“That’s all very well,” Mr. Greene protested, “but you saw the two men yourself, and you’ve probably read about the case of mysterious disappearance.  Surely you must admit that the coincidence is interesting?”

“Alas!” she went on, shaking her head, “I am afraid I must throw cold water upon your vivid imaginings.  You see, my eyesight is better than yours and I could see the two men distinctly, whilst you could only see their figures.  One of them, the better-dressed, was fair and obviously affluent, and the other was a labourer.  Neither of them could in any way have answered the description of the missing man.”

Mr. Raymond Greene was a little dashed.

“You didn’t say so at the time,” he complained.

“I really wasn’t sufficiently interested,” she told him.  “Besides, without knowing anything of Mr. Romilly’s cousin, I don’t think any person in the world could have had the courage to seek an exit from his troubles by means of that canal.”

“But my point,” Mr. Raymond Greene persisted, “is that it wasn’t suicide at all.  I maintain that the situation as I saw it presented all the possibilities of a different sort of crime.”

“My cousin hadn’t an enemy in the world except himself,” Philip intervened.

“And I would give you the filming of my next play for nothing,” Elizabeth ventured, “if either of those two men could possibly have been an art teacher....  Can I have a little more oil with my salad, please, steward, and I should like some French white wine.”

Mr. Raymond Greene took what appeared to be a positive disappointment very good-naturedly.

“Well,” he said, “I dare say you are both right, and in any case I shouldn’t like to persist in a point of view which might naturally enough become distressing to our young friend here.  Tell you what I’ll do to show my penitence.  I shall order a bottle of wine, and we’ll drink to the welfare of the missing Mr. Philip Romilly, wherever he may be.  Pommery, steward, and bring some ice along.”

Philip pushed away his whisky and soda.

“Just in time,” he remarked.  “I’ll drink to poor Philip’s welfare, with pleasure, although he hasn’t been an unmixed blessing to his family.”

The subject passed away with the drinking of the toast, and with the necessity for a guard upon himself gone, Philip found himself eating and drinking mechanically, watching all the time the woman who sat opposite to him, who had now engaged Mr. Raymond Greene in an animated conversation on the subject of the suitability for filming of certain recent plays.  He was trying with a curious intentness to study her dispassionately, to understand the nature of the charm on which dramatic critics had wasted a wealth of adjectives, and of which he himself was humanly and personally conscious.  She wore a high-necked gown of some soft, black material, with a little lace at her throat fastened by her only article of jewellery, a pearl pin.  Her hair was