Lady Olive came slowly forward to meet him.
"Mr. Deane is going to make the usual excuses, I know," she declared. "Let us anticipate him, and say nothing about our wait. We won't even ask whether it was a directors' meeting, or a message from the governor of the Bank of England. Stirling, this is my cousin, Mary Elstree, and her husband, Major Elstree—Mr. Deane! The others are somewhere about. What a tiresome person Julia is! She has drifted away over there with a lot of people whom I don't know. That is the worst of taking Julia anywhere. I think that she would discover acquaintances in an A B C shop. Do find her, Stirling. No, don't bother! Here she comes."
A tall, dark woman detached herself from a neighboring crowd, and came up to Deane with outstretched hands. "My dear man!" she exclaimed. "How dare you look so cool and nonchalant! Do you realize that we are all starving? We have been waiting here for you for more than half an hour."
"I am sorry," answered Deane. "You see, you people here have taken to lunching so early nowadays. You make it hard for a man to get through any work at all in the city."
"Early lunches have come in with the simpler life," Julia Raynham declared. "One has so many more hours to look forward to dinner, and so much more appetite when it comes. I suppose we must forgive you," she went on. "At any rate, you are better than my husband, who won't come out to lunch at all. He says that all restaurant food is poisonous, and I can't drag him away from the club. Why a man should put his digestion before our society, I can't imagine. I hope you will never be so ungallant, Mr. Deane. Shall we go in, Olive?"
"If you will excuse me for one moment," Deane said, passing on ahead, "I will just see that the table is all right. I telephoned to Gustave, but even a maître d'hôtel forgets sometimes."
He looked into the room, and nodded to the presiding genius who came hurrying up. The table was there, duly reserved, and covered with the dark red roses which he had ordered. He turned to Mrs. Elstree and the others who were following her.
"I think we can go in," he said. "I hope you people have not lost all your appetites waiting for me."
Lady Olive looked at him a little curiously as she took the seat at his left, hers by unspoken consent as his fiancée. "My dear Stirling," she whispered, "have you had a very trying morning? You look somehow as though you had been worried."
He hesitated. "Well," he answered, "scarcely that, perhaps. I had rather a bad hour or so. Things don't go always our way, you know, in the city, even when one is most prosperous."
"You are foolish to worry," she said calmly. "Half the people in the world spoil their lives by giving way to that sort of thing. I should have thought that your temperament would have saved you from that."
Deane smiled. "Remember," he said, "that I have been in other places when I might have been with you, and excuse me."
"You are much too gallant," she said, with a little laugh, "to argue with seriously."
"By the bye," Major Elstree asked, "has anyone seen a special edition? I wonder if the Rowan case is finished."
Deane set down the wineglass which he had just raised to his lips. "The verdict was given just as I left the city," he answered. "Rowan was found guilty!"