They found a fourth without difficulty and took possession of a table at the far end of the room.  Selingman, with a huge cigar in his mouth, played well and had every appearance of thoroughly enjoying the game.  Towards the end of their third rubber, Mrs. Benedek, who was dummy, leaned across towards Norgate.

“After all, perhaps you are better off here,” she murmured in German.  “There is nothing like this in Berlin.”

“One is at least nearer the things one cherishes,” Norgate quoted in the same language.

Selingman was playing the hand and held between his fingers a card already drawn to play.  For a moment, it was suspended in the air.  He looked towards Norgate, and there was a new quality in his piercing gaze, an instant return in his expression of the shadow which had swept the broad good-humour from his face on his first appearance.  The change came and went like a flash.  He finished playing the hand and scored his points before he spoke.  Then he turned to Norgate.

“Your gift of acquiring languages in a short space of time is most extraordinary, my young friend!  Since yesterday you have become able to speak German, eh?  Prodigious!”

Norgate smiled without embarrassment.  The moment was a critical one, portentous to an extent which no one at that table could possibly have realised.

“I am afraid,” he confessed, “that when I found that I had a fellow traveller in my coupe I felt most ungracious and unsociable.  I was in a thoroughly bad temper and indisposed for conversation.  The simplest way to escape from it seemed to be to plead ignorance of any language save my own.”

Selingman chuckled audibly.  The cloud had passed from his face.  To all appearance that momentary suspicion had been strangled.

“So you found me a bore!” he observed.  “Then I must admit that your manners were good, for when you found that I spoke English and that you could not escape conversation, you allowed me to talk on about my business, and you showed few signs of weariness.  You should be a diplomatist, Mr. Norgate.”

“Mr. Norgate is, or rather he was,” Mrs. Paston Benedek remarked.  “He has just left the Embassy at Berlin.”

Selingman leaned back in his chair and thrust both hands into his trousers pockets.  He indulged in a few German expletives, bombastic and thunderous, which relieved him so much that he was able to conclude his speech in English.

“I am the densest blockhead in all Europe!” he announced emphatically.  “If I had realised your identity, I would willingly have left you alone.  No wonder you were feeling indisposed for idle conversation!  Mr. Francis Norgate, eh?  A little affair at the Cafe de Berlin with a lady and a hot-headed young princeling.  Well, well!  Young sir, you have become more to me than an ordinary acquaintance.  If I had known the cause of your ill-humour, I would certainly have left you alone, but I would have shaken you first by the hand.”