bility and a starched shirt-front, then," Wilmore decided.
"We'll go to Claridge's."

CHAPTER III

The two men occupied a table set against the wall, not far from the
entrance to the restaurant, and throughout the progress of the earlier
part of their meal were able to watch the constant incoming stream of
their fellow-guests. They were, in their way, an interesting contrast
physically, neither of them good-looking according to ordinary
standards, but both with many pleasant characteristics. Andrew Wilmore,
slight and dark, with sallow cheeks and brown eyes, looked very much
what he was--a moderately successful journalist and writer of stories,
a keen golfer, a bachelor who preferred a pipe to cigars, and lived
at Richmond because he could not find a flat in London which he could
afford, large enough for his somewhat expansive habits. Francis Ledsam
was of a sturdier type, with features perhaps better known to the world
owing to the constant activities of the cartoonist. His reputation
during the last few years had carried him, notwithstanding his
comparative youth--he was only thirty-five years of age--into the very
front ranks of his profession, and his income was one of which men spoke
with bated breath. He came of a family of landed proprietors, whose
younger sons for generations had drifted always either to the Bar or the
Law, and his name was well known in the purlieus of Lincoln's Inn
before he himself had made it famous. He was a persistent refuser
of invitations, and his acquaintances in the fashionable world were
comparatively few. Yet every now and then he felt a mild interest in the
people whom his companion assiduously pointed out to him.

"A fashionable restaurant, Francis, is rather like your Law Courts--it
levels people up," the latter remarked. "Louis, the head-waiter, is the
judge, and the position allotted in the room is the sentence. I wonder
who is going to have the little table next but one to us. Some favoured
person, evidently."

Francis glanced in the direction indicated without curiosity. The
table in question was laid for two and was distinguished by a wonderful
cluster of red roses.

"Why is it," the novelist continued speculatively, "that, whenever we
take another man's wife out, we think it necessary to order red roses?"

"And why is it," Francis queried, a little grimly, "that a dear fellow
like you, Andrew, believes it his duty to talk of trifles for his pal's
sake, when al