As it was now seven o’clock, and the Junior Journalists were dropping off one by one to the dining-room below, the young men of The Planet began to stretch their legs, and raise their voices, and behave like young men who believe their privacy to be inviolable and complete.  They soon had the place to themselves, except for one person whose entrance had been covered by the outgoing stream; and he had delicately turned his back on them, and taken a seat in the farthest window, where his unobtrusive presence could be no possible hindrance to conversation.

“I’ve seen him after supper,” said Maddox.  He was obliged to speak rather loudly, because of the noise that came up from the overcrowded dining-room.

“Well, then, how did he strike you?”

Maddox’s eyes curled with limpid, infantile devilry.

“Well, I daresay he might be a bit of a bounder when he’s sober, but he’s a perfect little gentleman when he’s drunk.  Softens him down somehow.”

“In vino veritas—­a true gentleman at heart.”

“One of Nature’s gentlemen. I know ’em,” said Stables.

“One of Art’s gentlemen,” interposed Jewdwine severely, “and a very fine gentleman too, if you take him that way.”

Jewdwine raised his head from his letter and looked round uneasily.  Personalities were not altogether to his taste; besides, he was really anxious to finish that letter.  He caught sight of a back at the other window.

“I think,” said he quietly, “this conversation had better cease.”

The owner of the back had moved, a little ostentatiously.  He now got up and crossed the room.  The back was still towards the group of talkers.  Jewdwine followed its passage.  He was fascinated.  He gasped.

He could have sworn to that back anywhere, with its square but slender shoulders, its defiant swing from the straight hips, the head tossed a little backwards as if to correct the student’s tendency to stoop.  He looked from the back to Maddox.  Maddox could not see what he saw, but his face reflected the horror of Jewdwine’s.

Their voices were inaudible enough now.

“Do you know who it is?”

“I should think I did.  It’s the man himself.”

“How truly damnable,” said Rankin.  After those words there was a silence which Jewdwine, like the wise man he was, utilized for his correspondence.

It was Maddox who recovered first.  “Call him what you like,” said he, in a wonderfully natural voice, between two puffs of a cigarette, “I consider him an uncommonly good sort.  A bit of a bounder, but no end of a good sort.”