Ah! Bony leaned back in his chair and sipped his tea, sipped it from fragile china far removed from a tin pannikin. Comfort! Comfort surrounded him, solid and real, and no man was better able to appreciate comfort than he who but recently had come back from the interior, where he had been investigating a disappearance. Mr Pickwick again entered the room and this time laidhimself down beside the ball, flanks working like bellows, mouth wide open. Miss Pinkney returned, in her hands a silver cigarette-case anda silver lighter.

“I like a cigarette sometimes,” she said, and then giggled. “The sometimes is as often as the ration will allow. Please offer me one.”

On his feet, Bony opened her case. She took one and insisted that he should do likewise. Then he needs must take her lighter and find that it would not work, and whilst he held a lighted match in service, she said it was a shame that in these days the garage people didn’t know their business.

“I have been visualizing a stern lady who would denounce tobacco and forbid me smoking in the house,” he told her, smiling.

“My dear Mr Bonaparte, you may smoke when and where you like,” she said. “I’d hate to think of you lying with your head in a cold fire-place and smoking up the chimney. I am glad you smoke. My brother used to say, ‘Never trust a man who doesn’t smoke or drink or swear when he hits his thumb with a hammer’. Mr Pickwick distrusts them, too. He hated Mr Wilcannia-Smythe when he was staying next door at the time Mr Blake died. I’ve seen him lying on top of the division fence and hissing at Mr Wilcannia-Smythe. Afterwards, someone told me that Mr Wilcannia-Smythe neither smoked nor drank. And, I assume, never used an inaccurate adjective.”

“What was Mr Pickwick’s attitude towards Mr and Mrs Blake?” Bony asked.

“Mr Pickwick hated Mr Blake,” replied Miss Pinkney. “Mr Blake would sometimes throw a stone at Mr Pickwick if Mr Pickwick happened to be in his garden. Once I saw him do it, and I remonstrated with him. He was very rude to me.” Miss Pinkney smiled. “I’m afraid I spoke to him somewhat after the fashion of my brother!”