“I stayed there several months in 1911,” Preston said, “and I believe I met you there. Your face seemed familiar to me when I was introduced to you just now——” he was about to add that he had just remembered it was in Shanghai he had seen La Planta before, but he checked himself.
“Were you there in the autumn, and did you stay at the Astor Hotel?” Stapleton asked.
“I did, and in the autumn.”
“Then no doubt we did meet, though I can’t at the moment recollect the occasion.”
For a couple of seconds the two men looked hard at each other. It was rather a curious look, as though each were trying to read the other’s character. The conversation was changed by Mrs. Mervyn-Robertson’s saying suddenly:
“What is everybody going to do after lunch, I wonder?”
And then, as nobody seemed to have any fixed plans, she went on:
“Why don’t you all come to a little party I am giving? Just a few intimate friends. We shall play bridge, and several well-known artists will come in later and have promised to sing. It would be nice of you if you would all come.”
There was a strange expression, partly cynical and partly of contempt, in Captain Preston’s gray eyes as Mrs. Mervyn-Robertson stopped speaking. The sound of the terrific slaughter which he had listened to an hour or two before, and which must be in progress still, he reflected, rang again in his ears. And here in London, in the London which, but for the heroism of our troops and their allies, and the unflagging watchfulness of the nations’ navies, might already have been running in blood, these people, especially Mrs. Mervyn-Robertson and her friends Stapleton and La Planta, seemed to have no thought except for amusement and for themselves.
“Good heavens,” he muttered, as presently they all rose from the table. “I wish the Boches could get here just to show them all what war and its atrocities are like! Well, perhaps they may get here yet.”