The Prime Minister accompanied him. Congratulations suitable to the occasion were to be seen in the gestures of those in his immediate neighbourhood, and he himself wore the blest but sickly smile of a man who is about to be hanged but who is possessed of a fixed faith in a happy eternity. Only one question was set down to him; he had read it and re-read it; he had read and re-read the typewritten answer which Mr. Sorrel had furnished him and which he had now got by heart beyond, he hoped, the possibility of error. The questioner had chivalrously offered to withdraw his query in deference to the fatigues and anxieties through which the new Warden of the Court of Dowry had so recently passed, but the Prime Minister, though appreciative of that offer, rather determined that his dear young relative should win his spurs; and trivial as the subject was, Question No. 31 was by far the most important upon the paper for most of those present. It concerned (of course) the wreck which still banged about, the sport of wind and wave, upon the Royal Sovereign Shoals. This aching tooth of Empire had cropped up again in yet another aspect. The Member for Harrowell, a landowner upon that coast, wanted to know whether it was not a fact that large planks studded, he was ashamed to say, with long rusty nails, had not drifted shorewards from the wreck and grievously scratched such persons as were indulging in mixed bathing just off the popular and rapidly rising seaside resort which lay a little east by north of the wretched derelict. Question No. 29 was answered, Question 30 was answered. Demaine’s ordeal had come. He heard a low mumbling noise some distance down the benches which he would never have taken to be the single word “Thirty-one” had not his mother’s half-sister’s husband the Chancellor of the Exchequer given him a sharp dig in the ribs with his elbow and jolted him onto his feet. His hands shook like a motor car at rest as he began his reply. “I have nothing to tell my right honourable gentleman--I mean my honourable gentleman....” Here there was a pause, painful to all present with the exception of one ribald fellow who cackled twice and then was silent.... “I have nothing to add,” George Mulross began again with a lump in his throat, “in reply to my honourable friend--to what my predecessor said in reply to a similar” (another pause) ... “Oh,--_question_--upon the tenth of this month.” He had read all of it out now, anyhow, and he sat down, a trifle unsteadily, feeling for the seat. “Arre we to onderrstand,” boomed the voice of the inevitable fanatic, “that the carrgo of GIN is yet aboorrd...?” “Hey! what?” said Demaine over his shoulder, with a startled air. “Get up and ask for notice,” whispered a colleague very hurriedly. “Get up and say ‘I must ask for notice of that question.’ Say ‘I must ask for notice of that question.’ Get up quick.”