“George,” he exclaimed, as they walked off together, “I am disappointed in Mr. Quest! I am very disappointed indeed. You will not believe what I am going to tell you, but it is the truth. He could not conceal it from me. He takes no interest whatever in my anthropoid ape.”
“Neither do I,” the other replied grimly.
The Professor sighed as he hailed a taxicab.
“You, my dear fellow,” he said gravely, “are naturally not in the frame of mind for the consideration of these great subjects. Besides, you have no scientific tendencies. But in Sanford Quest I am disappointed. I expected his enthusiasm—I may say that I counted upon it.”
“I don’t think that Quest has much of that quality to spare,” his brother remarked, “for anything outside his own criminal hunting.”
They entered the taxicab and were driven almost in silence to the Professor’s home—a large, rambling old house, situated in somewhat extensive but ill-kept grounds on the outskirts of New York. The Englishman glanced around him, as they passed up the drive, with an expression of disapproval.
“A more untidy-looking place than yours, Edgar, I never saw,” he declared. “Your grounds have become a jungle. Don’t you keep any gardeners?”
The Professor smiled.
“I keep other things,” he said serenely. “There is something in my garden which would terrify your nice Scotch gardeners into fits, if they found their way here to do a little tidying up. Come into the library and I’ll give you one of my choice cigars. Here’s Craig waiting to let us in. Any news, Craig?”
The man-servant in plain clothes who admitted them shook his head.