"Loti, if you please, signor. I had indeed hoped that my name was well known enough to--_Pouffe!_ No, I miss nothing--I miss not so much as a pin. I am told he shall not have been that kind of a boy." And then, with a shake of the head and a pitying glance toward the author of these two asinine theories regarding the strange disappearance, returned to his work of putting the finishing touches to a recumbent figure representing a dead soldier lying in the foreground of the tableau. "Oh, well, you never can tell what boys will do; and it's an old saying that 'a good booty makes many a thief,'" replied Cleek airily. "Reckon I'll have to hunt up something a bit more promising, then. Don't mind my poking about a bit, do you?" "Not in the slightest, signor," replied the Italian, and glanced sympathizingly up at Trent and gave his shoulders a significant shrug, as if to say: "Is this the best that Scotland Yard can turn out?" when Cleek began turning over costume plates and looking under books and scraps of material which lay scattered about the floor, and even took to examining the jugs and vases and tumblers in which the signor's bunches of cut flowers were placed. There were many of them--on tables and chairs and shelves, and even on the platform of the tableau itself--so many, in fact, that he was minded, by their profusion, of what Trent had said regarding the old waxworker's great love of flowers. He looked round the room, in an apparently perfunctory manner, but in reality with a photographic eye for its every detail, finding that it agreed in every particular with the description which Trent had given him. There were the cheap lace curtains all along the glazed side which overlooked the short passage leading down to the narrow alley, but they were of so thin a quality, and so scantily patterned, that the mesh did not obstruct the view in any manner, merely rendering it a trifle hazy; for he could himself see from where he stood the window in the side of the house opposite, and, seated at that window, Mrs. Sherman and her daughter, busy at their endless sewing.