"Thank God for that!" he exclaimed, helping himself liberally to the brandy. "You know I'd find it hard to refuse you anything, Thew, but there are limits. Besides, you are never really out of sight there. We go out in squadrons, and from the height we fly at nothing I could drop would be very likely to reach its destination." Jocelyn Thew smiled coldly. "My dear Richard," he said, "I am not going to make you an unwilling partner in any foolhardy scheme such as you are thinking of, because that is just the Obvious thing that our friends who take so much interest in us would expect and prepare for. All the same, there is just a trifling commission which I will ask you to undertake for me, and which I will explain to you later. When do you leave?" "Ten o'clock train from Charing Cross on Monday night," the young man replied. "I have to fly on Tuesday morning." "Then if it pleases you we will all dine here that night," Jocelyn Thew suggested, "and I will take you on to the Alhambra for an hour. Doctor Gant and I were there our first night in town, and we found the performance excellent. You will honour me, Miss Beverley?" "I shall be delighted," she answered, "but I am not at all sure that you will be able to get seats at the Alhambra." "Why not?" he asked. "There is a great benefit performance there on Monday night," she told him. "The house is closed now for rehearsals. All the stalls have gone already, and the boxes are to be sold by auction at the Theatrical Fete." Jocelyn Thew was for a moment grave. "I am very glad that you told me this," he said, "but I think that I can nevertheless promise you the stage box for Monday night. I have a call on it. We must all meet once more. It is just possible that I may have a pleasant surprise for both of you." "Do give us an idea what it is," she begged. He shook his head. Somehow, since the coming of Michael Dilwyn, a tired look had crept into his eyes. He seemed to have lost all his old vivacity. He had paid the bill some time before and they strolled together now into the lounge. Katharine was carrying half a dozen of the roses, which the waiter had pressed into her hand. "To-night," she said, looking up into his face and dropping her voice a little, "I am feeling so much happier--happier than I have felt for a long time. Why do you keep us both, Mr. Thew, in such a state of uneasiness? You give us so little of your real confidence, so little of your real self. Sometimes it seems as though you deliberately try to make yourself out a harder, crueller person than you really are. Why do you do that?" For a moment she fancied that the impossible had happened, that she had penetrated the armour of that steadfast and studied indifference. "We are all just a little the fools of circumstance," he sighed. "A will to succeed sometimes, if it is strong enough, crushes out things we would like to keep alive." She thrust one of the blossoms which she was carrying through his buttonhole.