The face of the young vagrant rose before him, vital, mocking, sensitive; the sound of his quick French buzzed in his ears, and, oddly, the whole whiff of him had a power of raising more vividly than ever his memories of Antonia.

It had been at the end of the journey from Hyeres to London that he had met him; that seemed to give the youth a claim.
He took his hat and hurried, to Blank Row.

Dismissing his cab at the corner of Victoria Street he with difficulty found the house in question.

It was a doorless place, with stone-flagged corridor--in other words, a "doss-house." By tapping on a sort of ticket-office with a sliding window, he attracted the attention of a blowsy woman with soap-suds on her arms, who informed him that the person he was looking for had gone without leaving his address.
"But isn't there anybody," asked Shelton, "of whom I can make inquiry ?" "Yes; there's a Frenchman." And opening an inner door she bellowed: "Frenchy! Wanted!" and disappeared.
A dried-up, yellow little man, cynical and weary in the face, as if a moral steam-roller had passed over it, answered this call, and stood, sniffing, as it were, at Shelton, on whom he made the singular impression of some little creature in a cage.
"He left here ten days ago, in the company of a mulatto.

What do you want with him, if I may ask ?" The little man's yellow cheeks were wrinkled with suspicion.
Shelton produced the letter.
"Ah! now I know you"-- a pale smile broke through the Frenchman's crow's-feet--"he spoke of you.