t the cook was starting presently was
fulfilled to the letter, for the cook came out, pulling his gloves on,
even as they spoke.

But he was a very different figure from the confused mass of white and
black that had appeared for an instant in the doorway. He was buttoned
and buckled up to his bursting eyeballs in the most brilliant fashion.
A tall black hat was tilted on his broad black head--a hat of the sort
that the French wit has compared to eight mirrors. But somehow the black
man was like the black hat. He also was black, and yet his glossy skin
flung back the light at eight angles or more. It is needless to say
that he wore white spats and a white slip inside his waistcoat. The red
flower stood up in his buttonhole aggressively, as if it had suddenly
grown there. And in the way he carried his cane in one hand and his
cigar in the other there was a certain attitude--an attitude we must
always remember when we talk of racial prejudices: something innocent
and insolent--the cake walk.

"Sometimes," said Flambeau, looking after him, "I'm not surprised that
they lynch them."

"I am never surprised," said Father Brown, "at any work of hell. But as
I was saying," he resumed, as the negro, still ostentatiously pulling on
his yellow gloves, betook himself briskly towards the watering-place,
a queer music-hall figure against that grey and frosty scene--"as I was
saying, I couldn't describe the man very minutely, but he had a flourish
and old-fashioned whiskers and moustachios, dark or dyed, as in the
pictures of foreign financiers, round his neck was wrapped a long purple
scarf that thrashed out in the wind as he walked. It was fixed at the
throat rather in the way that nurses fix children's comforters with a
safety-pin. Only this," added the priest, gazing placidly out to sea,
"was not a safety-pin."

The man sitting on the long iron bench was also gazing placidly out to
sea. Now he was once more in repose. Flambeau felt quite certain that
one of his eyes was naturally larger than the other. Both were now well
opened, and he could almost fancy the left eye grew larger as he gazed.

"It was a very long gold pin, and had the carved head of a monkey or
some such thing," continued the cleric; "and it was fixed in a rather
odd way--he wore pince-nez and a broad black--"

The motionless man continued to gaze at the sea, and the eyes in his
head might have belonged to two different men. Then he made a movement
of blinding