She was not yet unduly late, and Mark Perryman was not impatient. He was a man approaching thirty-five who picked up a precarious living in Fleet Street. He had lived through many excitements, and at his present advanced age he liked to think of himself as imperturbable, but he would not have denied that his mind was pleasantly warmed by the prospect of an evening with Roderick Strood’s wife. The Stroods were old friends; he had dined at their house the very evening before, and had been surprised and amused to hear Daphne say, with an engaging candour which her husband gave every sign of enjoying: “Why don’t you take me to dinner some evening, Mark? No, not with Roderick. Just you and I.” Only Daphne, he reflected, could do a thing like that and get away with it, by virtue of a quality rarer than beauty, and, when allied to beauty, irresistible. With this thought the sense of her was so vivid in his mind that he became suddenly impatient for her coming; and to pass the time he beckoned the waiter and ordered a cocktail.
