I mounted the stairs with a heavy step and opened the outer door of my apartment with my private key; and then, Sir, I assure you that for one brief moment I felt that my knees were giving way under me and that I should presently measure my full length on the floor.

There, sitting at the table in my private room, was Theodore.  He had donned one of the many suits of clothes which I always kept at the office for purposes of my business, and he was calmly consuming a luscious sausage which was to have been part of my dinner today, and finishing a half-bottle of my best Bordeaux.

He appeared wholly unconscious of his enormities, and when I taxed him with his villainies and plied him with peremptory questions he met me with a dogged silence and a sulky attitude which I have never seen equalled in all my life.  He flatly denied that he had ever walked the streets of Paris with a dog under his arm, or that I had ever chased him up the Rue Beaune.  He denied ever having lodged in the Hotel des Cadets, or been acquainted with its proprietress, or with a red-polled, hunchback miscreant named Aristide Nicolet.  He denied that the coat and hat found in room No. 25 were his; in fact, he denied everything, and with an impudence, Sir, which was past belief.

But he put the crown to his insolence when he finally demanded two hundred francs from me:  his share in the sum paid to me by Mme. de Nole for the recovery of her dog.  He demanded this, Sir, in the name of justice and of equity, and even brandished our partnership contract in my face.

I was so irate at his audacity, so disgusted that presently I felt that I could not bear the sight of him any longer.  I turned my back on him and walked out of my own private room, leaving him there still munching my sausage and drinking my Bordeaux.

I was going through the antechamber with a view to going out into the street for a little fresh air when something in the aspect of the chair-bedstead on which that abominable brute Theodore had apparently spent the night attracted my attention.  I turned over one of the cushions, and with a cry of rage which I took no pains to suppress I seized upon what I found lying beneath:  a blue linen blouse, Sir, a peaked cap, a ginger-coloured wig and beard!

The villain!  The abominable mountebank!  The wretch!  The . . .  I was wellnigh choking with wrath.

With the damning pieces of conviction in my hand, I rushed back into the inner room.  Already my cry of indignation had aroused the vampire from his orgy.  He stood before me sheepish, grinning, and taunted me, Sir—­taunted me for my blindness in not recognizing him under the disguise of the so-called Aristide Nicolet.