Suddenly, and without any obvious reason, Heinrich completely changed his habits. Hitherto always on the move, he took to remaining indoors all day, hardly ever going out except for a short stroll in the evening. He met no one and apparently spoke scarcely a word to anybody. What his numerous pupils thought of his sudden neglect of them I cannot say. But it was clear enough that something important must have occurred to induce him thus suddenly to abandon what was, professedly at any rate, his sole means of livelihood. I was discussing him--he was almost invariably our sole topic of conversation nowadays--with Madame Gabrielle as she sat in my room one morning. "I cannot conceive of any reason," I said, "why Heinrich should have so suddenly changed the entire routine of his existence. It looks to me as though either something very important has happened or that he is expecting important news. Yet he receives no messages; he never gets even a letter or a telegram." "There is only one fact that is peculiar," said the smart Frenchwoman. "You know I have been looking after him pretty closely lately. Well, whenever he goes out, though he appears to wander about quite aimlessly, he invariably contrives his walk so that it takes him through Lembridge Square. He never misses." "Does he always go the same side of the Square?" I asked. She replied in the affirmative, and I decided to have a look round the Square for myself at once. That same afternoon found me on the scene of Blind Heinrich's daily walk. The Square itself varied little from hundreds of others in London: it showed every evidence of dreary respectability common to half the squares in London. Two things, however, attracted my notice. In the ground-floor window of one house was a big brass cage containing a grey parrot, which was insistently emitting the hideous noises common to the parrot tribe. In a similar window about a dozen houses away was a case containing some old-fashioned wax flowers beneath a glass dome, evidently a survival from the ornamental style peculiar to the early Victorian epoch to which, indeed, the whole dreary Square seemed to belong. There was nothing to offer a lucid explanation of why Blind Heinrich should choose such a path for his daily ramble. There were dozens of other far more attractive promenades within easy walking distance. Yet here, unless my instinct entirely misled me, was the solution to our riddle. Day after day I followed the old fellow's route. I even went so far as to shadow Heinrich himself more than once and verified Madame Gabrielle's observation. No matter which way he started out, he never failed, on either the outward or homeward journey, to pass along that particular side of the Square. Yet he never spoke to anyone, and I was morally certain that no signal was ever made to him from any of the houses.