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The lost hunchback of the horizon

Prologue:Cigars had burned low, and we were beginning to sample the disillusionment that usually afflicts old school friends who have met again as men found themselves with less in common than they had believed they had. Rutherford wrote novels; Wyland was one of the embassy secretaries; he had just given us dinner at the Tempelhof airport-not very cheerfully, I fancied, but with the equanimity which a diplomat must always keep on tap for such occasions. It seemed likely that nothing but the fact of being three celibate Englishmen in a foreign capital could have brought us together, and I had already reached the conclusion that the slight touch of priggishness which I remembered in Wyland had not diminished with years. Rutherford I liked more; he had ripened well out of the skinny, precocious infant whom I had once alternately bullied and patronized.