The pharmacist turned and raised a warning finger as Clayton hastened
away to resume his morning duties.

In the doorway, following Braun's mouse-colored overcoat, as he
mingled with the "madding crowd," stood Mr. Adolph Lilienthal, the
proprietor of the "Art Emporium."

Briskly rubbing his hands, the art dealer murmured "Vot devilment
is Fritz up to, now?"

He was only one of the many comrades in evil of the Sixth Avenue
chemist, for Mr. Lilienthal boasted a "private view" room, in rear
of his pretentious "Art Gallery," where many conveniently arranged
interviews habitually took place.

Not one in one hundred of his patrons knew the secret of that room
with its cosy divans and a private entrance to the stairway of an
adjoining fashionable photograph gallery.

But the dealers in the "queer," the handlers of lottery tickets,
the pool-sellers, the oily green-goods man, and many a velvet-voiced,
silken clad Delilah knew the pathway to that inner room.

Benevolent-looking old capitalists with gold-rimmed spectacles;
soft-eyed sirens of the Four Hundred, and the splendid Aspasias of
the apartment-house clique, brisk clubmen, and the reckless jeunesse
doree, were all in the secret of the "private view" rooms.

A meek, furtive cat-like connoisseur was Mr. Adolph Lilienthal,
and the "diamond coterie" of smugglers often hastily exchanged in