In answer to a curt but civil summons, the door opened inwards
and there shambled into the room a shapeless little figure,
which seemed to find its own hat and umbrella as unmanageable as
a mass of luggage. The umbrella was a black and prosaic bundle
long past repair; the hat was a broad-curved black hat, clerical
but not common in England; the man was the very embodiment of all
that is homely and helpless.

The doctor regarded the new-comer with a restrained astonishment,
not unlike that he would have shown if some huge but obviously
harmless sea-beast had crawled into his room. The new-comer
regarded the doctor with that beaming but breathless geniality
which characterizes a corpulent charwoman who has just managed
to stuff herself into an omnibus. It is a rich confusion of
social self-congratulation and bodily disarray. His hat tumbled
to the carpet, his heavy umbrella slipped between his knees with a thud;
he reached after the one and ducked after the other, but with
an unimpaired smile on his round face spoke simultaneously as follows:

"My name is Brown. Pray excuse me. I've come about
that business of the MacNabs. I have heard, you often help people
out of such troubles. Pray excuse me if I am wrong."

By this time he had sprawlingly recovered the hat, and made
an odd little bobbing bow over it, as if setting everything quite right.

"I hardly understand you," replied the scientist, with
a cold intensity of manner. "I fear you have mistaken the chambers.
I am Dr Hood, and my work is almost entirely literary and educational.
It is true that I have sometimes been consulted by the police