“We may as well have our coffee together,” he said. “I ordered Turkish and I’ve been waiting for it ten minutes. We got here early. Hullo! where’s your other guest?”
Densham was sitting alone. Wolfenden looked at him inquiringly.
“Your friend Felix has gone,” he announced. “Suddenly remembered an engagement with his chief, and begged you to excuse him. Said he’d look you up to-morrow.”
“Well, he’s an odd fellow,” Wolfenden remarked, motioning Harcutt to the vacant place. “His looks certainly belie his name.”
“He’s not exactly a cheerful companion for a supper party,” Densham admitted, “but I like his face. How did you come across him, Wolfenden, and where does he hail from?”
“He’s a junior attaché at the Russian Embassy,” Wolfenden said, stirring his coffee. “Only just been appointed. Charlie Meynell gave him a line of introduction to me; said he was a decent sort, but mopish! I looked him up last week, met him in Pall Mall just as you came along, and asked you both to supper. What liqueurs, Harcutt?”
The conversation drifted into ordinary channels and flowed on steadily. At the same time it was maintained with a certain amount of difficulty. The advent of these two people at the next table had produced an extraordinary effect upon the three men. Harcutt was perhaps the least affected. He was a young man of fortune and natural gifts, who had embraced journalism as a career, and was really in love with his profession. Partly on account of his social position, which was unquestioned, and partly because his tastes tended in that direction, he had become the recognised scribe and chronicle of smart society. His pen was easy and fluent. He was an inimitable maker of short paragraphs. He prided himself upon knowing everybody and all about them. He could have told how much a year Densham, a rising young portrait painter, was making from his profession, and exactly what Wolfenden’s allowance from his father was. A strange face was an annoyance to him; too, a humiliation. He had been piqued that he could not answer the eager questions of his own party as to these two people, and subsequently Wolfenden’s inquiries. The thought that very soon at any rate their name would be known to him was, in a sense, a consolation. The rest would be easy. Until he knew all about them he meant to conceal so far as possible his own interest.