Alias the Lone Wolf

TO ROBERT AITKEN SWAN WHOSE FRIENDSHIP I HAVE TRIED IN MANY OTHER WAYS, THIS YARN WITH DIFFIDENCE IS DEDICATED
NOTE: This is the fourth of the Lone Wolf stories. Its predecessors were, in chronological sequence, The Lone Wolf, The False Faces, Red Masquerade.
Each story, however, is entirely self-contained and independent of the others.
If it matters....
LOUIS JOSEPH VANCE
Westport--9 September, 1921.
Through the suave, warm radiance of that afternoon of Spring in England a gentleman of modest and commonly amiable deportment bore a rueful countenance down Piccadilly and into Halfmoon street, where presently he introduced it to one whom he found awaiting him in his lodgings, much at ease in his easiest chair, making free with his whiskey and tobacco, and reading a slender brown volume selected from his shelves.
This dégagé person was patently an Englishman, though there were traces of Oriental ancestry in his cast. The other, he of the doleful habit, was as unmistakably of Gallic pattern, though he dressed and carried himself in a thoroughly Anglo-Saxon fashion, and even seemed a trace intrigued when greeted by a name distinctively French.
For the Englishman, rousing from his appropriated ease, dropped his book to the floor beside the chair, uprose and extended a cordial hand, exclaiming: H'are ye, Monsieur Duchemin?
To this the other responded, after a slight pause, obscurely enough: Oh! ancient history, eh? Well, for the matter of that: How are you, Mister Wertheimer?
Their hands fell apart, and Monsieur Duchemin proceeded to do away his hat and stick and chamois gloves; while his friend, straddling in front of a cold grate and extending his hands to an imaginary blaze, covered with a mild complaint the curiosity excited by a brief study of that face of melancholy.
Pretty way you've got of making your friends wait on your pleasure. Here I've wasted upwards of two hours of His Majesty's time...