‘Not at all,’ said the young man. ‘I was brought up in the boot trade. My father’s a sort of boot king. He wanted me to go into the trade—marry and settle down. All that sort of thing. Nobody in particular—just the principle of the thing. But I wanted to be an artist.’ He sighed.

‘I’m so sorry,’ said Jane kindly.

‘I’ve been trying for six years. There’s no blinking it. I’m a rotten painter. I’ve a good mind to chuck it and go home like the prodigal son. There’s a good billet waiting for me.’

‘A job is the great thing,’ agreed Jane wistfully. ‘Do you think you could get me one trying on boots somewhere?’

‘I could give you a better one than that—if you’d take it.’

‘Oh, what?’

‘Never mind now. I’ll tell you later. You know, until yesterday I never saw a girl I felt I could marry.’

‘Yesterday?’

‘At the bazaar. And then I saw her—the one and only Her!’

He looked very hard at Jane.

‘How beautiful the delphiniums are,’ said Jane hurriedly, with very pink cheeks.

‘They’re lupins,’ said the young man.

‘It doesn’t matter,’ said Jane.

‘Not a bit,’ he agreed. And he drew a little nearer.

The Disappearance of Mr Davenheim

Poirot and I were expecting our old friend Inspector Japp of Scotland Yard to tea. We were sitting round the tea-table awaiting his arrival. Poirot had just finished carefully straightening the cups and saucers which our landlady was in the habit of throwing, rather than placing, on the table. He had also breathed heavily on the metal teapot, and polished it with a silk handkerchief. The kettle was on the boil, and a small enamel saucepan beside it contained some thick, sweet chocolate which was more to Poirot’s palate than what he described as ‘your English poison’.

A sharp ‘rat-tat’ sounded below, and a few minutes afterwards Japp entered briskly.

‘Hope I’m not late,’ he said as he greeted us. ‘To tell the truth, I was yarning with Miller, the man who’s in charge of the Davenheim case.’

I pricked up my ears. For the last three days the papers had been full of the strange disappearance of Mr Davenheim, senior partner of Davenheim and Salmon, the well-known bankers and financiers. On Saturday last he had walked out of his house, and had never been seen since. I looked forward to extracting some interesting details from Japp.

‘I should have thought,’ I remarked, ‘that it would be almost impossible for anyone to “disappear” nowadays.’

Poirot moved a plate of bread and butter the eighth of an inch, and said sharply:

‘Be exact, my friend. What do you mean by “disappear”? To which class of disappearance are you referring?’

‘Are disappearances classified and labelled, then?’ I laughed.

Japp smiled also. Poirot frowned at both of us.