"You never met Horrobin," said Mr. Ellis-Barrington to the Sailor. "We were all at Gamaliel with him."
Mr. Ellis-Barrington was wrong to assume that Mr. Harper had never met Mr. Esme Horrobin. Mr. Harper had not been with Mr. Horrobin at Gamaliel, but he had been with him at Bowdon House.
"Oh, yes," said Mr. Harper, feeling honorably glad that he could play this part in the conversation. "I have met a Mr. Horrobin of Gamaliel College, Oxford." Somehow, the young man could not repress a thrill of pride in his excellent memory for names and places.
"Not the great Esme?" cried Mr. Ellis-Barrington with serio-comic incredulity.
"Yes, Mr. Esme Horrobin," said Henry Harper stoutly.
"Do tell us where you met the great man?" The voice of Edward Ambrose was asking the question almost as if it felt that it ought not to do so.
"I met him, sir, when I was staying at Bowdon House. He was staying there, too, and he used to talk to me about the 'Satyricon' of Petronius Arbiter and the Feast of Trimalchio."
For one brief but deadly instant, there was a pause. The odd precision with which the carefully treasured words were spoken was uncanny. But the three friends who had been with the great Esme Horrobin at Gamaliel somehow felt that an abyss had opened under their feet.
Edward Ambrose was the first to speak. But the laugh of gay charm was no longer on his lips. There was a look almost of horror in those honest eyes.
"That's very interesting, my dear fellow," he said, with a change of tone so slight that it was hardly possible to detect it. "Interesting and curious that you should have met Horrobin." And then with a return to carelessness, as though no answer was required to a merely conventional inquiry: "What's he doing now, do you know?"