In this room the poles met, and the most remote civilizations of the world rubbed shoulders with modernity.  Here, encased, were a family of snow-white ermine from Alaska and a pair of black Manchurian leopards.  A flying lemur from the Pelews contemplated swooping upon the head of a huge tigress which glared with glassy eyes across the place at the snarling muzzle of a polar bear.  Mycenaean vases and gold death masks stood upon the same shelf as Venetian goblets, and the mummy of an Egyptian priestess of the thirteenth dynasty occupied a sarcophagus upon the top of which rested a basrelief found in one of the shrines of the Syrian fish goddess Derceto, at Ascalon.

Arrowheads of the Stone Age and medieval rapiers were ranged alongside some of the latest examples of the gunsmith’s art.  There were elephants’ tusks and Mexican skulls; a stone jar of water from the well of Zem-Zem, and an ivory crucifix which had belonged to Torquemada.  A mat of human hair from Borneo overlay a historical and unique rug woven in Ispahan and entirely composed of fragments of Holy Carpets from the Kaaba at Mecca.

“I take it,” said Mr. Brinn, suddenly, “that you are up against a stiff proposition.”

Paul Harley, accepting a cigarette from an ebony box (once the property of Henry VIII) which the speaker had pushed across the coffee table in his direction, stared up curiously into the sallow, aquiline face.  “You are right.  But how did you know?”

“You look that way.  Also—­you were followed.  Somebody knows you’ve come here.”

Harley leaned forward, resting one hand upon the table.  “I know I was followed,” he said, sternly.  “I was followed because I have entered upon the biggest case of my career.”  He paused and smiled in a very grim fashion.  “A suspicion begins to dawn upon my mind that if I fail it will also be my last case.  You understand me?”

“I understand absolutely,” replied Nicol Brinn.  “These are dull days.  It’s meat and drink to me to smell big danger.”

Paul Harley lighted a cigarette and watched the speaker closely the while.  His expression, as he did so, was an odd one.  Two courses were open to him, and he was mentally debating their respective advantages.

“I have come to you to-night, Mr. Brinn,” he said finally, “to ask you a certain question.  Unless the theory upon which I am working is entirely wrong, then, supposing that you are in a position to answer my question I am logically compelled to suppose, also, that you stand in peril of your life.”

“Good,” said Mr. Brinn.  “I was getting sluggish.”  In three long strides he crossed the room and locked the door.  “I don’t doubt Hoskins’s honesty,” he explained, reading the inquiry in Harley’s eyes, “but an A1 intelligence doesn’t fold dress pants at thirty-nine.”

Only one very intimate with the taciturn speaker could have perceived any evidence of interest in that imperturbable character.  But Nicol Brinn took his cheroot between his fingers, quickly placed a cone of ash in a little silver tray (the work of Benvenuto Cellini), and replaced the cheroot not in the left but in the right corner of his mouth.  He was excited.