"I suppose," said Miss de Haviland,

"that you want to see Philip?"

Did I want to see Philip? I had no idea.

All I had wanted to do was to see Sophia.

That I had done. She had given emphatic encouragement to the Old Man's plan - but she had now receded from the scene and was presumably somewhere telephoning about fish, having given me no indication of how to proceed. Was I to approach Philip Leonides as a young man anxious to marry his daughter, or as a casual friend who had dropped in (surely not at such a moment!) or as an associate of the police?

Miss de Haviland gave me no time to consider her question. It was, indeed, not a question at all, but more an assertion.

I Miss de Haviland, I judged, was more inclined to assert than to question. \ "We'll go to the library," she said. ^ She led me out of the drawing room, along a corridor and in through another door.

It was a big room, full of books. The books did not confine themselves to the bookcases that reached up to the ceiling.

They were on chairs and tables and even on the floor. And yet there was no sense of disarray about them.

The room was cold. There was some smell absent in it that I was conscious of having expected. It smelt of the mustiness of old books and just a little of beeswax. In a second or two I realised what I missed.

It was the scent of tobacco. Philip Leonides was not a smoker.

He got up from behind his table as we entered - a tall man aged somewhere around fifty, an extraordinarily handsome man. Everyone had laid so much emphasis on the ugliness of Aristide Leonides, that for some reason I expected his son to be ugly too. Certainly I was not prepared for this perfection of feature - the straight nose, the flawless line of jaw, the fair hair touched with grey that swept back from a well shaped forehead.