"Still, you go to Lords occasionally, I suppose," she suggested.
Yes, Philip went to Lords.
"And I hope you are Middlesex."
Yes; on consideration, Philip was Middlesex.
"My fiancé plays for Middlesex," mentioned Miss Garvey carelessly.
Philip, secretly blessing this unknown cricketer, said eagerly:—
"I should like to hear about him"—implying that the rest of Middlesex did not matter.
After that he enjoyed a welcome rest. By occasionally supplying such fuel as, "What did he do against the Australians in the fourth Test Match?" or, "What does he think about the off-theory?" he maintained a full head of steam on Miss Garvey for something like twenty minutes. He sat thankfully listening and watching the clock, secure in the knowledge that time was slipping away and that Timothy had promised that their call should not extend beyond half-past five.
"Another five minutes and we are out of the wood," he said to himself.
But he was mistaken. He had just accompanied Miss Garvey (chaperoned, of course, by the fiancé) step by step, match by match, through an entire cricket-tour in the Antipodes, including five Test Matches (with a special excursion up-country in order to see the fiancé score a century against Twenty-Two of Woolloomoolloo), when his hostess once more intervened, with the inevitable sentence:—