“Very good, sir.”

He gave one frosty look at the spats and biffed off. Dash him!

Anything merrier and brighter than the Twins, when they curveted into the old flat while I was dressing for dinner the next night, I have never struck in my whole puff. I’m only about half a dozen years older than Claude and Eustace, but in some rummy manner they always make me feel as if I were well on in the grandfather class and just waiting for the end. Almost before I realised they were in the place, they had collared the best chairs, pinched a couple of my special cigarettes, poured themselves out a whisky-and-soda apiece, and started to prattle with the gaiety and abandon of two birds who had achieved their life’s ambition instead of having come a most frightful purler and being under sentence of exile.

“Hallo, Bertie, old thing,” said Claude. “Jolly decent of you to put us up.”