“Yes, sir. Mr. Biffen rang up on the telephone while you were in your bath.”

“ Mr. Biffen? Good heavens!”

Amazing how one’s always running across fellows in foreign cities⁠—birds, I mean, whom you haven’t seen for ages and would have betted weren’t anywhere in the neighbourhood. Paris was the last place where I should have expected to find old Biffy popping up. There was a time when he and I had been lads about town together, lunching and dining together practically every day; but some eighteen months back his old godmother had died and left him that place in Herefordshire, and he had retired there to wear gaiters and prod cows in the ribs and generally be the country gentleman and landed proprietor. Since then I had hardly seen him.

“Old Biffy in Paris? What’s he doing here?”