For a moment the room seemed to spin round me. I put down the transmitter and pressed my hand to my forehead. Then in a shaking voice I continued—"Of all the double-barrelled, unmitigated, blue-faced——"
"What number, please?" sang a sweet soprano voice. I rang off, and went to break the news to Arabella.
She was silent for a few moments, and then asked me suddenly, "Whereabouts in the stalls were those seats of ours?"
"Almost in the middle of the third row," I replied mournfully.
Arabella said no more, but with a rather disdainful smile on her face walked firmly to her little escritoire, sat down, wrote a note, and addressed it to Mrs. Messington-Smith.
"What have you said?" I asked, as she stamped her letter with a rather vicious jab on King George's left eye.
"Just that I am sorry about her old sore throat," she replied. "And then I went on, that wasn't it funny by the same post we had been given two stalls for The Purple Lie to-night in a very good place in the middle of the third row? She will get the letter by lunch-time," she added pensively, "and it will be so nice for her to know that we shall be sitting almost next to them."
"But we aren't going to The Purple Lie at all," I protested.
"No," she said, "and as a matter of fact I don't suppose the Messington-Smiths are either—now."
I left Arabella smiling triumphantly through her tears, but when I returned in the evening the breakfast-time frown had reappeared with even crinklier ramifications.