“Now, I remember,” she said.  “Dad told me you had written novels and some essays.  Have you ever really seen Romney’s portrait of Lady Hamilton as Joan of Arc?”

Those fine eyes of hers pierced him with a glance of such candid inquiry that he cast pretence to the winds.

“No,” he said.

“Then you just invented the comparison as an excuse for colliding with the chair?”

“Yes.  At the same time I throw myself on the mercy of the court.”

“It was rather clever of you.”

He laughed, and their eyes met, at very close range.

“May I share the joke?” said a voice, and Theydon knew, before he turned, that the man he had last seen disappearing around the corner of Innesmore Mansions in a heavy rainstorm was in the room.

“Why did you tell me that Mr. Theydon was a serious scientific person?” cried the girl.  “He is anything but that.  He can talk nonsense quite admirably.”

“So can a great many serious scientific persons, Evelyn.  Glad to see you, Mr. Theydon.  Professor Scarth’s letter paved the way for something more than a formal meeting, so I thought you wouldn’t mind giving us an evening.  My wife is not in town.  She is a martyr to hay fever, and has to fly from London to the sea early in May to escape.  If caught here in June nothing can save her.  Tonight, as it happens, you’re our only guest, but my daughter is going to a musicale at Lady de Winton’s after dinner, so you and I will be free to soar into the empyrean through a blaze of tobacco smoke.”

Standing there, in that delightful drawing room, made welcome by a man like Forbes, and admitted to a degree of charming intimacy by a girl like Forbes’s daughter, Theydon tried to believe that his meeting with those ill-omened detectives at Waterloo Station was, in some sort, a figment of the imagination.

But he was instantly and effectually brought back to a dour sense of reality by Evelyn Forbes’s next words.  She, by chance, looked at Theydon just as she had looked at him the previous night.

“Were you at Daly’s Theater last night?” she inquired suddenly.

“Yes,” he said.  Then, finding there was no help for it, he went on:——­

“You and I have hit on the same discovery, Miss Forbes.  We three stood together at the exit.  I was waiting for a taxi, and saw you get into your car.  Now you know just why I fell over the chair.”

Forbes glanced up quickly.

“Don’t tell me Tomlinson forgot to move that infernal chair again!” he cried.  “Really, I must get rid either of our butler or the Canaletto, yet I prize both.”

“Don’t blame Tomlinson, Dad,” laughed the girl.  “If Mr. Theydon hadn’t made an unconventional entry we would have talked about the weather, or something equally stupid.”

At that moment Tomlinson himself, imperturbable and portly, announced that dinner was served.  The three descended the stairs, chatting lightly about the musical comedy witnessed overnight.  It was no new revelation to Theydon that truth should prove stranger than fiction, but the trite phrase was fast assuming a fresh and sinister personal significance.  He believed, and not without good reason, that no man living had ever undergone an experience comparable with his present adventure.