Well, what I’m driving at is that at this juncture, with her shoulder squashing against mine and her back-hair tickling my nose, a perfectly loony impulse came sweeping over me to kiss her.
“No, really?” I croaked.
“Have you forgotten?”
She lifted the old onion and her eyes looked straight into mine. I could feel myself skidding. I shut my eyes. And then from the doorway there spoke the most beautiful voice I had ever heard in my life.
“Give me that cat!”
I opened my eyes. There was good old Aunt Jane, that queen of her sex, standing before me, glaring at me as if I were a vivisectionist and she had surprised me in the middle of an experiment. How this pearl among women had tracked me down I don’t know, but there she stood, bless her dear, intelligent old soul, like the rescue party in the last reel of a motion picture.
I didn’t wait. The spell was broken, and I legged it. As I went, I heard that lovely voice again.
“He shot arrows at my Tibby from a bow,” said this most deserving and excellent octogenarian.
For the next few days all was peace. I saw comparatively little of Heloise. I found the strategic value of that water-pipe outside my window beyond praise. I seldom left the house now by any other route. It seemed to me that, if only the luck held like this, I might after all be able to stick this visit out for the full term of the sentence.
But meanwhile—as they say in the movies—
The whole family appeared to be present and correct as I came down to the drawing-room a couple of nights later. The Prof, Mrs. Prof, the two Exhibits, and the girl Heloise were scattered about at intervals. The cat slept on the rug, the canary in its cage. There was nothing, in short, to indicate that this was not just one of our ordinary evenings.
“Well, well, well!” I said, cheerily. “Hullo-ullo-ullo!”
I always like to make something in the nature of an entrance speech, it seeming to me to lend a chummy tone to the proceedings.
The girl Heloise looked at me reproachfully.
“Where have you been all day?” she asked.
“I went to my room after lunch.”
“You weren’t there at five.”
“No. After putting in a spell of work on the good old colleges, I went for a stroll. Fellow must have exercise if he means to keep fit.”
“Mens sana in corpore sano,” observed the prof.
“I shouldn’t wonder,” I said cordially.
At this point, when everything was going as sweet as a nut and I was feeling on top of my form, Mrs. Pringle suddenly soaked me on the base of the skull with a sandbag.
Not actually, I don’t mean. No, no. I speak figuratively, as it were.
“Roderick is very late,” she said.
You may think it strange that the sound of that name should have sloshed into my nerve-centres like a half-brick. But, take it from me, to a man who has had any dealings with Sir Roderick Glossop there is only one Roderick in the world. And that is one too many.
“Roderick?” I gurgled.
“My brother-in-law, Sir Roderick Glossop, comes to Cambridge tonight,” said the prof. “He lectures at St. Luke’s tomorrow. He is coming here to dinner.”
And while I stood there, feeling like the hero when he discovers that he is trapped in the den of the Secret Nine, the door opened.
“Sir Roderick Glossop,” announced the maid or some such person. And in he came.
One of the things that get this old crumb so generally disliked among the better element of the community is the fact that he has a head like the dome of St. Paul’s and eyebrows that want bobbing or shingling to reduce them to anything like reasonable size. It is a nasty experience to see this bald and bushy bloke advancing on you when you haven’t prepared the strategic railways in your rear. As he came into the room, I backed behind a sofa and commended my soul to God. I didn’t need to have my hand read to know that trouble was coming to me through a dark man.
He didn’t spot me at first. He shook hands with the prof and wife, kissed Heloise, and waggled his head at the Exhibits.
“I fear I am somewhat late,” he said. “A slight accident on the road, affecting what my chauffeur termed the—”
And then he saw me lurking on the outskirts, and gave a startled grunt, as if I hurt him a good deal internally.
“This—” began the prof, waving in my direction.
“I am already acquainted with Mr. Wooster.”
“This,” went on the prof, “is Miss Sipperley’s nephew Oliver. You remember Miss Sipperley?”
“What do you mean?” barked Sir Roderick. Having had so much to do with loonies has given him a rather sharp and authoritative manner on occasion. “This is that wretched young man, Bertram Wooster. What is all this nonsense about Olivers and Sipperleys?”
The prof was eyeing me with some natural surprise. So were the others. I beamed a bit weakly.
“Well, as a matter of fact—” I said.
The prof was wrestling with the situation. You could hear his brain buzzing.
“He said he was Oliver Sipperley,” he moaned.
“Come here!” bellowed Sir Roderick. “Am I to understand that you have inflicted yourself on this household under the pretence of being the nephew of an old friend?”
It seemed a pretty accurate description of the facts.
“Well—er—yes,” I said.
Sir Roderick shot an eye at me. It entered the body somewhere about the top stud, roamed around inside for a bit, and went out at the back.
“Insane! Quite insane, as I knew from the first moment I saw him.”
“What did he
