The doctor entertained his guests at the Holborn Restaurant. In his youth he had known the place when it was a dancing-hall; had visited it while undergoing various transformations during his recurrent trips to town, and, whenever he came to London, made a point of patronising it still. The meal was hardly a jovial one. The host and Harry did all they could to keep the conversation on impersonal and frivolous lines, but Margaret would have none of it. She could scarcely be induced to open her lips to put food between them; talk she would not. The colloquial gifts for which she was famous seemed to have deserted her entirely; she was tongue-tied. When, in a dinner party of three, the lady, who is both young and charming, cannot be persuaded to speak, the meal is apt to prove but a qualified success. The doctor's little festive gathering turned out to be not quite so festive as it might have been.
As chance, or fate, had it, the two men's well-meant efforts to keep the conversation in exhilarating channels were doomed to meet with complete fiasco. After the meal was finished, as they strolled along Holborn, enjoying the fine evening, considering whether to take a cab, and if so, where to tell the cabman to take them to--for the doctor was firm in his conviction that this was an occasion on which they were bound to make a night of it--the issue was taken out of their hands in a wholly unexpected fashion. A gentleman, who did not seem to be so capable of seeing where he was going as he ought to have been, all but cannoned against Mr. Talfourd, drawing back to apologise just in time.
"Beg pardon! Why, it's Talfourd! Hollo, Talfourd! who's the lady? and who's----" The speaker was staring at the doctor. "Hollo! I've seen you somewhere before!"
The doctor was returning him look for look.
"And I've seen you. You're Mr. Gregory Lamb, who lodged one time at David Blair's over the other side of Pitmuir, to whom I was foolish enough to loan a brace of sovereigns, for four-and-twenty hours, as I understood, but which you've never paid me back unto this day."
Mr. Lamb was not at all abashed; he never was by reminders of that kind--they were legion.
"Why, of course, it's the doctor--the cranky old doctor. I remember you quite well. How are you, old chap? You haven't--you haven't a brace of sovereigns on you now?"
"I have not a brace which you are likely to be able to bag, Mr. Lamb. I understand that you have married since I saw you last."
"Since you saw me! I was married then."
"Indeed? But I gathered that you had since married the widow of an old friend of mine--Mrs. Cuthbert Grahame."