The rational part of him (whether the wiser or not) regained its supremacy.  He remembered that the proprietor had told him that he should lock the door, and would come later to release him.  He told himself that twenty things he had not thought of might explain the eccentric sounds outside; he reminded himself that there was just enough light left to finish his own proper work.  Bringing his paper to the window so as to catch the last stormy evening light, he resolutely plunged once more into the almost completed record.  He had written for about twenty minutes, bending closer and closer to his paper in the lessening light; then suddenly he sat upright.  He had heard the strange feet once more.

This time they had a third oddity.  Previously the unknown man had walked, with levity indeed and lightning quickness, but he had walked.  This time he ran.  One could hear the swift, soft, bounding steps coming along the corridor, like the pads of a fleeing and leaping panther.  Whoever was coming was a very strong, active man, in still yet tearing excitement.  Yet, when the sound had swept up to the office like a sort of whispering whirlwind, it suddenly changed again to the old slow, swaggering stamp.

Father Brown flung down his paper, and, knowing the office door to be locked, went at once into the cloak room on the other side.  The attendant of this place was temporarily absent, probably because the only guests were at dinner and his office was a sinecure.  After groping through a grey forest of overcoats, he found that the dim cloak room opened on the lighted corridor in the form of a sort of counter or half-door, like most of the counters across which we have all handed umbrellas and received tickets.  There was a light immediately above the semicircular arch of this opening.  It threw little illumination on Father Brown himself, who seemed a mere dark outline against the dim sunset window behind him.  But it threw an almost theatrical light on the man who stood outside the cloak room in the corridor.

He was an elegant man in very plain evening dress; tall, but with an air of not taking up much room; one felt that he could have slid along like a shadow where many smaller men would have been obvious and obstructive.  His face, now flung back in the lamplight, was swarthy and vivacious, the face of a foreigner.  His figure was good, his manners good humoured and confident; a critic could only say that his black coat was a shade below his figure and manners, and even bulged and bagged in an odd way.  The moment he caught sight of Brown’s black silhouette against the sunset, he tossed down a scrap of paper with a number and called out with amiable authority:  “I want my hat and coat, please; I find I have to go away at once.”

Father Brown took the paper without a word, and obediently went to look for the coat; it was not the first menial work he had done in his life.  He brought it and laid it on the counter; meanwhile, the strange gentleman who had been feeling in his waistcoat pocket, said laughing:  “I haven’t got any silver; you can keep this.”  And he threw down half a sovereign, and caught up his coat.