was hardly a person of unexceptional taste, though he
had no suspicion of this fact, since he counted that room quite all that
any gentleman's parlor should be.

It was a large room furnished in dark velvet and heavy walnut. The red
velvet curtains at the windows, when drawn at night, permitted no ray of
light to escape; the carpet was a gorgeous Brussels affair, the like of
which both as to cost and enduring splendor was not to be found
elsewhere on any floor in Mount Hope. Seated as he then was, Gilmore
could look, if so disposed, at the reflection of his own dark but not
unhandsome face in a massive gilt-framed mirror that reached from
chimneypiece to ceiling; or, glancing about the room, his eyes could
dwell with genuine artistic pleasure on numerous copies in crayon of
French figure-studies; nor were the like of these to be found elsewhere
in Mount Hope.

Gilmore had quitted the McBride cottage some three hours before, and in
the interim had breakfasted well and napped abstemiously. Presently he
must repair to the court-house, where, it had already been intimated,
the coroner might wish to confer with him.

Marshall Langham he had not seen. He had expected to find him still in
his rooms, but the lawyer had left the key under the mat at the door,
presumably at an early hour. Gilmore wondered idly if Langham had not
made a point of getting away before he himself should arrive; he rather
thought so, and he smiled with cheerful malevolence at his own
reflection in the mirror.

Here his reveries were broken in on by the awkward shuffling of heavy
feet in the hallway, and then some one knocked loudly on his door.
Gilmore glanced hastily about to assure himself that the tell-tale
paraphernalia of his craft were nowhere visible, and that the room was
all he liked to fancy it--the parlor of a gentleman with sufficient
income and quiet taste.

"Come in," he called at last, without quitting his chair.

The door slowly opened and the crown of a battered cap first appeared,
then a long face streaked with coal-dust and grime and further decorated
about the chin by a violently red stubble of several days' growth. With
so much of himself showing; the new-comer paused on the threshold in
apparent doubt as to whether he would be permitted to enter, or ordered
to withdraw.

"Come in, Joe, and shut the door!" said Gilmore.

At his bidding the shoulders and trunk, and lastly the legs of a
slouching shambling man of forty-eigh