"I thought you might be able to tell us that!" said Mrs. M'Evoy, delivering her knock-out blow with the suddenness that belongs to the highest walks of the art. Miss M'Evoy, with equal suddenness, uttered a long and strident yell, and lay back in her place, grasping my arm as she did so, in what I am convinced was wholly unconscious sympathy. She and I were side by side, facing the window, and through the window, which, as I have mentioned, was wide open, I was aware of a new element in the situation. It was a figure in blue in the street outside; a soft and familiar blue, and it bore a parasol of the same colour. The figure was at a standstill; and very blue, the burning blue of tropical heavens, were the eyes that met mine beneath the canopy of the parasol. Even before my own had time to blink I foreknew that never, in time or in eternity, should I be able to make Philippa accept thoroughly my explanation. Philippa's explanation was extremely brief, and was addressed rather to the empty street of Carrow Cross than to me, as I crawled by her side. There had been, she said, half an hour to wait, and as I was not at the station--the blue eyes met mine for a steely moment--she had gone for a little walk. She had met some horrid drunken men, and turned into another street to avoid them, and then---- A brimming silence followed. We turned up the road that led to the station. "There are those men again!" exclaimed Philippa, coming a little nearer to me. In front of us, deviously ascending the long slope, was the Asylum party; the keepers, exceedingly drunk, being assisted to the station by the Lunatics. VIII THE BOSOM OF THE McRORYS Since the day when fate had shipwrecked us at the end of the Temple Braney shrubbery, and flung us, dripping, into the bosoms of the McRorys, we had been the victims of an indissoluble friendship with the family. This fulfilled itself in many ways. Gratitude, what is known as Common Gratitude (which is merely a hollow compliance with the voice of conscience), impelled us to lunch Mr. and Mrs. McRory, heavily and elaborately (but without any one to meet them); to invite the whole family to a lawn-tennis party (and the whole family came); and, at other people's tennis parties, to fawn upon them (when it was no longer possible to elude them). It was a despicable position, and had I at all foreseen, when the picnic sank at Temple Braney pier, that the result would have been dinner-parties, I should unhesitatingly have left Philippa to drown.