The library, whither Jimmy had made his way after leaving Mrs.

　　Pett, was a large room on the ground floor, looking out on thestreet which ran parallel to the south side of the house. It hadFrench windows, opening onto a strip of lawn which ended in ahigh stone wall with a small gate in it, the general effect ofthese things being to create a resemblance to a country houserather than to one in the centre of the city. Mr. Pett's townresidence was full of these surprises.

　　In one corner of the room a massive safe had been let into thewall, striking a note of incongruity, for the remainder of thewall-space was completely covered with volumes of all sorts andsizes, which filled the shelves and overflowed into a smallgallery, reached by a short flight of stairs and running alongthe north side of the room over the door.

　　Jimmy cast a glance at the safe, behind the steel doors of whichhe presumed the test-tube of Partridgite which Willie had carriedfrom the luncheon-table lay hid: then transferred his attentionto the shelves. A cursory inspection of these revealed nothingwhich gave promise of whiling away entertainingly the momentswhich must elapse before the return of Ann. Jimmy's tastes inliterature lay in the direction of the lighter kind of modernfiction, and Mr. Pett did not appear to possess a single volumethat had been written later than the eighteenth century--andmostly poetry at that. He turned to the writing-desk near thewindow, on which he had caught sight of a standing shelf full ofbooks of a more modern aspect. He picked one up at random andopened it.

　　He threw it down disgustedly. It was poetry. This man Pettappeared to have a perfect obsession for poetry. One would neverhave suspected it, to look at him. Jimmy had just resignedhimself, after another glance at the shelf, to a bookless vigil,when his eye was caught by a name on the cover of the last in therow so unexpected that he had to look again to verify thediscovery.

　　He had been perfectly right. There it was, in gold letters.

　　THE LONELY HEARTBYANN CHESTERHe extracted the volume from the shelf in a sort of stupor. Evennow he was inclined to give his goddess of the red hair thebenefit of the doubt, and assume that some one else of the samename had written it. For it was a defect in Jimmy'scharacter--one of his many defects--that he loathed and scornedminor poetry and considered minor poets, especially whenfeminine, an unnecessary affliction. He declined to believe thatAnn, his Ann, a girl full of the finest traits of character, thegirl who had been capable of encouraging a comparative strangerto break the law by impersonating her cousin Jimmy Crocker, couldalso be capable of writing The Lonely Heart and other poems. Heskimmed through the first one he came across, and shuddered. Itwas pure slush. It was the sort of stuff they filled up pageswith in the magazines when the detective story did not run longenough. It was the sort of stuff which long-haired blighters readalone to other long-haired blighters in English suburbandrawing-rooms. It was the sort of stuff which--to be brief--gavehim the Willies. No, it could not be Ann who had written it.