ht, save for the
death of a landlord, nor always for that. But to-night a murmur at most
distinguished it from the other houses in the street.

Meliar-Ann solved the puzzle for us, with a wise nod of the head--

"There's a press out; or elst they're expecting one," she said.

I heard a distant clock chiming for midnight as we followed her along this
row of houses. Ahead of us a door opened, throwing a thin line of light
upon the roadway, and was closed again softly, after the person within had
stood listening (as it seemed to me) for five seconds or so.

Meliar-Ann started suddenly in front of us, spreading her arms out, then
slowly backwards, and so motioning us to halt under the shadow of the
wall. Obeying, we saw her tiptoe forwards, till, coming to the door which
had just been closed, she crept close and tapped on it softly, yet in a
way that struck me as being deliberate. Afterwards, thinking it over, I
felt pretty sure that the child knocked by code.

At all events the door opened again, almost at once and as noiselessly as
before. Hartnoll and I squeezed our bodies back in the foggy shadow, and
I heard a voice ask, "Is that Smithers?" To this Meliar-Ann made some
response which I could not catch, but its effect was to make the voice--a
woman's--break out in a string of querulous cursings. "Drat the child!"
it said (or rather, it said something much stronger which I won't repeat
before the Rector. Eh, Rector--what's that you say? _Maxima debetur
pueris_--oh, make yourself easy: I won't corrupt their morals).
"Drat the child!" it said, then, or words to that effect. "Bothering here
at this time of night, when Bill's been a-bed this hour and a half, and
time you was the same." To this Meliar-Ann made, and audibly, the
briefest possible answer. She said, "You lie." "Strike me dead!"
replied the woman's voice in the doorway. "You lie," repeated the child;
"and you'd best belay to that. Bill's been stealin' and got himself into
trouble . . . a midshipman's dirk, it was, and he was seen taking it.
I've run all this way to warn him. . . ." The two voices fell to
muttering. "You can slip inside if you like and tell him quietly," said
the woman after a while. "He's upstairs and asleep too, for all I know.
If he brought any such thing home with him _I_ never saw it, and to that
I'll take my oath."

But here another and still angrier voice--a virago's--broke in from the
passage behind, demanding to kno