Mr. Brewster struggled with his feelings.  Then he seemed to overcome them and to force himself to look on the bright side.

“Well, anyway,” he said.  “I’ve got the pair of figures, and that’s what I wanted.  Is that it in that parcel?”

“This is it.  I wouldn’t trust an express company to deliver it.  Suppose we go up to your room and see how the two look side by side.”

They crossed the lobby to the lift.-The cloud was still on Mr. Brewster’s brow as they stepped out and made their way to his suite.  Like most men who have risen from poverty to wealth by their own exertions, Mr. Brewster objected to parting with his money unnecessarily, and it was plain that that twenty-three hundred dollars still rankled.

Mr. Brewster unlocked the door and crossed the room.  Then, suddenly, he halted, stared, and stared again.  He sprang to the bell and pressed it, then stood gurgling wordlessly.

“Anything wrong, old bean?” queried Archie, solicitously.

“Wrong!  Wrong!  It’s gone!”

“Gone?”

“The figure!”

The floor-waiter had manifested himself silently in answer to the bell, and was standing in the doorway.

“Simmons!” Mr. Brewster turned to him wildly.  “Has anyone been in this suite since I went away?”

“No, sir.”

“Nobody?”

“Nobody except your valet, sir—­Parker.  He said he had come to fetch some things away.  I supposed he had come from you, sir, with instructions.”

“Get out!”

Professor Binstead had unwrapped his parcel, and had placed the Pongo on the table.  There was a weighty silence.  Archie picked up the little china figure and balanced it on the palm of his hand.  It was a small thing, he reflected philosophically, but it had made quite a stir in the world.

Mr. Brewster fermented for a while without speaking.

“So,” he said, at last, in a voice trembling with self-pity, “I have been to all this trouble—­”

“And expense,” put in Professor Binstead, gently.

“Merely to buy back something which had been stolen from me!  And, owing to your damned officiousness,” he cried, turning on Archie, “I have had to pay twenty-three hundred dollars for it!  I don’t know why they make such a fuss about Job.  Job never had anything like you around!”

“Of course,” argued Archie, “he had one or two boils.”

“Boils!  What are boils?”

“Dashed sorry,” murmured Archie.  “Acted for the best.  Meant well.  And all that sort of rot!”

Professor Binstead’s mind seemed occupied to the exclusion of all other aspects of the affair, with the ingenuity of the absent Parker.

“A cunning scheme!” he said.  “A very cunning scheme!  This man Parker must have a brain of no low order.  I should like to feel his bumps!”