"Yes, and I know him so well! Hardly any one knows him so well as I do. Every one in town is crying out to find out all about him, and I'm really the only one who knows . . ." He looked towards the door. Thoughts of the two pretty girls beyond flushed the wayward, wine-heated mind. "I'm going to have a liqueur brandy," Toftrees said hastily--he had taken nothing the whole evening--"won't you, too?" "Now you'd never think," Ingworth said, sipping from his tiny glass, "that at seven o'clock this evening Prince and I--Prince is the valet at Gilbert's club--could hardly wake him up and get him to dress?" "No!" "It's a fact though, Mr. Toftrees. We had the devil of a time. He'd been out all day--it was bovril with lots of salt in it that put him right. As a matter of fact--of course, this is quite between you and me--I was in a bit of a funk that it was coming over him again at dinner. Stale drunk. You know! I saw he was paying a lot of compliments to Mrs. Amberley. At first she didn't seem to understand, and then she didn't quite seem to like it. But I was glad when I heard him ask the man for a whiskey and soda just now. I know his programme so well. I was sure that it would pull him together all right--or at least that number two would. I suppose you saw he was rather off when the ladies had gone and you were talking to him?" "Well, I wasn't sure of course." "I was, I know him so well. Gilbert's father was my father's solicitor--one of the old three bottle men. But when Gilbert collared number two just now I realised that it would be quite all right. You heard him with Mr. Amberley just now? Splendid!" "Yes. And now suppose we go and see how he's getting on in the drawing room," said Herbert Toftrees with a curious note in his voice. The boy mistook it for anxiety. "Oh, he'll be as right as rain, you'll find. It comes off and on in waves, you know," he said. Toftrees looked at the youth with frank wonder. He spoke in the way of use and wont, as if he were saying nothing extraordinary--merely stating a fact. The novelist was really shocked. Personally, he was the most temperate of men. He was _homme du monde_, of course. He touched upon life at other points than the decorous and above-board. He had known men, friends of his own, go down, down, down, through drink. But here, with these people, it was not the same. In Bohemia, in raffish literary clubs and the reprobate purlieus of Fleet Street, one expected this sort of thing and accepted it as part of the _milieu_.