which Colonel Boundary had his beautiful home was of a
type not uncommonly met with in the West End of London. The street floor
was taken up entirely with shops, the first floor with offices and the
remainder of the building was practically given over to the colonel. One
by one he had ousted every tenant from the building, and practically the
whole of the fourteen sets of apartments which constituted the
residential portion of the building was held by him in one name or
another. Some he had obtained by the payment of heavy premiums, some he
had secured when the lease of the former tenant had lapsed, some he had
gathered in by sub-hiring. He had tried to buy the building, since it
served his purpose well, but came against a deed of trust and the Court
of Chancery, and had wisely refrained from going any further into a
matter which must bring him vis-a-vis with a Master in Chancery, with
all the publicity which such a transaction entailed.

Nor had he been successful in acquiring any of the premises on the first
floor. They were held by three very old established businesses--an
estate agent, a firm of land surveyors and the offices of a valuer. He
missed his opportunity, at any rate, of securing the business of Lee and
Hol, the surveyors, and did not know it was in the market until after it
had been transferred to a new owner. But they were quiet, sober tenants,
who closed their offices between five and six every night and did not
open them until between nine or ten on the following morning, and their
very respectability gave him a certain privacy.

The new proprietor of Lee and Hol was a short-sighted, elderly man of no
great conversational power, and apparently of no fixed purpose in life
except to say "no" to the very handsome offers which the colonel's
agents made when they discovered there was a chance of re-purchasing the
business. Boundary had personally inspected all the offices. He had
found an excuse to visit them several times, duly noted the arrangement
of the furniture, the sizes of the staffs and the general character of
the business which was being carried on. This was a necessary precaution
because these offices were immediately under his own flat. But just now
they had a special value, because it was a practice during the daytime
for the three firms to employ a commissionaire, who occupied a little
glass-partitioned office on the landing and attended impartially to the
needs of all three tenants to the be