He was the most commonplace, prosperous-looking man you can possibly imagine. I thought of Orchard’s Hopkins--“Decided stoop, Norfolk jacket, and soft hat.” This man’s shoulders were well squared back and ingeniously padded by his tailor. He was the sort of man who would never wear a Norfolk jacket in town; a man who would go to spend Sunday in the country in a black diagonal coat, and take his top hat with him in case of emergency. I looked at him, looked into his dull, bulging eyes. Eyes without depth, without secrets, without soul--just eyes! hard, glassy things put for purely practical purposes into his head! It was clearly superfluous to ask him if he took an interest in Italian art or played the violin. “Perhaps you can explain,” he continued. “I went to the Inn the week before last. They’ve painted my name out on the door of the right-hand set and stuck it on the left-hand set with another man’s. I took his name--wait a moment.” He brought out a fat notebook--he was the kind of accurate dullard who would be sure to take notes. “D. B. ORCHARD. That’s it. Now, who is he? _I_ couldn’t find out. I went and beat up the man who does most of the painting, and he didn’t know. It was a piece of confounded impudence. It may have done me some injury--I use the place as a business address. If it was a practical joke, then it was a very foolish one, and in precious bad taste.” He began to look swollen and angry; looked at me as if he half suspected that I’d a hand in it. No doubt I looked guilty. “Who is D. B. Orchard?” he persisted, in the puffy, thick-throated way of the pompous man. “How is one to get at the fellow? I hammered at the door for the best part of half an hour. D. B. Orchard!” He laughed ironically. “I’d teach him not to play stupid jokes on me. I’d have him understand, sir, that Geoffrey Hopkins is not a man to be played with.” Geoffrey Hopkins! I felt my very lips grow white. I must have looked like some foolish, anæmic girl. “How is one to get at him? I might claim damages.” He brought his broad, hairy fist down vigorously on the shining table. Pray, looking from one to the other--my quivering countenance and the inflamed features of the man Hopkins--was evidently uncomfortable. I looked at that man. Geoffrey Hopkins! I could have taken that flabby body in my grip and shaken it for all that it had made poor Orchard suffer. And yet! _Was_ this the man? Instinct told me, common sense told me, that it was not. “D. B. Orchard is dead,” I said curtly at last; then, with a savage laugh and a terror-stricken glance at the coarse face, added, “You can’t get at him. He’s out of your reach, poor devil, at last.” I didn’t know; I don’t know, now--how can one be sure! Of course he wasn’t Orchard’s Hopkins. But! What an affair!