CHAPTER IV
THE FOREBODING BRITON
"I ran across him down at St. Albans last week," Preston obeyed willingly as they loitered easily along. "I had just come into town and concluded my frantic search of the inns—for what purpose you can decide for yourself later—and had been moping about most of the afternoon.
"After dinner, however, I dropped into the billiard room. My foreboding friend was in there with five or six other properly depressed and conventionally bored Britons playing pool. They had made up one of those pleasant little games where every player has a ball of a different color and the object of each player is to pocket as many of the other balls as possible. Every time he pockets a ball of a color not his own, he collects a shilling from the
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