He had recovered in some measure from this passion of grief, and was employed in arranging the letters, when the door was opened, and a man came into the room. The man was somewhere between forty and fifty, and was a very remarkable-looking person. He had once been handsome--of that there was no doubt, but the flower of his youth had faded in some pernicious atmosphere, and the chilling blasts of a premature autumn had blighted him while he should have been still in all the glory of his midsummer prime. He had a fiery red nose, and fiery black eyes, and dark hair, which he wore longer than was authorized by the fashion of the day. There were gray hairs amongst those straggling dark locks, and the man’s moustache had that tinge of Tyrian purple in its blackness which betrays the handiwork of the chemist. He was a man of imposing presence, tall and stalwart; and although he lacked the conventional graces of a modern gentleman, he was not without a certain style and dash of his own. To-day he wore mourning, and there was an unwonted softness in his manner. This was Daniel Mayfield; a man whose genius had been of much use to other people, but of little benefit to himself, and a man who contemplated the visage of his deadliest foe whenever he looked in the glass. Yes, the only enemy Mr. Mayfield had made was himself. Everybody liked him. He was your true Bohemian, your genuine Arab of the great desert of London. Money ran between his fingers like water. He had been more successful, and had worked harder, than men whose industry had won for them houses and lands, horses and carriages, plate and linen and Sèvres china. His acquaintance were always calculating his income, and wondering what he did with it. Did he gamble? Did he speculate on the Stock Exchange? Did he consume fifteen hundred a year in tavern-parlours? Daniel himself could not have answered these questions. He wondered as much as any one about this mysterious enigma. He had never known how he spent his money. It went, somehow, and there came an end to it. Jack borrowed a few pounds; and there was a night’s card-playing, through which the luck went against poor Dan; and there was a Greenwich dinner on Tom’s birthday; and he took a fancy to a rare old copy of the _Diable Boiteux_, on large paper, sold at Willis and Sotheran’s; and then there were occasional periods of famine, during which Dan had recourse to a friendly usurer, for whose succour he ultimately paid something like a hundred and fifty per cent. So the money went. Daniel was the last person to trouble himself as to the manner of its departure. When his pockets were empty, he called for pen, ink, and paper, and set himself to fill them.