Francis hesitated.

“I really don’t care,” he confessed.  “Now I think of it, I shall be glad to get away from here, though.  I don’t want any more congratulations on saving Oliver Hilditch’s life.  Let’s go where we are least likely to meet any one we know.”

“Respectability and a starched shirt-front, then,” Wilmore decided.  “We’ll go to Claridge’s.”

CHAPTER III

The two men occupied a table set against the wall, not far from the entrance to the restaurant, and throughout the progress of the earlier part of their meal were able to watch the constant incoming stream of their fellow-guests.  They were, in their way, an interesting contrast physically, neither of them good-looking according to ordinary standards, but both with many pleasant characteristics.  Andrew Wilmore, slight and dark, with sallow cheeks and brown eyes, looked very much what he was—­a moderately successful journalist and writer of stories, a keen golfer, a bachelor who preferred a pipe to cigars, and lived at Richmond because he could not find a flat in London which he could afford, large enough for his somewhat expansive habits.  Francis Ledsam was of a sturdier type, with features perhaps better known to the world owing to the constant activities of the cartoonist.  His reputation during the last few years had carried him, notwithstanding his comparative youth—­he was only thirty-five years of age—­into the very front ranks of his profession, and his income was one of which men spoke with bated breath.  He came of a family of landed proprietors, whose younger sons for generations had drifted always either to the Bar or the Law, and his name was well known in the purlieus of Lincoln’s Inn before he himself had made it famous.  He was a persistent refuser of invitations, and his acquaintances in the fashionable world were comparatively few.  Yet every now and then he felt a mild interest in the people whom his companion assiduously pointed out to him.

“A fashionable restaurant, Francis, is rather like your Law Courts—­it levels people up,” the latter remarked.  “Louis, the head-waiter, is the judge, and the position allotted in the room is the sentence.  I wonder who is going to have the little table next but one to us.  Some favoured person, evidently.”

Francis glanced in the direction indicated without curiosity.  The table in question was laid for two and was distinguished by a wonderful cluster of red roses.

“Why is it,” the novelist continued speculatively, “that, whenever we take another man’s wife out, we think it necessary to order red roses?”

“And why is it,” Francis queried, a little grimly, “that a dear fellow like you, Andrew, believes it his duty to talk of trifles for his pal’s sake, when all the time he is thinking of something else?  I know you’re dying to talk about the Hilditch case, aren’t you?  Well, go ahead.”