The room was the typical home of a man earning an income on commission just sufficient to enable him to "rub along" in comfort. It was certainly not the room of a man who was receiving cheques for such sums as seven thousand, eight hundred pounds. At first glance Bernard Boyne, as he stood there in his shirt-sleeves, was an excellent type of the steady, reliable insurance agent, with no soul above "proposals" and "premiums." They constituted his sole aim in life, now that his "dear wife" was dead. Nobody suspected the man who so piously passed round the bag in St. George the Martyr on Sundays to be a man of mystery. Nobody, indeed, would ever have dreamed that the active man in question would be placing cheques to his account of such value as seven thousand odd pounds. "I wonder how long I shall remain here?" he whispered to himself. "I wonder what all these good people would say if they but knew—eh? _If they knew_! But, happily, they don’t know!" He chuckled to himself. He was silent for a moment as he crossed to rearrange the dusty old Venetian blinds. Then he turned to a half-open cupboard beside the fireplace, and from it took a small wire cage from which he released a tame white rat, which instantly ran up his arm and settled upon his shoulder. "Poor little Nibby!" he exclaimed, tenderly stroking its sharp pink snout with his forefinger. "Have I neglected you? Poor little fellow!—a prisoner all day! But if I let you out when I’m away some nasty terrier might get you—eh? Come let me atone for my neglect." And he placed his pet upon the table, over which the rodent ran to investigate the remains of the meal. Boyne stood watching his pet nibbling at a scrap of sausage. "Ah!" he gasped in a whisper. "If they knew—but they will never know. They _can’t_!" A few minutes later his actions were, to say the least, strange. He flung himself into the old armchair from which the flock stuffing protruded from the worn-out American cloth, and unbuttoning his dusty boots, took them off. Then, in his socks, he crept upstairs, and on the landing listened at the deaf old woman’s door. Sounds of heavy snoring apparently satisfied him. Back again he returned to the parlour, and with a key opened the opposite cupboard beside the fireplace, from which he took a very long, loose coat which seemed to be made of white alpaca. This he shook out and submitted to close scrutiny. It was shaped like a monk’s habit, with a leather strap around the waist—a curious garment, for it had a hood attached, with two slits in it for the eyes. After careful examination of the strange garment, he put it on over his head, drawing down the hood over his eyes, which gave him a hideous appearance—like the ghost of an ancient Inquisitor of Spain, or a member of the mediæval Misericordia Society of Italy, dressed in white instead of black.