"You used to be Arthur Roden in the old days when I knew you. That was before they made you a Privy Councillor and His Majesty's Attorney-General."
"By Gad, I can hardly believe it!" he exclaimed, shaking my hand a second time and carrying me off to luncheon. "What have you been doing with yourself? Where have you been? Why did you go away?"
"As Dr. Johnson once remarked...." I began.
"'Questioning is not a mode of conversation among gentlemen,'" he interrupted. "I know; but if you drop out of the civilised world for the third of a lifetime...."
"You've not ordered yourself any lunch."
"Oh, hang lunch!"
"But you haven't ordered any for me, either."
My poor story—for what it was worth—started with the plovers' eggs, and finished neck-to-neck with the cheese. I told him how I had gone down to the docks twenty years before to see young Handgrove off to India, and how at the last moment he had cajoled me into accompanying him.... Arthur came with me in spirit from India to the diamond mines of South Africa where I made my money, took part with me in the Jameson Raid, and kept me company during those silent, discreet months when we all lay perdus wondering what course the Government was going to pursue towards the Raiders. Then I sketched my share in the war, and made him laugh by saying I had been three times mentioned in despatches. My experience of blackwater fever was sandwiched in between the settlement of South Africa, and my departure to the scene of the Russo-Japanese war: last of all came the years of vegetation, during which I had idled round the Moorish fringe of the Desert or sauntered from one Mediterranean port to another.
"What brings you home now?" he asked.
"Home? Oh, to England. I've a young friend stationed out at Malta, and when I was out there three weeks ago I found his wife down with a touch of fever. He wanted her brought to London, couldn't come himself, so suggested I should take charge. J'y suis...."