“What?  You know it?  Well, it is not my fault.  The gentleman come last night with a lady, his wife, I suppose.  How am I to know?  He ask for a room.  He look perfectly well.  I give them the room.  They go to bed.  At four o’clock in the morning I hear a bell ring.  I get up.  I go on the landing to listen.  I hear the bell again.  I run to the chamber of the lady and gentleman.  The lady is gone.  The gentleman falls back on the bed as I come in and dies.  Mon Dieu!  It is—­”

He suddenly paused in his excited narrative.  Valentine had moved his position slightly and was now standing almost immediately under the gas-lamp that lit the glass door.

“You—­you are relation of him?” he said.  “You come to see him?”

“I have come to see him, certainly,” said Valentine.  “But I am no relation of his.  This gentleman,” and he pointed to Julian, “knew him well, and wished to look at him once more.”

The landlord seemed puzzled.  He glanced from Valentine to Julian, then back again to Valentine.

“But,” he began, once more addressing himself to the latter, “you are like—­there is something; when the poor gentleman fell on the bed and died he had your eyes.  Yes, yes, you are relation of him.”

“No,” Valentine said; “you are mistaken.”

“I should think so,” exclaimed Julian.  “Poor Marr’s face was as utterly different from yours, Valentine, as darkness is different from light.”

“No, no; it is not the eyes of the gentleman,” the landlord continued, leaning forward through his window, and still violently scrutinizing Valentine,—­“it is not the eyes.  But there is something—­the voice, the manner—­yes, I say there is something, I cannot tell.”

“You are dreaming, my friend,” Valentine calmly interposed.  “Now, Julian, what do you want to do?”

Julian came forward and leant his arm on the counter.

“I am the poor gentleman’s great friend,” he said.  “You must let me see him.”

The landlord held up his fat hands with a large gesticulation of refusal.

“I cannot, sir.  To-morrow they remove him.  They sit on the poor gentleman—­”

“I know,—­the inquest.  All this is very hard upon you, an honest man trying to make an honest living.”

Julian put some money into one of the agitated hands.

“My friend and I only wish to see him for a moment.”

“Monsieur, I cannot.  I—­”

Julian insinuated another sovereign into his protesting fingers.  They took it as an anemone takes a shrimp, and made a gesture of abdication.

“Well, if Monsieur is the friend of the poor gentleman, I have not the heart, I am tender-hearted, I am foolish—­”

He disappeared muttering from the window, and in a moment appeared at a door on the left, disclosing himself now fully as a degraded, flaccid-looking, frouzy ruffian of a very low type, flashily dressed, and of a most unamiable expression.  Taking a candlestick from a dirty marble-topped slab that projected from the passage-wall, he struck a match, lit the candle, and preceded them up the narrow flight of stairs, his boots creaking loudly at every step.  On the landing at the top a smart maid-servant with a very pale face reconnoitered the party for a moment with furtive curiosity, then flitted away in the darkness to the upper regions of the house.