d.

"Here--quick--take it!" he gasped. "There's a man there, by that
restaurant door--he's waiting for Mr. Romarin--tell him--tell him--tell
him Mr. Romarin's had an accident--"

And he dashed away, leaving the man looking at the silver in his palm.

THE CIGARETTE CASE

"A cigarette, Loder?" I said, offering my case. For the moment Loder was
not smoking; for long enough he had not been talking.

"Thanks," he replied, taking not only the cigarette, but the case also.
The others went on talking; Loder became silent again; but I noticed
that he kept my cigarette case in his hand, and looked at it from time to
time with an interest that neither its design nor its costliness seemed
to explain. Presently I caught his eye.

"A pretty case," he remarked, putting it down on the table. "I once had
one exactly like it."

I answered that they were in every shop window.

"Oh yes," he said, putting aside any question of rarity.... "I lost
mine."

"Oh?..."

He laughed. "Oh, that's all right--I got it back again--don't be afraid
I'm going to claim yours. But the way I lost it--found it--the whole
thing--was rather curious. I've never been able to explain it. I wonder
if you could?"

I answered that I certainly couldn't till I'd heard it, whereupon Loder,
taking up the silver case again and holding it in his hand as he talked,
began:

"This happened in Provence, when I was about as old as Marsham there--and
every bit as romantic. I was there with Carroll--you remember poor old
Carroll and what a blade of a boy he was--as romantic as four Marshams
rolled into one. (Excuse me, Marsham, won't you? It's a romantic tale,
you see, or at least the setting is.) ... We were in Provence, Carroll
and I; twenty-four or thereabouts; romantic, as I say; and--and this
happened.

"And it happened on the top of a whole lot of other things, you must
understand, the things that do happen when you're twenty-four. If it
hadn't been Provence, it would have been somewhere else, I suppose,
nearly, if not quite as good; but this was Provence, that smells (as you
might say) of twenty-four as it smells of argelasse and wild lavender and
broom....

"We'd had the dickens of a walk of it, just with knapsacks--had started
somewhere in the Ardeche and tramped south through the vines and almonds
and olives--Montelimar, Orange, Avignon, and a fortnight at that blanched
skeleton of a town, Les Baux. We'd nothing to do, and had gone just where