tache or beard:
the face is furrowed all over, especially round the eyes, yet he does
not look old. That is because of the furrows; they form a wonderful
net-work round his eyes, giving them an expression of perpetual keen
amusement. The hair is pale in colour--not white but faded--and
scanty. Sir Thomas wears it carefully brushed across the top of his
head, with a parting on the left side.

He has a trick when he is thinking deeply of passing his hand--which
is white, slender and tapering--over that scanty covering of what, but
for it, would be a bald cranium.

Some people said that Sir Thomas Ryder was a man without any
sentiment; others that he was a slave to red tape; but no one denied
the uncontrovertible fact that he was the right man in the right
place.

He looked the part and always acted it, and fewer blunders had
undoubtedly been committed in the detective department of the
metropolitan police since Sir Thomas Ryder took the guiding reins in
hand.

"I suppose," he said at last, "that you've come to see me about this
de Mountford business."

"I have," replied Colonel Harris simply.

"Well, it's not a pleasant business."

"I know that. The papers are full of it, and it's all a confounded
damnable business, Tom, and that's all about it."

"Unfortunately it's not 'all about it,'" rejoined Sir Thomas dryly.

"That's what Louisa says. Women are so queer about things of that
sort, and the papers are full of twaddle. She is anxious about Luke."

"I don't wonder."

"But it's all nonsense, isn't it?"

"What is?"

Colonel Harris did not reply immediately; for one thing, he did not
know exactly how to put his own fears and anxieties into words. They
were so horrible and so farfetched that to tell them plainly and
baldly to his brother-in-law, to this man with whom he was soberly
smoking a cigar in a sober-looking office, whilst hansoms and taxicabs
were rattling past in the street below within sight and hearing,
seemed little short of idiocy. He was not a man of deep
penetration--was Colonel Harris--no great reader of thoughts or of
character. He tried to look keenly at Sir Thomas's shrewd face, but
all he was conscious of was a net-work of wrinkles round a pair of
eyes which seemed to be twinkling with humour.

Humour at this moment? Great Heavens above!

"I wish," he blurted out somewhat crossly at last, "you'd help me out
a bit, Tom. Hang it all, man, all this officialism makes me dumb."

"Don't,