Branshaw Teleragh. I knew it because every evening just before
dinner, whilst I waited in the hall, I used, by the courtesy of
Monsieur Schontz, the proprietor, to inspect the little police
reports that each guest was expected to sign upon taking a room.

The head waiter piloted him immediately to a vacant table, three
away from my own--the table that the Grenfalls of Falls River,
N.J., had just vacated. It struck me that that was not a very nice
table for the newcomers, since the sunlight, low though it was,
shone straight down upon it, and the same idea seemed to come at
the same moment into Captain Ashburnham's head. His face
hitherto had, in the wonderful English fashion, expressed nothing
whatever. Nothing. There was in it neither joy nor despair; neither
hope nor fear; neither boredom nor satisfaction. He seemed to
perceive no soul in that crowded room; he might have been
walking in a jungle. I never came across such a perfect expression
before and I never shall again. It was insolence and not insolence;
it was modesty and not modesty. His hair was fair, extraordinarily
ordered in a wave, running from the left temple to the right; his
face was a light brick-red, perfectly uniform in tint up to the roots
of the hair itself; his yellow moustache was as stiff as a toothbrush
and I verily believe that he had his black smoking jacket thickened
a little over the shoulder-blades so as to give himself the air of the
slightest possible stoop. It would be like him to do that; that was
the sort of thing he thought about. Martingales, Chiffney bits,
boots; where you got the best soap, the best brandy, the name of
the chap who rode a plater down the Khyber cliffs; the spreading
power of number three shot before a charge of number four
powder . . . by heavens, I hardly ever heard him talk of anything
else. Not in all the years that I knew him did I hear him talk of