In spite of the Food Comptroller’s regulations, the luncheon supplied at the Ritz lacked little. It was the second day of our great offensive, August 9th, 1918, but a stranger looking about him in the famous dining-room, where everybody seemed to be in the best of spirits and spending money lavishly, might have found it difficult to believe that men were being shot down, mangled, tortured, and blown to pieces in their thousands less than two hundred miles away. Captain Preston thought of it, and of the striking contrast, for that morning he had, while at the War Office, listened on the telephone to the great bombardment in progress. And that perhaps was the reason he looked glum, and why he was, as Mrs. Mervyn-Robertson afterwards remarked to La Planta as they drove away together, “a regular wet blanket right through the whole of lunch.” Aloysius Stapleton, though not distinguished-looking, was one of those men who, directly they begin to talk, rivet the attention of their hearers. Forty-two years of age, he did not look a day over thirty-five, and in addition to being an excellent conversationalist, his knowledge of men and women was exceptional. He had traveled several times round the world, or rather, as he put it, zig-zagged over it more than once. He appeared to possess friends, or at least acquaintances, in every capital in Europe, also in many American cities and in far-off China and Japan. The only country he had not visited, he observed that day at lunch, was New Guinea, but he meant to go there some day to complete his education. “Were you ever in Shanghai?” Preston inquired carelessly, looking him straight in the eyes across the table. As this was only the second time Preston had spoken since they had sat down to lunch, everybody looked towards him. “Yes,” Stapleton answered, meeting his gaze. “I was there twice, some years before the war.” “I stayed there several months in 1911,” Preston said, “and I believe I met you there. Your face seemed familiar to me when I was introduced to you just now----” he was about to add that he had just remembered it was in Shanghai he had seen La Planta before, but he checked himself. “Were you there in the autumn, and did you stay at the Astor Hotel?” Stapleton asked. “I did, and in the autumn.” “Then no doubt we did meet, though I can’t at the moment recollect the occasion.” For a couple of seconds the two men looked hard at each other. It was rather a curious look, as though each were trying to read the other’s character. The conversation was changed by Mrs. Mervyn-Robertson’s saying suddenly: “What is everybody going to do after lunch, I wonder?” And then, as nobody seemed to have any fixed plans, she went on: “Why don’t you all come to a little party I am giving? Just a few intimate friends. We shall play bridge, and several well-known artists will come in later and have promised to sing. It would be nice of you if you would all come.”