unrest, annoyance, and nervousness of the man with whom he walked. Basil
and I tramped behind, and it was not necessary for us to tell each other
that we had both noticed this.

Lieutenant Drummond Keith led us through very extraordinary and
unpromising neighbourhoods in the search for his remarkable house-agent.
Neither of the brothers Grant failed to notice this fact. As the streets
grew closer and more crooked and the roofs lower and the gutters grosser
with mud, a darker curiosity deepened on the brows of Basil, and the
figure of Rupert seen from behind seemed to fill the street with a
gigantic swagger of success. At length, at the end of the fourth or
fifth lean grey street in that sterile district, we came suddenly to a
halt, the mysterious lieutenant looking once more about him with a
sort of sulky desperation. Above a row of shutters and a door, all
indescribably dingy in appearance and in size scarce sufficient even for
a penny toyshop, ran the inscription: "P. Montmorency, House-Agent."

"This is the office of which I spoke," said Keith, in a cutting voice.
"Will you wait here a moment, or does your astonishing tenderness about
my welfare lead you to wish to overhear everything I have to say to my
business adviser?"

Rupert's face was white and shaking with excitement; nothing on earth
would have induced him now to have abandoned his prey.

"If you will excuse me," he said, clenching his hands behind his back,
"I think I should feel myself justified in--"

"Oh! Come along in," exploded the lieutenant. He made the same gesture
of savage surrender. And he slammed into the office, the rest of us at
his heels.

P. Montmorency, House-Agent, was a solitary old gentleman sitting behind
a bare brown counter. He had an egglike head, froglike jaws, and a grey
hairy fringe of aureole round the lower part of his face; the whole
combined with a reddish, aquiline nose. He wore a shabby black
frock-coat, a sort of semi-clerical tie worn at a very unclerical
angle, and looked, generally speaking, about as unlike a house-agent as
anything could look, short of something like a sandwich man or a Scotch
Highlander.

We stood inside the room for fully forty seconds, and the odd old
gentleman did not look at us. Neither, to tell the truth, odd as he
was, did we look at him. Our eyes were fixed, where his were fixed, upon
something that was crawling about on the counter in front of him. It was
a ferret.

The silence was