Surely this was an innocent enough question, but little Hamlyn went red from the edge of his clipped whisker on the right to the edge of his mathematically equal whisker on the left. ‘Friend!’ said he in an angry tone; ‘he’s not a friend of mine. I only met him on the Riviera.’ ‘That,’ I admitted, ‘does not, happily, in itself constitute a friendship.’ ‘And he won a hundred louis of me in the train between Cannes and Monte Carlo.’ ‘Not bad going that,’ observed Denny in an approving tone. ‘Is he then _un grec_?’ asked Mrs Hipgrave, who loves a scrap of French. ‘In both senses, I believe,’ answered Hamlyn viciously. ‘And what’s his name?’ said I. ‘Really I don’t recollect,’ said Hamlyn rather petulantly. ‘It doesn’t matter,’ observed Beatrice, attacking her oysters which had now made their appearance. ‘My dear Beatrice,’ I remonstrated, ‘you’re the most charming creature in the world, but not the only one. You mean that it doesn’t matter to you.’ ‘Oh, don’t be tiresome. It doesn’t matter to you either, you know. Do go away and leave me to dine in peace.’ ‘Half a minute!’ said Hamlyn. ‘I thought I’d got it just now, but it’s gone again. Look here, though, I believe it’s one of those long things that end in _poulos_.’ ‘Oh, it ends in _poulos_, does it?’ said I in a meditative tone. ‘My dear Charley,’ said Beatrice, ‘I shall end in Bedlam if you’re so very tedious. What in the world I shall do when I’m married, I don’t know.’ ‘My dearest!’ said Mrs Hipgrave, and a stage direction might add, _Business with brows as before_. ‘_Poulos_,’ I repeated thoughtfully. ‘Could it be Constantinopoulos?’ asked Hamlyn, with a nervous deference to my Hellenic learning. ‘It might conceivably,’ I hazarded, ‘be Constantine Stefanopoulos.’ ‘Then,’ said Hamlyn, ‘I shouldn’t wonder if it was. Anyhow, the less you see of him, Wheatley, the better. Take my word for that.’ ‘But,’ I objected--and I must admit that I have a habit of assuming that everybody follows my train of thought--‘it’s such a small place, that, if he goes, I shall be almost bound to meet him.’ ‘What’s such a small place?’ cried Beatrice with emphasised despair. ‘Why, Neopalia, of course,’ said I. ‘Why should anybody, except you, be so insane as to go there?’ she asked. ‘If he’s the man I think, he comes from there,’ I explained, as I rose for the last time; for I had been getting up to go and sitting down again several times. ‘Then he’ll think twice before he goes back,’ pronounced Beatrice decisively; she was irreconcilable about my poor island. Denny and I walked off together; as we went he observed: ‘I suppose that chap’s got no end of money?’ ‘Stefan----?’ I began. ‘No, no. Hang it, you’re as bad as Miss Hipgrave says. I mean Bennett Hamlyn.’ ‘Oh, yes, absolutely no end to it, I believe.’ Denny looked sagacious. ‘He’s very free with his dinners,’ he observed.