“I daresay,” said Bertie gloomily, “without their tails. Nice fool I shall look with a lot of Manx sheep.”

And by way of emphasising his annoyance at the prospect he sent Waldo’s pillows flying to the top of the wardrobe.

“But why no tails?” asked Waldo, whose teeth were chattering with fear and rage and lowered temperature.

“My dear boy, have you never heard the ballad of Little Bo-Peep?” said Bertie with a chuckle. “It’s my character in the Game, you know. If I didn’t go hunting about for my lost sheep no one would be able to guess who I was; and now go to sleepy weeps like a good child or I shall be cross with you.”

“I leave you to imagine,” wrote Waldo in the course of a long letter to his mother, “how much sleep I was able to recover that night, and you know how essential nine uninterrupted hours of slumber are to my health.”