to be bound by certain rules. One of
these rules was, even if he chose to linger a few minutes after
four-thirty, that no caller need hope to be admitted. That was a
favorite regulation of Sibley's. It made him feel that, after all, he
was very methodical. One afternoon, however, he did a worse thing than
break this rule. He went back from the elevator, the whole length of
the corridor to the outer office, simply to enquire about a man he had
met at the lift door.

They almost collided as the man was stepping out and as Sibley was
about to step in. But he did not step in. He let the lift shoot down
without him, while he paused to stare after the man.

"Strange-looking customer!" he thought.

Sibley himself was a particularly immaculate person. Being somewhat of
the Latin type, black eyed and olive skinned, he was shamefacedly
afraid of looking picturesque. He dressed, therefore, as precisely as a
fashion-plate. The man who had got out of the lift might have bought
his clothes at a junk-shop, and a foreign junk-shop at that. They were
not clothes a gentleman could wear--yet Sibley received a swift
impression that a gentleman was wearing them at that moment: a
remarkably tall fellow, so thin that his bones looked somehow too big
for him.

He walked past Sibley with no more than a glance, yet it was partly the
glance which impelled Sibley to stop short and gaze at the back of a
badly made tweed coat, the worst sort of a "reach-me-down" coat.

The quick mind of the publisher was addicted to similes. (He had once
written a book himself, under a _nom de guerre_. It had failed.) The
thought sprang to his mind that the glance was like the sudden opening
of a dingy box, which let out a flash of secret jewels.

In spite of his shocking clothes, the man had the air and bearing of a
soldier. Sibley noticed this, in criticizing the straight back, and it
aroused his curiosity more than ever in connection with the scarred
face.

Any one who got out at the tenth floor of the Sibley building must want
to see Eversedge Sibley or one of his partners, so evidently this
person intended to ask for some member of the firm. He looked the last
man on earth to be a budding author; yet Eversedge Sibley had caught
sight of a paper-wrapped roll of manuscript. One who was not of the
publishing or editorial world might have mistaken it for something
else; but no manuscript would disguise itself from eyes so trained to
fear and avoid it.

"