CHAPTER XMr. Parker, a faithful though doubting Thomas, had duly secured his medical student: a large young man like an overgrown puppy, with innocent eyes and a freckled face. He sat on the Chesterfield before Lord Peter's library fire, bewildered in equal measure by his errand, his surroundings and the drink which he was absorbing. His palate, though untutored, was naturally a good one, and he realised that even to call this liquid a drink—the term ordinarily used by him to designate cheap whiskey, post-war beer or a dubious glass of claret in a Soho restaurant—was a sacrilege; this was something outside normal experience; a genie in a bottle.
The man called Parker, whom he had happened to run across the evening before in the public-house at the corner of Prince of Wales Road, seemed to
