Lady Norwater addressed this query to the Club hall-porter, a bald person of habitually slow movements and singularly bland address. The man gnashed his teeth at her, uttering a sound between a groan and a snarl—made as though to tear non-existent hair,—leaped with astonishing nimbleness over a pile of luggage, and vanished. Margot would have made a note of his conduct in the Complaints register, but that the hall-table was obliterated by heaps of rugs, dust-cloaks and waterproofs. Wondering, she made her way into the big General Room on the ground-floor. Here travel-creased, dust-smeared members sat in voluble rows on the comfortable sofas, or reclined speechless in the capacious armchairs. Medical men, hastily summoned by ’phone, moved noiselessly from patient to patient. Husbands and male friends listened not unmoved, to piteous recitals of adverse experiences undergone on enemy ground. Kittums, snatched into the whirl, moved from friend to friend, gathering experiences. Mrs. Charterhouse, with her Pekinese pug and her maid, had just arrived at Homburg to undergo treatment for a twenty-two-inch waist when the War Cloud gathered monstrous on the horizon. Had not her Swiss doctor written a warning instead of a prescription the white and golden Cynthia, Mademoiselle Mariette and Chin-Chin, would at this moment have been languishing on rye bread and bean coffee in a Teutonic jail. "As it is, we’ve spent a whole week, and every sou we had on us making the journey!" said Cynthia, in her plaintive tones. "They held us up at Frankfurt, Basel, and Geneva! What inquisitions, what scowling suspicious looks! To be hunted and suspect makes you wicked, I’ve found out! When we got to Paris at four yesterday morning and took a rickety _fiacre_ to the Palais—all the taxis have vanished!—I could have _prayed_ for a cup of tea and a roll! But at the Palais all was confusion. The hotel was shutting up—every male servant called to the Reserve. We got to the ’Spitz’—the same experience there! Exhausted, I sat on something in the vestibule—it moved, groaned, and I found it to be the wreck of Sir Thomas Brayham. He and Lady Wathe, his man and her maid, who have been all through July at Franzenbad in the Egerland,—reaching Paris after awful adventures, had all four been hurled out in the same way. One of those jiggety motor-omnibuses took all of us to the Couronne. They were full to the roofs and cellars, but they wedged us in, somehow! Then, for two days Sir Thomas tore round Paris trying to get _laissez-passers_." She turned her lovely eyes upon a large, stertorously-breathing but otherwise inert object reclining with closed eyes and folded hands in the biggest of the Club armchairs. "Didn’t you, Sir Thomas?" "Beparr?" Brayham, waking with a bewildered stare, regarded the charming Cynthia uncomprehendingly until the Goblin, sitting opposite, centre of a knot of bosom friends, repeated the query: