“Here you are at last, old man!” he cried. “I thought you’d turn up some time or other! What became of you this afternoon? I never saw you after you disappeared with my mother.” The two men had met close to the door, and they were still standing, Loring, as _blasé_ and imperturbable-looking as usual, with his observant eyes on Julian’s face. “I didn’t care to spoil sport!” he returned with a significant smile. “You seemed to be particularly well employed!” Julian laughed--the conscious, not ill-pleased laugh which belonged to his part. Such contingencies were all incidental to the situation. “Oh, come, old boy,” he said deprecatingly. Then he laughed again, and added: “I suppose my mother said something to you?” “No!” returned Loring quietly. “I happen to have eyes, you see!” “Don’t make magnifying glasses of them, then!” was the laughing retort. “Now then, there are several fellows here who have been asking for you.” But as Julian glanced round he became aware that the room chanced to be almost empty. Loring understood at the same time that he had wished to make the conversation general and impersonal, and a slight smile touched his lips. Marston Loring had various reasons of his own for not intending to allow himself to be eluded by Julian Romayne. The change in the young man alone would have excited his curiosity; and sundry details which had already come to his knowledge, notably one across which he had stumbled in the City that morning, had quickened that curiosity. His suspicions of the preceding autumn, that there was something behind Julian’s life as it appeared on the surface, were by no means forgotten by him. His departure for Africa had taken him out of the way of the crisis, but he more than half suspected that a crisis there had been. The connection between the present and the past, and the means by which it could be most advantageously applied to the furtherance of his own ends, were the problems he had set himself to solve. “We’re rather in luck!” he said. “We can have a quiet chat together.” He established himself lazily and comfortably as he spoke, as Julian with much apparent satisfaction flung himself into another chair, and took out his cigar-case. Julian’s questions followed one another thick and fast. His interest in his friend’s life during the last six months seemed to be inexhaustible in its intelligence and sympathy. He had a great deal to tell, too; and he told it so fluently and gaily as almost to disguise the fact that the allusions to his own doings were of the most superficial type. But at last there was a pause. Julian was pulling out his watch, and saying something about going home, when Loring lighted a fresh cigar and opened the proceedings--as he conceived them. “I heard of you in the City this morning!” he said nonchalantly.