"Take the whole shop if you want it, but get the right dope from her about the girl!" The detective brought his hand down on the desk in a resounding slap. "It will be a long step up the ladder for you if you can start to make a reputation for yourself of successful discreet work among conservative people of the sort the old lady belongs to. That's why I put you on this; I haven't the time to go after it myself and it requires class as well as brains. The woods are full of refined young ladies who have turned one trick or another; a chance word may give you a line on how to locate this one. Try any scheme you like, but get results. That's all we're after."
The reference library was more like a club room than the sanctum of a private detective. A long, mahogany table surrounded by heavily carved chairs occupied the center of the room, and the walls were lined with bookcases, interspersed with tall glass cabinets filled with curios. A few prints and signed photographs hung above them and over the mantel was mounted a neat arrangement of firearms and various weapons.
There was nothing remarkable about the room or its appointments at first glance, save its obvious incongruity with the rest of the suite, but a closer inspection would have revealed the fact that all the volumes—with the exception of those in a small case between two windows—dealt with one subject; crime. The curios in the cabinets, the weapons above the mantel, each had its individual history, tragic or sordid, to bear mute testimony to the futility of defiance of the law.
Madame Dumois' return was punctual to the moment and she was ushered without delay to the apartment, where Ross awaited her. She stared critically at the slim, straight, immaculate figure as he turned toward her from the low bookcase, a quaint vellum-covered volume open in his hands.
"Madame Dumois?" he bowed low with continental courtesy over her hand. "I have come from Philadelphia to be of what service to you I may; I am Herbert Ross."
"Mr. McCormick suggested you—" she began, but he interrupted her swiftly.
"Do you know, while awaiting you I have come upon a real treasure here? The collected verse of Nizami!"
Mme. Dumois stepped backward, blinking.
"Poetry!" she ejaculated faintly, in blank amazement.
"Ah! I see you are interested." His face lightened in boyish eagerness. "Nothing so appeals to the woman of rare discernment and feeling as the lilting charm of the early Persians. The casual reader knows only the Bacchanalian philosophy of Omar, but you, I am sure are familiar with Rumi and this greatest of lyricists, Nizami, to say nothing of Hafiz—"