So the experiment of consulting the police came to an untimely end. The one result obtained was the expression of purblind opinion by the authorities of the detective department which pointed to Isabel, or to one of the servants, as the undiscovered thief. Thinking the matter over in the retirement of his own office--and not forgetting his promise to Isabel to leave no means untried of establishing her innocence--Mr. Troy could see but one alternative left to him. He took up his pen, and wrote to his friend at the Government office. There was nothing for it now but to run the risk, and try Old Sharon. CHAPTER IX. THE next day, Mr. Troy (taking Robert Moody with him as a valuable witness) rang the bell at the mean and dirty lodging-house in which Old Sharon received the clients who stood in need of his advice. They were led up stairs to a back room on the second floor of the house. Entering the room, they discovered through a thick cloud of tobacco smoke, a small, fat, bald-headed, dirty, old man, in an arm-chair, robed in a tattered flannel dressing-gown, with a short pipe in his mouth, a pug-dog on his lap, and a French novel in his hands. “Is it business?” asked Old Sharon, speaking in a hoarse, asthmatical voice, and fixing a pair of bright, shameless, black eyes attentively on the two visitors. “It _is_ business,” Mr. Troy answered, looking at the old rogue who had disgraced an honorable profession, as he might have looked at a reptile which had just risen rampant at his feet. “What is your fee for a consultation?” “You give me a guinea, and I’ll give you half an hour.” With this reply Old Sharon held out his unwashed hand across the rickety ink-splashed table at which he was sitting. Mr. Troy would not have touched him with the tips of his own fingers for a thousand pounds. He laid the guinea on the table. Old Sharon burst into a fierce laugh--a laugh strangely accompanied by a frowning contraction of his eyebrows, and a frightful exhibition of the whole inside of his mouth. “I’m not clean enough for you--eh?” he said, with an appearance of being very much amused. “There’s a dirty old man described in this book that is a little like me.” He held up his French novel. “Have you read it? A capital story--well put together. Ah, you haven’t read it? You have got a pleasure to come. I say, do you mind tobacco-smoke? I think faster while I smoke--that’s all.” Mr. Troy’s respectable hand waved a silent permission to smoke, given under dignified protest. “All right,” said Old Sharon. “Now, get on.” He laid himself back in his chair, and puffed out his smoke, with eyes lazily half closed, like the eyes of the pug-dog on his lap. At that moment, indeed there was a curious resemblance between the two. They both seemed to be preparing themselves, in the same idle way, for the same comfortable nap.