“Why—” Wanhope began again; but at that moment a man who had been elected the year before, and then gone off on a long absence, put his head in between the dull-red hangings of the doorway. It was Halson, whom I did not know very well, but liked better than I knew. His eyes were dancing with what seemed the inextinguishable gayety of his temperament, rather than any present occasion, and his smile carried his little mustache well away from his handsome teeth. “Private?”
“Come in, come in!” Minver called to him. “Thought you were in Japan?”
“My dear fellow,” Halson answered, “you must brush up your contemporary history. It's more than a fortnight since I was in Japan.” He shook hands with me, and I introduced him to Rulledge and Wanhope. He said at once: “Well, what is it? Question of Braybridge's engagement? It's humiliating to a man to come back from the antipodes, and find the nation absorbed in a parochial problem like that. Everybody I've met here to-night has asked me, the first thing, if I'd heard of it, and if I knew how it could have happened.”
“And do you?” Rulledge asked.
“I can give a pretty good guess,” Halson said, running his merry eyes over our faces.
“Anybody can give a good guess,” Rulledge said. “Wanhope is doing it now.”
“Don't let me interrupt.” Halson turned to him politely.
“Not at all. I'd rather hear your guess. If you know Braybridge better than I,” Wanhope said.
“Well,” Halson compromised, “perhaps I've known him longer.” He asked, with an effect of coming to business, “Where were you?”
“Tell him, Rulledge,” Minver ordered, and Rulledge apparently asked nothing better. He told him in detail, all we knew from any source, down to the moment of Wanhope's arrested conjecture.