with a changed mind about the bid to dinner.

He regretted Brentwick sincerely. Theirs was a curious sort of
friendship--extraordinarily close in view of the meagerness of either's
information about the other, to say nothing of the disparity between their
ages. Concerning the elder man Kirkwood knew little more than that they had
met on shipboard, "coming over"; that Brentwick had spent some years in
America; that he was an Englishman by birth, a cosmopolitan by habit, by
profession a gentleman (employing that term in its most uncompromisingly
British significance), and by inclination a collector of "articles of
virtue and bigotry," in pursuit of which he made frequent excursions to the
Continent from his residence in a quaint quiet street of Old Brompton. It
had been during his not infrequent, but ordinarily abbreviated, sojourns in
Paris that their steamer acquaintance had ripened into an affection almost
filial on the one hand, almost paternal on the other....

There came a rapping at the door.

Kirkwood removed the pipe from between his teeth long enough to say "Come
in!" pleasantly.

The knob was turned, the door opened. Kirkwood, swinging on one heel,
beheld hesitant upon the threshold a rather rotund figure of medium height,
clad in an expressionless gray lounge suit, with a brown "bowler" hat held
tentatively in one hand, an umbrella weeping in the other. A voice, which
was unctuous and insinuative, emanated from the figure.

"Mr. Kirkwood?"

Kirkwood nodded, with some effort recalling the name, so detached had been