"Don't know," I replied. "Probably at home."
"You seem to have the hump, my dear fellow," he remarked, with a laugh, and then I confided to him the reason.
At last, about six o'clock, I put on my overcoat and left the club. The rain had now stopped, therefore I decided to walk along to my rooms in Guilford Street.
Hardly had I turned the corner into Piccadilly, when I heard a voice at my elbow uttering my name with a foreign accent.
Turning quickly, I saw, to my great surprise, a man named Engler, whom I had known in Bremen. He was a clerk in the Deutsche Bank, opposite the Liebfrauen-Kirche, and popular in a certain circle in that Hanseatic city.
"My dear Meester Jacox!" he exclaimed in broken English in his enthusiastic way. "My dear frendt. Well, well! who would have thought of meeting you. I am so ve-ry glad!" he cried. "I have only been in London since three days."
I shook my friend's hand warmly, for a year ago, when I had spent some time beside the Weser watching two men I had followed from London, we had been extremely friendly.
I told him that I was on my way to my rooms, and invited him in to have a chat.
He gladly accompanied me, and when we were comfortably seated in my cosy sitting-room he began to relate to me all the latest news from Bremen and of several of my friends.
Otto Engler was a well-dressed, rather elegant man of forty, whose fair beard was well trimmed, whose eyes were full of fire, and who rather prided himself upon being something of a lady-killer. He was in London in connection with an important financial scheme in which his brother and a German merchant in London, named Griesbach, were interested. He and his brother Wilhelm were over on a visit to the merchant, who, he told me, had offices in Coleman Street, and who lived in Lonsdale Road, Barnes.