Through it all, Graham sat unmoved. He met Clarke’s broadside with a stare of bulldog pertinacity. Had his features been carved in stone, they could not have been more sphinx-like. I began to see that Clarke had met his match. This stolid, practical mind was not one that Clarke’s arts might bend and fathom at will. But for the one brainstorm of temper which was his undoing, the orchid alone might never have solved the murder of Hoppington.
Then the coming of the chief relieved a situation that was becoming tense.
“Well, Mr. Clarke,” he said when he had heard the details, “you have your nerve with you, coming right into a swell hotel and slipping the darbies on a distinguished foreign guest on the evidence of a bloomin’ flower; but I never knew you to be very far wrong yet, and if it work
