Hugo, with his hands still on either rail of the staircase, took the top
step, gazing the while at his burglar, first in wonder, and then with a
capricious abandonment to what he considered the humour of the
situation. He thought of Albert Shawn's account of the meeting between
Francis Tudor and his visitor in Tudor's flat on the previous night, and
some fantastic impulse, due to the strain of Welsh blood in him, caused
him to address the man as Tudor had addressed him:

'Hullo, Louis!'

There was a pause, and then came the reply in a tone which might have
been ferocious or facetious:

'Well, my young friend?'

It was indeed Louis Ravengar. Dishevelled, fatigued, and unstrung, he
formed a sinister contrast to Hugo, fresh from repose, cold water and
music, and also to the spirit of the beautiful summer morning itself,
which at that unspoilt hour seemed always to sojourn for a space in the
belvedere. The sun glinted joyously on the golden ornament of the dome,
and on Hugo's smooth hair, but it revealed without pity the stains on
Ravengar's flaccid collar and the disorder of his evening clothes and
opera-hat.

He was a fairly tall man, with thin gray hair round the sides of his
head, but none on the crown nor on his face, the chief characteristics
of which were the square jaw, the extremely long upper lip, the flat
nose, and the very small blue-gray eyes. He looked sixty, and was
scarcely fifty. He looked one moment like a Nonconformist local preacher
who had mistaken his vocation; but he was nothing of the kind. He looked