"I shall be 'almost' blind here, Parkinson," remarked Carrados, walking about the room. "It saves explanation." "Very good, sir," replied Parkinson. Five minutes later, an interval suggesting that Miss Chubb also found it rather early in the afternoon, Carrados was arranging to take rooms for his attendant and himself for the short time that he would be in London, seeing an oculist. "One bedroom, mine, must face north," he stipulated. "It has to do with the light." Miss Chubb replied that she quite understood. Some gentlemen, she added, had their requirements, others their fancies. She endeavoured to suit all. The bedroom she had in view from the first _did_ face north. She would not have known, only the last gentleman, curiously enough, had made the same request. "A sufferer like myself?" inquired Carrados affably. Miss Chubb did not think so. In his case she regarded it merely as a fancy. He had said that he could not sleep on any other side. She had had to turn out of her own room to accommodate him, but if one kept an apartment-house one had to be adaptable; and Mr Ghoosh was certainly very liberal in his ideas. "Ghoosh? An Indian gentleman, I presume?" hazarded Carrados. It appeared that Mr Ghoosh was an Indian. Miss Chubb confided that at first she had been rather perturbed at the idea of taking in "a black man," as she confessed to regarding him. She reiterated, however, that Mr Ghoosh proved to be "quite the gentleman." Five minutes of affability put Carrados in full possession of Mr Ghoosh's manner of life and movements--the dates of his arrival and departure, his solitariness and his daily habits. "This would be the best bedroom," said Miss Chubb. It was a fair-sized room on the first floor. The window looked out on to the roof of an outbuilding; beyond, the deep cutting of the railway line. Opposite stood the dead wall that Mr Carlyle had spoken of. Carrados "looked" round the room with the discriminating glance that sometimes proved so embarrassing to those who knew him. "I have to take a little daily exercise," he remarked, walking to the window and running his hand up the woodwork. "You will not mind my fixing a 'developer' here, Miss Chubb--a few small screws?" Miss Chubb thought not. Then she was sure not. Finally she ridiculed the idea of minding with scorn. "If there is width enough," mused Carrados, spanning the upright critically. "Do you happen to have a wooden foot-rule convenient?" "Well, to be sure!" exclaimed Miss Chubb, opening a rapid succession of drawers until she produced the required article. "When we did out this room after Mr Ghoosh, there was this very ruler among the things that he hadn't thought worth taking. This is what you require, sir?"