“Come on,” said Burnham desperately. “Let’s hear what you are going to say on the other side.” “What I’m going to say on the other side is simply this. That, with all your estimable qualities, I’ve never, for a single, solitary moment, looked on you as anything but a fool.” “Father,” reminded the girl, “these gentlemen are your guests.” “If you are so jolly keen on it,” said Burnham, with spirit, “and if you particularly want to strengthen our team next season, why don’t you put all the money down, and buy James McWinter for us?” Mr. Amherst struck the table with the side of his large fist. “Just,” he declared emphatically, “just exactly what I intend to do.” The waiter came forward in the character of a hat-stand, and Mr. Amherst, grabbing at the nearest, found his irritation in no way lessened on discovering that it was headgear of insufficient size. Mary Amherst, turning to the waiter who stood now arms filled with overcoats, remarked pleasantly that a night like this must surely make him think of the clear blue skies and the dazzling sunshine of his native country; the waiter appeared to have acquired some of the useful idioms of the country, for he said in appealing undertones, “Half-time, half-time!” The head waiter came with the bill, which Mr. Amherst, in his annoyance, had forgotten. Miss Amherst was called upon to check the addition, and it became her duty to point out that the head waiter had by an excusable oversight in making a total reckoned the date at the top. This remedied, with profuse apologies, the party was conducted to the doorway. “Also I don’t mind telling you,” said her father, speaking outside as though no interval had occurred since his last decisive remark, “exactly how much I’m prepared to go up to.” He named a figure. “Not a farthing more,” he declared resolutely. “What’s that, my dear?” “Only saying, father, that I was quite sure you couldn’t afford it.” “That is my business, Mary.” “It was the business I was thinking about.” Mr. Amherst, never one to allow pasture land to flourish extensively under his boots, wrote a letter that night, posted it at the corner of Trafalgar Square, and walked three times around the pedestal of the Nelson Statue, partly because he had a great belief in the value of exercise, partly to enjoy the thought that he had, in sending the note, started the ball a-rolling. Coming into the hotel he was told by the porter that Miss Amherst had retired to rest, and he went upstairs humming cheerfully. The porter, it would seem, had been misinformed, for later the girl was leaning over the low balcony chatting with a youth who carried a kit bag. You would have said he was the young waiter at the Soho Restaurant, only that he wore no moustache and she called him Willie, which, as one knows, is rarely counted an Italian name. “It’s all right, dear girl,” he said. “Now that I know his limit, I can easily arrange.” “I don’t want him to waste his money,” she explained.