own the
Southern lines apart, they were all one to him now. He looked out of the
window, and could have sworn that he thought of nothing but the visit
from which he was returning.

When he alighted at Cannon Street, however, it was to discover that his
mind was full of a large, new, carefully-prepared project. It came to
him, ready-made and practically complete, as he stood on the platform,
superintending the porter's efforts to find his bags. He turned it over
and over in his thoughts, in the hansom, more to familiarize himself
with its details than to add to them. He left the cab to wait for him at
the mouth of a little alley which delves its way into Old Broad Street
through towering walls of commercial buildings, old and new.

Colin Semple was happily in his office--a congeries of small, huddled
rooms, dry and dirty with age, which had a doorway of its own in a
corner of the court--and Thorpe pushed on to his room at the end like
one who is assured of both his way and his welcome.

The broker was standing beside a desk, dictating a letter to a clerk
who sat at it, and with only a nod to Thorpe he proceeded to finish
this task. He looked more than once at his visitor as he did so, in
a preoccupied, impersonal way. To the other's notion, he seemed the
personification of business--without an ounce of distracting superfluous
flesh upon his wiry, tough little frame, without a trace of unnecessary
politeness, or humour, or sensibility of any sort. He was the machine
perfected and fined down to absolute essentials. He could understand a
joke if it was useful to him to do so. He could drink, and even smoke
cigarettes, with a natural air, if these exercises seemed properly to
belong to the task he had in hand. Thorpe did not conceive him doing
anything for the mere human reason that he liked to do it. There was
more than a touch of what the rustic calls "ginger" in his hair and
closely-cropped, pointed beard, and he had the complementary florid
skin. His eyes--notably direct, confident eyes--were of a grey which had
in it more brown than blue. He wore a black frock-coat, buttoned close,
and his linen produced the effect of a conspicuous whiteness.

He turned as the clerk left the room, and let his serious, thin
lips relax for an instant as a deferred greeting. "Well?" he asked,
impassively.

"Have you got a quarter-of-an-hour?" asked Thorpe in turn. "I want a
talk with you."

For answer, Semple left the room. Returnin