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 And in the light of what was to follow it was a fact of considerable importance.

In the course of that morning, while June was helping Uncle Si to dress the front window, there sauntered into the shop a funny, oldish, foxy little man, who wore a brown billycock hat at the back of his head, and had a pair of legs as crooked as a Louis Quinze chair. She set him down at once as a character out of Dickens.

"Mornin' to you, Mr. Gedge," said this quaint visitor.

"Mornin' to you, Mr. Thornton!" said S. Gedge Antiques returning the salutation with deference.

June cocked her ears. The note in Uncle Si's rasping voice, which always seemed to need a file, told her at once that the visitor was no common man.

As a preliminary to business, whatever that business might be, Mr. Thornton fixed an eye like a small bright bead on the Hoodoo, whose sinister bulk seemed to dominate half the shop. It was fixed, moreover, with an air of whimsical appreciation as he murmured: "The British Museum is the place for that."

"There I'm with you, Mr. Thornton." S. Gedge Antiques looked his visitor steadily in the eye. "Wonderful example of early Polynesian craftsmanship."

"Early Polynesian craftsmanship." The little man stroked the belly of the Hoodoo with a kind of rapt delicacy which other men reserve for the fetlock of a horse.

"Only one of its kind."

"I should say so," murmured Louis Quinze-legs, screwing up his eyes; and then, by way of after-*thought: "I've just dropped in, Mr. Gedge, to have a look at that picture you mentioned to me yesterday."