That distinguished member of the detective profession waited upon Gilbert Fenton with his budget twice a week, but the budget was a barren one.

Mr.
Proul's agent pronounced Mr.Medler's clerk the toughest individual it had ever been his lot to deal with.

No amount of treating at the public-house round the corner--and the agent had ascended from the primitive simplicity of a pint of porter to the highest flights in the art of compound liquors--could exert a softening influence upon that rigid nature.

Either the clerk knew nothing about Percival Nowell, or had been so well schooled as to disclose nothing of what he knew.

Money had been employed by the agent, as well as drink, as a means of temptation; but even every insidious hint of possible gains had failed to move the ill-paid underling to any revelation.
"It's my belief the man knows nothing, or else I should have had it out of him by hook or by crook," Mr.Proul's agent told him, and Mr.Proul repeated to his client.
This first agent having thus come to grief, and having perhaps made himself a suspected person in the eyes of the Medler office by his manoeuvres, a second spy had been placed to keep close watch upon the house, and to follow any person who at all corresponded with the detective idea of Mr.Nowell.It could be no more than an idea, unfortunately, since Gilbert had been able to give the accomplished Proul no description of the man he wanted to trace.