"I don't know, my dear Reginald, that it much matters to you what I am doing, but I don't mind telling you, in confidence, that I am at present devoting my energies to the detection of crime." "To what?" The idea seemed too funny. "To the detection of crime. In other words, I am a private detective, on, I think I may say, a considerable scale." "The deuce you are! That is something new." "And you--may I ask what you are doing?" I stared at Alexander. He certainly was coming on. "I'm talking to you." "I trust that the occupation gives you satisfaction. I regret that I am compelled to cut it short. My time is valuable. In fact, at this moment I have a pressing appointment with a gentleman well known in City circles." "A bailiff or a policeman, Alexander? They are both of them well known in City circles." "Probably, my dear Reginald, they are better known to you than they are to me. Good-day." "Good-day!" He raised his hat about three feet; I raised mine about three inches. We parted, I do believe, for the first time in our lives, on the most affable of terms. CHAPTER XII. SIR HASELTON JARDINE. Sir Haselton Jardine was a man whom I had rather been in the habit of holding in awe. One never could be certain how much he knew. A man could scarcely rise to the forensic heights which he had reached without knowing something of almost every one. He was so quiet and so self-contained that it was impossible to gauge the extent of his knowledge until too late. He was rather short, and he was very thin, and he stooped. He had colourless grey eyes, which you scarcely ever saw, though, if you had your wits about you, you felt that they all the time saw you. He had a peaked grey beard, too straggling to be Vandyke, and sandy hair, which he parted low down on the right-hand side. His voice was as soft and gentle as any girl's--when he was asking a jury to hang a man he was always the very pink of courtesy, and I wonder how many he had sent that way in his time. He had beautiful hands, and he either braced his trousers too high or else it was a principle of his to have them made too short. Jardine's trousers were a standing joke--he always looked as if he had got into his younger, and distinctly smaller, brother's. He was a widower, and Dora was his only child.