CHAPTER XVII.
The bell in the darkened chambers rang with the insistent clamour of mechanism responding with blind obedience to a human hand, but Mr.Anthony Brimsdown suffered it to pass unnoticed.

As an elderly bachelor, living alone, he was sufficiently master of his own affairs to disregard the arrival of the last post, leaving the letters as they were tumbled through the slit in the door downstairs until he felt inclined to go and get them.
He was standing in the centre of the room examining an unusual trinket--a gold hoop like a bracelet, with numbers and the zodiac signs engraved on the inner surface.

Mr.Brimsdown had discovered it in a Kingsway curiosity shop a week before.

It was a portable sun-dial of the sixteenth century.

A slide, pushed back a certain distance in accordance with the zodiac signs, permitted the sun to fall through a slit on the figures of the hours within--a dainty timekeeper for mediaeval lovers.