a starched shirt and a dinner-jacket, and as I dressed I could have
sung from pure lightheartedness. I was in for some arduous job,
and sometime that evening in that place I should get my marching
orders. Someone would arrive - perhaps Bullivant - and read me
the riddle. But whatever it was, I was ready for it, for my whole
being had found a new purpose. Living in the trenches, you are apt
to get your horizon narrowed down to the front line of enemy
barbed wire on one side and the nearest rest billets on the other.
But now I seemed to see beyond the fog to a happy country.

High-pitched voices greeted my ears as I came down the broad
staircase, voices which scarcely accorded with the panelled walls
and the austere family portraits; and when I found my hostesses in
the hall I thought their looks still less in keeping with the house.
Both ladies were on the wrong side of forty, but their dress was
that of young girls. Miss Doria Wymondham was tall and thin with
a mass of nondescript pale hair confined by a black velvet fillet.
Miss Claire Wymondham was shorter and plumper and had done
her best by ill-applied cosmetics to make herself look like a foreign
demi-mondaine. They greeted me with the friendly casualness which
I had long ago discovered was the right English manner towards
your guests; as if they had just strolled in and billeted themselves,
and you were quite glad to see them but mustn't be asked to
trouble yourself further. The next second they were cooing like
pigeons round a picture which a young man was holding up in the
lamplight.

He was a tallish, lean fellow of round about thirty years, wearing
grey flannels and shoes dusty from the country roads. His thin face
was sallow as if from living indoors, and he had rather more hair