n lest others should hear the noise. Instead, I
stole out of the doorway, and crept round the house and round the house
again, hunting for a back entrance. I found none; but at last, goaded by
the reflection that fortune would never again be so nearly within my
grasp, I marked a window on the first floor, and at the side of the
house; by which it seemed to me that I might enter. A mulberry-tree
stood by it, and it lacked bars; and other trees veiled the spot. To be
brief, in two minutes I had my knee on the sill, and, sweating with
terror--for I knew that if I were taken I should hang for a thief--I
forced in the casement, and dropped on the floor.

There I waited a while, listening. I was in a bare room, the door of
which stood ajar. Somewhere in the bowels of the house the dog whined
again--and again; otherwise all was still--deadly still. But I had
risked too much to stand now; and in the end, emboldened by the silence,
I crept out and stole along a passage, seeking the way to the lower
floor.

The passage was dark, and every board on which I stepped shrieked the
alarm. But I felt my way to the landing at the head of the stairs, and I
was about to descend, when some impulse, I know not what--perhaps a
shrinking from the dark parts below, to which I was about to trust
myself--moved me to open one of the shutters and peer out.

I did so, cautiously, and but a little--a few inches. I found myself
looking, not into the garden through which I had passed, but into the
one over the way, beyond the alley, and there on a scene so strange and
yet so apropos to my thoughts, that I paused, gaping.

On a plat of grass four men were standing, two and two; between them,
with nose upraised and scenting this way and that, moved a beautiful
curly-haired spaniel, in colour black and tan. The eyes of all four men
were riveted to the dog; which, as I looked, walked sedately first to
the one pair, and then, as if dissatisfied, to the other pair; and then
again stood midway and sniffed the air. The men were speaking, but I
could not catch even their voices, and I was reduced to drawing what
inferences I could from their appearance.

Of the two further from me, one was my rascally bed-fellow; the other
was a crooked villain, almost in rags, with a leg shorter than its
comrade, yet a face bold and even handsome. Of the nearer pair, who had
their backs to me, the shorter, dressed in black, wore the ordinary
aspect of a clerk, or confiden