‘Yes, sir,’ he said, ‘that tallies with the account of an individual my men have had under observation for the best part of a fortnight. Twice he has called at the house I spoke of. Our gentleman has added a neatly-grown moustache and beard to his other attractions, recently, as I fancy; but it will hardly prevent your recognising him—that is if Lavender’s luck holds, sir, and I can procure you a good look at him.’ Regarding my mission to Fédore—we agreed, since Hartover could not be back in town under a couple of days at soonest—it might very well stand over until to-morrow, and that meanwhile I should place my time entirely at my companion’s disposal. ‘If we have not laid hands on this fellow before midnight, you shall be free to follow your own wishes as to visiting the lady,’ he promised me; and therewith, calling a coach, bore me off south-westward to Chelsea. The glorious summer weather of the past three or four days was about to terminate in the proverbial English thunder-storm. I seldom remember a more oppressive atmosphere. London still offers a not altogether satisfactory example of applied sanitary science, but, at the date in question, once you left the fashionable districts and main thoroughfares, was frankly malodorous, not to say filthy. Half-way along King’s Road Lavender paid off the coach, and conducted me, on foot, by festering, foul-smelling by-ways, to the back of a row of mean two-storied houses. Gaining access to one of them—which from its dilapidated condition I judged to be empty—through a yard strewn with all manner of unsightly rubbish, a dead cat included, we passed by a narrow passage and stairway to a front room on the first floor. Here two detectives awaited our coming, and here, seated on a remarkably comfortless Windsor chair, by the defaced and broken window I passed what appeared a small eternity, looking out into the ill-paved street, where groups of squalid, half-naked children played and fought, and hawkers plied a noisy, unremunerative trade. Opposite was a long stretch of much-defiled drab brick wall, pierced by a green-painted door, and furnished with a fringe of broken bottle glass along the top, above which showed the upper branches of a plane-tree and the roof and chimney-pots of an otherwise invisible dwelling. The whole presented a sordid and disheartening picture in the close heavy heat, beneath a sullen grey-blue sky across which masses of heavy cloud stalked upright in the face of a fitful and gusty wind. And to think this was the place to which Hartover—heir to immense wealth and princely possessions, heir to royal Hover affronting the grandeur of those wind-swept Yorkshire fells—must needs descend to seek comfort, companionship, and some ordinary human kindness of care and woman’s love! The irony, the cynicism, of it struck through me with indignation and disgust.