Mr. Jeekes took his _pince-nez_ from his nose, gave the glasses a hasty rub with his pocket-handkerchief, and replaced them. He slanted a long narrow look at the young man. Then, “What letter do you mean?” he asked composedly. “A letter which lay on H.P.’s desk in the library at Harkings when they found the body ...” “There _was_ a letter there then ...?” “Haven’t _you_ got it?” Jeekes shook his head. “Come inside for a minute and tell me about this,” he said. He led Bruce into the vast smoking-room of the club. They took seats in a distant corner near the blazing fire. The room was practically deserted. Now, Mr. Jeekes’s excessive carefulness about money had been a long-standing joke amongst his assistants when Bruce Wright had belonged to Hartley Parrish’s secretarial staff. Thrift had become with him more than a habit. It was a positive obsession. It revealed itself in such petty meannesses as a perpetual cadging for matches or small change and a careful abstention from any offer of hospitality. Never in the whole course of his service had Bruce Wright heard of Mr. Jeekes taking anybody out to lunch or extending any of the usual hospitalities of life. He was not a little surprised, therefore, to hear Jeekes ask him what he would take. Bruce said he would take some coffee. “Have a liqueur? Have a cigar?” said Jeekes, turning to Bruce from the somnolent waiter who had answered the bell. There was a strange eagerness, a sort of over-done cordiality, in the invitation which contrasted so strongly with the secretary’s habits that Robin felt dimly suspicious. He suddenly formed the idea that Mr. Jeekes wanted to pump him. He refused the liqueur, but accepted a cigar. Jeekes waited until they had been served and the waiter had withdrawn silently into the dim vastness of the great room before he spoke. “Now, then, young Wright,” he said, “what’s this about a letter? Tell me from the beginning ...” Bruce told him of the letter from Elias van der Spyck & Co. which Robin had seen upon the desk in the library at Harkings, of his (Bruce’s) journey down to Harkings that afternoon and of his failure to find the letter. “But why do you assume that I’ve got it?” There was an air of forced joviality about Mr. Jeekes as he put the question which did not in the least, as he undoubtedly intended it should, disguise his eagerness. On the contrary, it lent his rather undistinguished features an expression of cunning which can only be described as knavish. Bruce Wright, who, as will already have been seen, was a young man with all his wits about him, did not fail to remark it. The result was that he hastily revised an intention half-formed in his mind of taking Jeekes a little way into his confidence regarding Robin Greve’s doubts and suspicions about Hartley Parrish’s death. But he answered the secretary’s question readily enough.