The dinner was chosen with
taste and restraint, the wines were not only costly but rare. A
watchful butler, attended now and then by a trim parlour-maid,
superintended the service. Only once, when she ordered a bowl of
flowers removed from the table, did their mistress address either
of them. Conversation after the first few amenities speedily
became almost a monologue. One man talked whilst the others
listened, and the man who talked was Oliver Hilditch. He
possessed the rare gift of imparting colour and actuality in a
few phrases to the strange places of which he spoke, of bringing
the very thrill of strange happenings into the shadowy room. It
seemed that there was scarcely a country of the world which he
had not visited, a country, that is to say, where men congregate,
for he admitted from the first that he was a city worshipper,
that the empty places possessed no charm for him.
"I am not even a sportsman," he confessed once, half
apologetically, in reply to a question from his guest. "I have
passed down the great rivers of the world without a thought of
salmon, and I have driven through the forest lands and across the
mountains behind a giant locomotive, without a thought of the
beasts which might be lurking there, waiting to be killed. My
only desire has been to reach the next place where men and women
were.
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