in every compartment, and the windows completely blocked.
But if---- Hullo! Victoria at last, thank goodness, 'and so to bed,' as
Pepys says. The riddle's solved, Mr. Narkom. Good-night!"

CHAPTER VIII

THE LION'S SMILE

It was on the very stroke of five when Cleek, answering an urgent
message from headquarters, strolled into the bar parlour of "The Fiddle
and Horseshoe," which, as you may possibly know, stands near to the
Green in a somewhat picturesque by-path between Shepherd's Bush and
Acton, and found Narkom in the very act of hanging up his hat and
withdrawing his gloves preparatory to ordering tea.

"My dear Cleek, what a model of punctuality you are," said the
superintendent, as he came forward and shook hands with him. "You would
put Father Time himself to the blush with your abnormal promptness. Do
make yourself comfortable for a moment or two while I go and order tea.
I've only just arrived. Shan't be long, old chap."

"Pray don't hurry yourself upon my account, Mr. Narkom," replied Cleek,
as he tossed his hat and gloves upon a convenient table and strolled
leisurely to the window and looked out on the quaint, old-fashioned
arbour-bordered bowling green, all steeped in sunshine and zoned with
the froth of pear and apple blooms, thick-piled above the time-stained
brick of the enclosing wall. "These quaint old inns, which the march of
what we are pleased to call 'progress' is steadily crowding off the face
of the land, are always deeply interesting to me; I love them. What a
day! What a picture! What a sky! As blue as what Dollops calls the
'Merry Geranium Sea.' I'd give a Jew's eye for a handful of those apple
blossoms, they are divine!"

Narkom hastened from the room without replying. The strain of poetry
underlying the character of this strange, inscrutable man, his amazing
love of Nature, his moments of almost womanish weakness and sentiment,
astonished and mystified him. It was as if a hawk had acquired the
utterly useless trick of fluting like a nightingale, and being himself
wholly without imagination, he could not comprehend it in the smallest
degree.

When he returned a few minutes later, however, the idealist seemed to
have simmered down into the materialist, the extraordinary to have
become merged in the ordinary, for he found his famous ally no longer
studying the beauties of Nature, but giving his whole attention to the
sordid commonplaces of man. He was standing before a glaringly