Then one day her host had gone out to lunch with an editor and she was taking hers with the Lump, when there came a rather hurried knocking at the front door. She opened it, and to her surprise found Flossie standing without. She was at once stricken with admiration of Flossie's hat, which was very large and apparently loaded with the contents of several beds of flowers. But Flossie herself looked to be in a state of considerable perturbation. "Is Mr. Vance in?" she said somewhat breathlessly. She seemed to have been hurrying, and the hat was a little on one side. Pollyooly eyed her with some disfavour, and said coldly: "No, he isn't." "Will he be in soon?" said Flossie anxiously. "I don't know," said Pollyooly yet more coldly. Flossie gazed up and down the street with a helpless air; then she said: "Then I'd better come In and write a note for him and leave it." And she walked down the passage and into the studio. Still wearing an air of disapproval, Pollyooly found paper and pencil for her; and she sat down and began to write. She wrote a few words, stopped, and bit the end of the pencil. "It's dreadful when gentlemen will quarrel about you," she said in a tone and with an air in which gratified vanity forced itself firmly through the affectation of distress. "What gentlemen?" said Pollyooly. "Mr. Vance and my fiongsay, Mr. Reginald Butterwick," said Flossie. "I don't know how he found out that Mr. Vance is friendly with me; and I'm sure there's nothing in it--I told him so. But he's that jealous when there's a gentleman in the case that he can't believe a word I say. It isn't that he doesn't try; but he can't. He says he can't. He's got a passionate nature; he says he has. And he can't do anything with it. It runs away with him; he says it does. And now it's Mr. Vance. How he found out I can't think--unless it was something I let slip by accident about his taking me to the Chelsea Empire. He's so quick at taking you up--Reginald is; and before you know where you are, there he is--making a fuss. And what's going to happen I don't know." Her effort to look properly distressed failed. Pollyooly was somewhat taken aback by the flood of information suddenly gushed upon her; but she said calmly: "But what's he going to do?" "He's going to knock the stuffing out of Mr. Vance--he said he would. And he'll do it, too--I know he will. He's done it before. There was a gentleman friend of mine who lives in the same street as me in Hammersmith; and he got to know about him--not that there was anything to know, mind you--but he thought there was. And he blacked his eyes and made his nose bleed. You see, Reginald's a splendid boxer; he boxes at the Chiswick Polytechnic. And if he goes for Mr. Vance he'll half kill him--I know he will. Reginald's simply a terror when his blood's up." "But Mr. Vance is very big," said Pollyooly in a doubting tone.