“Is anything the matter?” asked Lady Harman with a sisterly interest. “My dear Lady Harman, I find myself——Ridiculous position. Might I borrow half a sovereign?” He felt sure that the two waiters exchanged glances. He looked at them,—a mistake again—and got hotter. “Oh!” said Lady Harman and regarded him with frank amusement in her eyes. The thing struck her at first in the light of a joke. “I’ve only got one-and-eightpence. I didn’t expect——” She blushed as beautifully as ever. Then she produced a small but plutocratic-looking purse and handed it to him. “Most remarkable—inconvenient,” said Mr. Brumley, opening the precious thing and extracting a shilling. “That will do,” he said and dismissed the waiter with a tip of sixpence. Then with the open purse still in his hand, he spent much of his remaining strength trying to look amused and unembarrassed, feeling all the time that with his flushed face and in view of all the circumstances of the case he must be really looking very silly and fluffy. “It’s really most inconvenient,” he remarked. “I never thought of the—of this. It was silly of me,” said Lady Harman. “Oh no! Oh dear no! The silliness I can assure you is all mine. I can’t tell you how entirely apologetic——Ridiculous fix. And after I had persuaded you to come here.” “Still we were able to pay,” she consoled him. “But you have to get home!” She hadn’t so far thought of that. It brought Sir Isaac suddenly into the picture. “By half-past five,” she said with just the faintest flavour of interrogation. Mr. Brumley looked at his watch. It was ten minutes to five. “Waiter,” he said, “how do the trains run from here to Putney?” “I don’t _think_, sir, that we have any trains from here to Putney——” An A.B.C. Railway Guide was found and Mr. Brumley learnt for the first time that Putney and Hampton Court are upon two distinct and separate and, as far as he could judge by the time-table, mutually hostile branches of the South Western Railway, and that at the earliest they could not get to Putney before six o’clock. Mr. Brumley was extremely disconcerted. He perceived that he ought to have kept his taxi. It amounted almost to a debt of honour to deliver this lady secure and untarnished at her house within the next hour. But this reflection did not in the least degree assist him to carry it out and as a matter of fact Mr. Brumley became flurried and did not carry it out. He was not used to being without money, it unnerved him, and he gave way to a kind of hectic _savoir faire_. He demanded a taxi of the waiter. He tried to evolve a taxi by will power alone. He went out with Lady Harman and back towards the gates of Hampton Court to look for taxis. Then it occurred to him that they might be losing the 5.25 up. So they hurried over the bridge of the station.