Alone in that small room where the dinner-cloth had been removed and a decanter and glasses had been placed by his one elderly serving-woman, who had now gone for the night, he was muttering to himself as he smoked—murmuring incoherent words that sounded much like threats.
It was difficult to recognise in this well-groomed, gentlemanly-looking man, with the diamond in his shirt-front and the sparkling ring upon his finger, the low-looking tramp whose eyes had encountered those of the man whose ruin he now sought to encompass.
In half a dozen capitals of the world he was known as Jean Adam, for he spoke French perfectly, and passed as a French subject, a native of Algiers; but in London, New York, and Montreal he was known as the wandering and adventurous Englishman John Adams.
Whether he was really English was doubtful. True, he spoke English without the slightest trace of accent, yet sometimes in his gesture, when unduly excited, there was unconsciously betrayed his foreign birth.
His French was as perfect as his English. He spoke with an accent of the South, and none ever dreamed that he could at the same time speak the pure, unadulterated Cockney slang.
He had just glanced at his watch, and knit his brows when the electric bell rang, and he rose to admit a short, triangular-faced, queer-looking little old man, whose back was bent and whose body seemed too large for his legs. He, too, was in evening-dress, and carried his overcoat across his arm.
“I began to fear, old chap, that you couldn’t come,” Adams exclaimed, as he hung his friend’s coat in the narrow hall. “You didn’t acknowledge my wire.”
“I couldn’t until too late. I was out,” the other explained, in a tone of apology. “Well,” he asked, with a sigh, as he stretched himself before he seated himself in the proffered chair, “what has happened?”
“A lot, my dear fellow. We shall come out on top yet.”
“Be more explicit. What do you mean?”