“I certainly give it my blessing,” the Vicar hardily countered. He was enjoying a second champagne cocktail.

“And, by the way, the party won’t be undiluted Quintern. There’s somebody still to come. I do hope he’s not going to be late. He’s a man I ran across in New York, a Doctor Basil Schramm. I found him—” Mr. Markos paused and an odd little smile touched his mouth, “quite interesting. He rang up out of a clear sky this morning, saying he was going to take up a practise somewhere in our part of the world and was driving there this evening. We discovered that his route would bring him through Upper Quintern and on the spur of the moment I asked him to dine. He’ll unbalance the table a bit but I hope nobody’s going to blench at that.”

“An American?” asked Mrs. Field-Innis. She had a hoarse voice.

“He’s Swiss by birth, I fancy.”

“Is he taking a locum,” asked Dr. Field-Innis, “or a permanent practice?”

“The latter, I supposed. At some hotel or nursing home or convalescent place or something of the sort. Green — something.”

“Not ‘gages’!” cried Sybil, softly clapping her hands.

“I knew it made me think of indigestion. Greengages it is,” said Mr. Markos.

“Oh,” said Dr. Field-Innis. “That place.”

Much was made of this coincidence, if it could be so called. The conversation drifted to gardeners. Sybil excitedly introduced her find. Mr. Markos became grand signorial and, when Gideon asked if they hadn’t taken on a new man, said they had but he didn’t know what he was called. Verity, who, apolitical at heart, drifted guiltily from left to right and back again, felt her redder hackles rising. She found that Mr. Markos was looking at her in a manner that gave her the sense of having been rumbled.