“My good fellow, that’s the whole point! I’ll go myself and ask for the asthma cigarettes that Dr. Baumgartner always has; if they say he never had them before, that’ll be talking. His being a doctor looks well. But I’m certain I know his name; you might look it up in _Who’s Who_, and read out what they say.” And Mullins did so with due docility, albeit with queer gulps at barbaric mouthfuls such as the list of battle-fields on which Dr. Baumgartner had fought in his martial youth; the various Universities whereat he had studied psychology and theology in an evident reaction of later life; even the titles of his subsequent publications, which contained some long English words, but were given in German too. A copious contribution concluded with the information that photography and billiards were the doctor’s recreations, and that he belonged to a polysyllabically unpronounceable Berlin club, and to one in St. James’s which Mullins more culpably miscalled the Parthenian. “Parthenon!” said Thrush, as though he had bitten on a nerve. “But what about his address?” “There’s no getting hold of that address,” said Mullins, demoralised and perspiring. “It’s not given here either.” “Well, the chemist or the directory will supply that if we want it, but I’m afraid he sounds a wheezy old bird. The author of _Peripatetic Psychology_ deserves to have asthma all his nights, and _After this Life_ smacks of the usual Schopenhauer and Lager. No, we won’t build on Dr. Baumgartner, Mullins; but we’ll go through the chemists of London with a small tooth-comb, from here to the four-mile radius.” Thrush had finished breakfast, and Mullins was beginning to clear away, when a stormy step was heard upon the stairs, and in burst Mr. Upton with a panic-stricken face. He was colourless almost to the neck, but he denied that he had any news, though not without a pregnant glance at Mullins, and fell to abusing London and the Londoners, but City men above all others, till Thrush and he should be alone together. The incidental diatribe was no mere padding, either; it was the sincere utterance of a passionately provincial soul. Nobody in all London, he declared, and apparently without excepting Mr. Thrush, cared a twopenny curse what became of his poor boy. In view of the fact that the present company alone knew of his disappearance, and not so very many more of the boy’s existence, this was an extravagantly sweeping statement. But the distracted man had a particular instance to bear him out; he had been to see his boy’s friends’ father, “a swine called Knaggs,” that very morning at his house in St. John’s Wood. “Rather early, wasn’t it?” suggested Thrush, whose manner was more softly sympathetic than it had been the night before. The change was slight, and yet marked. He was more solicitous.