“I don’t agree with you,” rejoined the professor.  “He is unquestionably a Scandinavian—­you can see that in the high cheekbones and flat nose.  He is evidently studying our people with a view of writing a book.  Nothing else would persuade a man of his parts to live here.  I lived in just such a place the winter I spent in Dresden.  You want to get close to the people when you study their peculiarities.  But whoever he is, or wherever he comes from, he is a most delightful gentleman—­perfectly simple, and so sincere that it is a pleasure to hear him talk.”

As for myself, I am ashamed to say that I did not agree with either the bank clerk or the professor.  Although I admitted Mr. Bing’s wide experience of men and affairs, and his marvellous powers of conversation, I could not divest myself of the conviction that underneath it all there lay something more than a mere desire to be either kindly or entertaining; in fact, that his geniality, though outwardly spontaneous, was really a cloak to hide another side of his nature—­a fog into which he retreated—­and that some day the real man would be revealed.

I made no mention of my misgivings to any of my fellow-boarders.  My knowledge of men of his class —­brilliant conversationalists with a world-wide experience to draw upon—­was slight, and my grounds for doubting his sincerity were so devoid of proof that few persons would have considered them anything but the product of a disordered mind.

And yet I still held to my opinion.

I had caught something, I fancied, that the others had missed.  It occurred one night after he had told a story and was waiting for the laugh to subside.  Soon a strange, weary expression crept over his face —­the same look that comes into the face of a clown who has been hurt in a tumble and who, while wrestling with the pain, still keeps his face a-grin.  Suddenly, from out of his merry, smooth-shaven face, there came a flash from his eyes so searching, so keen, so suspicious, so entirely unlike the man we knew, so foreign to his mood at the moment, that I instantly thought of the burglar peering through the painted spectacles of the family portrait while he watched his unconscious victim counting his gold.

This conviction so possessed me that I found myself for days after peering into Bing’s face, watching for its repetition—­so much so that the professor asked me with a laugh: 

“Has Mr. Bing hypnotized you as badly as he has the ladies?  They hang on his every word.  Curious study of the effect of mind on matter, isn’t it?”

The second time I caught the strange flash was before he had told his story—­when his admonitory glance—­his polite way of compelling attention—­was sweeping the table.  In its course his eyes rested for an instant on mine, kindled with suspicion, and then there flashed from their depths a light that seemed to illuminate every corner of my brain.  When I looked again his face was wreathed in smiles, his eyes sparkling with merriment.  Instantly my doubts returned with redoubled force.  What had he found in that instantaneous flash, I wondered?  Had he read my thoughts, or had he, from his place behind the painted canvas, caught some expression on some victim’s face which had roused his fears?