Niko rose from his place. He had a habit of ending a discussion exactly at the period he chose.
'Not in your time or mine,' he answered simply....
Lavendale, notwithstanding a nervous system almost unexampled, was possessed of curiously sensitive instincts. Before he reached Pall Mall, he was obsessed with an idea that he was being followed. He turned rather abruptly around. A tall, broad-shouldered man in dark clothes, wearing a Homburg hat and with a cigar in the corner of his mouth, waved his stick in friendly greeting.
'This is Mr. Lavendale, isn't it?' he remarked. 'Kind of forgotten me, perhaps? My name's Courlander. Met you with Mr. Kessner the other night.'
'I remember you perfectly,' Lavendale acknowledged. 'Very pleasant dinner we had.'
Mr. Courlander fell into step with his companion, who had turned eastwards.
'There are few things in the world that Ludwig Kessner doesn't understand,' he continued, 'from the placing of a loan to the ordering of a dinner. He isn't much use at eating it, poor fellow, but that's the fault of his digestion. Too much ice-water, I tell him.'
Lavendale nodded affably. He had no objection whatever to discussing Mr. Kessner.
'Kind of misunderstood over here, the boss,' Courlander went on. 'People think because he's of German extraction that his sympathies are altogether that way. As a matter of fact, I can tell you, Mr. Lavendale, that people are dead wrong. At the present moment—I wouldn't have every one know this, but you're an American, too—Mr. Kessner is making proposals for a very large purchase of British War Loan.'
'Is he indeed!' Lavendale observed, in a tone as colourless as he could make it.