"See whom?" Mr. Philpotts was selecting a paper from a side table. "I see your cigar is burning a hole in the carpet."
"Confound my cigar!" Mr. Bloxham stamped on it with an angry tread. "Did Geoff Fleming pass you as you came in?"
Mr. Philpotts looked round with an air of evident surprise.
"Geoff Fleming!--Why, surely he's in Ceylon by now."
"Not a bit of it. A minute ago he was in that chair talking to me."
"Bloxham!" Mr. Philpotts' air of surprise became distinctly more pronounced, a fact which Mr. Bloxham apparently resented.
"What are you looking at me like that for pray? I tell you I was glancing through the Field, when I felt someone touch me on the shoulder. I looked round--there was Fleming standing just behind me. 'Geoff.' I cried, 'I thought you were on the other side of the world--what are you doing here?' 'I've come to have a peep at you,' he said. He drew a chair up close to mine--this chair--and sat in it. I turned round to reach for a match on the table, it scarcely took me a second, but when I looked his way again hanged if he weren't gone."
Mr. Philpotts continued his selection of a paper--in a manner which was rather marked.
"Which way did he go?"
"Didn't you meet him as you came in?"