"Only son," added Mr. Wickham, "of the Duke of Damsillie. Scotland for ever!" "A Highlander?" I asked. "Yes," said The Freak gleefully. "I am going to wear a red beard and talk Gaelic." "Who are to be the other--inmates?" I asked. "You’ll see when the time comes," replied Dicky. "At present we have to decide on a part for you, my lad." "I think I had better be Absent Friends," I said. "Then I need not come, but you can drink my health." Mr. Wickham said nothing, but rose to his feet and crossed the room to the mantelpiece. On the corner of the mirror which surmounted it hung a red Turkish fez, with a long black tassel. This my host reached down and handed to me. "Wear that," he said briefly--"with your ordinary evening things." "What shall I be then?" I enquired meekly. "Junior Egyptologist to the Fitzwilliam Museum," replied the fertile Mr. Wickham. II That shrinking but helpless puppet, the Junior Egyptologist to the Fitzwilliam Museum, duly presented himself at Mr. Wickham’s at seven-thirty that evening, surmounted by the fez. Here I was introduced to the guest of the evening, Mr. Jebson. He was a pasty-faced, pig-eyed youth of about four-and-twenty, in an extravagantly cut dress suit with a velvet collar. He wore a diamond ring and a soft shirt. He looked like an unsuccessful compromise between a billiard-marker and a casino croupier at a French watering-place. His right forefinger was firmly embedded in the buttonhole of a shaggy monster in a kilt, whom, from the fact that he spoke a language which I recognised as that of Mr. Harry Lauder, I took to be the heir of the Duke of Damsillie. The Freak was certainly playing his part as though he enjoyed it, but the other celebrities, who stood conversing in a sheepish undertone in various corners, looked too like stage conspirators to be entirely convincing. However, Mr. Jebson appeared to harbour no suspicion as to the _bona fides_ of the company in which he found himself, which was the main point. I was now introduced to the President of the Cambridge University Boat Club, a magnificent personage in a made-up bow tie of light-blue satin; to the Sultan of Cholerabad, a coffee-coloured potentate in sweeping Oriental robes, in whom the dignity that doth hedge a king was less conspicuous than a thoroughly British giggle; and to the Senior Wrangler of the previous year, who wore a turn-down collar, trousers the bagginess of which a music-hall comedian would have envied, and blue spectacles. Mesmerised by Mr. Wickham’s cold eye and correct deportment, we greeted one another with stately courtesy: but the President of the Boat Club winked at me cheerfully; the Sultan of Cholerabad, scrutinising my fez, enquired in broken English the exact date of my escape from the cigarette factory; and the Senior Wrangler invited my opinion, _sotto voce_, upon the cut of his trousers.