“Only mislaid, I expect,” he answered, but it was easy to see his tone was not quite so confident as usual. “I shouldn’t be surprised if it turned up at any moment.” But Lane hastened to put on a damper at once. “And if it did, I don’t see that it would help you so very much. You couldn’t possibly know in what other hands it might have been during the interval.” The financier had no wish to engage in further argument with this calm, self-possessed man, whose merciless logic made such short work of anything in the nature of a positive opinion. “It doesn’t seem to matter much what I think,” he cried with a slight return of his old petulance. “And perhaps it would be wiser to admit at once that I don’t possess your capacity for weighing facts and drawing deductions from them. I should like to know one thing, Mr. Lane—does what has just happened convey any new suggestions to you, throw any fresh light upon the situation?” He did not gauge the detective as accurately as one might have expected from a man with his wide knowledge of human nature, or he would never have put this question in the hope of getting a satisfactory answer. Whatever theory or theories might be forming in his mind, and there could be no doubt that it was working at full-speed all the time, and readjusting itself to every fresh turn of events, Lane would make no disclosures till he judged the time was ripe. He shook his head with great gravity: “We work very slowly, Mr. Morrice; we come to conclusions with equal slowness, in our profession. I dare say to a keen business man like yourself who plan your _coups_ with lightning rapidity, make and clinch a deal of many thousands in a few minutes, we must seem dull, plodding fellows. But you must remember that most of our time we are working underground where very little light penetrates. What has happened to-day may suggest a new line of thought to me, but I have not yet had time to digest its significance. It will want a great deal of patient thinking over before it bears any fruit.” With this the rather impatient financier had to be content. He was beginning to have a certain respect for the firm, self-reliant attitude of the detective, who did not appear to be in the least overawed by Morrice’s wealth and position. And he had a shrewd idea that, in his own particular and less remunerative line, Lane had a brain not greatly inferior to his own. They worked in different directions with a vast disproportion between the rewards attending their efforts. Morrice had the instinct of moneymaking, Lane the instinct of unravelling criminal mysteries. Perhaps in the bare fact of intellectual equipment there was not much to choose between them.