“If you mean Copper,” Mr. Period observed, “I’ve always understood him to be a thoroughly dependable fellow.”

“He’s a sort of half-pie, broken-down gent or something, isn’t he?” Leonard asked casually.

“Jolly good man, George Copper,” Miss Cartell said.

“Certainly,” Mr. Period faintly agreed. He was exceedingly pale.

“Oh,” Leonard said, stretching his arms easily, “I think I can manage Mr. George Copper quite successfully.” He glanced round the table. “Smoking allowed?” he asked.

Miss Cartell swallowed her last fragment of cheese and her brother looked furious. Mr. Period murmured: “Since you are leaving us, why not?”

Leonard groped in his pockets. “I’ve left mine in the car,” he said to Moppett. “Hand over, Sexy, will you?”

Mr. Period said: “Please,” and offered his gold case. “These are Turks,” he said. “I’m so sorry if you don’t like them. Old-fogyishly, I can’t get used to the others.”

“Makes a change,” Leonard said, obligingly. He took a cigarette, looked at the case and remarked: “That’s nice.” It was extraordinary how off-key his lightest observations could sound.

“Do let me see,” Moppett asked, and took the case.

“It was left me,” Mr. Period said, “by dear old Lady Barsington. An eighteenth-century cardcase. The jewelled clasp is said to be unique. There’s an inscription, but it’s very faint. If you take it to the light….”

Moppett took it to the window, and Leonard joined her there. He began to hum and then to sketch in the words of his little number: “If you mean what I think you mean, O.K. by me. Things aren’t always what they seem. O.K. by me.” Moppett gaily joined in.

Alfred came in to say that Mr. Period was wanted on the telephone, and he bustled out, after a pointedly formal apology.

Leonard strolled back to the table. He had evidently decided that some conventional apology was called for. “So sorry to break up the party,” he said winningly. “But if it’s all the same, I think we’d better toddle.”

“By all means. Please,” said Mr. Cartell.

“What P.P. and Uncle Hal will think of your manners, you two!” Miss Cartell said, and laughed uneasily.

They got up. Moppett said good-bye to Mr. Cartell quite civilly and was suddenly effusive in her thanks. Leonard followed her lead, but with an air of finding it only just worth while to do so.

“Be seeing you, ducks,” Moppett said in Cockney to Miss Cartell, and they went out.

There followed a rather deadly little silence.

Mr. Cartell addressed himself to his sister. “My dear Connie,” he said, “I should be failing in my duty if I didn’t tell you I consider that young man to be an unspeakable bounder.”

Mr. Period returned.

“Shall we have our coffee in the drawing-room?” he asked in the doorway.

Nicola would have dearly liked to excuse herself and go back to the study, but Mr. Period took her gently by the arm and led her to the drawing-room. His fingers, she noticed, were trembling. “I want,” he said, “to show you a newly acquired treasure.”

Piloting her into a far corner, he unfolded a brown-paper parcel. It turned out to be a landscape in water colour: the distant view of a manor house.

“It’s charming,” Nicola said.

“Thought to be an unsigned Cotman, but the real interest for me is that it’s my great-grandfather’s house at Ribblethorpe. Destroyed, alas, by fire. I came across it in a secondhand shop. Wasn’t that fun for me?”

Alfred took round the coffee tray. Nicola pretended she couldn’t hear Mr. Cartell and his sister arguing. As soon as Alfred had gone, Miss Cartell tackled her brother.

“I think you’re jolly prejudiced, Boysie,” she said. “It’s the way they all talk nowadays. Moppett tells me he’s brilliantly clever. Something in the City.”

“Too clever by half if you ask me. And what in the City?”

“I don’t know exactly what. He’s got rather a tragic sort of background, Moppett says. The father was killed in Bangkok and the mother’s artistic.”

“You’re a donkey, Connie. If I were you I should put a stop to the friendship. None of my business, of course. I am not,” Mr. Cartell continued with some emphasis, “Mary’s uncle, despite the courtesy title she is good enough to bestow upon me.”

“You don’t understand her.”

“I make no attempt to do so,” he replied in a fluster.

Nicola murmured: “I think I ought to get back to my job.” She said good-bye to Miss Cartell.

“Typin’, are you?” asked Miss Cartell. “P.P. tells me you’re Basil Maitland-Mayne’s gel. Used to know your father. Hunted with him.”

“We all knew Basil,” Mr. Period said with an attempt at geniality.

“I didn’t,” Mr. Cartell said, crossly.

They glared at each other.

“You’re very smart all of a sudden, P.P.,” Miss Cartell remarked. “Private secretary! You’ll be telling us next that you’re going to write a book.” She laughed uproariously.

Nicola returned to the study.

Nicola had a ridiculously overdeveloped capacity for feeling sorry. She was sorry now for Mr. Period, because he had been upset and had made a silly of himself; and for Miss Cartell, because she was boisterous and vulnerable and besotted with her terrible Moppett who treated her like dirt. She was sorry for Mr. Cartell, because he had been balanced on a sort of tightrope of irritability. He had been angry with his guests when they let him down, and angry with Mr. Period out of loyalty to his own sister.

Even Nicola was unable to feel sorry for either Moppett or Leonard.

She ordered herself back to work and was soon immersed in the niceties of polite behaviour. Every now and then she remembered Andrew Bantling and wondered what the row with his stepfather had been about. She hoped she would meet him on the train, though she supposed Lady Bantling would insist on his staying for the party.

She had worked solidly for about half an hour when her employer came in. He was still pale, but he smiled at her, and tiptoed with playful caution to his desk.

“Pay no attention to me,” he whispered. “I’m going to write another little note.”

He sat at his desk and applied himself to this task. Presently he began dismally to hum an erratic version of Leonard Leiss’s song: If you mean what I think you mean, O.K. by me. He made a petulant little sound. “Now, why in the world,” he cried, “should that distressingly vulgar catch come into my head? Nicola, my dear, what a perfectly dreadful young man! That you should be let in for that sort of party! Really!”

Nicola reassured him. By-and-by he sighed, so heavily that she couldn’t help glancing at him. He had folded his letter and addressed an envelope and now sat with his head on his hand. “Better wait a bit,” he muttered. “Cool down.”

Nicola stopped typing and looked out of the window. Riding up the drive on a bicycle was a large policeman.

He dismounted, propped his machine against a tree trunk and removed his trouser clips. He then approached the house.

“There’s a policeman outside.”

“What? Oh, really? Noakes, I suppose. Splendid fellow, old Noakes. I wonder what he wants. Tickets for a concert, I misdoubt me.”

Alfred came in. “Sergeant Noakes, sir, would like to see you.”

“What’s it all about, Alfred?”

“I don’t know, I’m sure, sir. He says it’s important.”

“All right. Show him in, if I must.”

“Thank you, sir.”

The impressive things about Sergeant Noakes were his size and his mildness. He was big, even for a policeman, and he was mild beyond belief. When Mr. Period made him known to Nicola, he said: “Good afternoon, Miss,” in a loud but paddy voice and added that he hoped she would excuse them for a few minutes. Nicola took this as a polite dismissal and was about to conform, when Mr. Period said that he wouldn’t dream of it. She must go on typing and not let them bore her. Please. He insisted.