ting him to send up my name at all," he said with a
half smile on his face. "He insisted on knowing all about me and my
business before he announced me. So I told him everything nearly--except
the truth."

"I gathered from his tone he was a bit doubtful about you; but I was
glad to get the word. This is the third time you've favoured me with a
visit and each of the other times something highly exciting followed.
Come in and let me make you a cup of tea, won't you? Is it business that
brings you?"

"Yes," he said, "it's business."

They sat down in the big inner studio room; on one side of the fireplace
the short, slow-speaking, colourless-looking man who knew the inner
blackness of so many whited sepulchres; and on the other side, facing
him from across the tea table, this small patrician lady who, having
rich kinfolk and friends still richer and a family tree deep-rooted in
the most Knickerbockian stratum of the Manhattan social schist,
nevertheless chose to earn her own living; and while earning it to find
opportunity for service to her Government in a confidential capacity.
Not all the volunteers who worked on difficult espionage jobs through
the wartime carried cards from the Intelligence Department.

"Yes," he repeated, "it's business--a bigger piece of business and a
harder one and probably a more interesting one than the last thing you
helped on. If it weren't business I wouldn't be coming here to-day,
taking up your time. I know how busy you are with your own affairs."

"Oh, I'm not busy," she said. "This is one of my loafing days. Since
lunch time I've been indulging in my favourite passion. I've been
prowling through a secondhand bookstore over on Lexington Avenue,
picking up bargains. There's the fruit of my shopping."

She indicated a pile of five or six nibbled-looking volumes in dingy
covers resting upon one corner of the low mantelshelf.

"Works on interior decorating?" he guessed.

"Goodness, no! Decorating is my business; this is my pleasure. The top
one of the heap--the one bound in red--is all about chess."

"Chess! Did anybody ever write a whole book about chess?"

"I believe more books have been written on chess than on any other
individual subject in the world, barring Masonry," she said. "And the
next one to it--the yellow-bound one--is a book about old English games;
not games of chance, but games for holidays and parties. I was glancing
through it in my car on the way here from the sh