Trotter's brow wrinkled in vague
thought as he peered down at it. He was trying to think what it
reminded him of, what possible link it made in a chain of lost
association.
Then he remembered. It was toward the pillars of the First
National Trust Building that his mind was trying to grope. They
were of the same stuff, highly polished porphyritic granite, the
pride and wonder of the avenue along which they made a burnished
and flashing peristyle.
Trotter rubbed his chin, meditatively, and once more examined the
stone. Then he took a sudden deeper breath, and, leaning
hurriedly forward, raked through the parcel with his fingers. He
found nothing of note.
But as he sat there, stupidly staring at the fragment of granite,
his crouching body, with his feet tucked in under the chair
rungs, was startlingly like that familiar figure known as an
interrogation mark.
III
It was nine o'clock the next morning when Trotter, carrying a
parcel of laundry, walked casually past the First National Trust
Building and turned the corner. He also made note, as he stepped
into the open-fronted Chinese laundry, of this incongruous
side-street neighbor, its squalid meanness cheek by jowl with the
lordly magnificence of the many-columned bank structure.
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