"You don't know, eh?" he shot at him.
"I'm sure I do not."
"And whether he does or not, what do you think you're doing?" Johnson Boller asked impatiently. "Acting a moving picture or——"
"Mr. Boller, may I trouble you to keep out of this for a little?" the crime student asked amazingly. "Later on I may wish to ask you a question or two, and if you will answer them it will serve me and—Mr. Fry. Just now, suppose we draw up around the table here, so that it will not be necessary to shout?"
Anthony was there already, scowling. Johnson Boller, with a grunt, shuffled over and took a chair; because this Hitchin creature, on the face of him, was the morning's latest full-blown freak, and Johnson Boller did not wish to miss anything.
Also, if the chance came, he meant to inform Hitchin that Mary was not Mrs. Boller at all, if it could be contrived without casting too much of a slur on Mary—although that could wait until they learned the cause of Hitchin's pale cheek and his keen, excited eye.
Hitchin, however, had relaxed in the most curious fashion; he was smiling whimsically at Anthony now and, although his eye was across the room, one felt that it could turn with one one-thousandth of a second's warning and peer through Anthony's soul.
"Fry," he said thoughtfully, "I have been interested in crime for a good many years. I have, as it were, dabbled in it partly for the love of the thing and partly because, on one occasion or another, it has been possible for me to extend help that would not otherwise have been extended."
"That's a mysterious statement," Anthony said.
"Crime—some of it—is mysterious," smiled Mr. Hitchin. "Motives are usually more mysterious. Mistaken motives—motives formed under misapprehension—are most mysterious of all. But the consequences of crime," said Mr. Hitchin, whirling suddenly on Anthony, "are inevitable, inescapable as the rising of the sun."