poisoned, he was bound to cop it later on.
Well, I hadn’t expected anything in the nature of beaming joie de vivre from Uncle Thomas, so I didn’t pay much attention to him.
What did surprise me was the extraordinary gloom of young Bingo. You may say what you like against Bingo, but nobody has ever found him a depressing host. Why, many a time in the days of his bachelorhood I’ve known him to start throwing bread before the soup course.
Yet now he and Uncle Thomas were a pair. He looked haggard and careworn, like a Borgia who had suddenly remembered that he had forgotten to shove cyanide in the consommé, and the dinner-gong due any moment.
And the mystery wasn’t helped at all by the one remark he made to me before conversation became general. As he poured out my cocktail, he suddenly bent forward.
“Bertie,” he whispered, in a nasty, feverish manner, “I want to see you. Life and death matter. Be in tomorrow morning.”
That was all. Immediately after that the starting-gun went and we toddled down to the festive.
And from that moment, I’m bound to say, in the superior interest of the proceedings he rather faded out of my mind. For good old Anatole, braced presumably by the fact of there being guests, had absolutely surpassed himself.
I am not a man who speaks hastily