e and pleasant; one glance around them
decided Triffitt.

"This place will suit me very well," he said. "Now I'll give you
satisfactory references about myself, and pay you a month's rent in
advance, and if that's all right to you, I'll come in today. You can
ring up my references on your 'phone, and then, if you're satisfied,
we'll settle the rent, and I'll see the caretaker's wife about airing
that bed."

Within half an hour Triffitt was occupant of the flat, the cashier of
the _Argus_ having duly telephoned that he was a thoroughly dependable
and much-respected member of its staff, and Triffitt himself having
handed over ten pounds as rent for the coming month, he interviewed the
caretaker's wife, went to a neighbouring grocer's shop and ordered a
stock of necessaries wherewith to fill his larder, repaired to his own
lodgings and brought away all that he wanted in the way of luggage,
books, and papers, and by the middle of the afternoon was fairly settled
in his new quarters. He spent an hour in putting himself and his
belongings straight--and then came the question what next?

He was there for a special purpose--that special purpose was to
acquaint himself as thoroughly as possible with the doings of Frank
Burchill. Burchill was there--he was almost on the point of saying, in
the next cell!--there, in the flat across the corridor; figuratively,
within touch, if it were not for sundry divisions of brick, mortar, and
the like. Burchill's door was precisely opposite his own; there was an
advantage in that fact. And in Triffitt's outer door (all these flats,
he discovered--that is, if they were all like his own, possessed double
doors) there was a convenient letter slit, by manipulating which he
could, if he chose, keep a perpetual observation on the other opposite.
But Triffitt did not propose to sit with his eye glued to that letter
slit all day--it might be useful at times, and for some special purpose,
but he had wider views. And the first thing to do was to make an
examination, geographical and exhaustive, of his own surroundings:
Triffitt had learnt, during his journalistic training, that attention to
details is one of the most important things in life.

The first thing that had struck Triffitt in this respect was that there
was no lift in this building. He had remarked on that to the clerk, and
the clerk had answered with a shrug of the shoulders that it was a
mistake and one for which the proprietor was alre