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For the soul of me I could not tell whether this quaint little gentleman was chaffing me or not. I laid down my knife and fork, and stared at him.

“Then there are the mathematicians!” he cried vivaciously, without waiting for a reply. “I take great interest in them. Hear this!” and Mr. Jaffrey drew a newspaper from a pocket in the tail of his coat, and read as follows: “It has been estimated that if all the candles manufactured by this eminent firm (Stearine & Co.) were placed end to end, they would reach 2 and 7/8 times around the globe. Of course,” continued Mr. Jaffrey, folding up the journal reflectively, “abstruse calculations of this kind are not, perhaps, of vital importance, but they indicate the intellectual activity of the age. Seriously, now,” he said, halting in front of the table, “what with books and papers and drives about the country, I do not find the days too long, though I seldom see any one, except when I go over to K—— for my mail. Existence may be very full to a man who stands a little aside from the tumult and watches it with philosophic eye. Possibly he may see more of the battle than those who are in the midst of the action. Once I was struggling with the crowd, as eager and undaunted as the best; perhaps I should have been struggling still. Indeed, I know my life would have been very different now if I had married Mehetabel–if I had married Mehetabel.”

His vivacity was gone, a sudden cloud had come over his bright face, his figure seemed to have collapsed, the light seemed to have faded out of his hair. With a shuffling step, the very antithesis of his brisk, elastic tread, he turned to the door and passed into the road.

“Well,” I said to myself, “if Greenton had forty thousand inhabitants, it could n’t turn out a more astonishing old party than that!”

II. THE CASE OF SILAS JAFFREY.

A man with a passion for bric-a-brac is always stumbling over antique bronzes, intaglios, mosaics, and daggers of the time of Benvenuto Cellini; the bibliophile finds creamy vellum folios and rare Alduses and Elzevirs waiting for him at unsuspected bookstalls; the numismatist has but to stretch forth his palm to have priceless coins drop into it. My own weakness is odd people, and I am constantly encountering them. It was plain that I had unearthed a couple of very queer specimens at Bayley’s Four-Corners. I saw that a fortnight afforded me too brief an opportunity to develop the richness of both, and I resolved to devote my spare time to Mr. Jaffrey alone, instinctively recognizing in him an unfamiliar species. My professional work in the vicinity of Greenton left my evenings and occasionally an afternoon unoccupied; these intervals I purposed to employ in studying and classifying my fellow-boarder. It was necessary, as a preliminary step, to learn something of his previous history, and to this end I addressed myself to Mr. Sewell that same night.

“I do not want to seem inquisitive,” I said to the landlord, as he was fastening up the bar, which, by the way, was the salle a manger and general sitting-room–“I do not want to seem inquisitive, but your friend Mr. Jaffrey dropped a remark this morning at breakfast which–which was not altogether clear to me.”

“About Mehetabel?” asked Mr. Sewell, uneasily.

“Yes.”

“Well, I wish he would n’t!”

“He was friendly enough in the course of conversation to hint to me that he had not married the young woman, and seemed to regret it.”

“No, he did n’t marry Mehetabel.”

“May I inquire why he did n’t marry Mehetabel?”

“Never asked her. Might have married the girl forty times. Old Elkins’s daughter, over at K——. She ‘d have had him quick enough. Seven years, off and on, he kept company with Mehetabel, and then she died.”

“And he never asked her?”