he said, "we have never met before, and it was good of you to
wait in for me. I hope my telephone message has not interfered with your
plans for the evening?"

Nicol Brinn, without change of pose, no line of the impassive face
altering, shot out a large, muscular hand, seized that of Paul Harley
in a tremendous grip, and almost instantly put his hand behind his back
again. "Had no plans," he replied, in a high, monotonous voice; "I was
bored stiff. Take the armchair."

Paul Harley sat down, but in the restless manner of one who has urgent
business in hand and who is impatient of delay. Mr. Brinn stooped to a
coffee table which stood upon the rug before the large open fireplace.
"I am going to offer you a cocktail," he said.

"I shall accept your offer," returned Harley, smiling. "The 'N. B.
cocktail' has a reputation which extends throughout the clubs of the
world."

Nicol Brinn, exhibiting the swift adroitness of that human dodo, the
New York bartender, mixed the drinks. Paul Harley watched him, meanwhile
drumming his fingers restlessly upon the chair arm.

"Here's success," he said, "to my mission."

It was an odd toast, but Mr. Brinn merely nodded and drank in silence.
Paul Harley set his glass down and glanced about the singular apartment
of which he had often heard and which no man could ever tire of
examining.

In this room the poles met, and the most remote civilizations of the
world rubbed shoulders with modernity. Here, encased, were a family of
snow-white ermine from Alaska and a pair of black Manchurian leopards.
A flying lemur from the Pelews contemplated swooping upon the head of
a huge tigress which glared with glassy eyes across the place at the
snarling muzzle of a polar bear. Mycenaean vases and gold death masks
stood upon the same shelf as Venetian goblets, and the mummy of an
Egyptian priestess of the thirteenth dynasty occupied a sarcophagus upon
the top of which rested a basrelief found in one of the shrines of the
Syrian fish goddess Derceto, at Ascalon.

Arrowheads of the Stone Age and medieval rapiers were ranged alongside
some of the latest examples of the gunsmith's art. There were elephants'
tusks and Mexican skulls; a stone jar of water from the well of Zem-Zem,
and an ivory crucifix which had belonged to Torquemada. A mat of human
hair from Borneo overlay a historical and unique rug woven in Ispahan
and entirely composed of fragments of Holy Carpets from the Kaaba at
Mecca.

"I t