It was known to some few that he occupied rooms in a flat at
Westminster,--but to very few exactly where the rooms were
situate. Among all his friends no one was known to have entered
them. In a moderate way he was given to hospitality,--that is
to infrequent but when the occasion came, to graceful
hospitality. Some club, however, or tavern perhaps, in the
summer, some river bank would be chosen as the scene of these
festivities. To a few,--if, as suggested, amidst summer flowers
on the water's edge to men and women mixed,--he would be a
courtly and efficient host; for he had the rare gift of doing
such things well.

Hunting was over, and the east wind was still blowing, and a
great portion of the London world was out of town taking its
Easter holiday, when on an unpleasant morning, Ferdinand Lopez
travelled into the city by the Metropolitan railway from
Westminster Bridge. It was his custom to go thither when he did
go,--not daily like a man of business, but as chance might
require, like a capitalist or a man of pleasure,--in his own
brougham. But on this occasion he walked down the river side,
and then walked from the Mansion House into a dingy little court
called Little Tankard Yard, near the Bank of England, and going
through a narrow dark long passage got into a little office at
the back of a building, in which there sat at a desk a greasy
gentleman with a new hat on one side of his head, who might
perhaps be about forty years old. The place was very dark, and
the man was turning over the leaves of a ledger. A stranger to
city ways might probably have said that he was idle, but he was
no doubt filling his mind with that erudition which would enable