“Who is this man Mullet? Have you any objection to telling me?”
“The man whom your daughter was discussing—the man known to his friends as ‘Red Mullet’—is a cosmopolitan who lives mostly on the Continent, and, between ourselves, has the reputation of being an adventurer.”
“And a friend of my daughter!” the elder man exclaimed in surprise. “She seems to meet very undesirable people sometimes. The latitude allowed to girls nowadays, Doctor, is very different from that of thirty years ago—eh?”
“What can we expect in this age of the ‘New Woman’ and the Suffragette?” laughed the other, holding up his hands.
“But could we not induce this Mr Mullet to help us—or at least to reveal to us in what direction our enemies are working? They have with them a very clever and ingenious scholar, of that I have already satisfied myself.”
“Ah!” sighed Diamond. “If we only could get ‘Red Mullet’ with us. But I fear that there are certain circumstances which entirely preclude such an arrangement. At least, that is what I suspect.”
“I wonder what my daughter can know of the man?” remarked Griffin, ignorant of the fact that Gwen’s curiosity had got the better of her, or that the door being ajar she had heard the Doctor’s statement.
“It certainly does seem a rather curious fact that they are acquainted,” remarked the Doctor. “But, Professor,” he went on eagerly, “I suppose you now have no doubt that there is more in the remarkable story than mere surmise.”
Griffin was again silent for a few moments.
“Providing that the sacred relics remain still hidden—and there certainly seems nothing against that belief, even though some have declared that Solomon’s golden vessels were afterwards used in Persia—then we have, of course, precise knowledge of certain of them,” he said with great deliberation. Opening the Hebrew-English Bible at 2 Chronicles, iv, 19, he said: “Listen to this as an example,” and he read as follows: