"If you will excuse me," he said, clenching his hands behind his
back, "I think I should feel myself justified in--"
"Oh! Come along in," exploded the lieutenant. He made the same
gesture of savage surrender. And he slammed into the office, the
rest of us at his heels.
P. Montmorency, House-Agent, was a solitary old gentleman sitting
behind a bare brown counter. He had an egglike head, froglike jaws,
and a grey hairy fringe of aureole round the lower part of his
face; the whole combined with a reddish, aquiline nose. He wore a
shabby black frock-coat, a sort of semi-clerical tie worn at a very
unclerical angle, and looked, generally speaking, about as unlike a
house-agent as anything could look, short of something like a
sandwich man or a Scotch Highlander.
We stood inside the room for fully forty seconds, and the odd old
gentleman did not look at us. Neither, to tell the truth, odd as he
was, did we look at him. Our eyes were fixed, where his were fixed,
upon something that was crawling about on the counter in front of
him. It was a ferret.
The silence was broken by Rupert Grant. He spoke in that sweet and
steely voice which he reserved for great occasions and practised
for hours together in his bedroom. He said:
"Mr Montmorency, I think?"
The old gentleman started, lifted his eyes with a bland
bewilderment, picked up the ferret by the neck, stuffed it alive
into his trousers pocket, smiled apologetically, and said:
"Sir.
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