fingers rattle quickly on the edge
of the crazy table. He read the message, "You must go on. This devil has
sucked me dry!"

Syme plunged into the breach with that bravado of improvisation which
always came to him when he was alarmed.

"Yes, the thing really happened to me," he said hastily. "I had the good
fortune to fall into conversation with a detective who took me, thanks
to my hat, for a respectable person. Wishing to clinch my reputation for
respectability, I took him and made him very drunk at the Savoy. Under
this influence he became friendly, and told me in so many words that
within a day or two they hope to arrest the Marquis in France.

"So unless you or I can get on his track--"

The Doctor was still smiling in the most friendly way, and his protected
eyes were still impenetrable. The Professor signalled to Syme that he
would resume his explanation, and he began again with the same elaborate
calm.

"Syme immediately brought this information to me, and we came here
together to see what use you would be inclined to make of it. It seems
to me unquestionably urgent that--"

All this time Syme had been staring at the Doctor almost as steadily
as the Doctor stared at the Professor, but quite without the smile. The
nerves of both comrades-in-arms were near snapping under that strain of
motionless amiability, when Syme suddenly leant forward and idly
tapped the edge of the table. His message to his ally ran, "I have an
intuition."

The Professor, with scarcely a pause in his monologue, signalled back,
"Then sit on it."

Syme telegraphed, "It is quite extraordinary."

The other answered, "Extraordinary rot!"

Syme said, "I am a poet."

The other retorted, "You are a dead man."

Syme had gone quite red up to his yellow hair, and his eyes were burning
feverishly. As he said he had an intuition, and it had risen to a sort
of lightheaded certainty. Resuming his symbolic taps, he signalled to
his friend, "You scarcely realise how poetic my intuition is. It has
that sudden quality we sometimes feel in the coming of spring."

He then studied the answer on his friend's fingers. The answer was, "Go
to hell!"

The Professor then resumed his merely verbal monologue addressed to the
Doctor.

"Perhaps I should rather say," said Syme on his fingers, "that it
resembles that sudden smell of the sea which may be found in the heart
of lush woods."

His companion disdained to reply.

"Or yet again," tapped Syme