be his; and it belongs to
his sense of security in his right that not once, not even when he
remembered it most avidly, did he think of the expedient of buying it
from the sick peddler by paying him the value of it.

Another man would probably have gone forthwith to Selby, told him the
secret, and enlisted his aid; but Mr. Baruch did not work like that.
He allowed chance a week in which to show its reasonableness; and not
till then, nothing having happened, did he furnish himself, one
afternoon, with an excuse, in the form of a disputed customs charge,
and cross the narrow landing to the American Vice-Consulate.

Selby was there alone at his disorderly desk by the window, fussing
feebly among the chaos of his tumbled papers, and making a noise of
desperation with his lips like a singing kettle.

"Ah, Selby, my friend!" Mr. Baruch went smilingly forward. "You work
always too much. And now come I with a little other thing for you. It
is too bad yes?"

"Hallo, Baruch!" returned Selby. "You're right about the working.
Here I keep a girl to keep my papers in some kind of a sort of order
and I been hunting and digging for an hour to find one of 'em. It
gets me what she thinks I pay her for! Hoboes an' that kind o' trash,
that's her style."

Mr. Baruch had still his agreeable, mild smile, which was as much a
part of his daily wear as his trousers. He could not have steered the
talk to better purpose.

"Hoboes?" he said vaguely. "Trash?"

Selby exploded in weak, sputtering fury, and, as always, his glasses
canted on the high, thin bridge of his nose and waggled in time to
each jerk of words.

"It's that hobo, you saw him, Baruch, that pranced in here and threw
a fit and a lot of old carpets all over my floor. Armenian or some
such thing! Well, they took him to the hospital and this afternoon he
hadn't got more sense than to send a message over here."

Mr. Baruch nodded.

"Ah, to Miss Pilgrim, yes? because of her very kind treatment."

Selby caught his glasses as they fell.

"Huh!" he sneered malevolently. "You'd have to be a hobo before you'd
get kindness from her. Hard-luck stories is the only kind she
believes. 'I'll have to go, Mr. Selby,' she says. And she goes--and
here's me hunting and pawing around--"

"Yes," agreed Mr. Baruch; "it is inconvenient. So I will come back
tomorrow with my matter, when you shall have more time. Then the poor
man, he is worse or better?"

"You don't suppose I been inquiring