“You’re Arnold Kemper and I’m Roger Adams,” he said, laying his hand upon the other’s arm.

Kemper wheeled about immediately, while the smile of placid amusement in his face broadened into a laugh of delighted recognition.

“Well, by Jove, it’s great!” he responded, and the heartiness of his handshake sent a tingling sensation through Adams’ arm.  “I don’t know when I’ve been so pleased for years.  Been to luncheon?”

“I’ve just had it,” laughed Adams, remembering that fifteen years ago, when he last saw him, Kemper had extended a similar invitation with the same grasp of hearty good fellowship.  Was it possible that the man had really kept his college memories alive? he wondered in a daze of admiration, or had he himself merely awakened by his reappearance a train of associations which had lain undisturbed since their last parting.  Let it be as it might, Adams felt that the encounter was of the pleasantest.

“I’m driven like a slave back to office drudgery,” he added, “and I’m half inclined to envy you your freedom and your automobiles.”

Kemper’s eyes shot back an intimate curiosity.  “So you’re editor of The International Review, I hear,” he said.  “Do you know I’ve had it in my mind for years to look you up, but there’s such a confounded temptation to let things drift, you know.”

“I know,” rejoined Adams, smiling.  “I’ve drifted with them.”

“Well, I’m jolly glad that you’ve drifted my way at last.  So you’ve been to luncheon, have you?” Kemper enquired again, as he unfastened a button of his overcoat and drew out his watch.  “I wish you hadn’t—­I’ve promised to meet a man at the club and it’s past the hour.  I say, look here,” he added hastily as he was about to hurry off, “I’ve some rather decent rooms of my own now where I sometimes manage to get a quiet morsel.  Will you come to dine to-morrow at half-past seven, sharp?”

It took Adams hardly an instant to consider and accept the invitation.  Though he rarely dined out he felt a positive pleasure at the thought, and when, a minute later, he walked on again, repeating the number of the address which the other had pressed upon him, he found that Kemper’s greeting had left a trail of cheerfulness which lingered for at least a half hour after the man himself had gone on his genial way.  If, as Gerty Bridewell had once declared in a fit of exasperation, “Arnold Kemper consisted of a surface,” he managed at least to present those mystifying ripples of personality which suggest to the imagination depths of pleasantness as yet undiscovered.  Adams had lived to his present age by the help of few illusions—­and he realised even now that the thing he liked in Kemper was an effect of manner which implied an impossible subtlety—­that the power one saw in the man was produced simply by some trick of pose, by a frankness so big that one felt intuitively there must be still bigger qualities behind it.  Whether it was all a bluster of affectation