“Who is Dora Mason?” enquired Millie, quickly.
“A plain, elderly sort of female who used to be my aunt’s secretary,” replied Ukridge, with equal promptness.
Personally, I remembered Miss Mason as a rather unusually pretty and attractive girl, but I felt that it would be injudicious to say so. I contented myself with making a mental note to the effect that Ukridge, whatever his drawbacks as a husband, had at any rate that ready tact which is so helpful in the home.
“Miss Mason,” he proceeded, speaking, I thought, in a manner a shade more careful and measured, “used to talk to me about her job from time to time. I was sorry for the poor old thing, you understand, because hers was a grey life, and I made rather a point of trying to cheer her up now and then.”
“How like you, dear!”
It was not I who spoke—it was Millie. She regarded her betrothed with shining and admiring eyes, and I could see that she was thinking that my description of him as a modern Galahad was altogether too tame.
“And one of the things she told me,” continued Ukridge, “was that my aunt, though she’s always speaking at these bally dinners, can’t say a word unless she has her speech written for her and memorises it. Miss Mason swore solemnly to me that she had written every word my aunt had spoken in public in the last two years. You begin to get on to the scheme, laddie? The long and the short of it is that we must get hold of that speech she’s going to deliver at the Pen and Ink Club binge. We must intercept it, old horse, before it can reach her. We shall thus spike her guns. Collar that speech, Corky, old man, before she can get her hooks on it, and you can take it from me that she’ll find she has a headache on Friday night and can’t appear.”
There stole over me that sickening conviction that comes to those in peril that I was for it.
“But it may be too late,” I faltered, with a last feeble effort at self-preservation. “She may have the speech already.”
“Not a chance. I know what she’s like when she’s finishing one of these beastly books. No distractions of any sort are permitted. Wassick, the secretary bloke, will have had instructions to send the thing to her by registered post to arrive Friday morning, so that she can study it in the train. Now, listen carefully, laddie, for I have thought this thing out to the last detail. My aunt is at her cottage at Market Deeping, in Sussex. I don’t know how the trains go, but there’s sure to be one that’ll get me to Market Deeping to-night. Directly I arrive I shall send a wire to Wassick—signed ‘Ukridge,’” said the schemer. “I have a perfect right to sign telegrams ‘Ukridge,’” he added, virtuously, “in which I tell him to hand the speech over to a gentleman who will call for it, as arrangements have been made for him to take it down to the cottage. All you have to do is to call at my aunt’s house, see Wassick—a splendid fellow, and just the sort of chump who won’t suspect a thing—get the manuscript, and biff off. Once round the corner, you dump it in the nearest garbage-box, and all is well.”