Mr. Raymond Greene's blue eyes looked as though they saw visions.
"But surely," he expostulated, "the Elletania—my table on the Elletania, when Miss Dalstan crossed—"
Philip laughed easily.
"Why," he exclaimed, "are you going to be like the others and take me for—wasn't it Mr. Romilly?—the man who disappeared from the Waldorf? Why, I've been tracked all round New York because of my likeness to that man."
"Likeness!" Mr. Raymond Greene muttered. "Likeness!"
There was a moment's silence. Then Mr. Greene knew that the time had arrived for him to pull himself together. He had carried his bewilderment to the very limits of good breeding.
"Well, well!" he continued. "Fortunately, it's six o'clock, and I can offer you gentlemen a cocktail, for upon my word I need it! Come to look at you, Mr. Ware, there's a trifle more what I might term savoir faire, about you. That chap on the boat was a little crude in places, but believe me, sir," he went on, thrusting his arm through Ware's and leading him towards the bar, "you don't want to be annoyed at those people who have mistaken you for Romilly, for in the whole course of my life, and I've travelled round the world a pretty good deal, I never came across a likeness so entirely extraordinary."
"I have heard other people mention it," Noel Bridges intervened, "although not quite with the same conviction as you, Mr. Greene. Curiously enough, however, the photograph of Romilly which they sent out from England, and which was in all the Sunday papers, didn't strike me as being particularly like Mr. Ware."
"It was a damned bad photograph, that," Mr. Raymond Greene pronounced. "I saw it—couldn't make head nor tail of it, myself. Well, the world is full of queer surprises, but this is the queerest I ever ran up against. Believe me, Mr. Ware, if this man Romilly who disappeared had been a millionaire, you could have walked into his family circle and been made welcome at the present moment. Why, I don't believe his own wife or sister, if he had such appendages, would have been able to tell that you weren't the man."
"Unfortunately," Bridges remarked, as he sipped the cocktail which the cinema man had ordered, "this chap Romilly was broke, wasn't he?—did a scoot to avoid the smash-up? They say that he had a few hundred thousand dollars over here, ostensibly for buying material, and that he has taken the lot out West."