This page has been validated.
IV
THE SINGULAR SPECULATION OF
THE HOUSE-AGENT
Lieutenant Drummond Keith was a man about whom conversation always burst like a thunder-storm the moment he left the room. This arose from many separate touches about him. He was a light, loose person who wore light, loose clothes, generally white, as if he were in the tropics; he was lean and graceful, like a panther, and he had restless black eyes.
He was very impecunious. He had one of the habits of the poor in a degree so exaggerated as immeasurably to eclipse the most miserable of the unemployed—I mean the habit of continual change of lodgings. There are inland tracts of London which, in the very heart of artificial civilization, humanity has almost become nomadic once more. But
131
