"David Square?" repeated Mr. Potham, frowning. "I don't think I know of anything there."
"It had a Potham and Spode board hung out," said the Saint relentlessly "Perhaps Spode hung it up one dark night when you weren't looking."
"David Square!" re-echoed Mr. Potham, like a forsaken bass in an oratorio. "David Square!" He polished his spectacles agitatedly, burrowed into his file again, and presently looked up over his gold rims. "Would that be No. 17?"
"I think it would."
Mr. Potham extracted the page of particulars and leaned back, gazing at the Saint with a certain tinge of pity.
"There is a flat to let at No. 17, David Square," he admitted in a hushed voice, as if he were reluctantly discussing a skeleton in his family cupboard. "It is one of Major Bellingford Smart's buildings."
He made this announcement as though he expected the Saint to recoil from it with a cry of horror, and looked disappointed when the cry did not come. But the Saint pricked up his ears. Mr. Potham's tone, and the name of Bellingford Smart, touched a dim chord of memory in his mind; and never in his life had one of those chords led the Saint astray. Somewhere, some time, he knew that he had heard the name of Bellingford Smart before, and it had not been in a complimentary reference.
"What's the matter with that?" he asked coolly. "Is he a leper or something?"
Mr. Potham smoothed down the sheet on his blotter with elaborate precision.
"Major Bellingford Smart," he said judiciously, "is not a landlord with whose property we are anxious to deal. We have it on our books, since he sends us particulars; but we don't offer it unless we are specially asked for it."