brothers, and wherever this leveller went on his pale horse it was
Father Brown's trade to follow. One of the waiters, an Italian, had
been struck down with a paralytic stroke that afternoon; and his Jewish
employer, marvelling mildly at such superstitions, had consented to send
for the nearest Popish priest. With what the waiter confessed to Father
Brown we are not concerned, for the excellent reason that that cleric
kept it to himself; but apparently it involved him in writing out a note
or statement for the conveying of some message or the righting of some
wrong. Father Brown, therefore, with a meek impudence which he would
have shown equally in Buckingham Palace, asked to be provided with a
room and writing materials. Mr. Lever was torn in two. He was a kind
man, and had also that bad imitation of kindness, the dislike of any
difficulty or scene. At the same time the presence of one unusual
stranger in his hotel that evening was like a speck of dirt on something
just cleaned. There was never any borderland or anteroom in the Vernon
Hotel, no people waiting in the hall, no customers coming in on chance.
There were fifteen waiters. There were twelve guests. It would be as
startling to find a new guest in the hotel that night as to find a
new brother taking breakfast or tea in one's own family. Moreover,
the priest's appearance was second-rate and his clothes muddy; a mere
glimpse of him afar off might precipitate a crisis in the club. Mr.
Lever at last hit on a plan to cover, since he might not obliterate, the
disgrace. When you enter (as you never will) the Vernon Hotel, you pass
down a short passage decorated with a few dingy but important pictures,
and come to the main vestibule and lounge which opens on your right
into passages leading to the public rooms, and on your left to a similar
passage pointing to the kitchens and offices of the hotel. Immediately
on your left hand is the corner of a glass office, which abuts upon
the lounge--a house within a house, so to speak, like the old hotel bar
which probably once occupied its place.

In this office sat the representative of the proprietor (nobody in this
place ever appeared in person if he could help it), and just beyond the
office, on the way to the servants' quarters, was the gentlemen's cloak
room, the last boundary of the gentlemen's domain. But between the
office and the cloak room was a small private room without other outlet,
sometimes used by the proprietor