When they reached the street, Thornton Carey parted from them, with promises to see them on the morrow; and Bryan Duval, who seemed to have recovered all his old manner, said to Miss Montressor: 'I am going down, my dear Clara, on a little mission to the Tombs, which is the cheerful name they give to the police office here. The judge is an old friend of mine, and I have already started inquiries among some of the police officers. It is not a place that I can conveniently take you to, so I advise you to get into the approaching omnibus, which these Americans, with their usual perversity, insist on calling a "stage," and which will put you down at the hotel. You will find the step very high, but woman is privileged in America, and you can seize the knee or the nose of the nearest gentleman, and help yourself in by it, without giving him any offence. You can add to the compliment, so soon as you are seated, by handing him this ten-cent bill, and observing his graceful attitudes as he pushes it through the hole in the roof to the driver. Adios, my child; I shall be back by dinner time.' 'Our Clara is a very nice little girl,' said Bryan Duval, as he strolled down the street, 'and Mr. Thornton Carey is a worthy, good man--rather of the steady-going beef-and-potatoes kind of order, without any particular originality or fancy about him, and they both do their best, and very possibly be of use in helping to puzzle out the inquiry; but there are times when a man of any genius likes to be alone, and not to be yoked to any of his humdrum fellow creatures. Collaboration, working with another person, is a thing that I never appreciated--I mean working at the same time with another person. If a fellow has been before me with certain excellent crude notions, which he had brought to a certain point, and then gave them up because he lacked the ability to carry them further, and I take them up where he dropped them, and trundle them into a triumph, I do not call that collaboration; they become my ideas, and his failure becomes my success.