He drove straight to his flat. Two telegrams awaited him. One must be from Evelyn, of course. She had chosen to send a message there, rather than risk missing him at Ostend. But he was wrong. The first he opened read: “Baumgartner and everybody else have gone. I am coming to London. Staying at Savoy. Rosamund.”
His brain was still confused by this strange substitution of one woman for another, when his eyes fell on the contents of the second telegram:
“Black Mask won. Took you forties. Congratulations, Dick.”
The perplexity in his face attracted the sympathy of the hall porter.
“I ‘ope you’ve had no bad news, sir,” said the man.
Warden laughed with a harshness that was not good to hear.
“No,” he said, “just the reverse. I backed a horse and he has won, at forty to one.”
The hall porter, like most of his class, was a sportsman.
“Lord love a duck!” he cried, “that’s the sort you read about but seldom see, sir. Where did he run—at Newmarket?”