Mr. Bennett peered at Sam with protruding eyes which gave him the appearance of a rather unusually stout prawn. “How _are_ you?” he asked, with such intensity that Sam unconsciously found himself replying to a question which does not as a rule call for any answer. “Very well, thanks.” Mr. Bennett shook his head moodily. “You are lucky to be able to say so! Very few of us can assert as much. I can truthfully say that in the last fifteen years I have not known what it is to enjoy sound health for a single day. Marlowe,” he proceeded, swinging ponderously round on Sir Mallaby like a liner turning in the river, “I assure you that at twenty-five minutes past four this afternoon I was very nearly convinced that I should have to call you up on the ’phone and cancel this dinner engagement. When I took my temperature at twenty minutes to six....” At this point the butler appeared at the door announcing that dinner was served. Sir Mallaby Marlowe’s dinner table, which, like most of the furniture in the house had belonged to his deceased father and had been built at a period when people liked things big and solid, was a good deal too spacious to be really ideal for a small party. A white sea of linen separated each diner from the diner opposite and created a forced intimacy with the person seated next to him. Billie Bennett and Sam Marlowe, as a consequence, found themselves, if not exactly in a solitude of their own, at least sufficiently cut off from their kind to make silence between them impossible. Westward, Mr. Mortimer had engaged Sir Mallaby in a discussion on the recent case of Ouseley _v._ Ouseley, Figg, Mountjoy, Moseby-Smith and others, which though too complicated to explain here, presented points of considerable interest to the legal mind. To the east, Mr. Bennett was relating to Bream the more striking of his recent symptoms. Billie felt constrained to make at least an attempt at conversation. “How strange meeting you here,” she said. Sam, who had been crumbling bread in an easy and debonair manner, looked up and met her eye. Its expression was one of cheerful friendliness. He could not see his own eye, but he imagined and hoped that it was cold and forbidding, like the surface of some bottomless mountain tarn. “I beg your pardon?” “I said, how strange meeting you here. I never dreamed Sir Mallaby was your father.” “I knew it all along,” said Sam, and there was an interval caused by the maid insinuating herself between them and collecting his soup plate. He sipped sherry and felt a sombre self-satisfaction. He had, he considered, given the conversation the right tone from the start. Cool and distant. Out of the corner of his eye he saw Billie bite her lip. He turned to her again. Now that he had definitely established the fact that he and she were strangers, meeting by chance at a dinner-party, he was in a position to go on talking. “And how do you like England, Miss Bennett?”