“He knows her, do you tell me?  He knows Mrs. Minchin—­”

“Or whatever her name is now; yes; so he says.”

“And what is her name?”

“He won’t say.”

“Nor where she lives?”

“No.”

“Then where does he live?”

“None of us know that either; he’s the darkest horse in the club.”

Venn agreed with this speaker, some little bitterness in his tone.  Another stood up for Langholm.

“We should be as dark,” said he, “if we had married Gayety choristers, and they had left us, and we went in dread of their return!”

They sum up the life tragedies pretty pithily, in these clubs.

“He was always a silly ass about women,” rejoined Langholm’s critic, summing up the man.  “So it’s Mrs. Minchin now!”

The name acted like magic upon young Severino.  His attention had wandered.  In an instant it was more eager than before.

“If you don’t know where he lives in the country,” he burst out, “where is he staying in town?”

“We don’t know that either.”

“Then I mean to find out!”

And the pale musician rushed from the room, in pursuit of the man who had been all day pursuing him.

CHAPTER XXII

THE DARKEST HOUR

The amateur detective walked slowly up to Piccadilly, and climbed on top of a Chelsea omnibus, a dejected figure even to the casual eye.  He was more than disappointed at the upshot of his wild speculations, and in himself for the false start that he had made.  His feeling was one of positive shame.  It was so easy now to see the glaring improbability of the conclusion to which he had jumped in his haste, at the first promptings of a too facile fancy.  And what an obvious idea it had been at last!  As if his were the only brain to which it could have occurred!

Langholm could have laughed at his late theory if it had only entailed the loss of one day, but it had also cost him that self-confidence which was the more valuable in his case through not being a common characteristic of the man.  He now realized the difficulties of his quest, and the absolutely wrong way in which he had set about it.  His imagination had run away with him.  It was no case for the imagination.  It was a case for patient investigation, close reasoning, logical deduction, all arts in which the imaginative man is almost inevitably deficient.

Langholm, however, had enough lightness of temperament to abandon an idea as readily as he formed one, and his late suspicion was already driven to the four winds.  He only hoped he had not shown what was in his mind at the club.  Langholm was a just man, and he honestly regretted the injustice that he had done, even in his own heart, and for ever so few hours, to a thoroughly innocent man.

And all up Piccadilly this man was sitting within a few inches of him, watching his face with a passionate envy, and plucking up courage to speak; he only did so at Hyde Park Corner, where an intervening passenger got down.