the advertising people, I don't ask you to trust me, without offering
a respectable reference. Mortimer there, is my reference, and knows all
about it.'

Mortimer raises his drooping eyelids, and slightly opens his mouth. But
a faint smile, expressive of 'What's the use!' passes over his face, and
he drops his eyelids and shuts his mouth.

'Now, Mortimer,' says Lady Tippins, rapping the sticks of her closed
green fan upon the knuckles of her left hand--which is particularly rich
in knuckles, 'I insist upon your telling all that is to be told about
the man from Jamaica.'

'Give you my honour I never heard of any man from Jamaica, except the
man who was a brother,' replies Mortimer.

'Tobago, then.'

'Nor yet from Tobago.'

'Except,' Eugene strikes in: so unexpectedly that the mature young lady,
who has forgotten all about him, with a start takes the epaulette out
of his way: 'except our friend who long lived on rice-pudding and
isinglass, till at length to his something or other, his physician said
something else, and a leg of mutton somehow ended in daygo.'

A reviving impression goes round the table that Eugene is coming out. An
unfulfilled impression, for he goes in again.

'Now, my dear Mrs Veneering,' quoth Lady Tippins, I appeal to you