My brother's face lost all preoccupation. He was a naval officer, you will remember, and, though a distinguished one, was as young gentlemen in that Service usually are in both age and inclination.
"Well, I'll go," Lockhart remarked, with just a trace of his old bitterness.
"You sit where you are, old soul," I told him. "Bernard, both the girls are only stepdaughters of the Doctor, who, they have told me, did not treat their mother very well and who is a perfect tyrant to them. They're as true as steel; I can answer for them. They will be of tremendous help."
"Leave it all to me," he replied. "I am skipper of this from now onwards. You follow my lead."
A minute or two afterwards the girls came in. Doris, as I have already explained, was as pretty as Venus, Cleopatra, and Gertie Millar all in one, and she only beat Marjorie by a short head. All the other girls I've ever met were simply "also ran."
Marjorie's hair was black. She was a brunette with olive-coloured skin and green eyes, like very dark, clear emeralds. She was extraordinarily lovely. Indeed, all three of us had seriously considered starting a picture postcard firm, with the girls as models and I to manage it, so that Doris and I could get married and have Marjorie to live with us. Rather a good scheme, only it would have needed at least two hundred pounds capital, which we hadn't got! Doris had on her engagement ring, which she generally wore on a string round her neck, underneath her blouse. I had put thirty shillings each way on "Baby Mine" for the Grand National and it had come off--hence the ring.
"Let me introduce you to my fiancée, Miss Joyce," I said to Bernard.
He took her hand and bowed over it, looking out of the corner of his eyes at Marjorie.
Little Lockhart gasped. "Babe that I am!" he said, "blind mole! To think that I have lived in this house with young John Carey for so long, the house honeycombed with secret wires, and an illicit engagement in progress under my nose, and I knew nothing of it!"
"Well, you are not the only person, Mr. Lockhart," Marjorie said. "And now I am going to fetch up dinner. Cook is out for the evening. Amy is in the plot. We've got soup--only tinned, but quite nice; there's a round of cold beef; and we will make an omelette on John's fire."