“You said you had something important to say to me.”

“Absolutely!” I had decided to open the proceedings by sort of paving the way for young Bingo. I mean to say, without actually mentioning his name, I wanted to prepare the girl’s mind for the fact that, surprising as it might seem, there was someone who had long loved her from afar and all that sort of rot. “It’s like this,” I said. “It may sound rummy and all that, but there’s somebody who’s frightfully in love with you and so forth⁠—a friend of mine, you know.”

“Oh, a friend of yours?”

“Yes.”

She gave a kind of a laugh.

“Well, why doesn’t he tell me so?”