the words: "Robbins & Hartley, Brokers." The clerks had gone. It was
past five, and with the solid tramp of a drove of prize Percherons,
scrub-women were invading the cloud-capped twenty-story office
building. A puff of red-hot air flavoured with lemon peelings,
soft-coal smoke and train oil came in through the half-open windows.

Robbins, fifty, something of an overweight beau, and addicted to first
nights and hotel palm-rooms, pretended to be envious of his partner's
commuter's joys.

"Going to be something doing in the humidity line to-night," he said.
"You out-of-town chaps will be the people, with your katydids and
moonlight and long drinks and things out on the front porch."

Hartley, twenty-nine, serious, thin, good-looking, nervous, sighed
and frowned a little.

"Yes," said he, "we always have cool nights in Floralhurst, especially
in the winter."

A man with an air of mystery came in the door and went up to Hartley.

"I've found where she lives," he announced in the portentous
half-whisper that makes the detective at work a marked being to his
fellow men.

Hartley scowled him into a state of dramatic silence and quietude.
But by that time Robbins had got his cane and set his tie pin to his
liking, and with a debonair nod went out to his metropolitan
amusements.