he slow de Worms manner. "You have no doubt made
all the arrangements for the Paris affair?" Then he added with infinite
slowness, "We have information which renders intolerable anything in the
nature of a moment's delay."

Dr. Bull smiled again, but continued to gaze on them without speaking.
The Professor resumed, a pause before each weary word--

"Please do not think me excessively abrupt; but I advise you to alter
those plans, or if it is too late for that, to follow your agent with
all the support you can get for him. Comrade Syme and I have had an
experience which it would take more time to recount than we can afford,
if we are to act on it. I will, however, relate the occurrence in
detail, even at the risk of losing time, if you really feel that it is
essential to the understanding of the problem we have to discuss."

He was spinning out his sentences, making them intolerably long and
lingering, in the hope of maddening the practical little Doctor into an
explosion of impatience which might show his hand. But the little Doctor
continued only to stare and smile, and the monologue was uphill work.
Syme began to feel a new sickness and despair. The Doctor's smile and
silence were not at all like the cataleptic stare and horrible silence
which he had confronted in the Professor half an hour before. About the
Professor's makeup and all his antics there was always something merely
grotesque, like a gollywog. Syme remembered those wild woes of yesterday
as one remembers being afraid of Bogy in childhood. But here was
daylight; here was a healthy, square-shouldered man in tweeds, not odd
save for the accident of his ugly spectacles, not glaring or grinning at
all, but smiling steadily and not saying a word. The whole had a sense
of unbearable reality. Under the increasing sunlight the colours of
the Doctor's complexion, the pattern of his tweeds, grew and expanded
outrageously, as such things grow too important in a realistic novel.
But his smile was quite slight, the pose of his head polite; the only
uncanny thing was his silence.

"As I say," resumed the Professor, like a man toiling through heavy
sand, "the incident that has occurred to us and has led us to ask for
information about the Marquis, is one which you may think it better to
have narrated; but as it came in the way of Comrade Syme rather than
me--"

His words he seemed to be dragging out like words in an anthem; but
Syme, who was watching, saw his long