Page:The council of seven.djvu/96

 a very little reflection was needed for the mind of Saul Hartz to set the incident in true perspective. The achievement of this obscure servant of the U. P. was not a matter for censure. To dash round the Haymarket corner at midday without warning, at the rate of twenty miles an hour, was praiseworthy in the highest degree. Feats such as that, on an ever-ascending plane, without a thought for the rights of others, had enabled the U. P. to declare, as usual, a dividend for the last financial year of one hundred per cent, free of tax.

Difficult as it was to know why at that moment the mangled form of the Colossus was not on its way in a wheeled ambulance to Charing Cross Hospital, he was not a man to yield to an isolated fact of experience. By the time he had passed through Jermyn Street and had made the perilous crossing to Swan & Edgar's corner, this minor incident was as if it had not been. The mind of Saul Hartz was now engulfed in a far more potent thing.

Near the entrance of the Piccadilly Hotel he stopped and took from an inner pocket a small address book bound in red leather. Memory reinforced, he went on as far as the Albany and halted finally at a door towards the Vigo Street end of that quaint caravansary.

The knock of the Colossus was answered at once by a creature slightly more odd than his surroundings. A pure bred Egyptian in a neat gray flannel suit, surmounted by a taboosh, opened the door and greeted