is name?" he asked with abruptness.

"I don't in the least remember," she made answer, holding the desk-top
up, but temporarily suspending her search. "He was a little man,
five-and-fifty, I should think. He had long grey hair--a kind of
Quaker-looking man. He said he saw the name over the door, and he
remembered your telling him your people were booksellers. He only got
back here in England yesterday or the day before. He said he didn't know
what you'd been doing since you left Mexico. He didn't even know whether
you were in England or not!"

Thorpe had been looking with abstracted intentness at a set of
green-bound cheap British poets just at one side of his sister's head.
"You must find that card!" he told her now, with a vague severity in
his voice. "I know the name well enough, but I want to see what he's
written. Was it his address, do you remember? The name itself was
Tavender, wasn't it? Good God! Why is it a woman never knows where
she's put anything? Even Julia spends hours looking for button-hooks or
corkscrews or something of that sort, every day of her life! They've
got nothing in the world to do except know where things are, right under
their nose, and yet that's just what they don't know at all!"

"Oh, I have a good few other things to do," she reminded him, as she
fumbled again inside the obscurity of the desk. "I can put my hand on
any one of four thousand books in stock," she mildly boasted over her
shoulder, "and that's something you never learned to do. And I can tell
if a single book is missing--and I wouldn't trust any shopman I ever
knew to do that."

"Oh of course, you're an exception," he admitted, under a sense of
justice. "But I wish you'd find the card."

"I know where it is," she suddenly announced, and forthwith closed the
desk. Moving off into the remoter recesses of the crowded interior, she
returned to the light with the bit of pasteboard in her hand. "I'd stuck
it in the little mirror over the washstand," she explained.

He almost snatched it from her, and stood up the better to examine it
under the gas-light. "Where is Montague Street?" he asked, with rough
directness.

"In Bloomsbury--alongside the Museum. That's one Montague Street--I
don't know how many others there may be."

Thorpe had already taken up his umbrella and was buttoning his coat.
"Yes--Bloomsbury," he said hurriedly. "That would be his form. And you
say he knew nothing about my movements or whereabouts--nothin