Barney gave considerable thought to where he should take Mary to dinner on the Thursday. It had to be a restaurant at which he was not known as Mr. Sullivan. That left open to him most of the more expensive places; for although his salary, coupled with the allowance his uncle made him, enabled him to live quite comfortably, he was not well enough off to go to them except occasionally when he was on a job and the bill, or a good part of it, could be charged up to his expense account. In this case that applied, and he wanted to do Mary well; moreover, he wanted to dance with her afterwards. But he had said nothing about that and spoken only of a quiet dinner; so, even if he turned up in a black tie, the odds were that she would not be wearing the sort of clothes in which she would be happy for him to take her to the Berkeley or the Savoy. At length he decided to go in a dark suit and take her to the Hungaria, as he had been there only a few times as a member of other people's parties, the food and band were good, and evening dress optional. So, using his title, he rang up and booked a table.

She was ready for him when he called for her in a taxi, and, as he expected, was dressed in a cocktail frock. At the sight of her his pulses quickened slightly, for she struck him as even better looking than as he had seen her in his thoughts during the past two days. Nevertheless, their evening together did not run with anything like the smoothness that he had hoped.

The reason for that was not far to seek. Ostensibly they were a well-matched young couple out for the sole purpose of enjoying one another's company; but actually each of them was deliberately deceiving the other, and finding it necessary to lie about nearly every question that cropped up.

Both, in preparation for the meeting, had thought out a false past and present for themselves. Barney had decided to take the role of the late Lord Larne's eldest son, who had been killed with his father in the aeroplane crash. He said that he had spent most of his life in Kenya and was over in England only on a long visit to go into the possibilities of opening a new Travel Agency, with London tie-ups, in Nairobi.