‘Let’s go and lunch there, shall we?’ she suggested, and in a few minutes’ time the Smithly-Dubb mind was contemplating at close quarters a happy vista of baked meats and approved vintage.

‘Are you going to start with caviare? I am,’ confided Lady Drakmanton, and the Smithly-Dubbs started with caviare. The subsequent dishes were chosen in the same ambitious spirit, and by the time they had arrived at the wild duck course it was beginning to be a rather expensive lunch.

The conversation hardly kept pace with the brilliancy of the menu. Repeated references on the part of the guests to the local political conditions and prospects in Sir James’s constituency were met with vague ‘ahs’ and ‘indeeds’ from Lady Drakmanton, who might have been expected to be specially interested.

‘I think when the Insurance Act is a little better understood it will lose some of its present unpopularity,’ hazarded Cecilia Smithly-Dubb.

‘Will it? I dare say. I’m afraid politics don’t interest me very much,’ said Lady Drakmanton.

The three Miss Smithly-Dubbs put down their cups of Turkish coffee and stared. Then they broke into protesting giggles.

‘Of course, you’re joking,’ they said.

‘Not me,’ was the disconcerting answer; ‘I can’t make head or tail of these bothering old politics. Never could, and never want to. I’ve quite enough to do to manage my own affairs, and that’s a fact.’

‘But,’ exclaimed Amanda Smithly-Dubb, with a squeal of bewilderment breaking into her voice, ‘I was told you spoke so informingly about the Insurance Act at one of our social evenings.’

It was Lady Drakmanton who stared now. ‘Do you know,’ she said, with a scared look around her, ‘rather a dreadful thing is happening. I’m suffering from a complete loss of memory. I can’t even think who I am. I remember meeting you somewhere, and I remember you asking me to come and lunch with you here, and that I accepted your kind invitation. Beyond that my mind is a positive blank.’

The scared look was transferred with intensified poignancy to the faces of her companions.

‘You asked us to lunch,’ they exclaimed hurriedly. That seemed a more immediately important point to clear up than the question of identity.

‘Oh, no,’ said the vanishing hostess, ‘that I do remember about. You insisted on my coming here because the feeding was so good, and I must say it comes up to all you said about it. A very nice lunch it’s been. What I’m worrying about is, who on earth am I? I haven’t the faintest notion.’

‘You are Lady Drakmanton,’ exclaimed the three sisters in chorus.

‘Now, don’t make fun of me,’ she replied crossly. ‘I happen to know her quite well by sight, and she isn’t a bit like me. And it’s an odd thing you should have mentioned her, for it so happens she’s just come into the room. That lady in black with the yellow plume in her hat, there over by the door.’

The Smithly-Dubbs looked in the indicated direction, and the uneasiness in their eyes deepened into horror. In outward appearance the lady who had just entered the room certainly came rather nearer to their recollection of their Member’s wife than the individual who was sitting at table with them.

‘Who are you, then, if that is Lady Drakmanton?’ they asked in panic-stricken bewilderment.

‘That is just what I don’t know,’ was the answer; ‘and you don’t seem to know much better than I do.’

‘You came up to us in the club—’