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was about ten days ago. She isn’t livin’ with Freddy, you know.”
    “Why isn’t she?”
    “Nobody knows. Girls are so dashed independent nowadays. She went off on her own when Freddy took her mother abroad—and she’s stayed on her own ever since—works for her livin’, and doesn’t look as if it agreed with her. I think it’s a pity myself.” He looked at Charles apologetically. “I always liked Margaret, you know.”
    Charles laughed.
    “So did I. What’s she doing?”
    “Job in a shop—low screw, long hours. Rotten show I should call it. Fancy workin’ when you don’t have to. Girls don’t know when they’re well off.”
    “Where’s she living?”
    “She told me,” said Archie, “but I’m hanged if I remember. Sort of minute flat affair. She had a little money from her own father, didn’t she?”
    “Yes—nothing to speak of.”
    “You’re such a beastly plutocrat!”
    “She couldn’t live on it.”
    “She’s livin’ on it, plus a pound a week.”
    Charles exclaimed:
    “A pound a week!”
    “That’s her screw.”
    “Impossible!”
    “I told you you were a beastly plutocrat. Pound a week’s her market value. She told me so herself.”
    “It’s sweating! What’s her job?”
    “Tryin’ on hats for ugly old women who can’t face ’emselves in the glass. Margaret puts on the hat, the old woman thinks she looks a bit of a daisy in it, pays five or ten guineas, and goes away pleased as Punch. Give you my word that’s how it’s done. Amazin’—isn’t it?”
    Charles frowned.
    “What’s the shop?”
    “Place called Sauterelle in Sloane Street—frightfully smart and exclusive.”
    Charles detached himself with a jerk from a vision of Margaret trying on hats for other people.
    “The Hula-Bula Indians say that a vain woman is like an empty egg-shell,” he observed.
    “Women are all vain,” said Archie. “I only once met one that wasn’t, and I give you my word she was a grim proposition. You should see my Aunt Elizabeth’s nightcaps. By the way she’s just made a will leavin’ every farthin’ to a home for decayed parrots. She says the lot of parrots who outlive their devoted mistresses is enough to make a walrus weep. She says she feels a call to provide for their indigent old age. I shall have to marry an heiress—I see it loomin’. I think I’d better make the runnin’ with the Standing girl before there are too many starters.”
    “Who’s the Standing girl?”
    Archie very nearly dropped his knife and fork.
    “My dear old bean, don’t you read the evenin’ papers? Old man Standing was a multi-millionaire who got washed overboard in one of the late weather spasms in the Mediterranean. Beastly place the Mediterranean—nasty cold wind, nasty choppy sea—draughty sort of place. Well, he got washed overboard; and they can’t find any will, and he’s got an only daughter, who scoops the lot. I’m just hesitatin’ on the brink as it were, because they haven’t published her photograph, and that probably means she’s a bit of a nightmare—I mean, think of the photographs they do publish. And my Aunt Elizabeth might alter her will again any day if her parrot bit her, or came out with some of the swear words she thinks she’s broken him of. She told me with tears in her eyes what a reformed bird he was. But you can’t ever tell with parrots.”
    Charles had not been attending. He had decided that he would tell Archie just what had happened the other night; only he would leave Margaret out of it. He interrupted an ingenious plan for priming the parrot with something really hair-raising in the way of an expletive.
    “The other night, Archie, when you didn’t come, I walked down to have a look at the old house.”
    “Did you? Did you go in?”
    “Anyone might have walked in,” said Charles drily. “The door into the alley-way was open, and the garden door was open too. I walked in, and I walked upstairs, and I found a cheery sort of criminal