ir, but I should like to attend, if quite
convenient," replied Mullins deferentially. "The police were very stingy
with their evidence to-day; they've still to produce the fatal bullet, and
I should like a sight of that, sir."

Mr. Thrush did not continue the conversation, possibly because he took as
little real interest as he professed in the case which was being thrust
upon him, but more obviously owing to the necessary care in shaving the
corners of a delightfuly long and mobile mouth. Indeed, the whole face
emerging from the lather, as a cast from its clay, would have delighted
any eye but its own. It was fat and flabby as the rest of Eugene Thrush;
there was quite a collection of chins to shave; and yet anybody but
himself must have recognised the invincible freshness of complexion, the
happy penetration of every glance, as an earnest of inexhaustible
possibilities beneath the burden of the flesh. Great round spectacles,
through which he stared like a wise fish in an aquarium, were caught
precariously on a button of a nose which in itself might have prevented
the superficial observer from taking him any more seriously than he took
himself.

Mr. Upton, who arrived before Thrush was visible, was an essentially
superficial and antipathetic observer of unfamiliar types; and being badly
impressed by the forbidding staircase, he had determined on the landing to
sound his man before trusting him. In the rank undergrowth of his
prejudices there was no more luxuriant weed than an innate abhorrence of
London and all Londoners, which neither the cause of his visit nor the
murky mien of Mullins was calculated to abate. The library of books in
solid bindings, many of them legal tomes, was the first reassuring
feature; another was the large desk, made business-like with pigeon-holes
and a telephone; but Mr. Upton was only beginning to recover confidence
when Eugene Thrush shook it sadly at his first entry.

It might have been by his face, or his fat, or his evening clothes seen
from the motorist's dusty tweeds, almost as much as by the misplaced
joviality with which Thrush exclaimed: "I'm sorry to have kept you
waiting, sir, and the worst of it is that I can't let you keep me!"

This touched a raw nerve in the ironmaster, as the kind of reception one
had to come up to London to incur. "Then I'll clear out!" said he, and
would have been as good as his word but for its instantaneous effect.

Thrush had pulled out a gold