CALL MR FORTUNE BY THE SAME AUTHOR The Highwayman The Gamesters The Young Lovers Barry Leroy E. P. DUTTON & COMPANY CALL MR. FORTUNE BY H. C. BAILEY [Illustration: publisher's mark] NEW YORK E. P. DUTTON & COMPANY 681 FIFTH AVENUE COPYRIGHT, 1921, BY E. P. DUTTON & COMPANY _All Rights Reserved_ Printed in the United States of America CONTENTS CASE I The Archduke’s Tea CASE II The Sleeping Companion CASE III The Nice Girl CASE IV The Efficient Assassin CASE V The Hottentot Venus CASE VI The Business Minister CALL MR. FORTUNE CASE I THE ARCHDUKE’S TEA Mr. Reginald Fortune, M.A., M.B., B.Ch., F.R.C.S., was having a lecture from his father. “You only do just enough,” Dr. Fortune complained. “Never brilliant. No zeal. Now, Reginald, it won’t do. Just enough is always too little. Take my word for it. And do be attentive to the Archduke. God bless you!” “Have a good time, sir,” said Mr. Reginald Fortune, and watched his father settle down in the car (a long process) beside his mother and drive off. They were gone at last, which Reginald had begun to think impossible, and the opulent practice of Dr. Fortune lay for a month in the virgin hands of Reginald. “Beautifully patient the mater is,” Reginald communed with himself as he ate his third muffin. “Fretful game to spend your life waitin’ for a man to get ready. Quaint old bird, the pater. Death-bed manner for a tummy-ache. Wonder the patients lap it up.” But old Dr. Fortune was good at diagnosis, and he had his reasons for saying that Reggie lacked zeal. At Oxford, at his hospital, Reggie did what was necessary to take respectable degrees, but no more than he could help. It was remarked by his dean that he did things too easily. He always had plenty of time, and spent it here, there, and everywhere, on musical comedy and prehistoric man, golf and the newer chemistry, bargees and psychical research. There was nothing which he knew profoundly, but hardly anything of which he did not know enough to find his way about in it. Nobody, except his mother, had ever liked him too much, for he was a self-sufficient creature, but everybody liked him enough; he got on comfortably with everybody from barmaids to dons. He was of a round and cheerful countenance and a perpetual appetite. This gave him a solidity of aspect emphasized by his extreme neatness. Neither his hair nor anything else of his was ever ruffled. He was more at his ease with the world than a man has a right to be at thirty-five.