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eating a biscuit. But as luck would have it, the fellow next to him had ordered some crumpets, and crumpets were a thing that old Stanwood couldn’t resist. He had a look at them, and then he sent away his biscuits and ordered some for himself. By Jove, I can see him now! With the long bony fingers of one hand picking out the finest and most buttery specimen from his dish, holding it up, and delicately sprinkling it with salt and pepper. I can see him savouring it and praising it—‘instinct with rich juices’ is a phrase that sticks in my memory. I’ve never seen a greedy man much happier. And when he’d once started he couldn’t stop. So when dinner time came I had to entertain a bilious old dyspeptic, with about as much chance of getting him to back our new review as I had of flying to the moon. A wasted dinner!”
    â€œAnyhow you could enjoy your own dinner.”
    Monty chuckled. “That’s the saddest part of the tale. He looked so damned happy with his crumpets that I just couldn’t bear to be out of it. I ordered a dish for myself, and ate nearly as many as he did. At eight o’clock I wasn’t in much better shape than he was. So no incontinence of that kind for you to-day. I can’t have the best dinner of the year spoiled in that way.”
    He jumped up from his seat. “Half-past eleven, I must run. See you at the Trufflers at eight. And I’ll tell you the whole history of London since 1932. So long.”
    He was gone, and I had not dared to ask him about Cynthia. No matter—if I had waited for two and a half years I could wait till dinner-time that night.

Chapter III
    â€œIn an aristocratical institution like England, not trial by jury, but the dinner is the capital institution.”
    EMERSON
    It seemed odd to me to be dining out in London once more; odd, yet, in a way, strangely natural too. Odd because I had not dressed for dinner for three long years; natural because the old familiar sights and sounds and smells of London were around me again. A sort of excitement seized me as I walked down Piccadilly towards the Trufflers, and all the anxious crises of my life passed one after another before my mental vision. The first day at school, the news of the war, the day when I had joined my regiment, a lad of eighteen, in the first year of the great struggle. And then, more vividly still, my first sight of Oxford in the autumn of 1919, with ancient buildings vague and misty in the damp fog of an October evening; a long hot weary struggle in the schools; a cricket match or two, my first meeting with Cynthia. Certitude filled me and braced me; another crisis was near. I felt it, I prepared for it, but whether it betided well or ill I would not even guess. Some time soon I must know; in another hour or less Monty’s cheery voice would be mentioning her name, and I should know whether she was still the same to me as three years back. I loved her—that I knew—and, somehow, it seemed to me that, as I listened, I should know too whether she might learn to love me. Yes. I was filled with expectation, with hope, with a foreknowledge of events of importance looming in the near future. My mind seemed to cover years in the space of a fewmoments; all my past, and the present, and faintly, dimly, uncertainly, the future too.
    Then my mood changed. I had not dressed for more than two years. Were my clothes all right? I fingered my tie like a nervous schoolboy; I restlessly agitated my shoulders within the unaccustomed stiff shirt. At least there would be no women; I couldn’t go wrong dining alone with Monty! Yet how different it would all be! I tasted again in retrospect the rude meals of the old Southern Light—and listened again to Christiansen’s unhurried speech as he opened one of the everlasting tins for our evening meal. How neatly, how deftly, he had always opened them; and how madly his very deftness and certainty had irritated