The mystery at lovers' cave

“If,” said Roger Sheringham, helping himself to a third piece of toast, “your brain had as many kinks in it as your trousers have few, Anthony, you would have had the intelligence to find out our train from St. Pancras this morning before you ever arrived here last night.”

“There’s a telephone here and an enquiry office at St. Pancras, I believe,” retorted his cousin. “Couldn’t the two be connected in some way?”

“You write to me and ask me to waste my valuable time in amusing you on your holiday,” Roger pursued indignantly. “I not only consent but very kindly allow you to choose the place we shall go to and book our rooms for us; I even agree to harbour you here for a night before we start and submit to your company and your chattering at my own breakfast-table (a thing peculiarly offensive to any right-minded man and destroying at one blow the chief and abiding joy of bachelorhood). I do all this, I say, and what is my reward? You refuse point-blank even to find out the time of our train from St. Pancras!”

“I say, did you see this?” exclaimed Anthony, glancing up from the Daily Courier. “Kent all out for forty-seven on a plumb wicket at Blackheath! Whew!”

“If you were to turn to the centre of the paper,” replied Roger coldly, “I think you might find some rather more interesting reading matter than the performances of Kent on plumb wickets at Blackheath. The editorial page, for instance.”

“Meaning there’s another of your crime articles in?” Anthony asked, flicking back the pages. “Yes, I’ve been reading some of them. They’re really not at all bad, Roger.”

“Thank you very much indeed,” Roger murmured gratefully. “Out of the mouths of babes and sucklings! Anyhow, you understood them, did you? That’s good. I was trying to write down to the standard of intelligence of the ordinary Courier reader. I appear to have succeeded.”

“This is rather interesting,” Anthony remarked, his eyes on the required page.

“Well, yes,” said Roger modestly, folding up his napkin. “I did rather flatter myself that I’d——”

“This article on ‘Do Shingled Heads Mean Shingled Hearts?’ By Jove, that’s an idea, isn’t it? You see what he’s getting at. Boyishness, and all that. He says——”

“I think you’ve mistaken the column,” Roger interrupted coldly. “The one you’re looking for is on the right, next to the correspondence.”

“Correspondence?” repeated Anthony vaguely. “Oh, yes; I’ve got it. ‘Clergymen Who Gabble. Sir: I attended the burial service of my great-aunt by marriage last Thursday and was exceedingly distressed by the slipshod way in which the officiating clergyman read the——’”

“I don’t think I’ll go for a holiday with you, Anthony, after all!” observed Roger suddenly, rising to his feet with such vehemence that his chair fell violently to the floor behind him.

“You’ve knocked over your chair,” said Anthony, quite seriously.

At this point, very fortunately, the telephone-bell rang.

“Hullo!” said Roger into the mouth-piece, more loudly than was strictly necessary.

“Hullo!” answered a voice. “Is that Mr. Sheringham?”

“No! He left for Derbyshire early this morning.”

“Oh, come!” chided the voice gently. “Not before eleven o’clock, surely. He wouldn’t go without his breakfast, would he?”

“Who’s speaking?”

“Burgoyne, Daily Courier. Seriously, Sheringham, I’m very relieved that I’ve caught you. Listen!”

Roger listened. As he did so his face gradually cleared and a look of intense excitement began to take the place of the portentous frown he had been wearing.