“It should be a most intriguing tale, I believe, though it requires some going over. May I ask you to lock it away, and in God’s name let me sleep?” He waited for no answer, but thrust the pile at Wessel, and literally poured himself like stuff from a suddenly inverted bottle upon a couch in the corner; slept, with his breathing regular, but his brow wrinkled in a curious and somewhat uncanny manner. Wessel yawned sleepily and, glancing at the scrawled, uncertain first page, he began reading aloud very softly: _The Rape of Lucrece_ “_From the besieged Ardea all in post, Borne by the trustless wings of false desire, Lust-breathing Tarquin leaves the Roman host--_” “O RUSSET WITCH!” Merlin Grainger was employed by the Moonlight Quill Bookshop, which you may have visited, just around the corner from the Ritz-Carlton on Forty-seventh Street. The Moonlight Quill is, or rather was, a very romantic little store, considered radical and admitted dark. It was spotted interiorly with red and orange posters of breathless exotic intent, and lit no less by the shiny reflecting bindings of special editions than by the great squat lamp of crimson satin that, lighted through all the day, swung overhead. It was truly a mellow bookshop. The words “Moonlight Quill” were worked over the door in a sort of serpentine embroidery. The windows seemed always full of something that had passed the literary censors with little to spare; volumes with covers of deep orange which offer their titles on little white paper squares. And over all there was the smell of the musk, which the clever, inscrutable Mr. Moonlight Quill ordered to be sprinkled about--the smell half of a curiosity shop in Dickens’ London and half of a coffee-house on the warm shores of the Bosphorus. From nine until five-thirty Merlin Grainger asked bored old ladies in black and young men with dark circles under their eyes if they “cared for this fellow” or were interested in first editions. Did they buy novels with Arabs on the cover, or books which gave Shakespeare’s newest sonnets as dictated psychically to Miss Sutton of South Dakota? he sniffed. As a matter of fact, his own taste ran to these latter, but as an employee at the Moonlight Quill he assumed for the working day the attitude of a disillusioned connoisseur.