I was glad of an excuse to go out in the evening, now being rather bored with all those stories about chaps killing other chaps by highly complicated means. As I sat down among the potted municipal palms, I found Avril in the next seat.

'Quite a coincidence,' I remarked. She smiled.

'You have such a sense of humour, Gaston. Wasn't it nice of Mrs Wattle to give us the tickets?'

'Oh, yes, quite.'

The dear old thing seemed to be getting forgetful, which I put down to the normal hormonal changes in a woman of her age.

The next few days were brightened by excitement over the great event in professional circles at Porterhampton, the annual medical dinner. As the Wattles seemed to find this a combination of the Chelsea Arts Ball and the Lord Mayor's Banquet, to please the dear old couple I agreed to put on a dinner jacket and accompany them, though personally nothing depresses me quite so much as a lot of other doctors. I had just eased into my chair in the ballroom of the Commercial Hotel, when I realized that I was once more sitting next to Avril Atkinson.

'So nice of Dr Wattle to have invited me,' she began. 'Are you going to make a speech with your terribly funny stories?'

'Not for me, I'm afraid. Though the fat chap with the microphone has a wad of papers in his pocket the size of an auctioneer's catalogue. Remarkable, isn't it, how men find so much to say after dinner when their wives haven't had a word out of them for years over breakfast?'

She giggled. 'Gaston, you're terribly witty.'

'Just wait till you've heard the fat chap.'

The guest on my other side having nothing to talk about except the progress of his patients and his putting, I passed the meal chatting lightly to Avril and when the floods of oratory had subsided took her home in my car.

'You simply must come in and meet daddy,' she invited.