“Please don’t appear surprised, or scared or anything Jack,” he said with his delicious intonation. “I saw a fellow looking for me an hour or so ago. He’s been at it for several months; hence my presence on these shores of the brave and the free. He’s probably still looking, as he’s a persistent devil. I’m here, as we may say, quite incog. Staying at an East-side lodging-house, where I shan’t invite you to call on me. But I must see you.”

“Dine with me to-night, at Sherry’s—”

“Too big, too many people—”

“Therein lies security, if you’re in trouble. I’m about to go into exile, and I want to eat one more civilized dinner before I go.”

“Perhaps it’s just as well. Where are you off for,—not Africa again?”

“No. Just Indiana,—one of the sovereign American states, as you ought to know.”

“Indians?”

“No; warranted all dead.”

“Pack-train—balloon—automobile—camels,—how do you get there?”

“Varnished cars. It’s easy. It’s not the getting there; it’s the not dying of ennui after you’re on the spot.”

“Humph! What hour did you say for the dinner?”

“Seven o’clock. Meet me at the entrance.”

“If I’m at large! Allow me to precede you through the door, and don’t follow me on the street, please!”

He walked away, his gloved hands clasped lazily behind him, lounged out upon Broadway and turned toward the Battery. I waited until he disappeared, then took an up-town car.

My first meeting with Laurance Donovan was in Constantinople, at a café where I was dining. He got into a row with an Englishman and knocked him down. It was not my affair, but I liked the ease and definiteness with which Larry put his foe out of commission. I learned later that it was a way he had. The Englishman meant well enough, but he could not, of course, know the intensity of Larry’s feeling about the unhappy lot of Ireland. In the beginning of my own acquaintance with Donovan I sometimes argued with him, but I soon learned better manners. He quite converted me to his own notion of Irish affairs, and I was as hot an advocate as he of head-smashing as a means of restoring Ireland’s lost prestige.