Brixton had evidently been waiting impatiently for our arrival.
"Mr. Kennedy?" he inquired, adding quickly without waiting for an
answer: "I am glad to see you. I suppose you have noticed the
precautions we are taking against intruders? Yet it seems to be
all of no avail. I can not be alone even here. If a telephone
message comes to me over my private wire, if I talk with my own
office in the city, it seems that it is known. I don't know what
to make of it. It is terrible. I don't know what to expect next."

Brixton had been standing beside a huge mahogany desk as we
entered. I had seen him before at a distance as a somewhat pompous
speaker at banquets and the cynosure of the financial district.
But there was something different about his looks now. He seemed
to have aged, to have grown yellower. Even the whites of his eyes
were yellow.

I thought at first that perhaps it might be the effect of the
light in the centre of the room, a huge affair set in the ceiling
in a sort of inverted hemisphere of glass, concealing and
softening the rays of a powerful incandescent bulb which it
enclosed. It was not the light that gave him the altered
appearance, as I concluded from catching a casual confirmatory
glance of perplexity from Kennedy himself.

"My personal physician says I am suffering from jaundice,"
explained Brixton. Rather than seeming to be offended at our
notice of his condition he seemed to take it as a good evidence of
Kennedy's keenness that he had at once hit on one of the things
that were weighing on Brixton's own mind. "I feel pretty badly,