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“But it’s too ridiculous! I–we–why we ALL remember studying Xingu last year–or the year before last,” Mrs. Ballinger stammered.

“I thought I did when YOU said so,” Laura Glyde avowed.

“I said so?” cried Mrs. Ballinger.

“Yes. You said it had crowded everything else out of your mind.”

“Well, YOU said it had changed your whole life!”

“For that matter, Miss Van Vluyck said she had never grudged the time she’d given it.”

Mrs. Plinth interposed: “I made it clear that I knew nothing whatever of the original.”

Mrs. Ballinger broke off the dispute with a groan. “Oh, what does it all matter if she’s been making fools of us? I believe Miss Van Vluyck’s right–she was talking of the river all the while!”

“How could she? It’s too preposterous,” Miss Glyde exclaimed.

“Listen.” Miss Van Vluyck had repossessed herself of the Encyclopaedia, and restored her spectacles to a nose reddened by excitement. “‘The Xingu, one of the principal rivers of Brazil, rises on the plateau of Mato Grosso, and flows in a northerly direction for a length of no less than one thousand one hundred and eighteen miles, entering the Amazon near the mouth of the latter river. The upper course of the Xingu is auriferous and fed by numerous branches. Its source was first discovered in 1884 by the German explorer von den Steinen, after a difficult and dangerous expedition through a region inhabited by tribes still in the Stone Age of culture.'”

The ladies received this communication in a state of stupefied silence from which Mrs. Leveret was the first to rally. “She certainly DID speak of its having branches.”

The word seemed to snap the last thread of their incredulity. “And of its great length,” gasped Mrs. Ballinger.

“She said it was awfully deep, and you couldn’t skip–you just had to wade through,” Miss Glyde subjoined.

The idea worked its way more slowly through Mrs. Plinth’s compact resistances. “How could there be anything improper about a river?” she inquired.

“Improper?”

“Why, what she said about the source–that it was corrupt?”

“Not corrupt, but hard to get at,” Laura Glyde corrected. “Some one who’d been there had told her so. I daresay it was the explorer himself–doesn’t it say the expedition was dangerous?”

“‘Difficult and dangerous,'” read Miss Van Vluyck.

Mrs. Ballinger pressed her hands to her throbbing temples. “There’s nothing she said that wouldn’t apply to a river–to this river!” She swung about excitedly to the other members. “Why, do you remember her telling us that she hadn’t read ‘The Supreme Instant’ because she’d taken it on a boating party while she was staying with her brother, and some one had ‘shied’ it overboard– ‘shied’ of course was her own expression?”

The ladies breathlessly signified that the expression had not escaped them.

“Well–and then didn’t she tell Osric Dane that one of her books was simply saturated with Xingu? Of course it was, if some of Mrs. Roby’s rowdy friends had thrown it into the river!”

This surprising reconstruction of the scene in which they had just participated left the members of the Lunch Club inarticulate. At length Mrs. Plinth, after visibly labouring with the problem, said in a heavy tone: “Osric Dane was taken in too.”

Mrs. Leveret took courage at this. “Perhaps that’s what Mrs. Roby did it for. She said Osric Dane was a brute, and she may have wanted to give her a lesson.”

Miss Van Vluyck frowned. “It was hardly worth while to do it at our expense.”

“At least,” said Miss Glyde with a touch of bitterness, “she succeeded in interesting her, which was more than we did.”

“What chance had we?” rejoined Mrs. Ballinger. “Mrs. Roby monopolised her from the first. And THAT, I’ve no doubt, was her purpose–to give Osric Dane a false impression of her own standing in the Club. She would hesitate at nothing to attract attention: we all know how she took in poor Professor Foreland.”