Mr. Raymond Greene became almost impressive in his interested earnestness.

“Talk about coincidences!” he continued.  “Do you remember last night talking about subjects for cinema plays?  I told you of a little incident I happened to have noticed on the way from London to Liverpool, about the two men somewhere in Derbyshire whom I had seen approaching a tunnel over a canal—­they neither of them came out, you know, all the time that the train was standing there.”

Philip helped himself a little absently to whisky and soda from the bottle in front of him.

“I remember your professional interest in the situation,” he confessed.

“I felt at the time,” Mr. Raymond Greene went on eagerly, “that there was something queer about the affair.  Listen!  I have been putting two and two together, and it seems to me that one of those men might very well have been this missing Mr. Romilly.”

Philip shook his head pensively.

“I don’t think so,” he ventured.

“What’s that?  You don’t think so?” the cinema magnate exclaimed.  “Why not, Mr. Romilly?  It’s exactly the district—­at Detton Magna, the message said, in Derbyshire—­and it was a canal, too, one of the filthiest I ever saw.  Can’t you realise the dramatic interest of the situation now that you are confronted with this case of disappearance?  I have been asking myself ever since I strolled up into the library before dinner and read this notice—­’What about the other man?’”

Philip had commenced a leisurely consumption of his first course, and answered without undue haste.

“Well,” he said, “if this young man Romilly is my cousin, it would be the second or third time already that he has disappeared.  He is an ill-balanced, neurotic sort of creature.  At times he accepts help—­even solicits it—­from his more prosperous relations, and at times he won’t speak to us.  But of one thing I am perfectly convinced, and that is that there is no man in the world who would be less likely to make away with himself.  He has a nervous horror of death or pain of any sort, and in his peculiar way he is much too fond of life ever to dream of voluntarily shortening it.  On the other hand, he is always doing eccentric things.  He probably set out to walk to London—­I have known him do it before—­and will turn up there in a fortnight’s time.”

Mr. Raymond Greene seemed rather to resent having cold water poured upon his melodramatic imaginings.  He turned to Elizabeth, who had remained silent during the brief colloquy.

“What do you think, Miss Dalstan?” he asked.  “Don’t you think that, under the circumstances, I ought to give information to the British police?”

She laughed at him quite good-naturedly, and yet in such a way that a less sensitive man than Mr. Raymond Greene might well have been conscious of the note of ridicule.

“No wonder you are such a great success in your profession!” she observed.  “You carry the melodramatic instinct with you, day by day.  You see everything through the dramatist’s spectacles.”