“I beg your pardon?”

“Nothing, nothing. You were saying⁠—”

“The vehicles proceeding in the opposite direction had also been temporarily arrested, but after a moment they were permitted to proceed. I had fallen into a meditation, when suddenly the most extraordinary thing took place. My hat was snatched abruptly from my head! And as I looked back I perceived it being waved in a kind of feverish triumph from the interior of a taxicab, which, even as I looked, disappeared through a gap in the traffic and was lost to sight.”

I didn’t laugh, but I distinctly heard a couple of my floating ribs part from their moorings under the strain.

“Must have been meant for a practical joke,” I said. “What?”

This suggestion didn’t seem to please the old boy.