Page:The Eyes of Max Carrados.pdf/240

238 to communicate with Mr Carlyle as soon as the dead man was identified.

"And if he has a room anywhere he probably will be, with all this talk about Miss Roscastle. Then we may find something there that will help us," he predicted. "If he is purely casual the chances are we shall never hear."

His experience was justified and he kept his promise. Two days later Carlyle heard that the unknown had been identified as the occupant of a single room in a Lambeth lodging-house. He had only occupied it for a few weeks and he was known there as Mr Hay. Tenement gossip described him as a foreigner and credited him with having seen better days—an easy enough surmise in the circumstances. Mr Carlyle had been on the point of turning his attention to a Monte Carlo Miss Roscastle when this information reached him. He set off at once for Lambeth, but at Tubb's Grove disappointment met him at the door. The landlady of the ramshackle establishment—a female with a fluent if rather monotonous delivery—was still smarting from the unappreciated honour of the police officials' visit and the fierce light of publicity that it had thrown upon her house. All Mr Carlyle's bland cajolery was futile and in the end he had to disburse a sum that bore an appreciable relation to a week's rent before he was allowed to inspect the room and to command conversation that was not purely argumentative.

Then the barrenness of the land was revealed. Mr Hay had been irregular with his rent at the best, and when he disappeared he was a week in arrears. After two days' absence, with the easy casuistry of her circumstances, the lady had decided that he was not returning and had proceeded to "do out" the room for