The secretary, bending respectfully over, ran a fresh white-nailed finger down the Agony Column, and stopped it at a three-line advertisement:-- “_Lady_ (_young_) _a victim to persecution, seeks honourable employment to extricate her from pressing difficulties. Good typewriter and linguist. Address Viatrix, Rufus Cottage, Knight’s Hill, West Norwood._” Gilead read and considered, his hand thoughtfully caressing his chin. Then he looked up. “You think it promising?” he said. The secretary, withdrawn a little, deferred to his employer. “If I am right, sir, in interpreting your mood.” Gilead reflected. “There has been a monotony, I admit, hitherto,” he said. “You differentiate this, somehow, from the others?” “It is, if I may use the expression, sir, manly--no cringing. There are tokens of culture; and the hint of persecution, the mystery, puts it in another category. Certainly it is a lady--and young.” “You have misread me, Nestle,” said his master, “if you can hint that as an objection. I should be a useless agent in this business were I constitutionally susceptible. The sex has never more than an abstract attraction for me, and any desire I may have to possess it is limited to its idealised presentments in art.” He returned to the advertisement, frowning a little, while the secretary murmured an apology. Presently he looked up, with decision. “I will undertake,” he said, “this case in person. You will of course allow no hint of the fact to escape you.” “Of course, Mr Balm.” They spent the subsequent hour or two in discussing the business of the Bureau, and at two o’clock Gilead, having lunched lightly at Victoria Station, took a train thence for West Norwood. Alighted there, and enquiring his way, he found himself in a decent suburban road, which ascended at a steepish angle between a broken double line of houses, detached or in ranks. There were terraces, some shops, many raw modern villas, a few large mansions, of an older date, standing in their own grounds, and here and there, contemporaneous with these, a detached cottage or maisonette, almost hidden behind the shrubs and foliage of its front garden. Reading _Rufus Cottage_ upon the gate-post of one of these last, situated high on the hill, Gilead turned into a tiny drive, and rang the door bell of a little sober brown-brick house built after the sturdy architecture of the fifties. As he waited, he had time to observe that the scrap of lawn behind the shrubs was weed-grown and neglected, and the general atmosphere of the place fuscous and wet-smelling like an over-ripe walnut. And the next instant the door was opened by a weeping servant maid. “I am sorry,” said Gilead, chivalrous to all. “Is anything the matter?” She was small and moist, of the “tweenie” breed; and her emotion had inflamed her little nose and shaken her cap awry. She gazed at him open-mouthed, seeing an angel alighted on her step; but she answered nothing.