The rumour travelled round the noisy room that Mr. Byrne had made Mrs. Ambrose have a cocktail, and they all said, "How _like_ him! the naughty old thing! No one else would have done _that_." Margery Byrne was trying to make the dramatic critic talk about the drama, but he had come to the conclusion that no one in Hammerton liked to talk about anything but domestic worries. As he lived in a service flat and did not have any, it was far from easy for him, but he was doing his best, and had ascertained from Mrs. Byrne that she had just engaged a new maid, named Emily, who seemed likely to be satisfactory. When Mrs. Byrne heard of her husband's feat, she looked across at him fondly, but almost reproachfully. "That means he's had three himself," she said, with a gay laugh. The dramatic critic, who flattered himself that he had probed the depths of human nature, thought, "What a nice, easygoing wife!" But Mrs. Byrne was really thinking, "I _wish_ he wouldn't drink so many--horrid, strong stuff." And she saw that, though her husband was being so pleasant and kind to the two old ladies, he was looking most of the time at Muriel Tarrant, the pretty girl in the corner beyond him, who was talking to John Egerton, and blushing prettily about something. Margery Byrne said to herself, "I am not jealous," and looked away. An enormous chatter filled the room. The psychologist sat silent, noticing things. Mr. Whittaker fussed about with coffee and thin glasses. Odd corners of tables and mantelpieces and bookshelves became crowded with discarded coffee-cups and dissipated glasses, perilously poised. Mrs. Whittaker, talking busily to the Reverend Peter, listened anxiously, with both ears at the public pulse, as it were, and could detect no single murmur of domestic worries. Every one, it seemed, was being interesting and intelligent. Then the carroty-haired Mrs. Vincent bustled up to her. "_Won't_ you make them sing to us, Mrs. Whittaker?--Mr. Byrne's Choir, I mean. I've never heard them, you know." The Reverend Peter roared across the room, "A song, Stephen--a song! Forward, the Choir!" The Hammerton Choir was the unduly dignified title of the faintly flippant, faintly musical company of pleasant people which the Byrnes gathered periodically at their house along The Chase. They sang, indeed, informally and wholly impromptu, a wide range of quartettes and choruses and glees. But volume of sound rather than delicacy of execution was their strong point, and the prevailing tone was frivolous. Indeed, it was scarcely in keeping with the sonorous title they had assumed; and Mrs. Vincent and others of Mrs. Whittaker's guests, who had heard of the Hammerton Choir, but had not actually heard it, might be pardoned if they had formed too flattering an impression of its powers.