I don’t know why I tell you of Whiffin, of the Mackarys, of Orchard’s crazy architectural ideas--they have nothing to do with the story. But they will prove to you what a harmless simpleton he was before he took set 7, before the advent of Hopkins. Hopkins had the set on the other side of the landing--the right-hand side as you go up. Orchard took the one on the left, he moved there from a ground floor in the other square. Set 7 was cheaper--that baleful set, which held at different times the tragedies of Orion, of Jimmy, of Stapley. No one had ever seen Hopkins, he was said to be abroad. Therefore it surprised me when Orchard said casually, with faint annoyance, that his neighbor across the landing was a nuisance; he came in late and made an awful row taking off his boots. I didn’t see Orchard for two or three months after this. It was astounding when next I went up to his rooms to see that Hopkins’ name was painted out from the oak on the right-hand set and bracketed with Orchard’s name on the left. There it was, as plain as white paint on a black door could make it: MR. D. B. ORCHARD. MR. GEOFFREY HOPKINS. I was surprised, I was also interested; no one had ever seen Hopkins. No one particularly wanted to. Still, as I waited for Orchard to let me in, I had a languid curiosity to know what his co-tenant was like. Orchard was not looking well. He didn’t talk in his usual airy, sweeping way. There were no new daubs on the wall. When I said, with a look round the room: “What’s this about Hopkins?” he jerked his head toward the bedroom wall, with the cautious remark: “Don’t speak so loudly: he’s in the bedroom. Hopkins! Oh! he’s all right. We thought it more convenient for him to come here. Great authority on Italian art; subject I’m interested in, as you know.” I didn’t know, but I waited on, chatting in rather a strained way, and expecting Hopkins--who never came out of the bedroom. Orchard wasn’t conversational that night. He let every subject I started flaccidly drop. He wanted perpetually winding up. His accustomed dogmatic manner had quite deserted him. He didn’t bring out his sketchbook. He talked disjointedly of Hopkins. I must come in some other night and look over Hopkins’ books on Italian art--thirteenth century principally. It was quite a valuable collection. Hopkins played the violin. That was his fiddle case in the corner. To hear him play Rubinstein’s “Melody in F” was a genuine musical treat. Other men noticed the change in Orchard. Some said that he was drinking too much beer; others that he was in love with Miss Mackary, who had produced a true degenerate poem. He was not sociable, rarely came out, and took to sporting his oak. He said that he and Hopkins were deep in thirteenth-century Italian art, and had no time for anything else. They were writing a book on it. No one ever saw Hopkins. I, living immediately underneath, never heard his violin.