But before I had time to set one thought beside another, a new man in evening dress came breezing nonchalantly past me to the door, which he opened and peered out of, to close it in a moment with a small shiver. It had grown chilly out-of-doors during the latter hour of my odyssey. Turning, he beheld me in my recess.
“Hello,” he exclaimed mildly. “So you have come. No news of him?”
He was, I now think, one of the most deceptive-appearing persons I have ever encountered, of a type emphatically British, but the extreme of his type. He was the nonpareil for unobtrusiveness and lack of distinction; without even the stamp of vulgarity, he was ordinary and unnoticeable to the last degree. I have never seen a man who appeared to possess so many properties of a vacuum. His age, perhaps, was somewhere about the third decade. He was of no particular height (actually about five feet seven) or weight (about ten stone ten), and his face was all that was commonplace. A pair of futilely brown moustaches divided it into upper and lower portions, in the superior of which pastel-grey eyes kept an unblinking but unobservant watch; below, his mouth and jaw were neither strong nor weak. His complexion was pale but not to excessive sallowness, and his brownish hair, rather thin, was faintly flecked with grey. His dinner coat fitted exceptionally well.
“Yes, I have come,” I answered, “but I’m not sure I’m the ‘you’ you mean.”
“Why, you’re Hughes, the keeper, aren’t you?”
“No, I’m just a friend of Pendleton’s.”
“Oh, is that so?”
He was not cloudy and remote like Crofts Pendleton; rather I thought I detected even a trace of the sardonic in his tone, and I must have flushed at the remembrance of my rough and woebegone attire.
“I don’t look the part, I admit.”
“Well, no, you don’t.” He held out his hand with a cordiality surprising to me. “Belvoir’s my name—Ted Belvoir. It’s B-e-l-v-o-i-r, you know.”