like," he said, "to ask you a question or two about Wednesday
night."

Pritchard nodded.

"Go right ahead," he invited.

"You seem to take the whole affair as a sort of joke," Tavernake
remarked.

"Well, isn't that what it was?" the detective asked, smiling.

Tavernake shrugged his shoulders.

"There didn't seem to me to be much joke about it!" he exclaimed.

Pritchard laughed gayly.

"You are not used to Americans, my young friend," he said. "Over on this
side you are all so fearfully literal. You are not seriously supposing
that they meant to dose me with that stuff the other night, eh?"

"I never thought that there was any doubt about it at all," Tavernake
declared deliberately.

Pritchard stroked his moustache meditatively.

"Well," he remarked, "you are certainly green, and yet I don't know why
you shouldn't be. Americans are always up to games of that sort. I am
not saying that they didn't mean to give me a scare, if they could, or
that they wouldn't have been glad to get a few words of information out
of me, or a paper or two that I keep pretty safely locked up. It would
have been a better joke on me then. But as for the rest, as for really
trying to make me take that stuff, of course, that was all bunkum."

Tavernake sat quite still in his chair for several minutes.

"Will you take another gin fizz, Mr. Pritchard?" he asked.

"Why not?"

Tavernake gave the order. He sat on his stool whistling softly to
himself.

"Then I suppose," he said at last, "I must have looked a pretty sort of
an ass coming through the wall like a madman."

Pritchard shook his head.

"You looked just about what you were," he answered, "a d----d good sort.
I'm not playing up to you that it was all pretense. You can never trust
that gang. The blackguard outside was in earnest, anyway. After all, you
know, they wouldn't miss me if I were to drop quietly out. There 's no
one else they 're quite so much afraid of. There 's no one else knows
quite as much about them."

"Well, we'll let it go at that," Tavernake declared. "You know so much
of all these people, though, that I rather wish you 'd tell me something
I want very much to know."

"It's by telling nothing," the detective replied quickly, "that I know
as much as I do. Just one cocktail, eh?"

Tavernake shook his head.

"I drank my first cocktail last night," he remarked. "I had supper with
the professor and his daughter."

"Not Elizabeth?" Pritchard asked sw