"Send these," he directed, "to the police-station. There is nothing in
them which calls for outside intervention. They are all matters which had
better take their normal course. To the others simply reply that the
matter they refer to does not interest me. No further enquiries?"
"Nothing, Mr. Quest."
She left the room almost noiselessly. Quest took down a volume from the
swinging book-case by his side, and drew the reading lamp a little closer
to his right shoulder. Before he opened the volume, however, he looked for
a few moments steadfastly out across the sea of roofs, the network of
telephone and telegraph wires, to where the lights of Broadway seemed to
eat their way into the sky. Around him, the night life of the great city
spread itself out in waves of gilded vice and black and sordid crime. Its
many voices fell upon deaf ears. Until long past midnight, he sat
engrossed in a scientific volume.
CHAPTER II
THE APARTMENT-HOUSE MYSTERY
1.
"This habit of becoming late for breakfast," Lady Ashleigh remarked, as
she set down the coffee-pot, "is growing upon your father."
Ella glanced up from a pile of correspondence through which she had been
looking a little negligently.
"When he comes," she said, "I shall tell him what Clyde says in his new
play--that unpunctuality for breakfast and overpunctuality for dinner are
two of the signs of advancing age."
"I shouldn't," her mother advised. "He hates anything that sounds like an
epigram, and I noticed that he avoided any allusion to his birthday last
month.
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