"Thank you, oh! Ah! Thank you! Thank you again! Thank you most warmly!" said his host more and more nervously. "Really you know, we must not be seen together. Pray take your time, Mr. Collop; the ladies are always late coming down."
"Ah, that's their sort, ain't it? Girls are the devil nowadays, aren't they?" said Mr. Collop in his friendliest tones; and with that farewell in his ears the master of the house slipped out.
The Home Secretary's next action was to go straight to McTaggart's room. It was an act of decision and initiative that you would hardly have expected in so well-bred a man. But suffering is a powerful tonic. He knew what he was after. He had to speak. He would come boldly, directly and simply. He would tell the young man of what he was accused, and ask him straightforwardly and at once to clear himself—or at any rate to say "yes" or "no." He knocked on the door; he went in; and he began thus:
"Ah, Mr. McTaggart! Mr. McTaggart! I'm afraid I am interrupting you in your dressing. It is really very rude of me! I wish ... But the fact is ... It's rather important.... I want to put it to you as clearly as I can, and you'll understand me when I say that time presses after a fashion ... so to speak...."
McTaggart was at the last stage when the male brushes the hair before he puts on the coat; all the rest of the detestable ritual was accomplished, including the sacrosanct tie. He stood gaping with his round face, a brush in either hand. Then he said:
"Yes, certainly, sir, if you please." He rapidly brushed his disordered hair into a shape yet more disordered, struggled into his coat, and then, with an odd reminiscence of manner elsewhere, said, "Won't you sit down," feeling that he was a temporary host, as it were, a host within his host's house; a nest of Chinese boxes.
"Thank you," said the Home Secretary. "Thank you. Thank you very much. Thank you." And he sank his long, lean and therefore gentlemanly body into the only armchair. He crossed his long, lean and therefore gentlemanly legs, poised his two hands together like a steep Norwegian roof, and said:
"Mr. McTaggart, you will think it very odd of me, this invasion of your ... er, your, ah ... privacy? Yes, your privacy, er! If I may say so. But there is something very important I must say to you before we go down to dinner."
"Yes, sir," said McTaggart, still expectant, as he slowly filled his pockets with the various things which journalists carry about with them, even among the great, and which destroy the shape of their clothes.
"Mr. McTaggart ..." began the Home Secretary desperately, now leaning forward with his elbow on his knee and his forehead in his hand. "What I have to say is not very easy, but it is best to get these difficult things over at once. Don't you think so?"