Horne Fisher came down next morning in a late and leisurely fashion, as was his reprehensible habit; he had evidently no appetite for catching worms.  But the other guests seemed to have felt a similar indifference, and they helped themselves to breakfast from the sideboard at intervals during the hours verging upon lunch.  So that it was not many hours later when the first sensation of that strange day came upon them.  It came in the form of a young man with light hair and a candid expression, who came sculling down the river and disembarked at the landing stage.  It was, in fact, no other than Mr. Harold March, whose journey had begun far away up the river in the earliest hours of that day.  He arrived late in the afternoon, having stopped for tea in a large riverside town, and he had a pink evening paper sticking out of his pocket.  He fell on the riverside garden like a quiet and well-behaved thunderbolt, but he was a thunderbolt without knowing it.

The first exchange of salutations and introductions was commonplace enough, and consisted, indeed, of the inevitable repetition of excuses for the eccentric seclusion of the host.  He had gone fishing again, of course, and must not be disturbed till the appointed hour, though he sat within a stone’s throw of where they stood.

“You see it’s his only hobby,” observed Harker, apologetically, “and, after all, it’s his own house; and he’s very hospitable in other ways.”

“I’m rather afraid,” said Fisher, in a lower voice, “that it’s becoming more of a mania than a hobby.  I know how it is when a man of that age begins to collect things, if it’s only collecting those rotten little river fish.  You remember Talbot’s uncle with his toothpicks, and poor old Buzzy and the waste of cigar ashes.  Hook has done a lot of big things in his time—­the great deal in the Swedish timber trade and the Peace Conference at Chicago—­but I doubt whether he cares now for any of those big things as he cares for those little fish.”

“Oh, come, come,” protested the Attorney-General.  “You’ll make Mr. March think he has come to call on a lunatic.  Believe me, Hook only does it for fun, like any other sport, only he’s of the kind that takes his fun sadly.  But I bet if there were big news about timber or shipping, he would drop his fun and his fish all right.”

“Well, I wonder,” said Horne Fisher, looking sleepily at the island in the river.

“By the way, is there any news of anything?” asked Harker of Harold March.  “I see you’ve got an evening paper; one of those enterprising evening papers that come out in the morning.”

“The beginning of Lord Merivale’s Birmingham speech,” replied March, handing him the paper.  “It’s only a paragraph, but it seems to me rather good.”

Harker took the paper, flapped and refolded it, and looked at the “Stop Press” news.  It was, as March had said, only a paragraph.  But it was a paragraph that had a peculiar effect on Sir John Harker.  His lowering brows lifted with a flicker and his eyes blinked, and for a moment his leathery jaw was loosened.  He looked in some odd fashion like a very old man.  Then, hardening his voice and handing the paper to Fisher without a tremor, he simply said: