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Janet Church left London next day and I congratulated myself that I had escaped one worry. I actually enjoyed several peaceful days. Then Norheys came to me again.

“Did you tell Uncle Ned,” he said, “that I’m going to marry Viola and no one else?”

“No, I didn’t,” I said. “I told him exactly what you said I was to tell him; that you were determined to marry Miss Temple, but were quite ready to marry anybody else as well.”

Norheys grinned.

“How did he take that?” he asked.

“He said just what I expected him to say, that he’d never agree to your committing bigamy.”

“If that’s so,” said Norheys, “it puts the lid on the whole black princess scheme. What I always say is this: a fellow ought to knuckle under to his family—uncles and aunts and all that lot—so long as they’re asking him to do things which don’t annoy him much; but as soon as they begin chipping in in really offensive ways then he oughtn’t to. That’s my idea of a fellow’s duty, anyhow. I don’t know if it’s yours.”

I said that a great deal depended on his definition of the word offensive, and that so far as I could see, Calypso was anything but that.

“Anyhow,” said Norheys, “whether you agree with me or not, you can tell Uncle Ned what I say.”

I did; and Troyte told Procopius Cable. Norheys was back with me two days later and this time he was in a really bad temper.

“Look here, Uncle Bill,” he said, “I’m getting a bit fed up with this sort of thing. I don’t say it’s your fault, but there it is, and I’m damned if I stand any more of it.”

“What’s happened to you now?”

“Nothing has happened to me. If it had happened to me I shouldn’t have groused. But what I say is this:—and I always will say it even if Uncle Ned says the exact opposite—it’s a low-down trick to go behind a fellow’s back and start ragging a girl. Any fellow who does that ought to be jolly well thrashed and what’s more, will be if I catch him at it again.”

“Do tell me what’s happened.”

“This way of going on is simply rotten,” said Norheys. “As long as it was merely a matter of Uncle Ned persecuting me day and night and pelting me with oil paintings of Indian squaws, I didn’t mind. He’s my uncle, and I’m prepared to put up with a good deal from him rather than start a beastly whirlpool of family jars. But it’s a bit too thick when he sets on a slimy Jewish money-lender to try bribing Viola to give me up. I didn’t think Uncle Ned would have played it as low down as that.”

“I’m perfectly certain,” I said, “that he never did any such thing.”

Lord Edmund was extremely anxious to rescue the head of his family from an undesirable entanglement and he wanted to see Norheys established as a European sovereign. But he would not hire a Jew to offer bribes to Miss Temple.

“Anyhow,” said Norheys, “the brute came, a fat flabby animal, and tried to persuade Viola to take a check for ten thousand pounds. If Uncle Ned didn’t send him, who did?”

“Did you hear his name?”

“Yes, I did. He sent in his card to Viola and she kept it. Here it is.”

He handed me a visiting-card. I half expected the name I saw on it—Procopius Cable.

“That’s the same swine,” said Norheys, “who’s doing the deal with Uncle Ned about the oil.”

“Exactly. But I’m sure your uncle didn’t send him to bribe Miss Temple.”

Procopius Cable, eager to get at the Lystrian oil, had tired of Troyte’s cautious diplomacy and begun to act for himself. He had made a mess of it, a far worse mess than I knew or guessed then.

“Viola threw his dirty money in his face,” said Norheys, “and you’d have thought that would have been enough for him. But it wasn’t. When he saw she wasn’t going to be bribed he took a high moral tone with her, talked about ruining the prospects of a bright young life—mine, the beast meant, not hers. There’d have been some sense in talking about getting married ruining her prospects considering the way she dances. But what was the good of talking about ruining me? All the same, that’s what he did. He told her I stood a four to one chance of being a king if only she’d let me off my engagement. He told her all about that Calypso girl and what a scoop it would be for me to marry her. I happened to be round in Viola’s flat an hour later and I found the poor girl crying. Now, what do you think of that, Uncle Bill?”

“Did she promise to give you up?”

“Of course she didn’t. And what the devil good would it have been if she had? I wouldn’t have given her up. What I always say is this: If a fellow won’t give up a girl, there’s no use the girl’s trying to give up the fellow, especially if she happens to be fond of him. You see what I mean, don’t you, Uncle Bill? Well, after making Viola cry, which is a thing no man would do unless he was an actual devil, that octopus took to threatening her. He said that, being a princess, the Calypso girl could marry me if she chose; only had to say the word and there we were. Viola doesn’t know much about princesses, but she didn’t believe that. All the same, it made her more than a bit uncomfortable.”

It seems, as I heard afterward, to have roused Miss Temple to simple but effective action. I do not know whether she told Norheys what she had done. If she did, he did not confide in me.

“So you can tell Uncle Ned,” he said, “to keep that disgusting Semitic toad of his chained up for the future. If I catch him mouching round Viola’s flat again there’ll be murder done.”

“I’m afraid,” I said, “that this will be a disappointment to your uncle. He’s rather set his heart on seeing you King of Lystria.”

“I haven’t the slightest objection to being King of Lystria.”

“But you can’t be if you won’t marry the princess.”

“I’m not so sure about that,” said Norheys. “What I always say is this: A fellow like Uncle Ned, who is a Cabinet Minister and head bottle-washer to all the Leagues of Nations and Councils of Ambassadors and so forth, a fellow in that position can jolly well work things if he chooses. After all, if a thing can’t be done in one way it generally can in another. Just you try to make that clear to Uncle Ned. Tell him I’m an uncommonly dutiful nephew and all that, as keen as nuts on bucking up the family and pouring oil all over the good old empire; but there’s one thing I can’t and won’t do.”

“Marry the princess?”

“No. I’ll marry her if I have to, but I won’t go back on Viola.”

I never made all that clear to Troyte. Indeed, I never tried to. But Norheys succeeded in explaining himself, more or less, to his uncle, and I heard no more of the matter for some little time.

Another worry—a small, even a ridiculous one—came to make my life uneasy. My sister Emily wrote to me that she had lost a curate. She wanted me to set the whole machinery of the British Empire to work to find the creature for her. He was not, it appeared, a particularly valuable curate. Emily admitted that she did not like him. She went so far as to say that he was not the sort of man who ought to have been in Holy Orders. But he was the only curate there was in Emily’s parish and they could not get on without him, because the rector, Canon Pyke, had fallen suddenly ill.

The curate had gone off on a holiday, which, according to Emily, he did not deserve. Almost immediately after his departure Canon Pyke had broken down.

“All we’ve heard from him since he left is one post-card which came from Berlin and has a picture of a museum on it. I don’t think, considering all that happened during the war, that Berlin is a place a clergyman ought to go to for a holiday, not a good clergyman. It seems to me a callous thing to do, scarcely what I should call Christian. But I dare say I’m prejudiced. Anyhow, he went there. At least he said he was going there, and I suppose he really did, for that is where the post-card came from. He left his address before he started in case anything went wrong in the parish and we wanted him back. Directly the poor canon broke down Mrs. Pyke telegraphed to Berlin, but no answer came. Then I telegraphed. When I got no answer I telegraphed again to the manager of the hotel. I got a reply saying that he had left two days after he arrived and not given any address.

“Now I know that with your influence and all your London friends—I am sure Lord Edmund Troyte could do something to help us. . . .”

Apparently I was to set our consular service to work to find a curate who was rampaging about Central Europe. I should look a nice fool if I went to the Foreign Office with a request like that. I was inclined to agree with Emily. That curate of hers should never have been a clergyman. No curate ought to disappear leaving no address behind him, when his rector lies ill and my sister Emily is hungry for her accustomed Sunday sermon. I sympathized with her, and with Canon Pyke, and with the parish. I even sympathized slightly with the curate. But I was not going to do anything.

I slipped Emily’s letter into the “Unanswered” basket on top of her earlier letter about Janet Church. But I was not allowed to dismiss the matter from my mind. I got another letter the next day.

“I’m afraid I forgot to mention,” she wrote, “that the address he gave us was the Adlon Hotel. He said that if anything went wrong in the parish he would come back at once.”

She had not forgotten to give me that address. I remembered quite well that the curate meant to stop at the Adlon. The thing impressed itself on me because the Adlon is the most fashionable hotel in Berlin and might be supposed to be beyond a curate’s means. That letter joined the other two in my basket. What Emily had forgotten to tell me was the curate’s name. That rather tied my hands, or would have tied them if I had meant to do anything.

Next day I got a fourth letter from Emily. In it she enclosed twelve penny stamps.

“Please get our ambassador in Berlin to telegraph,” she wrote, “as soon as he finds out where our curate is. I don’t know what it costs to send a telegram from Berlin, but I send twelve stamps which ought to be enough considering the present state of the exchange. Besides, an ambassador probably gets his telegrams sent cheap.”

That letter joined the others in the basket.

By the same post came one from Canon Pyke himself written in pencil from his bed. He began apologetically. He would never have dreamed of troubling me with his private affairs had not his friend Mrs. Chambers (my sister Emily) urged him to write to me on a subject very near to his heart at the moment—the lost curate.

“The dear fellow,” he went on, “is not in all respects exactly what a clergyman ought to be. At the same time, he is a worthy young man, full of heartiness and energy. What makes us fear that he may have involved himself in some serious difficulty is that he is by natural disposition both daring and adventurous, more so perhaps than one of our younger clergy ought to be. If you can . . .”

He, too, seemed to think that I ought to get the Foreign Office to send out a search party to Berlin or perhaps to get the ambassador and the head of the Inter-Allied Mission of Control to take the matter up.

His letter joined Emily’s in the basket.

Then Emily took to telegraphing to me. She is a frugal woman whose spare money goes to missionary societies, but she spent a lot on telegrams. The first cost two-and-sixpence, and they kept getting longer and longer. The fourth can not have been sent for less than ten shillings. There was no doubt that she was in earnest about finding that curate.

I disposed of the fourth telegram in the usual way. The pile in the basket on my desk was becoming large. If Emily means to make a habit of corresponding with me about lost curates she must give me another unanswered letter basket next Christmas.

Then my servant brought me in some letters which had just arrived by post. I glanced at the envelopes anxiously, fearing that either Emily or her dear Canon Pyke had written again. I was relieved to find that the only real letter was addressed in Edmund Troyte’s writing. Along with it was an unmistakable bill with a London post-mark on the envelope, and a post-card. I began with Edmund Troyte.

He invited me to dine with him that very evening.

“You and I,” he wrote, “nobody else. I want to talk to you about Norheys.”

I was getting a little tired of being talked to about Norheys. I admit that I am that young man’s godfather, but that does not make me responsible for all his actions. Lord Edmund ought to be capable of looking after his own nephew. Then it occurred to me that if Edmund Troyte went on worrying me I might as well have the satisfaction of worrying him. I would tell him the story of Emily’s curate and see how he liked being consulted about business which is none of his. I telephoned my acceptance of his invitation and then went back to the bill and the post-card.

The bill was totally uninteresting. The post-card came from Janet Church and announced that she had got as far as Berlin and meant to go farther. Janet is fairly well off and likes to be as comfortable as she can when traveling. She was staying in the Adlon Hotel. The address reminded me of Emily’s curate and a really brilliant idea occurred to me. Janet Church had given me a great deal of trouble. I would give her a little in return.

I wrote her a long letter in which I explained that a really valuable curate had disappeared, having been last heard of at the Adlon Hotel in Berlin. I said that foul play was suspected, which I am sure was true. Emily evidently thought that the young man had gone off on a disreputable spree, which would have been foul play on his part. Canon Pyke feared that he had been decoyed into a den of infamy and there robbed—foul play on the part of some one else. I asked Janet to stay a few days longer in Berlin to go into the matter thoroughly. It was just the sort of thing she ought to do. What is the good of working for World Peace through the Union of Christian Churches if the world, combined with the flesh and the devil, is kidnapping the clergy?

“The curate’s name,” I wrote, “has unfortunately not been told me. But that won’t be any real obstacle. There can not be many English curates at large in Berlin. If you find one at all, he’ll probably be the one we want. He has a hearty manner, is full of energy and good spirits. In all probability his face is round and plump. My sister Emily is most anxious about him, so I’m sure you’ll do your best.”

Then I wrote to Emily.

“I’m delighted to help in any way I can in the good work of finding your lost curate. I am dining with Edmund Troyte this evening and intend to put the whole case before him. He is, as you know, minister for Balkan affairs, and though Berlin is not actually in the Balkans, it is quite likely that your curate may have drifted eastward. So many people do, don’t they?—and will be found in Bukarest or Sophia. You can confidently count on everything possible being done. I have also written to Janet Church, who is in Berlin. She is just the kind of woman who will find a curate however carefully he is hidden—or, if your suspicion is justified, however carefully he has hidden himself. But I hope you are wrong about him. Poor boy. I can not help thinking of him as a nice, straightforward, merry lad, a little lacking perhaps in serious purpose, but sound at heart. It would be a thousand pities if he were permanently lost. But we need not anticipate that. The unanswered letter basket you gave me at Christmas is one of the most useful things I have ever had. I don’t know how I should get on without it. Give my kind regards to the canon.”