"Very well: I will be up in a moment, Annie." Then, as she closed the door, he gave Nitocris the card, and continued: "Our ally on the lower plane that may be. You say you wouldn't care to be present and help me with your opinion?"
"Oh no, Dad. I don't want any one to know that I am taking any part in this little adventure. But if you will introduce him afterwards, I'll tell you what I think. You know, women generally judge other people that way."
"Very well," laughed her father, as he turned to the door, "that will be best. If everything goes right and I think I can work with him, I shall bring him upstairs and you can give him a cup of tea. If I don't, you will know that he won't do."
"Good-bye, then, for the present," she smiled, "and don't frighten the poor man, if you can help it. I dare say he's only an exaggerated policeman, after all."
But it was a very different sort of person whom Franklin Marmion greeted in the drawing-room. M. Nicol Hendry was a slimly but strongly-built man of about forty. His high, somewhat narrow forehead was framed with close-cut, crinkly, reddish-brown hair. Under well-defined brown eyebrows shone a pair of alert steel-grey eyes of almost startling brilliancy. His nose was a trifle long and slightly aquiline. A carefully-trained golden-brown moustache half-concealed firm, thinly-cut lips, and a closely-trimmed, pointed beard just revealed the strength of the chin beneath. He was dressed in a dark grey frock-coat suit, and wore a pinky-red wild rose, which he had plucked on the Common, in his button-hole. As he shook hands with him the Professor made a mental note of him as an embodiment of strength, keenness, and quiet inflexibility: a summing-up which was pretty near the truth.
"Good afternoon, M. Hendry," he said, as the hands and eyes met.
"Good afternoon, Professor," returned the other in a gentle voice, and almost perfect English. "May I ask to what happy circumstance—at least, I hope it is a happy one—I owe the honour of making the acquaintance of the gentleman who has succeeded in mystifying all the mathematicians of Europe?"
"Well," said Franklin Marmion with a smile, "I don't know whether there is so very much honour about that, but I do know that your time is very valuable and that I have already taken up a good deal of it by bringing you all the way out here, so I will come to the point at once. But wait a moment. Come down into my study. We can talk more comfortably there." When the Professor had given his guest a cigar and lit his pipe, he said quite abruptly: "It is about the Zastrow affair."
If he had said it was about the last Grand Ducal plot in the Peterhof, M. Hendry could not have been inwardly more astonished. Outwardly the Professor might have mentioned the last commonplace murder. Only his eyelids lifted a little as he replied:
"Ah, indeed? Well, really, Professor, you must forgive me for saying that that is about the very last matter I should have expected you to have brought up. All the world knows you as one of its most distinguished men of science, now, of course, more distinguished than ever; but I hardly think any one would have expected you to interest yourself in political mysteries. I have a recollection of hearing or reading somewhere that politics were your pet aversion."