Pritchard laughed gayly.

“You are not used to Americans, my young friend,” he said.  “Over on this side you are all so fearfully literal.  You are not seriously supposing that they meant to dose me with that stuff the other night, eh?”

“I never thought that there was any doubt about it at all,” Tavernake declared deliberately.

Pritchard stroked his moustache meditatively.

“Well,” he remarked, “you are certainly green, and yet I don’t know why you shouldn’t be.  Americans are always up to games of that sort.  I am not saying that they didn’t mean to give me a scare, if they could, or that they wouldn’t have been glad to get a few words of information out of me, or a paper or two that I keep pretty safely locked up.  It would have been a better joke on me then.  But as for the rest, as for really trying to make me take that stuff, of course, that was all bunkum.”

Tavernake sat quite still in his chair for several minutes.

“Will you take another gin fizz, Mr. Pritchard?” he asked.

“Why not?”

Tavernake gave the order.  He sat on his stool whistling softly to himself.

“Then I suppose,” he said at last, “I must have looked a pretty sort of an ass coming through the wall like a madman.”

Pritchard shook his head.

“You looked just about what you were,” he answered, “a d——­d good sort.  I’m not playing up to you that it was all pretense.  You can never trust that gang.  The blackguard outside was in earnest, anyway.  After all, you know, they wouldn’t miss me if I were to drop quietly out.  There ’s no one else they ’re quite so much afraid of.  There ’s no one else knows quite as much about them.”

“Well, we’ll let it go at that,” Tavernake declared.  “You know so much of all these people, though, that I rather wish you ’d tell me something I want very much to know.”

“It’s by telling nothing,” the detective replied quickly, “that I know as much as I do.  Just one cocktail, eh?”

Tavernake shook his head.

“I drank my first cocktail last night,” he remarked.  “I had supper with the professor and his daughter.”

“Not Elizabeth?” Pritchard asked swiftly.

Tavernake shook his head.

“With Miss Beatrice,” he answered.

Pritchard set down his glass.

“Say, Tavernake,” he inquired, “you are friendly with that young lady, Miss Beatrice, aren’t you?”

“I certainly am,” Tavernake answered.  “I have a very great regard for her.”

“Then I can tell you how to do her a good turn,” Pritchard continued, earnestly.  “Keep her away from that old blackguard.  Keep her away from all the gang.  Believe me, she is looking for trouble by even speaking to them.”

“But the man’s her father,” Tavernake objected, “and he seems fond of her.”