is with me?"

"Yes, but not the Inspector. He sees nothing but the victim of a strange
coincidence in Orlando Brotherson."

"Again the scales hang even. But they won't remain so. One side is bound
to rise. Which? That's the question, Mr. Gryce."

XVI. OPPOSED

There was a new tenant in the Hicks Street tenement. He arrived late one
afternoon and was shown two rooms, one in the rear building and another
in the front one. Both were on the fourth floor. He demurred at the
former, thought it gloomy but finally consented to try it. The other, he
said, was too expensive. The janitor--new to the business--was not much
taken with him and showed it, which seemed to offend the newcomer, who
was evidently an irritable fellow owing to ill health.

However, they came to terms as I have said, and the man went away,
promising to send in his belongings the next day. He smiled as he said
this and the janitor who had rarely seen such a change take place in
a human face, looked uncomfortable for a moment and seemed disposed to
make some remark about the room they were leaving. But, thinking better
of it, locked the door and led the way downstairs. As the prospective
tenant followed, he may have noticed, probably did, that the door they
had just left was a new one--the only new thing to be seen in the whole
shabby place.

The next night that door was locked on the inside. The young man had
taken possession. As he put away the remnants of a meal he had cooked
for himself, he cast a look at his surroundings, and imperceptibly
sighed. Then he brightened again, and sitting down on his solitary
chair, he turned his eyes on the window which, uncurtained and without
shade, stared open-mouthed, as it were, at the opposite wall rising high
across the court.

In that wall, one window only seemed to interest him and that was on a
level with his own. The shade of this window was up, but there was no
light back of it and so nothing of the interior could be seen. But his
eye remained fixed upon it, while his hand, stretched out towards the
lamp burning near him, held itself in readiness to lower the light at a
minute's notice.

Did he see only the opposite wall and that unillumined window? Was there
no memory of the time when, in a previous contemplation of those dismal
panes, he beheld stretching between them and himself, a long, low bench
with a plain wooden tub upon it, from which a dripping cloth beat out
upon the boards beneath a