ant to show
you those Welkin letters. Then you might run round the corner and fetch
your friend." He pressed a button concealed in the wall, and the door
opened of itself.

It opened on a long, commodious ante-room, of which the only arresting
features, ordinarily speaking, were the rows of tall half-human
mechanical figures that stood up on both sides like tailors' dummies.
Like tailors' dummies they were headless; and like tailors' dummies
they had a handsome unnecessary humpiness in the shoulders, and a
pigeon-breasted protuberance of chest; but barring this, they were not
much more like a human figure than any automatic machine at a station
that is about the human height. They had two great hooks like arms, for
carrying trays; and they were painted pea-green, or vermilion, or
black for convenience of distinction; in every other way they were only
automatic machines and nobody would have looked twice at them. On
this occasion, at least, nobody did. For between the two rows of
these domestic dummies lay something more interesting than most of the
mechanics of the world. It was a white, tattered scrap of paper scrawled
with red ink; and the agile inventor had snatched it up almost as soon
as the door flew open. He handed it to Angus without a word. The red ink
on it actually was not dry, and the message ran, "If you have been to
see her today, I shall kill you."

There was a short silence, and then Isidore Smythe said quietly, "Would
you like a little whiskey? I rather feel as if I should."

"Thank you; I should like a little Flambeau," said Angus, gloomily.
"This business seems to me to be getting rather grave. I'm going round
at once to fetch him."

"Right you are," said the other, with admirable cheerfulness. "Bring him
round here as quick as you can."

But as Angus closed the front door behind him he saw Smythe push back a
button, and one of the clockwork images glided from its place and slid
along a groove in the floor carrying a tray with syphon and decanter.
There did seem something a trifle weird about leaving the little man
alone among those dead servants, who were coming to life as the door
closed.

Six steps down from Smythe's landing the man in shirt sleeves was doing
something with a pail. Angus stopped to extract a promise, fortified
with a prospective bribe, that he would remain in that place until the
return with the detective, and would keep count of any kind of stranger
coming up those stairs.