He had heard at his club the news of Campion’s death, and the friends he was with had tried to lessen the shock it gave him.
“You have an excellent man in Herriard,” Sir Perrott Aspall had remarked encouragingly.
“Couldn’t have a better,” Baron de Daun had agreed. “Quite the best man at the Bar for that sort of case, since Paul Gastineau.”
“By the way,” another man of the group broke in, “talking of Gastineau, an extraordinary thing happened to me the other evening. As I was walking across the Green Park a man passed me whom I could have sworn was Paul Gastineau.”
“What, the Paul Gastineau?” Sir Perrott asked, with a smile of toleration for another man’s stupidity.
“The Paul Gastineau,” the other maintained. “The K.C. Member for Starbury. I knew him well.”
“But,” Sir Perrott objected, with all the superiority which disbelief in the obviously impossible confers, “Paul Gastineau, the K.C., and all that, was killed some years ago in a railway accident in Spain.”
“Yes,” retorted the other; “that is just what made my seeing him in the Green Park so extraordinary.”
CHAPTER XV
A HALF-WON VICTORY
DEPRIVED of its promised dramatic sensation scene, the trial which came on in the next week was, being mere repetition of what had been heard before, to all but the interested parties, a comparatively tame affair. By tacit consent the case was not mentioned again between Gastineau and Herriard. There were one or two points on which Geoffrey would have liked his mentor’s advice, but he forbore to ask it; and, on the whole, was well content, save for the responsibility of Alexia’s reputation which was in his hands, to take for once the whole burden of a big case on his shoulders.