e him a cup of tea. If I don't, you
will know that he won't do."

"Good-bye, then, for the present," she smiled, "and don't frighten the
poor man, if you can help it. I dare say he's only an exaggerated
policeman, after all."

But it was a very different sort of person whom Franklin Marmion greeted
in the drawing-room. M. Nicol Hendry was a slimly but strongly-built man
of about forty. His high, somewhat narrow forehead was framed with
close-cut, crinkly, reddish-brown hair. Under well-defined brown
eyebrows shone a pair of alert steel-grey eyes of almost startling
brilliancy. His nose was a trifle long and slightly aquiline. A
carefully-trained golden-brown moustache half-concealed firm, thinly-cut
lips, and a closely-trimmed, pointed beard just revealed the strength of
the chin beneath. He was dressed in a dark grey frock-coat suit, and
wore a pinky-red wild rose, which he had plucked on the Common, in his
button-hole. As he shook hands with him the Professor made a mental note
of him as an embodiment of strength, keenness, and quiet inflexibility:
a summing-up which was pretty near the truth.

"Good afternoon, M. Hendry," he said, as the hands and eyes met.

"Good afternoon, Professor," returned the other in a gentle voice, and
almost perfect English. "May I ask to what happy circumstance--at least,
I hope it is a happy one--I owe the honour of making the acquaintance of
the gentleman who has succeeded in mystifying all the mathematicians of
Europe?"

"Well," said Franklin Marmion with a smile, "I don't know whether there
is so very much honour about that, but I do know that your time is very
valuable and that I have already taken up a good deal of it by bringing
you all the way out here, so I will come to the point at once. But wait
a moment. Come down into my study. We can talk more comfortably there."
When the Professor had given his guest a cigar and lit his pipe, he
said quite abruptly: "It is about the Zastrow affair."

If he had said it was about the last Grand Ducal plot in the Peterhof,
M. Hendry could not have been inwardly more astonished. Outwardly the
Professor might have mentioned the last commonplace murder. Only his
eyelids lifted a little as he replied:

"Ah, indeed? Well, really, Professor, you must forgive me for saying
that that is about the very last matter I should have expected you to
have brought up. All the world knows you as one of its most
distinguished men of science, now, of cours