There was one other customer ahead of him.

He was lighting a cigar, and the light of a big hanging lamp flashed on a diamond ring.

Over his sputtering match his eyes met those of John Aldous.

They were dark eyes, neither brown nor black, but dark, with the keenness and strange glitter of a serpent's.

He wore a small, clipped moustache; his hands were white; he was a man whom one might expect to possess the _sang froid_ of a devil in any emergency.