ou expected?"

"I suppose so," he said impatiently, thrusting a card through the
opening. "Please take my name to him at once, and say I come from Mr.
Sidebotham on the matter Mr. Garvey wrote about."

The man took the card, and the face vanished into the darkness, leaving
Shorthouse standing in the cold porch with mingled feelings of
impatience and dismay. The door, he now noticed for the first time, was
on a chain and could not open more than a few inches. But it was the
manner of his reception that caused uneasy reflections to stir within
him--reflections that continued for some minutes before they were
interrupted by the sound of approaching footsteps and the flicker of a
light in the hall.

The next instant the chain fell with a rattle, and gripping his bag
tightly, he walked into a large ill-smelling hall of which he could only
just see the ceiling. There was no light but the nickering taper held by
the man, and by its uncertain glimmer Shorthouse turned to examine him.
He saw an undersized man of middle age with brilliant, shifting eyes, a
curling black beard, and a nose that at once proclaimed him a Jew. His
shoulders were bent, and, as he watched him replacing the chain, he saw
that he wore a peculiar black gown like a priest's cassock reaching to
the feet. It was altogether a lugubrious figure of a man, sinister and
funereal, yet it seemed in perfect harmony with the general character of
its surroundings. The hall was devoid of furniture of any kind, and
against the dingy walls stood rows of old picture frames, empty and
disordered, and odd-looking bits of wood-work that appeared doubly
fantastic as their shadows danced queerly over the floor in the shifting
light.

"If you'll come this way, Mr. Garvey will see you presently," said the
Jew gruffly, crossing the floor and shielding the taper with a bony
hand. He never once raised his eyes above the level of the visitor's
waistcoat, and, to Shorthouse, he somehow suggested a figure from the
dead rather than a man of flesh and blood. The hall smelt decidedly ill.

All the more surprising, then, was the scene that met his eyes when the
Jew opened the door at the further end and he entered a room brilliantly
lit with swinging lamps and furnished with a degree of taste and comfort
that amounted to luxury. The walls were lined with handsomely bound
books, and armchairs were arranged round a large mahogany desk in the
middle of the room. A bright fire burned in t