yed a large and increasing
practice; and it was hinted that the police had been the instigators of
this change of scene. At least he, who had made something of a figure in
earlier life, now dwelt in the Latin Quarter in great simplicity and
solitude, and devoted much of his time to study. Mr. Scuddamore had made
his acquaintance, and the pair would now and then dine together
frugally in a restaurant across the street.

Silas Q. Scuddamore had many little vices of the more respectable order,
and was not restrained by delicacy from indulging them in many rather
doubtful ways. Chief among his foibles stood curiosity. He was a born
gossip; and life, and especially those parts of it in which he had no
experience, interested him to the degree of passion. He was a pert,
invincible questioner, pushing his inquiries with equal pertinacity and
indiscretion; he had been observed, when he took a letter to the post,
to weigh it in his hand, to turn it over and over, and to study the
address with care; and when he found a flaw in the partition between his
room and Madame Zephyrine's, instead of filling it up, he enlarged and
improved the opening, and made use of it as a spy-hole on his
neighbour's affairs.

One day, in the end of March, his curiosity growing as it was indulged,
he enlarged the hole a little further, so that he might command another
corner of the room. That evening, when he went as usual to inspect
Madame Zephyrine's movements, he was astonished to find the aperture
obscured in an odd manner on the other side, and still more abashed when
the obstacle was suddenly withdrawn and a titter of laughter reached his
ears. Some of the plaster had evidently betrayed the secret of his
spy-hole, and his neighbour had been returning the compliment in kind.
Mr. Scuddamore was moved to a very acute feeling of annoyance; he
condemned Madame Zephyrine unmercifully: he even blamed himself; but
when he found, next day, that she had taken no means to baulk him of his
favourite pastime, he continued to profit by her carelessness, and
gratify his idle curiosity.

That next day Madame Zephyrine received a long visit from a tall,
loosely-built man of fifty or upwards, whom Silas had not hitherto seen.
His tweed suit and coloured shirt, no less than his shaggy
side-whiskers, identified him as a Britisher, and his dull grey eye
affected Silas with a sense of cold. He kept screwing his mouth from
side to side and round and round during the