A good year afterward I was dining with the Prays at Kensington. There was another man there—a tiresome fool. The second Mrs. Pray has a knack of collecting stupid people—the sort of stupid people who are small somebodies in their particular line. This man had been abroad collecting rare orchids. His name was Hopkins. It is such a common name that, although I remembered poor Orchard at once, I never thought of asking him if he knew the Inn. Still, I brought the conversation round to it. After dinner, when Mrs. Pray had left us, I said to Pray:
“There is a man called Jackson in your old set. And Kinsman’s gone—to the bad some say.”
Hopkins pricked up his ears.
“You are talking of the Inn,” he said, and mentioned my number. “Odd thing! I have a set in that very house. Top floor, right-hand side as you go up the stairs. Of course you’ve seen my name—Hopkins.”
I could only look at him and nod my head. He filled his glass and carefully cut the end of a cigar.
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.