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“I don’t blame you, my man,” said Basil coolly. “But I want your whiskers. And your bald head. Do they belong to Captain Fraser?”

“No, no,” said Mr Shorter, laughing, “we provide them ourselves. They don’t belong to Captain Fraser.”

“What the deuce does all this mean?” I almost screamed. “Are you all in an infernal nightmare? Why should Mr Shorter’s bald head belong to Captain Fraser? How could it? What the deuce has Captain Fraser to do with the affair? What is the matter with him? You dined with him, Basil.”

“No,” said Grant, “I didn’t.”

“Didn’t you go to Mrs Thornton’s dinner-party?” I asked, staring. “Why not?”

“Well,” said Basil, with a slow and singular smile, “the fact is I was detained by a visitor. I have him, as a point of fact, in my bedroom.”

“In your bedroom?” I repeated; but my imagination had reached that point when he might have said in his coal scuttle or his waistcoat pocket.

Grant stepped to the door of an inner room, flung it open and walked in. Then he came out again with the last of the bodily wonders of that wild night. He introduced into the sitting-room, in an apologetic manner, and by the nape of the neck, a limp clergyman with a bald head, white whiskers and a plaid shawl.

“Sit down, gentlemen,” cried Grant, striking his hands heartily. “Sit down all of you and have a glass of wine. As you say, there is no harm in it, and if Captain Fraser had simply dropped me a hint I could have saved him from dropping a good sum of money. Not that you would have liked that, eh?”

The two duplicate clergymen, who were sipping their Burgundy with two duplicate grins, laughed heartily at this, and one of them carelessly pulled off his whiskers and laid them on the table.

“Basil,” I said, “if you are my friend, save me. What is all this?”

He laughed again.

“Only another addition, Cherub, to your collection of Queer Trades. These two gentlemen (whose health I have now the pleasure of drinking) are Professional Detainers.”

“And what on earth’s that?” I asked.

“It’s really very simple, Mr Swinburne,” began he who had once been the Rev. Ellis Shorter, of Chuntsey, in Essex; and it gave me a shock indescribable to hear out of that pompous and familiar form come no longer its own pompous and familiar voice, but the brisk sharp tones of a young city man. “It is really nothing very important. We are paid by our clients to detain in conversation, on some harmless pretext, people whom they want out of the way for a few hours. And Captain Fraser–” and with that he hesitated and smiled.

Basil smiled also. He intervened.

“The fact is that Captain Fraser, who is one of my best friends, wanted us both out of the way very much. He is sailing tonight for East Africa, and the lady with whom we were all to have dined is–er–what is I believe described as ‘the romance of his life’. He wanted that two hours with her, and employed these two reverend gentlemen to detain us at our houses so as to let him have the field to himself.”

“And of course,” said the late Mr Shorter apologetically to me, “as I had to keep a gentleman at home from keeping an appointment with a lady, I had to come with something rather hot and strong–rather urgent. It wouldn’t have done to be tame.”

“Oh,” I said, “I acquit you of tameness.”

“Thank you, sir,” said the man respectfully, “always very grateful for any recommendation, sir.”

The other man idly pushed back his artificial bald head, revealing close red hair, and spoke dreamily, perhaps under the influence of Basil’s admirable Burgundy.

“It’s wonderful how common it’s getting, gentlemen. Our office is busy from morning till night. I’ve no doubt you’ve often knocked up against us before. You just take notice. When an old bachelor goes on boring you with hunting stories, when you’re burning to be introduced to somebody, he’s from our bureau. When a lady calls on parish work and stops hours, just when you wanted to go to the Robinsons’, she’s from our bureau. The Robinson hand, sir, may be darkly seen.”

“There is one thing I don’t understand,” I said. “Why you are both vicars.”

A shade crossed the brow of the temporary incumbent of Chuntsey, in Essex.

“That may have been a mistake, sir,” he said. “But it was not our fault. It was all the munificence of Captain Fraser. He requested that the highest price and talent on our tariff should be employed to detain you gentlemen. Now the highest payment in our office goes to those who impersonate vicars, as being the most respectable and more of a strain. We are paid five guineas a visit. We have had the good fortune to satisfy the firm with our work; and we are now permanently vicars. Before that we had two years as colonels, the next in our scale. Colonels are four guineas.”