“Roderick, don’t be infuriating. Has Bunchy Gospell got anything to do with Scotland Yard?”

Alleyn was staring out into the garden.

“You might say,” he said at last, “that we have a very great respect for him at the Yard. Not only is he charming — he is also, in his own way, a rather remarkable personage.”

Lady Alleyn looked at her son meditatively for some seconds.

“Are you meeting him today?” she asked.

“I think so.”

“Why?”

“Why, darling, to listen to one of his famous stories, I suppose.”

It was Miss Harris’s first day in her new job. She was secretary to Lady Carrados and had been engaged for the London season. Miss Harris knew quite well what this meant. It was not, in a secretarial sense, by any means her first season. She was a competent young woman, almost frighteningly unimaginative, with a brain that was divided into neat pigeon-holes, and a mind that might be said to label all questions ‘answered’ or ‘unanswered’. If a speculative or unconventional idea came Miss Harris’s way, it was promptly dealt with or promptly shut up in a dark pigeon-hole and never taken out again. If Miss Harris had not been able to answer it immediately, it was unanswerable and therefore of no importance. Owing perhaps to her intensive training as a member of the large family of a Buckinghamshire clergyman she never for a moment asked herself why she should go through life organising fun for other people and having comparatively little herself. That would have seemed to Miss Harris an irrelevant and rather stupid speculation. One’s job was a collection of neatly filed duties, suitable to one’s station in life, and therefore respectable. It had no wider ethical interest of any sort at all. This is not to say Miss Harris was insensitive. On the contrary, she was rather touchy on all sorts of points of etiquette relating to her position in the houses in which she was employed.