Then her face reddened.
"Never mind," she said. "You are right—quite right. It is the other hotel. But can you tell me, please, if Mr. Hiram De Lancey Percival lives here?"
The clerk smiled broadly.
"Oh yes," he said. "Mr. Percival does, but he's out at present. You will find him, however, at this address."
He wrote it down for her and she took it nervously.
"Thank you," she said, glancing at it. "Don't be silly, Bertram. Yes, it's the publisher's. Let us go. Good-day, sir."
It was not a large publisher's, we discovered, for the place was a single and dingy store-room in a small side street. Its walls were shelved, filled from the floor to the very ceiling—volume after volume, sets upon sets, most of them shopworn and bearing the imprints of by-gone years. Between the shelves other books, equally old and faded, and offered for sale at trifling prices, lay on tables in that tempting disarray and dust which hints of treasures overlooked and waiting only for recognition—always on the higher shelf, or at the bottom of the other pile. The window was filled with encyclopædias long outgrown by a wiser world, and standing beside them, and looking back towards the store-room's farther end, was a melancholy vista of discarded and forgotten literature.
"Who buys them?" asked Letitia.
"Who wrote them?" I replied.