The dinner, I believe, was excellent and the company was good, but down at my end I could eat little, and I did not want to talk. Here in this pleasant room, with servants moving softly about and a mellow light on the silver from the shaded candles, I felt the man was buttressed and defended beyond my reach. A kind of despairing hatred gripped me when I looked his way. For I was always conscious of that other picture--the Asian desert, Pitt-Heron's hunted face, and the grim figure of Tuke on his trail. That, and the great secret wheels of what was too inhuman to be called crime moving throughout the globe under this man's hand. There was a party afterwards, but I did not stay. No more did Lumley, and for a second I brushed against him in the hall at the foot of the big staircase. He smiled on me affectionately. "Have you been dining here? I did not notice you." "You had better things to think of," I said. "By the way, you gave me good advice some weeks ago. It may interest you to hear that I have taken it." "I am so glad," he said softly. "You are a very discreet young man." But his eyes told me that he knew I lied. CHAPTER VI THE RESTAURANT IN ANTIOCH STREET I was working late at the Temple next day, and it was nearly seven before I got up to go home. Macgillivray had telephoned to me in the afternoon saying he wanted to see me, and suggesting dinner at the Club, and I had told him I should come straight there from my Chambers. But just after six he had rung me up again and proposed another meeting place. "I've got some very important news for you, and want to be quiet. There's a little place where I sometimes dine--Rapaccini's, in Antioch Street. I'll meet you there at half-past seven." I agreed, and sent a message to Chapman at the flat, telling him I would be out to dinner. It was a Wednesday night, so the House rose early. He asked me where I was dining, and I told him, but I did not mention with whom. His voice sounded very cross, for he hated a lonely meal. It was a hot, still night, and I had had a heavy day in Court, so heavy that my private anxieties had almost slipped from my mind. I walked along the Embankment, and up Regent Street towards Oxford Circus. Antioch Street, as I had learned from the Directory, was in the area between Langham Place and Tottenham Court Road. I wondered vaguely why Macgillivray should have chosen such an out-of-the-way spot, but I knew him for a man of many whims. The street, when I found it, turned out to be a respectable little place, boarding-houses and architects' offices, with a few antiquity shops and a picture-cleaner's. The restaurant took some finding, for it was one of those discreet establishments, common enough in France, where no edibles are displayed in the British fashion, and muslin half-curtains deck the windows. Only the doormat, lettered with the proprietor's name, remained to guide the hungry.