Seated at one of the narrow tables on the opposite side of the room, and facing the door, was a man who took my attention more than any one there, the _cafetier_ excepted. He was a full-cheeked, heavy-browed man, not tall, but strongly built, and with something of that added corpulence which so often comes with middle age. He had close-cropped iron-gray hair, which stood out like a stiff stubble in every direction; but his moustache and imperial were jet black, and therefore presumably dyed. He had a rather thick aquiline nose, and he wore a pair of gold-rimmed spectacles; but once or twice I caught a glance from his eyes, which were steel-gray in colour, so keen and piercing, that his assumption of artificial aid for them seemed somewhat of a mockery. He was dressed in a tightly buttoned black frock-coat, and wore a wisp of black ribbon round his neck, tied in a formal little bow under his turn-down collar. His trousers were dark gray in colour, and his feet were incased in a pair of broad-toed varnished boots. His rather large plump hands were white and shapely, and his filbert nails were carefully trimmed. He looked so superior to the general run of the other frequenters of the coffee-shop whom I had hitherto seen, that he had an air of being altogether out of place. He neither spoke to nor was addressed by any one except Jean, who served him with his chocolate, but seemed immersed in the contents first of one foreign newspaper and then of another, several of which were spread on the table in front of him. Still, notwithstanding his seeming indifference to everything that was going on around him, an impression somehow got possession of me that not a man entered or left the place without being keenly scrutinised from behind those gold-rimmed spectacles, while more than once I had an uneasy consciousness that I was the object who was being photographed by that coldly penetrative gaze. As soon as I had finished my chop, Jean came to clear the table, upon which I took the opportunity of saying to him: ‘I shall require a bed here to-night. I suppose you can find room for me?’ He stared at me for a moment or two in open-eyed astonishment. Then he said: ‘Monsieur is mistaken. We have no beds for strangers here.’ ‘Then why have you the announcement of “Good Beds” painted up on the lamp outside?’ I demanded a little hotly. Jean shrugged his shoulders. ‘Ah, that is a mistake—all at once a mistake,’ he answered with his strong French accent. ‘The Englishman who had this place before Monsieur Karavich, used to let out beds; but Monsieur Karavich, who has been here but two months, does not. No.’ At this juncture M. Karavich himself appeared on the scene. He had come to ascertain what the discussion was about. He put a question to Jean in French, and the latter answered him volubly in the same language.