eed, only a vague mutter, with a few disjointed phrases, came
through the door, but suddenly an angry voice rang out clear and
painfully distinct.

"Yes, I did! And I say it again. Bribery! Collusion! That's what it
amounts to. You want to square me!"

"Nothing of the kind, Godfrey," was the reply in a lower tone; but at
this point I coughed emphatically and moved a chair, and the voices
subsided once more into an indistinct murmur.

To distract my attention from my unseen neighbors I glanced curiously
about the room and speculated upon the personalities of its occupants.
A very curious room it was, with its pathetic suggestion of decayed
splendor and old-world dignity; a room full of interest and character
and of contrasts and perplexing contradictions. For the most part it
spoke of unmistakable though decent poverty. It was nearly bare of
furniture, and what little there was was of the cheapest--a small
kitchen table and three Windsor chairs (two of them with arms); a
threadbare string carpet on the floor, and a cheap cotton cloth on the
table; these, with a set of bookshelves, frankly constructed of
grocer's boxes, formed the entire suite. And yet, despite its poverty,
the place exhaled an air of homely if rather ascetic comfort, and the
taste was irreproachable. The quiet russet of the table-cloth struck a
pleasant harmony with the subdued bluish green of the worn carpet; the
Windsor chairs and the legs of the table had been carefully denuded of
their glaring varnish and stained a sober brown: and the austerity of
the whole was relieved by a ginger jar filled with fresh-cut flowers
and set in the middle of the table.

But the contrasts of which I have spoken were most singular and
puzzling. There were the bookshelves, for instance, home made and
stained at the cost of a few pence, but filled with recent and costly
new works on archeology and ancient art. There were the objects on the
mantelpiece: a facsimile in bronze--not bronze plaster--of the
beautiful head of Hypnos and a pair of fine Ushabti figures. There
were the decorations of the walls, a number of etchings--signed proofs,
every one of them--of Oriental subjects, and a splendid facsimile
reproduction of an Egyptian papyrus. It was incongruous in the
extreme, this mingling of costly refinements with the barest and
shabbiest necessaries of life, of fastidious culture with manifest
poverty. I could make nothing of it. What manner of man, I w