e butler.

"Is your master at home?" the Inspector asked.

"His Highness does not see strangers," the man replied coldly.

"Will you take him my card?" the Inspector asked.

The man bowed, and showed him into an apartment on the ground floor.
Then with the card in his hand, he turned reluctantly away.

"His Highness shall be informed that you are here," he said. "I fear,
however, that you waste your time. I go to see."

Inspector Jacks subsided into a bamboo chair and looked out of the
window with a frown upon his forehead. It was certain that he was not
proceeding with altogether his usual caution. As a matter of tactics,
this visit of his might very well be fatal!

CHAPTER XXII. A BREATH FROM THE EAST

Inspector Jacks was a man who had succeeded in his profession chiefly on
account of an average amount of natural astuteness, and also because he
was one of those favored persons whose nervous system was a whole and
perfect thing. Yet, curiously enough, as he sat in this large, gloomy
apartment into which he had been shown, a room filled with art treasures
whose appearance and significance were entirely strange to him, he felt
a certain uneasiness which he was absolutely unable to understand. He
was somewhat instinctive in his likes and dislikes, and from the first
he most heartily disliked the room itself,--its vague perfumes, its
subdued violet coloring, the faces of the grinning idols, which
seemed to meet his gaze in every direction, the pictures of those
fierce-looking warriors who brandished two-edged swords at him from the
walls. They belonged to the period when Japanese art was perhaps in
its crudest state, and yet in this uncertain atmosphere they seemed to
possess an extraordinary vitality, as though indeed they were prepared
at a moment's notice to leap from their frames and annihilate this
mysterious product of modern days, who in black clothes and silk hat,
unarmed and without physical strength, yet wielded the powers of life
and death as surely as they in their time had done.

The detective rose from his seat and walked around the room. He made a
show of examining the arms against the walls, the brocaded hangings with
their wonderful design of faded gold, the ivory statuettes, the black
god who sat on his haunches and into whose face seemed carved some dumb
but eternal power. Movement was in some respects a solace, but the sound
of a hansom bell tinkling outside was a much greater relief. He cr