“To me,” said Walker, “—because you believe in providence?” “Yes, sir,” the boy continued, “that is precisely the reason I came to you. It is true that the American Ambassador has a point of attack with Dercum because of these American properties, but that is not the thing I depended upon. My uncle, when he was chief of the criminal investigation department of Scotland Yard, used to say when we had a perplexed thing to take up with America: ‘We can unravel it, if Captain Walker comes up with one of his inspirations from heaven.’ Well, sir, I have come to you for one of these inspirations.” Walker laughed softly. The reputation was perhaps his greatest asset—a sort of intuition arising at certain complicated stages of an affair, the sudden swift realization of some essential hitherto unobserved. Walker continued to smile. The young man was looking at him with a tense, serious expression. “You will have one of these inspirations, Captain Walker?” The Secret Service agent began to walk about the room. He was disturbed that Lord Donald Muir should come to him with this affair. It was not a thing in which he ought to take any part. Outside of some courteous discussion at the request of the American Ambassador, he did not see how it was possible for him to have anything to do with the matter. And further, it disturbed him that this youth should come depending upon what was to him the absurd phase of a detective reputation. Scotland Yard called his sudden swift insight into some complicated matter, “the inspirations from heaven of the Chief of the American Secret Service,” and not precisely with a complimentary accent. The thing annoyed him. But he smiled at the youth in the chair—that vague, placid smile for which the man was famous. “I do not see what I can do, my dear Lord Muir,” he said; “but I shall be receptive to any inspiration that may arrive. Let us go down.” They went out of the little room into the great library. It was a long, immense room, and the doors were closed. As they passed through, the music from below ascended, and the vast confusion of human voices, like the hum of some distant insect hive. Walker opened the door, and they were at once above an immense sea of human figures, gay, brilliant. The crowded Embassy ball moved below them. The jewels, the gowns of women, the color of uniforms gave the thing the aspect of an almost barbaric saturnalia. The dense crowd overflowed onto the bronze stairway. Lord Muir entered and was lost in the immense throng, seeking the one about whom he was so greatly concerned. The Chief of the American Secret Service went slowly down the stairway, moving his hand along the mahogany rail under which, in a magnificent frieze, a wood-nymph entangled in a flowering vine fled from the pursuit of satyrs. He was more disturbed than he had been willing to admit. This girl was the daughter of that charming American woman who had married the Earl of Rexford.