st at present."

"Have you any inkling----?"

"None."

"If our agents have to travel----"

I expressed a reasonable generosity in the matter of expenses, and left
him at last with a vague discomfort in my mind. How far mightn't this
undesirable unearth the whole business in the course of his
investigations? And then what could he do? Suppose I went back forthwith
and stopped his enquiries before they began! I had a disagreeable
feeling of meanness that I couldn't shake off; I felt I was taking up a
weapon that Justin didn't deserve. Yet I argued with myself that the
abduction of Mary justified any such course.

As I was still debating this I saw Philip. He was perhaps twenty yards
ahead of me, he was paying off a hansom which had just put him down
outside Blake's. "Philip," I cried, following him up the steps and
overtaking him and seizing his arm as the commissionaire opened the door
for him. "Philip! What have you people done with Mary? Where is Mary?"

He turned a white face to me. "How dare you," he said with a catch of
the breath, "mention my sister?"

I spoke in an undertone, and stepped a little between him and the man at
the door in order that the latter might not hear what I said. "I want
to see her," I expostulated. "I _must_ see her. What you are doing is
not playing the game. I've _got_ to see her."

"Let go of my arm, sir!" cried he, and suddenly I felt a whirlwind of
rage answering the rage in his eyes. The pent-up exasperation of three
weeks rushed to its violent release. He struck me in the face with the
hand that was gripped about his umbrella. He meant to strike me in the
face and then escape into his club, but before he could get away from me
after his blow I had flung out at him, and had hit him under the
jawbone. My blow followed his before guard or counter was possible. I
hit with all my being. It was an amazing flare up of animal passion;
from the moment that I perceived he was striking at me to the moment
when both of us came staggering across the door-mat into the dignified
and spacious hall-way of Blake's, we were back at the ancestral ape, and
we did exactly what the ancestral ape would have done. The arms of the
commissionaire about my waist, the rush of the astonished porter from
his little glass box, two incredibly startled and delighted pages, and
an intervening member bawling out "Sir! Sir!" converged to remind us
that we were a million years or so beyond those purely arboreal da