Simpkins instantly decided to dislike the young clergyman beside him. He was tall and athletic-looking, but with a slight stoop, that impressed the reporter as a physical assumption of humility which the handsome face, with its faintly sneering lines and bold eyes, contradicted. But he acknowledged Brander's offhand "How d'ye do?" in a properly deferential manner, and listened respectfully to a few careless sentences of instructions. For the rest of the morning, Simpkins mechanically addressed circulars appealing for funds to carry on the good work of the Society, while his mind was busy trying to formulate a plan by which he could get Mrs. Athelstone to tell what she knew about the whereabouts of Madame Blavatsky's soul. He felt, with the accurate instinct of one used to classing the frailties of flesh and blood according to their worth in columns, that those devices which had so often led women to confide to him the details of the particular sensation that he was working up would avail him nothing here. "You simply haven't got her Bertillon measurements, Simp.," he was forced to admit, after an hour of fruitless thinking. "You'll have to trust in your rabbit's foot." But if Mrs. Athelstone was a new species to him, the office boy was not. He knew that youth down to the last button on his jacket. He knew, too, that an office boy often whiles away the monotonous hours by piecing together the president's secrets from the scraps in his waste-basket. So at the noon hour he slipped out after Buttons, caught him as he was disappearing up a near-by alley in a cloud of cigarette smoke, like the disreputable little devil that he was, and succeeded in establishing friendly and even familiar relations with him. It was not, however, until late in the afternoon, when he was called into the ante-chamber to discover the business of a caller, that he improved the opportunity to ask the youth some leading questions. "Suppose you open up mornings?" he began carelessly. "Naw; Mrs. A. does. She bunks here." "How?" "In a bed. She's got rooms in de buildin'. That door by Booker T. leads to 'em." "Booker T.? Oh, sure! The brunette statue. And that other door--the one to the left. Where does that go?" "Into Brander's storeroom. He sells mummies on de side." "Does, eh? Curious business!" commented Simpkins. "Seems to rub it into _you_ pretty hard. And stuck on himself! Don't seem able to spit without ringing his bell for some one to see him do it. Guess you'd have to have four legs to satisfy _him_, all right." "Say, dat duck ain't on de level," the grievance for which Simpkins had been probing coming to the surface. "Holds out on what he collects? Steals?" "Sure t'ing--de loidies," and the boy lowered his voice; "he's dead stuck on Mrs. A." "Oh! nonsense," commented Simpkins, an invitation to continue in his voice. "She's a married woman."