"Had no plans," he replied, in a
high, monotonous voice; "I was bored stiff. Take the armchair."
Paul Harley sat down, but in the restless manner of one who has
urgent business in hand and who is impatient of delay. Mr. Brinn
stooped to a coffee table which stood upon the rug before the
large open fireplace. "I am going to offer you a cocktail," he
said.
"I shall accept your offer," returned Harley, smiling. "The 'N.
B. cocktail' has a reputation which extends throughout the clubs
of the world."
Nicol Brinn, exhibiting the swift adroitness of that human dodo,
the New York bartender, mixed the drinks. Paul Harley watched
him, meanwhile drumming his fingers restlessly upon the chair
arm.
"Here's success," he said, "to my mission."
It was an odd toast, but Mr. Brinn merely nodded and drank in
silence. Paul Harley set his glass down and glanced about the
singular apartment of which he had often heard and which no man
could ever tire of examining.
In this room the poles met, and the most remote civilizations of
the world rubbed shoulders with modernity. Here, encased, were a
family of snow-white ermine from Alaska and a pair of black
Manchurian leopards. A flying lemur from the Pelews contemplated
swooping upon the head of a huge tigress which glared with glassy
eyes across the place at the snarling muzzle of a polar bear.
Mycenaean vases and gold death masks stood upon the same shelf as
Venetian goblets, and the mummy of an Egyptian priestess of the
thirteenth dynasty occupied a sarcophagus upon the top of which
rested a basrelief found in one of the shrines of the Syrian fish
goddess Derceto, at Ascalon.
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