Margaret stretched out her hand, plucked a handful of
the creamy petals and held them against her cheek. A thrush was
singing noisily. A few yards away they heard the soft swish of
the river.
"Tell me," she asked curiously, "my father still speaks of you as
being in some respects an enemy. What does he mean?"
"I will tell you exactly," he answered. "The first time I ever
spoke to your father I was dining at Soto's. I was talking to
Andrew Wilmore. It was only a short time after you had told me
the story of Oliver Hilditch, a story which made me realise the
horror of spending one's life keeping men like that out of the
clutch of the law."
"Go on, please," she begged.
"Well, I was talking to Andrew. I told him that in future I
should accept no case unless I not only believed in but was
convinced of the innocence of my client. I added that I was at
war with crime. I think, perhaps, I was so deeply in earnest
that I may have sounded a little flamboyant. At any rate, your
father, who had overheard me, moved up to our table. I think he
deduced from what I was saying that I was going to turn into a
sort of amateur crime-investigator, a person who I gathered later
was particularly obnoxious to him. At any rate, he held out a
challenge. 'If you are a man who hates crime,' he said, or
something like it, 'I am one who loves it.
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