from this hasty glance to pick up another snuff-box.
As my fingers closed on it the music suddenly grew louder, and I
looked up as the door opened, and a man stood on the threshold--a
short, square-set man, dressed in black.

'Eh?' He gave a little start of surprise. 'No, no, excuse me, my
friend, but you are seeking in the wrong cabinet.'

Before I could pull myself together, he had stepped to the window and
closed it. 'You had best keep quite still,' he said, 'and then we
can talk. There are servants on the stairs below, and should you
attempt the way you came there are three constables just around the
corner. I hired them to regulate the carriage traffic: but now that
the last guest has arrived, they will be cooling their heels for a
spell; and I have a whistle. I have also a pistol.' With a turn of
his hand he flung open a door in a dark armoire beside the window,
dived a hand into its recesses, and produced the weapon. 'And it is
loaded,' he added, still in the same business-like voice, in which,
after his first brief exclamation, my ear detected no tremor.

'By all means let us talk,' I said.

He was crossing to the fireplace, but wheeled about sharply at the
sound of my voice. 'Eh? An educated man, apparently!' Laying the
pistol on the mantelshelf, he plucked a twisted spill of paper from a
vase hard by, stooped, ignited it from the flame dancing in the
sea-coals, and proceeded to light the candles in an old-fashioned
girandole that overhung the fireplace. There were five candles, and
he lit them all.

They revealed him a clean-shaven, white-haired man, meticulously
dressed in black--black swallowtail coat, open waistcoat, and frilled
shirt-front, on which his laundress must have spent hours of labour;
closely fitting black knee-breeches, black silk stockings, black
polished shoes. They silhouetted, too, in the moment before he swung
round on me, an enormous nose, like a punchinello's, and the outline
of a shapely head, sufficiently massive to counterbalance and save it
from caricature. The size of the head again would have suggested
deformity, but for the broad shoulders that carried it. As he faced
me squarely with his back to the hearth, his chest and shoulders
narrowing to the hips of a runner, and still narrowing (though he
stood astraddle) to ankles and feet that would not have disgraced a
lady, he put me in mind of a matador I had seen years before, facing
his bull in the ring at Sevi