“Your voice?” he repeated. “How should I? I had never heard it—we have never met.”
“And yet we have been in conversation before now,” said I, “and I asked you a question which you never answered, and which I have since had many thousand better reasons for putting to myself.”
He turned suddenly white. “Good God!” he cried, “are you the man in the telephone?”
I nodded.
“Well, well!” said he. “It would take a good deal of magnanimity to forgive you that. What nights I have passed! That little whisper has whistled in my ear ever since, like the wind in a keyhole. Who could it be? What could it mean? I suppose I have had more real, solid misery out of that....” He paused, and looked troubled. “Though I had more to bother me, or ought to have,” he added, and slowly emptied his glass.
“It seems we were born to drive each other crazy with conundrums,” said I. “I have often thought my head would split.”
Carthew burst into his foolish laugh. “And yet neither you nor I had the worst of the puzzle,” he cried. “There were others deeper in.”
“And who were they?” I asked.
“The underwriters,” said he.
“Why, to be sure!” cried I. “I never thought of that. What could they make of it?”