Dollops, and leaving the boy to journey on to Clarges
Street alone, he fared forth to find Lennard and the red limousine, and
was whirled away in record time to the inn of the Fiddle and Horseshoe.

CHAPTER XVI

It had but just gone five when Narkom walked into the little bar parlour
and found him standing there, looking out on the quaint, old-fashioned
bowling green that lay all steeped in sunshine and zoned with the froth
of pear and apple blossoms thick piled above the time-stained bricks of
an enclosing wall.

"What a model of punctuality you are, old chap," the superintendent
said, nodding approvingly. "Wait a moment while I go and order tea, and
then we will get down to business in real earnest. Shan't be long."

"Pray, don't hurry yourself on my account, Mr. Narkom," returned Cleek,
"coming down to earth" out of a mental airship. "I could do with another
hour of that"--nodding toward the view--"and still wonder where the time
had gone. These quaint old inns, which the march of what we are pleased
to call 'Progress' is steadily crowding off the face of the land, are
always deeply interesting to me; I love them. What a day! What a
picture! What a sky! As blue as what Dollops calls the 'Merry Geranium
Sea.' I'd give a Jew's eye for a handful of those apple blossoms--they
are divine!"

Narkom hastened from the room without replying. The strain of poetry
underlying the character of this strange, inscrutable man, his amazing
love of Nature, his moments of almost womanish weakness and sentiment,
astonished and mystified him. It was as if a hawk had acquired the
utterly useless trick of fluting like a nightingale, and being himself
wholly without imagination, he could not comprehend it in the smallest
degree.

When he returned a few minutes later, however, the idealist seemed to
have simmered down into the materialist, the extraordinary to have
become merged in the ordinary, for he found his famous ally no longer
studying the beauties of Nature, but giving his whole attention to the
sordid commonplaces of man, for he was standing before a glaringly
printed bill one of many that were tacked upon the walls, which set
forth in amazing pictures and double-leaded type the wonders that were
to be seen daily and nightly at Olympia, where, for a month past, "Van
Zant's Royal Belgian Circus and World-famed Menagerie" had been holding
forth to "Crowded and delighted audiences." Much was made of two "star
turns" upon