eared.

Herr Haase's wrist was aching with his burden. Gently, and with
precaution against noise, he stooped, and let the suit-case down upon
the floor. So that he did not see the entry at that moment of the man
who came from the balcony, walking noiselessly upon rubber-soled
tennis-shoes. He heard Von Wetten's "Good afternoon, Herr
Bettermann," and straightened up quickly to be introduced.

He found himself taking the hand it lay in his an instant as
lifelessly as a glove of a young man whose eyes, over-large in a
tragically thin face and under a chrysanthemum shock of hair, were at
once timid and angry. He was coatless, as though he had come fresh
from some work, and under his blue shirt his shoulders showed
angular. But what was most noticeable about him, when he lifted his
face to the light, was the scar of which Von Wetten had spoken a red
and jagged trace of some ugly wound, running from the inner corner of
the right eye to the edge of the jaw. He murmured some inaudible
acknowledgment of Herr Haase's scrupulously correct greeting.

Then, as actually as though an arm of flesh and blood had thrust him
back. Herr Haase was brushed aside. It was as if the Baron von
Steinlach, choosing his moment, released his power of personality
upon the scene as a man lets go his held breath. "A wonderful view
you have here, Herr Bettermann," was all he said. The young man
turned to him to reply; it was as though their opposite purposes and
wills crossed and clashed like engaged swords. Herr Haase, and even
the salient and insistent presence of Von Wetten, thinned and became
vague ghostly, ineffectual natives of the background in the stark
light of the reality of that encounter.

There were some sentences, mere feigning, upon that radiant
perspective which the wide windows framed.

Then: "My friend and associate, Herr Wetten here, has asked me to
look into this matter," said the Baron. His voice was silk, the silk
"that holds fast where a steel chain snaps."

"First, to confirm his impressions of the the apparatus; second" the
subtle faint-blue eyes of the old man and the dark suspicious eyes of
the young man met and held each other "and second, the question, the
minor question, of the price. However" his lips, under the clipped,
white moustache, widened in a smile without mirth "that need not take
us long, since the price, you see, is not really a question at all."

The haggard young man heard him with no change in that pa