be rude, and
I hate just as much to throw away good money. But I can't take good money
for bad work, Mr. Lyne, and if you will be advised by me, you will drop
this stupid scheme for vengeance which your hurt vanity has suggested--it
is the clumsiest kind of frame up that was ever invented--and also you
will go and apologise to the young lady, whom, I have no doubt, you have
grossly insulted."

He beckoned to his Chinese satellite and walked leisurely to the door.
Incoherent with rage, shaking in every limb with a weak man's sense of
his own impotence, Lyne watched him until the door was half-closed, then,
springing forward with a strangled cry, he wrenched the door open and
leapt at the detective.

Two hands gripped his arm and lifting him bodily back into the room,
pushed him down into a chair. A not unkindly face blinked down at him,
a face relieved from utter solemnity by the tiny laughter lines about
the eyes.

"Mr. Lyne," said the mocking voice of Tarling, "you are setting an awful
example to the criminal classes. It is a good job your convict friend is
in gaol."

Without another word he left the room.

CHAPTER III

THE MAN WHO LOVED LYNE

Two days later Thornton Lyne sat in his big limousine which was drawn up
on the edge of Wandsworth Common, facing the gates of the gaol.

Poet and _poseur_ he was, the strangest combination ever seen in man.

Thornton Lyne was a store-keeper, a Bachelor of Arts, the winner of the
Mangate Science Prize and the author of a slim volume. The quality of the
poetry therein was not very great--but it was undoubtedly a slim volume
printed in queerly ornate type with old-fashioned esses and wide margins.
He was a store-keeper because store-keeping supplied him with caviare and
peaches, a handsome little two-seater, a six-cylinder limousine for state
occasions, a country house and a flat in town, the decorations of which
ran to a figure which would have purchased many stores of humbler
pretensions than Lyne's Serve First Emporium.

To the elder Lyne, Joseph Emanuel of that family, the inception and
prosperity of Lyne's Serve First Emporium was due. He had devised a sale
system which ensured every customer being attended to the moment he or
she entered one of the many departments which made up the splendid whole
of the emporium. It was a system based upon the age-old principle of
keeping efficient reserves within call.

Thornton Lyne succeeded to the business at a mome