She staggered off and I bathed and dressed. Mummy was a notoriously late riser so I went up on deck and immediately saw my American friend, among a group of younger men, playing quoits again. “Come and join us,” he called.

I was glad to see no Tubby Halliday among them and went over to them.

“I say. You’re Georgiana Rannoch, aren’t you?” one of them exclaimed.

Oh Lord. Not another newspaper reporter, I thought.

He was tall and gangly with hair that flopped forward across his forehead and a rather silly, vacant-looking face. He bounded toward me like an over-keen puppy. At the very moment I realized I knew him he said, “I’m Algie. Algie Broxley-Foggett. We met at a hunt ball during your season. At the Windermeres’.”

“Oh yes, I do remember now,” I said. “Didn’t you set the curtains on fire?”

He grinned. “Oh that. Silly little accident with a cigarette I thought I’d put out. No harm intended, what? I’m afraid things just seem to happen to me. Accident-prone, y’know.”

He took the quoit that was handed to him and hurled it at the peg. Instead it went sailing up into the air and struck an elderly military-looking man, taking his constitutional around the deck with his wife, in the back of the head.

“What the devil?” he demanded, spinning around.

“Sorry, and all that,” Algie said with an apologetic grin. “Sudden gust of wind, don’t you know.”

He turned back to us again. “See what I mean? The pater says I’m an utter disaster. That’s putting it a bit strongly, I think. I’d say more like a disappointment, or maybe even a hopeless case, but not a complete disaster. But he got a bit huffy when I flooded the bathroom and the ceiling came down on some rather valuable paintings. So he bought me a one-way ticket to America and told me to go out West and make a man of myself.”

“What will you be doing?” I asked.

“His pa wants him to work on a ranch to toughen him up,” my American friend said. “He’ll probably stampede the whole darned herd.”

“I probably will,” Algie said easily. “And be trampled in the process. Serve the old man right if his son and heir is flattened and the title dies out. Come on, Georgie. Your turn.”

Strangely enough I tossed the quoit remarkably well. Maybe it was knowing that there was someone on board who was more clumsy and accident-prone than I was that gave me reassurance. After that it was suggested that we go down for a swim. It was strange to be swimming in that echoing, cavernous place. There was something sinister about it and when Algie did a cannonball on top of a large American lady and she made such a fuss that we beat a hasty retreat, I was glad to be back in the bright sunlight.