If one cannot command attention by one's admirable qualities one can at least be a nuisance.

His name is Albert Campion,” she said. “He came down in Anne Edgeware’s car and the first thing he did when he introduced himself was to show me a conjuring trick with a two-headed penny – he’s quite inoffensive, just a silly ass.

THE main thing to remember in autobiography, I have always thought, is not to let any damned modesty creep in to spoil the story. This adventure is mine, Albert Campion’s, and I am fairly certain that I was pretty nearly brilliant in it in spite of the fact that I so nearly got myself and old Lugg killed that I hear a harp quintet whenever I consider it.

George Abbershaw’s prosaic mind quivered on the verge of poetry when he looked at her.

Consider, o consider the lowly mole. His small hands are sore and his snout bleedeth.

Mr. Campion felt that among the ordeals by fire and by water there should now be numbered the ordeal by dinner at Socrates Close.

He used to be a burglar, you know. It’s the old story – lost his figure. As he says himself, it cramps your style when your only means of exit are the double doors in the front hall.

Women are terribly shocking to men, my dear. Don’t understand them. Like them. It saves such a lot of hurting one way and the other.

Most oddly he was not frightened. That alone he had learned from experience. With the danger would come the courage.

Mourning is not forgetting,’ he said gently, his helplessness vanishing and his voice becoming wise. ‘It is an undoing. Every minute tie has to be untied and something permanent and valuable recovered and assimilated from the knot. The end is gain, of course. Blessed are they that mourn, for they shall be made strong, in fact. But the process is like all other human births, painful and long and dangerous.