"By Jove! And I was congratulating myself on my quiet life! No bothers, a good, steady little business, the police sent to the right about and a comforting sense of the general sympathy that surrounds me.... We shall have to change all this! It is the reverse of the medal.... After sunshine comes rain.... This is no time for laughing! Good-bye."
"Look sharp!" said Wilson, full of solicitude on behalf of a person whom Shears inspired with such obvious respect. "Don't lose a minute."
"Not a minute, Mr. Wilson, except to tell you how pleased I have been to meet you and how I envy the leader who has an assistant so valuable as yourself."
Courteous bows were exchanged, as between two adversaries on the fencing-ground who bear each other no hatred, but who are constrained by fate to fight to the death. And Lupin took my arm and dragged me outside:
"What do you say to that, old fellow? There's a dinner that will be worth describing in your memoirs of me!"
He closed the door of the restaurant and, stopping a little way off:
"Do you smoke?"
"No, but no more do you, surely."
"No more do I."
He lit a cigarette with a wax match which he waved several times to put it out. But he at once flung away the cigarette, ran across the road and joined two men who had emerged from the shadow, as though summoned by a signal. He talked to them for a few minutes on the opposite pavement and then returned to me: