The old boy was quite right, and he had put things very well indeed. There was some sort of schedule somewhere, some sort of Olympian Bradshaw, and you caught the trains as they came along. You mustn’t let one go by, and you mustn’t try for the one in front. That was cheating. You couldn’t cheat successfully with the Olympians, they dealt the cards and they held all the aces....

I’m mixing my metaphors, Hilary thought, as he turned into Northumberland Avenue and caught sight of Nelson on his column. No mist in Trafalgar Square. That was queer. London was suddenly in sharper focus as he reached Cockspur Street and heard taxi horns and passed a policeman with a short rolled mackintosh hooked to his belt in a normal sort of way, and noticed that the pavement was up in the Haymarket as usual.

But it was still rather like a dream, to sight the Carlton again, with Pall Mall just ahead.... Maybe I never really saw those two blokes at all, he thought, crossing Waterloo Place. Maybe I was talking to myself. It is a queer night, I’ll have a stiff one at the club....

CHAPTER FIVE

HILARY SHENSTONE and his brother George, dissimilar in appearance and temperament as two brothers can be, had the same favorite club in Pall Mall, though each preferred it for a different reason. George went there because it was most convenient to his West End orbit, and because its wines and cigars were superior. Hilary frequented it, when he was in London, because various pals of his father’s could still be found there, and because to a man returned from heathen lands its upholstered silences epitomized to the greatest degree the luxuries of English civilization.

The usual after-dinner peace brooded over its lounge that June evening. Semi-recumbent, contented figures were sunk behind newspapers in armchairs. The air was fragrant with pipe smoke and good cigars. An occasional glass stood half empty on a smoking-table. The high beamed ceiling, the spacious walls, absorbed the murmur of low voices here and there.

In a big chair by the fireplace George Shenstone was smoking a cigar and working his way without a smile through the newest Punch. He was fair, and a little thick through the neck, and still young enough to enjoy being sardonic. Near him old Calthorpe—he was barely fifty, and old was a term of affection—sat behind the Standard, ruddy and cheerful, wise in the ways of men and of horses. On the other side of a table full of periodicals Lord Totleigh, father of the Honorable Alice, had his nose in the Illustrated London News, and was not pleased with what he saw there. He was a gentle, tired, humorous man with a white mustache.

“Chamberlain has been very clever, if you ask me,” said Calthorpe to the world in general. “Damned clever bird he is!”

“What, again?” said George lazily.