Charles Cameron was forty- four years old and had achieved the happy fortune of being able to select his practice when and as he chose, thanks to an unexpected inheritance from an uncle whom he had dimly remembered from his childhood and who had settled in India some forty years ago. Thus Charles Cameron was able to travel on the Continent during the summer and to enjoy the finest food and vintage wines when it pleased him.

His own parents had died when he was in hip twenties, by which time he had become a barrister’ s clerk in London, the city of his birth. In due course, he passed his examination and was engaged as a solicitor for the same firm with which he had spent his legal apprenticeship.

He had found the profession of law satisfying as to status in his community and because of the respectability of the profession which accrued to members of it, and his firm was quite proper and oldfashioned so that the litigation in which he was involved was mainly that of estates, transfers of property, and the like. There were no criminal cases, as the senior member of his firm regarded them as demeaning to the dignity of a reputable lawyer.

Charles Cameron had conducted himself with becoming propriety during his years with the firm, but he had never married. It was not that he did not enjoy the companionship of the opposite sex: quite he contrary. It was just that he did not wish to be saddled with the encumbrances that a wife and family would give him, since he wished to feel free to seek his fortune where the wind blew. Had he wished to marry, doubtless the fact that he was employed in one of London’ s leading legal offices would have prevented him from seeking a livelihood abroad if the opportunity had presented itself. But perhaps, too, with a bachelor’ s cynicism, he had decided that too many of his friends found their pleasures curtailed when they took unto themselves a wife.