Thorpe had listened to these apathetic sentences without much interest, but the sum of their message appeared suddenly to catch his attention. He sat upright, and after a moment's frowning brown study, looked sharply up at his sister.
“What was his name?” he asked with abruptness.
“I don't in the least remember,” she made answer, holding the desk-top up, but temporarily suspending her search. “He was a little man, five-and-fifty, I should think. He had long grey hair—a kind of Quaker-looking man. He said he saw the name over the door, and he remembered your telling him your people were booksellers. He only got back here in England yesterday or the day before. He said he didn't know what you'd been doing since you left Mexico. He didn't even know whether you were in England or not!”
Thorpe had been looking with abstracted intentness at a set of green-bound cheap British poets just at one side of his sister's head. “You must find that card!” he told her now, with a vague severity in his voice. “I know the name well enough, but I want to see what he's written. Was it his address, do you remember? The name itself was Tavender, wasn't it? Good God! Why is it a woman never knows where she's put anything? Even Julia spends hours looking for button-hooks or corkscrews or something of that sort, every day of her life! They've got nothing in the world to do except know where things are, right under their nose, and yet that's just what they don't know at all!”
“Oh, I have a good few other things to do,” she reminded him, as she fumbled again inside the obscurity of the desk. “I can put my hand on any one of four thousand books in stock,” she mildly boasted over her shoulder, “and that's something you never learned to do. And I can tell if a single book is missing—and I wouldn't trust any shopman I ever knew to do that.”
“Oh of course, you're an exception,” he admitted, under a sense of justice. “But I wish you'd find the card.”
“I know where it is,” she suddenly announced, and forthwith closed the desk. Moving off into the remoter recesses of the crowded interior, she returned to the light with the bit of pasteboard in her hand. “I'd stuck it in the little mirror over the washstand,” she explained.
He almost snatched it from her, and stood up the better to examine it under the gas-light. “Where is Montague Street?” he asked, with rough directness.
“In Bloomsbury—alongside the Museum. That's one Montague Street—I don't know how many others there may be.”
Thorpe had already taken up his umbrella and was buttoning his coat. “Yes—Bloomsbury,” he said hurriedly. “That would be his form. And you say he knew nothing about my movements or whereabouts—nothing about the Company, eh?” He looked at his watch as he spoke. Evidently the presence of this stranger had excited him a good deal.