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 Wickson tossed aside the sheet eagerly. "Send him in."

There was nothing personal in the furnishings of Wickson's room—an official desk-table, some bare chairs, some framed photographs of men and buildings on the walls, and beyond that not even a bookcase. There was nothing characteristic about his "ready-made" clothes that hung on him as if their one purpose was to impede his impatient movements. And in his interview with McPhee Harris he had been impersonal, withdrawn, and as colorless as his surroundings.

But now, to receive the detective, there came a relaxing in the muscles of his mouth and a meditative widening of the eyes. He pushed his papers back from him. He began to beat a tattoo on his desk blotter, looking aside out of the window and allowing his mind to rove with his eyes. It was evident that the detective gave him a sense of security.

Collins entered, hat in hand, closed the door behind him, and crossed to a chair with a peculiar noiseless placidity. He was plump, clean-shaven, commonplace, with mild and rather vacant brown eyes, broad-shouldered, short, and slow. He might have been the proprietor of a commercial travelers' hotel. He did not look genial enough to be a saloon-keeper, yet he had the sort of figure that you would