry?" asked Clare. Unquestionably she was a difficult girl to talk to about hats.
The eccentricity of her conversational methods bewildered Lord Short-lands, who had never been nimble-minded.
"Terry?"
"Have you seen her?"
"No."
"Well, if you do, tell her that Cosmo Blair wants to read her MS second act."
The name seemed to grate upon Lord Shortlands' sensibilities.
"Cosmo Blair!"
"Why do you say 'Cosmo Blair' like that?"
"Like what?"
"Like you did."
"I didn't."
"Yes, you did."
"Well, why shouldn't I?" demanded Lord Shortlands, driven out into the open. "He's a potbellied perisher."
Clare quivered from head to foot.
"Don't call him a potbellied perisher!"
"Well, what else can you call him?" asked Lord Shortlands, like Roget trying to collect material for his Thesaurus. "I've studied him closely, and I say he's a potbellied perisher."
"He's a very brilliant man," said Clare, and swept from the room, banging the door behind her.
"His last play ran nine months in London," she added, reopening and rebanging the door.
"And a year in New York," she said, opening the door again and closing it with perhaps the loudest bang of the series.
Lord Shortlands was not a patient man. He resented the spectacle of a daughter behaving like a cuckoo in a cuckoo clock. When the door opened once more a moment later, he was all ready with a blistering reproof, and was on the point of delivering it when he perceived that this was not his child playing a return date, but a godlike figure with short side whiskers that carried a glass of malted milk on a salver. One of Lord Shortlands' numerous grievances against his daughter Adela was the fact that she made him drink a glass of malted milk every morning, and this was Spink, the butler, bringing it.
Nature is a haphazard caster, and no better example of her sloppy methods could have been afforded than by the outer husks of the fifth Earl of Short-lands and Spink, his butler. Called upon to provide an earl and a butler, she had produced an earl who looked like a butler and a butler who looked like an earl. Mervyn Spink was tall and aristocratic and elegant, Lord Shortlands square and stout and plebeian. No judge in a beauty contest would have hesitated between them for an instant, and no one was more keenly aware of this than Lord Shortlands. He would willingly have given half his fortune—amounting at the moment, as we have seen, to two shillings and eightpence—to have possessed a tithe of this malted milk carrier's lissomeness and grace. For something even remotely resembling his profile he would probably have gone still higher.
The butler advanced into the room with the air of an ambassador about to deliver important dispatches to a reigning monarch, and Lord Shortlands turned to the window, to avoid looking at him. He did not like Mervyn Spink.
It is to be doubted if he would have liked him even in the most favourable circumstances; say, just after the other had saved him from drowning or death by fire, for some people are made incompatible by nature, like film stars and their husbands. And the circumstances were very far from favourable. Lord Shortlands wanted to marry Mrs. Alice Punter, the cook, and so did Spink. And it not agreeable for the last of a proud line to have his butler as a rival in love.
Not that you have to be the last of a proud line to chafe at such a state of affairs. No householder would like it. In a race for which the hand of a cook is the prize a butler starts with the enormous advantage of being constantly at her side. While the seigneur has to snatch what surreptitious interviews he can, quivering all the while at the thought that his daughter Adela may pop in at any moment and catch him, the butler can hobnob with her by the hour, freely exerting the full force of his fascination.
And you simply could not afford to be handicapped like that in a struggle against such an adversary as Mervyn Spink, facially a feast for the eye and in addition a travelled sophisticate who had seen men and cities. Spink had been for a time in service in the United States, and so was able to bring to his wooing a breath of the great world outside. He also had a nephew on the stage. And while it was true that this nephew had so far played only minor character parts, and those only intermittently, a nephew on the stage is always a nephew on the stage.
Add the fact that he could imitate Spencer Tracy and do tricks with bits of string, and it was only too easy to picture the impact of such a personality on a woman of Mrs. Punter's cloistered outlook. Lord Shortlands, who was doing it now, shuddered and gave vent to a little sighing sound like the last gurgle of an expiring soda-water syphon.
Had happier conditions prevailed, there might have taken place at this juncture a word or two of that genial conversation which does so much to smooth relations between employer and employed. Such snatches as "Nice day, Spink," "Yes indeed, m'lord," or "Your malted milk, m'lord," "Eh? Oh? Ah. Right. Thanks!" suggest themselves. But now the silence was strained and unbroken. Spink put the salver on the table without comment, and Lord Shortlands continued to present a chilly back. The shadow of Alice Punter lay between these men.
Spink withdrew, gracefully and sinuously, with a touch of the smugness of the ambassador who is pluming himself on having delivered the important despatches without dropping them, and Lord Shortlands pursued the train of thought which the man's entry had started. He was musing dejectedly on Mervyn Spink's profile, and trying to make himself believe that it was not really so perfectly chiselled as he knew in his heart it was, when the telephone rang.
He approached it warily, as any man would have done whose most recent unhooking of the receiver had resulted in the impact on his eardrum of a Western Union tenor's "Happy birthday." The burned child fears the fire.
"Hullo?" he said.
"Hello," replied a pleasant male voice. "Can I speak to Lady Teresa?"
"Terry? I haven't seen her this morning."
"Who is that speaking?"
"Lord Shortlands."
"Oh, how do you do, Lord Shortlands? You've probably forgotten me. Mike Cardinal."
Lord Shortlands was obliged to confess that the name did not seem familiar.
"I was afraid it wouldn't. Well, would you mind telling Terry I called up. Good-bye."
"Good-bye," said Lord Shortlands, and returned to his meditations. He was sinking steadily again into the slough of despond in which he had spent most of the morning, when the door opened again, this time to admit the Lady Teresa of whom the pleasant voice had spoken.
"Ha!" said Lord Shortlands, brightening.
To say that he beamed at the girl would be too much. A man who has lost his favourite hat and is contending in the lists of love against a butler who might have stepped out of a collar advertisement in a magazine does not readily beam. But his gloom perceptibly lightened. A moment before, you would have taken him for a corpse that had been some days in the water. Now, he might have passed for such a corpse at a fairly early stage of its