"If I was you, sir," advised the constable, kindness itself, "I wouldn't, however much they wanted it."
I gave him my card. He held it close under the ray of his bull's-eye and altered his manner with a jerk. "Begging your pardon, Sir Roderick—"
"Not at all," I assured him. "Most natural mistake in the world. If there's a side entrance, now, near the platform—"
He led us up a gusty by-street and tapped for us on the side door. It was opened at once, though cautiously, by a little frock-coated man ornamented with a large blue-and-white favour. After an instant's parley he received us obsequiously, and the constable pocketed our blessing.
"Of course," he said by way of Good night, "I knew from the first I was dealing with gentlemen. I made no mistake about that."
The little steward admitted us to a sort of lobby or improvised cloak-room stowed somewhere beneath the platform. While helping us off with our coats he told us that the audience was satisfactory "considering the weather." "A night like this isn't calculated to fetch out doubtfuls."
"It has fetched out one, anyhow," said I. "This is Professor Foe, of your University College."
"Greatly honoured, sir, I am sure!" The little man bowed to Foe, and turned again to me: "Your friends, Sir Roderick, will accompany you on the platform, of course. Shall we go in at once? Or—at this moment Mr. Jenkinson is up. He has been speaking for twenty minutes."
"—And has just started his peroration," said I; for though it came muffled through the boarding, I had recognised Mr. Jenkinson's voice, and the oration to which in other parts of London I had already listened twice. I could time it. "There's no hurry," I said. "Jenkinson—good man, Jenkinson—has finished with the tram-service statistics, and will now for a brief two minutes lift the whole question on to a higher plane. Then he'll sit down, and that's where we'll slip in, covered by the thunder of applause."
He divided a grin between us and a couple of assistants who had been hanging up our coats and now came forward.