"You do not understand what you ask as yet," he said; "still less what we would ask in return of you."
"I have seen something to-day," said Andrew.
"But you are mistaken in its application. You think I followed the man lately deceased as pertinaciously as you followed me. You are wrong. When you met me in Chancery Lane I was in pursuit of a gentleman to whose case I have devoted myself for several days. It has interested me much. There is no reason why I should conceal his name. It is one honoured in this country, Sir Wilfrid Lawson. He looked in on his man of business, which delayed me at the shop-window of which you have spoken. I waited for him, and I thought I had him this time. But you see I lost him in the Strand, after all."
"But the other, then," Andrew asked, "who was he?"
"Oh, I picked him up at Charing Cross. He was better dead."
"I think," said Andrew, hopefully, "that my estimate of the sacredness of human life is sufficiently high for your purpose. If that is the only point—"
"Ah, they all say that until they join. I remember an excellent young man who came among us for a time. He seemed discreet beyond his years, and we expected great things of him. But it was the old story. For young men the cause is as demoralizing as boarding schools are for girls."
"What did he do?"
"It went to his head. He took a bedroom in Pall Mall and sat at the window with an electric rifle picking them off on the door-steps of the clubs. It was a noble idea, but of course it imperilled the very existence of the society. He was a curate."
"What became of him?" asked Andrew.