"If I'm not in the way," said Breton.

Rathbury laughed.

"Well, we may find out something about this scrap of paper," he
observed. And he waved a signal to the nearest taxi-cab driver.




CHAPTER FOUR

THE ANGLO-ORIENT HOTEL


The house at which Spargo and his companions presently drew up was an
old-fashioned place in the immediate vicinity of Waterloo Railway
Station--a plain-fronted, four-square erection, essentially
mid-Victorian in appearance, and suggestive, somehow, of the very early
days of railway travelling. Anything more in contrast with the modern
ideas of a hotel it would have been difficult to find in London, and
Ronald Breton said so as he and the others crossed the pavement.

"And yet a good many people used to favour this place on their way to
and from Southampton in the old days," remarked Rathbury. "And I
daresay that old travellers, coming back from the East after a good
many years' absence, still rush in here. You see, it's close to the
station, and travellers have a knack of walking into the nearest place
when they've a few thousand miles of steamboat and railway train behind