“I beg your pardon… how do you do? No… well, yes, interested, but I am afraid very ill-informed,” stammered Nigel.

“Ah!” ejaculated Doctor Tokareff deeply. “You will be compulsion learn somesing of the weapons (he pronounced it ‘ooeponzs’) of the ancients if you stay heere. Sir Hubert is a great authority and an enthusiastic collector.”

He spoke with extreme formality, and his phrases with their curiously stressed inflexions sounded pedantic and unreal. Nigel murmured something about being very ignorant, he was afraid, and was relieved to hear the hoot of the Bentley.

Angela came running back out of the shadows, simultaneously a butler appeared, and in a moment the hall was clamorous with the arrival of the rest of the party. A cheerful voice sounded from the head of the stairs, and Sir Hubert Handesley came down to welcome his guests.

Perhaps the secret of the success of the Frantock parties lay entirely in the charm of the host. Handesley was a singularly attractive man. Rosamund Grant once said that it wasn’t fair for one individual to have so many good things. He was tall, and although over fifty years of age had retained an athlete’s figure. His hair, dead white, had not suffered the indignity of middle-age, but lay, thick and sleek, on his finely shaped head. His eyes were a peculiarly vivid blue and deep-set under heavily marked brows, his lips firm and strongly compressed at the corners: altogether an almost too handsome man. His brain was of the same stereotyped quality as his looks. An able diplomat before the war, and after it a cabinet minister of rather orthodox brilliance, he still found time to write valuable monographs on the subject of his ruling passion — the fighting tools of the older civilizations — and to indulge his favorite hobby — he had almost made it a science — of organizing amusing house-parties.