"You may prefer to digest it alone," I said.
He held out his hand with a determined little smile.
"I'll take it home and read it," he promised. "I can't sleep with unknown perils hanging over me."
I gave him the letter, and we parted on the understanding that he was to call round in Princes Gardens as soon as he was sufficiently rested.
I have no idea how he slept that night. Next morning there was no sign of him, and in the afternoon when I went to make inquiries at the Charing Cross Hotel I was handed a pencil note scrawled on the back of my own envelope to him.
"My apologies to your uncle. Just off to Flushing to complete my rest cure."
When I met Sonia and Loring at dinner the following night, I told them that I had caught a glimpse of O'Rane on his way through London from Mexico to the Continent. They were politely interested.
VI
I have reached an age when some four-fifths of my contemporaries are married. It is a melancholy exercise familiar to all bachelors to count the number of friendships that have closed on one side with a silver cigarette-box and on the other with an invitation to dinner in a very new house. "I want you and my wife to be great friends," Benedict has written. Usually I have wondered what he could see in his common-place partner, and always the little woman has marvelled that Benedict and I have any bond of union. Sometimes I can see him growing wistful in recollection of old times—and this makes her jealous; sometimes marriage obliterates the past, and we both decide, without a word exchanged, to leave our friendship in its grave. The little dinners end early—and yet seem strangely long. We meet perhaps once a year after that, and I affect interest in curiously raw babies; but the Benedicts, man and wife, as a rule become too much absorbed in their family to care for interlopers. Sometimes I give a christening present and make rash promises by the font; and then nothing happens until half a generation later my god-children present themselves for confirmation....