He cast a quick and startled glance around him, but failed to discover the source of the remark.
“It’s a bad fit,” said the voice again, but this time the stranger merely shrugged his shoulders.
“Nothing else in it,” was the next remark of his mysterious neighbor. A moment more and he heard:
“Then he made nothing by it?”
“No, the doctor got it back.”
“Do such fellows come here?”
One after another the words, in varying tones and seemingly close beside him, added their harrowing suggestions, and the cold sweat was beginning to stand out on the forehead of the unfortunate “foreigner.”
He would not have looked around him for the world, but he stealthily reached out to the hat-rack for his hat and cane, and was swiftly gliding out of the front door, when a watchful waiter intercepted him with the polite suggestion that he had better pay for his dinner first.
He was glad enough to do that, nor did he once look back from the “pay-desk.” It was not likely he would soon again venture into that precise restaurant.
“Bar, my boy,” said Val, “who was it talking with that chap?”