No one ventured on such a rash assertion; indeed, putting aside the carter's discouraging air, everyone present considered Tony's offer to be the very acme of aristocratic behaviour. The creator of this favourable impression pushed open the swinging door of the Club and, accepting a couple of letters from the hotel porter, walked through into the comfortably furnished bar lounge at the back. Its two inhabitants, who were each in the act of consuming a cocktail, glanced round at his entrance. One was "Doggy" Donaldson, the manager, a burly, genial-looking, bullet-headed individual with close-cropped grey hair, and a permanently unlit cigar jutting up rakishly out of the corner of his mouth. "Hello, Tony," he exclaimed. "You're just in time to join us. You know the Marquis da Freitas, of course?" Tony nodded easily, and Donaldson's companion, a stout, dark-complexioned, well-dressed man of about fifty with a certain air of distinction about him, returned the greeting with a courteous wave of his hand. "We meet as enemies, Sir Antony," he remarked smilingly. "Well, I just dropped in for a second to see that everything was all right about to-morrow," said Tony. "Our boy is in fine form: never been fitter. I hope you have been equally lucky?" The Marquis indulged in the faintest possible shrug of his broad shoulders. "I believe so," he said. "I am not a great authority on these matters myself, but they amuse His Majesty." "Everything's O.K.," observed the manager in a satisfied voice. "We sold the last seat this morning, and there have been several applications since. It's going to be the best night of the season. You will see your boy turns up in good time, won't you?" Tony helped himself to the cocktail, which the barman, without asking any superfluous questions, had been quietly preparing for him. "Right you are," he said, drinking it off. "What's the betting, Doggy?" "Martin-Smith told me this morning he'd got a level hundred on Lopez." Tony put down the empty glass. "Ah well," he said, "he can afford to lose it." There was a short pause. "You seem confident, Sir Antony," remarked the Marquis in his suave voice. "Perhaps you would like to back your opinion a little further. I don't know much about this sort of thing, as I said just now, but I am prepared to support our man if only from patriotic motives." "Anything you care to suggest, Marquis," said Tony indifferently. "Shall we say a couple of hundred, then?" Tony nodded, and booked the bet on his shirt cuff. "I must be off now," he said. "I suppose you and the King will be at the Albert Hall to-night?" The Marquis shook his head. "I do not think His Majesty intends to be present. As for me--" he again shrugged his shoulders--"I grow old for such frivolities." "Well, till to-morrow then," said Tony.