As he asked the last question, the door of the room opened, and the waiter came in, carrying supper.
While the man was handing round the dishes and pouring out the wine—a delicious wine it was, too, by the way—Northcote talked away lightly and cleverly about several more or less topical subjects. I answered him occasionally, in the same careless strain; but my mind was almost wholly occupied with the mysterious suggestion that he had just let fall. I was wondering what on earth the service could be that I was capable of rendering him. That it had something to do with our amazing likeness to each other I felt convinced; but beyond that it was impossible to guess. The whole thing—our meeting on the Embankment, his invitation to supper, and the strange hint of an unknown purpose in his actions—had all been so sudden and bizarre that I felt as if I had been caught up into some modern version of the Arabian Nights.
Still, there could be no harm in making him more or less acquainted with my innocent past and my embarrassed present. I had nothing I wished to conceal, except the whereabouts of my goldfield; and it seemed quite on the cards that, in return for this unknown service that he wanted from me, I might be able to interest him in my scheme. In any case, curiosity alone would have made me go through with the matter now I had got so far. I instinctively felt that Mr. Northcote's proposals when they came would be of a decidedly interesting nature.
So, as soon as the waiter had withdrawn, I filled up my glass again, and looking across at my companion with a smile, began to satisfy his curiosity.
"There's not very much to tell you, after all," I said. "To start with, I'm thirty-four."
He gazed at me keenly. "You look five years older," he said.
"Yes," I retorted. "Perhaps, if you'd been knocking about South America for fifteen years, you'd show some fairly obvious signs of it."
A momentary flicker of surprise passed across his face. Then he laughed dryly.
"Oh!" he said. "What part of South America have you been in?"
"Most of it," I said, "but I know the Argentine best."