It was a large room furnished in dark velvet and heavy walnut.  The red velvet curtains at the windows, when drawn at night, permitted no ray of light to escape; the carpet was a gorgeous Brussels affair, the like of which both as to cost and enduring splendor was not to be found elsewhere on any floor in Mount Hope.  Seated as he then was, Gilmore could look, if so disposed, at the reflection of his own dark but not unhandsome face in a massive gilt-framed mirror that reached from chimneypiece to ceiling; or, glancing about the room, his eyes could dwell with genuine artistic pleasure on numerous copies in crayon of French figure-studies; nor were the like of these to be found elsewhere in Mount Hope.

Gilmore had quitted the McBride cottage some three hours before, and in the interim had breakfasted well and napped abstemiously.  Presently he must repair to the court-house, where, it had already been intimated, the coroner might wish to confer with him.

Marshall Langham he had not seen.  He had expected to find him still in his rooms, but the lawyer had left the key under the mat at the door, presumably at an early hour.  Gilmore wondered idly if Langham had not made a point of getting away before he himself should arrive; he rather thought so, and he smiled with cheerful malevolence at his own reflection in the mirror.

Here his reveries were broken in on by the awkward shuffling of heavy feet in the hallway, and then some one knocked loudly on his door.  Gilmore glanced hastily about to assure himself that the tell-tale paraphernalia of his craft were nowhere visible, and that the room was all he liked to fancy it—­the parlor of a gentleman with sufficient income and quiet taste.

“Come in,” he called at last, without quitting his chair.

The door slowly opened and the crown of a battered cap first appeared, then a long face streaked with coal-dust and grime and further decorated about the chin by a violently red stubble of several days’ growth.  With so much of himself showing; the new-comer paused on the threshold in apparent doubt as to whether he would be permitted to enter, or ordered to withdraw.

“Come in, Joe, and shut the door!” said Gilmore.

At his bidding the shoulders and trunk, and lastly the legs of a slouching shambling man of forty-eight or fifty entered the room.

Closing the door Joe Montgomery slipped off one patched and ragged cloth mitten and removed his battered cap.

“Well, what the devil do you want?” demanded Gilmore sharply.

Joe, shuffling and shambling, edged toward the grate.

“Boss, I want to drop a word with you!” he said in a husky voice.  His glance did not quite meet Gilmore’s, but the moment Gilmore shifted his gaze, that moment Joe’s small, bright blue eyes sought the gambler’s.