'If I did,' Moreton declared with a little laugh, 'I could have had my weight in dollars from the newspaper men alone. No, I know nothing whatever about it. All I can promise is that I'll take you up to Riverside Drive and do my best to boost you in. Now tell me what you've been doing with yourself this year, Ambrose? You've left the Diplomatic Service, haven't you?'
'Not altogether. I have a sort of unofficial position at the Embassy, perhaps as important as my last one, only not quite so prominent.'
'Still as great a scaremonger as ever? Do you remember those discussions you used to start at the debating society?'
'I remember them all right,' Lavendale assented grimly, 'and since you ask me the question, let me tell you this, Jim. I've lived, as you know, during the last seven years in the diplomatic atmosphere of Paris, of London and Berlin. I tell you soberly that anything I felt and believed in those days, I feel and believe twice as strongly to-day. Just look over your left shoulder, Jimmy. Isn't that rather a queer-looking couple for a fashionable roof-garden!'
Moreton turned a little lazily around. An elderly man and woman who had just entered were being shown to an adjacent table. The man was apparently of some seventy years of age, his morning clothes were of old-fashioned cut and he wore only a little wisp of black tie. His grey beard was cut in the fashion of a century ago, his bushy hair was long and unkempt. His companion, who seemed but a few years younger, wore the simplest of dark travelling clothes, some jet jewellery, a huge cameo brooch fastened a shawl at her throat and she carried a leather handbag.
'Don't they look as though they'd come out of the ark!' Lavendale murmured.
Moreton had risen slowly to his feet.
'Queer thing that you should spot them, Ambrose,' he remarked. 'This is what you might call something of a coincidence.'
'You don't mean to say that you know them?'
Jim Moreton nodded.