“It’s the liquor, Monty,” Charlie said. “It will feel even larger in the morning-the head, I mean. Mine too. Not to mention my stomach.”

“This is the morning,” Jasper said gloomily. “We ought to be in bed.”

“Not together, though, Monty,” Sir Isaac said. “We might cause a scandal.”

There was a bellow of raucous and risque mirth for this sorry attempt at humor-and then a collective grimace.

“Agatha Strangelove,” said Henry Blackstone, rousing himself from a semicomatose state in the depths of a leather chair in order to contribute to the conversation for the first time in at least half an hour.

“What about her, Hal?” Sir Isaac asked gently.

Agatha Strangelove was a dancer at the opera house. She had luscious blond curls and ringlets, a pouting rosebud mouth, a figure that was overgenerous in all the right places, and legs that stretched all the way up to her shoulders-or so one wag had observed when she first appeared on the stage a month or two ago, and every man who heard him had known exactly what he meant. She was also very miserly in the granting of her favors to the gentlemen who crowded the green room after each performance begging for them.

“Monty should have to bed her,” Hal said. “In no more than a week.”

There was a small, incredulous silence.

“He did that the second week she was in town,” Sir Isaac said, his voice still gentle, as though he were talking to an invalid. “Have you forgotten, Hal? It went into the betting book at White’s on a Monday night with a one-week time limit, and Monty had her on Tuesday and Wednesday and Thursday nights, not to mention the days in between, until he had exhausted them both.”

“Devil take it,” Hal said in some surprise, “and so he did. I must be foxed. You ought to have sent us home an hour ago, Monty.”