after him, do you?" squealed
Selby.

"No," replied Mr. Baruch equably, "I do not suppose that, Selby, my
friend."

The street in which Miss Pilgrim had her rooms was one of the long
gullies of high-fronted architecture running at right angles to the
river, and thither portly, handsomely overcoated, with the
deliberateness of a balanced and ordered mind in every tread of his
measured gait went Mr. Baruch. He had no plan; his resource and
personality would not fail him in an emergency, and it was time he
brought them to bear. One thing he was sure of he would take the
carpet home that night.

At the head of two flights of iron-railed stone stairs, he reached
the door of the flat which he sought. Two or three attempts upon the
bell-push brought no response, and he could hear no sound of life
through the door. He waited composedly. It did not enter his head
that all the occupants might be out; and he was right, for presently,
after he had thumped on the door with his gloved fist, there was a
slip-slap of feet within and a sloven of a woman opened to him.

Mr. Baruch gave her his smile.

"The American lady is in? I wish to speak to her." The woman stood
aside hastily to let him enter. "Say Gaspodin Baruch is here," he
directed blandly.

It was a narrow corridor, flanked with doors, in which he stood. The
woman knocked at the nearest of these, opened it, and spoke his name.
Immediately from within he heard the glad, gentle voice of the
consul's clerk.

"Surely!" it answered the servant in Russian; then called in English,
"Come in, Mr. Baruch, please!"

He removed his hat and entered. An unshaded electric-light bulb
filled the room with crude light, stripping its poverty and
tawdriness naked to the eye its bamboo furniture, its imitation
parquet, and the cheap distemper of its walls. But of these Mr.
Baruch was only faintly aware, for in the middle of the floor, with
brown paper and string beside her, Miss Pilgrim knelt amid a
kaleidoscope of tumbled rugs, and in her hand, half folded already,
was the rug.

She was smiling up at him with her mild, serene face, while under her
thin, pale hands lay the treasure.

"Now this is nice of you, Mr. Baruch," she was saying. "I suppose Mr.
Selby told you I'd had to go out."

Mr. Baruch nodded. He had let his eyes rest on the rug for a space of
seconds, and then averted them.

"Yes," he said. "He said it was some message about the poor man who
was ill, and I think he