open, and scores of heads were looking out. People emerged
from all quarters, seemed to spring from the ground or drop from the
skies, and in a few seconds, as it were, the street, so dead-alive
before, was full of a running and shouting crowd.

"It's a fight!" said Peabody, as the crowd came up with them. "Listen!"

Shrieks--of the most ghastly and piercing note, rang through the air.
The men and women who rushed past the two strangers--hustling them, yet
too excited to notice them--were all making for a house some ten or
twelve yards in front of them, to their left. Aldous had turned white.

"It is a woman!" he said, after an instant's listening, "and it sounds
like murder. You go back for that policeman!"

And without another word he threw himself on the crowd, forcing his way
through it by the help of arms and shoulders which, in years gone by,
had done good service for the Trinity Eight. Drink-sodden men and
screaming women gave way before him. He found himself at the door of the
house, hammering upon it with two or three other men who were there
before him. The noise from within was appalling--cries, groans,
uproar--all the sounds of a deadly struggle proceeding apparently on the
second floor of the house. Then came a heavy fall--then the sound of a
voice, different in quality and accent from any that had gone before,
crying piteously and as though in exhaustion--"Help!"

Almost at the same moment the door which Aldous and his companions were
trying to force was burst open from within, and three men seemed to be
shot out from the dark passage inside--two wrestling with the third, a
wild beast in human shape, maddened apparently with drink, and splashed
with blood.

"Ee's done for her!" shouted one of the captors; "an' for the Sister
too!"

"The Sister!" shrieked a woman behind Aldous--it's the nuss he means! I
sor her go in when I wor at my window half an hour ago. Oh! yer
_blackguard_, you!"--and she would have fallen upon the wretch, in a
frenzy, had not the bystanders caught hold of her.

"Stand back!" cried a policeman. Three of them had come up at Peabody's
call. The man was instantly secured, and the crowd pushed back.

Aldous was already upstairs.

"Which room?" he asked of a group of women crying and cowering on the
first landing--for all sounds from above had ceased.

"Third floor front," cried one of them. "We all of us _begged_ and
_implored_ of that young person, sir, not to go a-near him!