Mr. Thrush did not continue the conversation, possibly because he took as little real interest as he professed in the case which was being thrust upon him, but more obviously owing to the necessary care in shaving the corners of a delightfuly long and mobile mouth. Indeed, the whole face emerging from the lather, as a cast from its clay, would have delighted any eye but its own. It was fat and flabby as the rest of Eugene Thrush; there was quite a collection of chins to shave; and yet anybody but himself must have recognised the invincible freshness of complexion, the happy penetration of every glance, as an earnest of inexhaustible possibilities beneath the burden of the flesh. Great round spectacles, through which he stared like a wise fish in an aquarium, were caught precariously on a button of a nose which in itself might have prevented the superficial observer from taking him any more seriously than he took himself. Mr. Upton, who arrived before Thrush was visible, was an essentially superficial and antipathetic observer of unfamiliar types; and being badly impressed by the forbidding staircase, he had determined on the landing to sound his man before trusting him. In the rank undergrowth of his prejudices there was no more luxuriant weed than an innate abhorrence of London and all Londoners, which neither the cause of his visit nor the murky mien of Mullins was calculated to abate. The library of books in solid bindings, many of them legal tomes, was the first reassuring feature; another was the large desk, made business-like with pigeon-holes and a telephone; but Mr. Upton was only beginning to recover confidence when Eugene Thrush shook it sadly at his first entry. It might have been by his face, or his fat, or his evening clothes seen from the motorist’s dusty tweeds, almost as much as by the misplaced joviality with which Thrush exclaimed: “I’m sorry to have kept you waiting, sir, and the worst of it is that I can’t let you keep me!” This touched a raw nerve in the ironmaster, as the kind of reception one had to come up to London to incur. “Then I’ll clear out!” said he, and would have been as good as his word but for its instantaneous effect. Thrush had pulled out a gold watch after a stare of kindly consternation. “I really am rather rushed,” said he; “but I can give you four minutes, if that’s any good to you.” Now, at first sight, before a word was spoken, Mr. Upton would have said four hours or four days of that boiled salmon in spectacles would have been no good to him; but the precise term of minutes, together with a seemlier but not less decisive manner, had already quickened the business man’s respect for another whose time was valuable. This is by no means to say that Thrush had won him over in a breath. But the following interchange took place rapidly. “I understand you’re a detective, Mr. Thrush?” “Hardly that, Mr.——I’ve left your card in the other room.” “Upton is my name, sir.”