en years I have not known what it is to enjoy sound health for a
single day. Marlowe," he proceeded, swinging ponderously round on Sir
Mallaby like a liner turning in the river, "I assure you that at
twenty-five minutes past four this afternoon I was very nearly convinced
that I should have to call you up on the 'phone and cancel this dinner
engagement. When I took my temperature at twenty minutes to six...." At
this point the butler appeared at the door announcing that dinner was
served.

Sir Mallaby Marlowe's dinner table, which, like most of the furniture in
the house had belonged to his deceased father and had been built at a
period when people liked things big and solid, was a good deal too
spacious to be really ideal for a small party. A white sea of linen
separated each diner from the diner opposite and created a forced
intimacy with the person seated next to him. Billie Bennett and Sam
Marlowe, as a consequence, found themselves, if not exactly in a
solitude of their own, at least sufficiently cut off from their kind to
make silence between them impossible. Westward, Mr. Mortimer had engaged
Sir Mallaby in a discussion on the recent case of Ouseley _v._ Ouseley,
Figg, Mountjoy, Moseby-Smith and others, which though too complicated to
explain here, presented points of considerable interest to the legal
mind. To the east, Mr. Bennett was relating to Bream the more striking
of his recent symptoms. Billie felt constrained to make at least an
attempt at conversation.

"How strange meeting you here," she said.

Sam, who had been crumbling bread in an easy and debonair manner, looked
up and met her eye. Its expression was one of cheerful friendliness. He
could not see his own eye, but he imagined and hoped that it was cold
and forbidding, like the surface of some bottomless mountain tarn.

"I beg your pardon?"

"I said, how strange meeting you here. I never dreamed Sir Mallaby was
your father."

"I knew it all along," said Sam, and there was an interval caused by the
maid insinuating herself between them and collecting his soup plate. He
sipped sherry and felt a sombre self-satisfaction. He had, he
considered, given the conversation the right tone from the start. Cool
and distant. Out of the corner of his eye he saw Billie bite her lip. He
turned to her again. Now that he had definitely established the fact
that he and she were strangers, meeting by chance at a dinner-party, he
was in a position to go on talking