"You'd better go abroad," said Dorothy. "They mend hearts very well there."
"If you're not jolly careful I shall go abroad."
"Then go," she said, "but don't talk about it. I hate people who talk, just as much as you do."
Within a week Lord Clarehaven had equipped himself like the hero of a late nineteenth-century novel to shoot big game in Somaliland, and on the vigil of his departure Arthur Lonsdale came round to see Dorothy.
"Look here. You know," he began, "I'm the cause of all this. Hard-hearted little girls and all that who require a lesson."
"Yes, it's evident you've been spending a good deal of time lately with Sylvia," said Dorothy.
"Now don't start backfiring, Doodles. I've come here as a friend of the family and I don't want to sprain my tongue at the start. Poor old Tony came weeping round to me and asked what was to be done about it."
"It?" asked Dorothy, angrily. "What is _it_? The chimpanzee?"
"No, no, no. _It_ is you and Tony. If you go on interrupting like this you'll puncture my whole speech. When Tony skidded over that rope of pearls and you froze him with a look, he came and asked my advice about what to do next. So I loosened my collar like Charles Wyndham and said: 'Make her jealous, old thing. There's only one way with women, which is to make them jealous. I'm going to make the Molyneux jealous. If you follow my advice, you'll do the same with the Lonsdale.'"
Dorothy nearly put her fingers in her ears to shut out any more horrible comparisons between herself and Queenie, but she assumed, instead, a martyred air and submitted to the gratification of her curiosity.
"Well, just about that fatal time," Lonsdale continued, "Tony and I went for a jolly little bump round at Covent Garden and bumped into Sylvia and Lily _en pierrette_, as they say at my crammer's, where they're teaching me enough French to administer the destinies of Europe for ten years to come. Where were we? Oh yes, _en pierrette_. 'Hello, hello' I said. 'Two jolly little girls _en pierrette_, and what about it? Well, we had two or three more bumps round, and Tony was getting more and more depressed about himself, and so I said, 'Why don't we go down to Brighton and cheer ourselves up?' 'That's all right,' said Sylvia, 'if you'll help me put a jolly old chimpanzee in a fellow's flat.' I said, I'll put a jolly old elephant, if you like.' You see, the notion was that when Hausberg opened the door of the flat he should say, 'Are you there, Lily?' It was all to be very amusing and jolly."