“Certainly, sir.”

“Yes. The party—” Jonathan paused, hugged his sides with his elbows and uttered a thin cackle of laughter. “The party may be a little sticky at first. I regard it as an experiment.”

“I hope everything will be quite satisfactory, sir.”

“Quite satisfactory,” Jonathan repeated. “Yes. Sure of it. Is that a car? Have a look.”

Jonathan turned off his table lamp. Caper went to the windows and drew aside their heavy curtains. The sound of wind and sleet filled the room.

“It’s difficult to say, sir, with the noise outside, but — yes, sir, there are the head-lamps. I fancy it’s coming up the inner drive, sir.”

“Mr. Mandrake, no doubt. Show him in here, and you can take away these tea things. Too excited for ’em. Here he is.”

Caper closed the curtains and went out with the tea things. Jonathan switched on his lamp. He heard the new footman cross the hall and open the great front door.

“It’s beginning,” thought Jonathan, hugging himself. “This is the overture. We’re off.”

Mr. Aubrey Mandrake was a poetic dramatist and his real name was Stanley Footling. He was in the habit of telling himself, for he was not without humour, that if it had been a little worse — if, for instance, it had been Albert Muggins — he would have clung to it, for there would have been a kind of distinction in such a name. Seeing it set out in the programme, under the title of his “Saxophone in Tarlatan,” the public would have enclosed it in mental inverted commas. But they would not perform this delicate imaginary feat for a Stanley Footling. So he became Aubrey Mandrake, influenced in his choice by such names as Sebastian Melmoth, Aubrey Beardsley, and Peter Warlock.