"Morning, Pongo," said Jimmy. "I suppose I shall have to go and make myself agreeable to those blasted girls. You coming?" Bateman shook his head and hurried along the terrace and in at the library window. Jimmy grinned pleasantly at his retreating back. He and Bateman had been at school together, when Bateman had been a serious, spectacled boy, and had been nicknamed Pongo for no earthly reason whatever. Pongo, Jimmy reflected, was very much the same sort of ass now that he had been then. The words "Life is real, life is earnest" might have been written specially for him. Jimmy yawned and strolled slowly down to the lake. The girls were there, three of them--just the usual sort of girls, two with dark, shingled heads and one with a fair, shingled head. The one that giggled most was (he thought) called Helen--and there was another called Nancy--and the third one was, for some reason, addressed as Socks. With them were his two friends, Bill Eversleigh and Ronny Devereux, who were employed in a purely ornamental capacity at the Foreign Office. "Hallo," said Nancy (or possibly Helen). "It's Jimmy. Where's what's his name?" "You don't mean to say," said Bill Eversleigh, "that Gerry Wade's not up _yet_? Something ought to be done about it." "If he's not careful," said Ronny Devereux, "he'll miss his breakfast altogether one day--find it's lunch or tea instead when he rolls down." "It's a shame," said the girl called Socks. "Because it worries Lady Coote so. She gets more and more like a hen that wants to lay an egg and can't. It's too bad." "Let's pull him out of bed," suggested Bill. "Come on, Jimmy." "Oh! let's be more subtle than that," said the girl called Socks. Subtle was a word of which she was rather fond. She used it a great deal. "I'm not subtle," said Jimmy. "I don't know how." "Let's get together and do something about it to-morrow morning," suggested Ronny vaguely. "You know, get him up at seven. Stagger the household. Tredwell loses his false whiskers and drops the tea urn. Lady Coote has hysterics and faints in Bill's arms--Bill being the weight carrier. Sir Oswald says 'Ha!' and steel goes up a point and five eighths. Pongo registers emotion by throwing down his spectacles and stamping on them." "You don't know Gerry," said Jimmy. "I daresay enough cold water _might_ wake him--judiciously applied, that is. But he'd only turn over and go to sleep again." "Oh! we must think of something more subtle than cold water," said Socks. "Well, what?" asked Ronny bluntly. And nobody had any answer ready. "We ought to be able to think of something," said Bill. "Who's got any brains?" "Pongo," said Jimmy. "And here he is, rushing along in a hurried manner as usual. Pongo was always the one for brains. It's been his misfortune from his youth upwards. Let's turn Pongo on to it."