ght. I saw as I passed that they have been doing a little building
opposite to you. It's an improving quarter. The rents go higher and
higher. You have a lease of your own little place, eh?"

"Yes, sir, yes!" cried Johnson, whose ears were straining for every
sound from above, and who felt none the less that it was very soothing
that the doctor should be able to chat so easily at such a time.
"That's to say no, sir, I am a yearly tenant."

"Ah, I should get a lease if I were you. There's Marshall, the
watchmaker, down the street. I attended his wife twice and saw him
through the typhoid when they took up the drains in Prince Street. I
assure you his landlord sprung his rent nearly forty a year and he had
to pay or clear out."

"Did his wife get through it, doctor?"

"Oh yes, she did very well. Hullo! hullo!"

He slanted his ear to the ceiling with a questioning face, and then
darted swiftly from the room.

It was March and the evenings were chill, so Jane had lit the fire, but
the wind drove the smoke downwards and the air was full of its acrid
taint. Johnson felt chilled to the bone, though rather by his
apprehensions than by the weather. He crouched over the fire with his
thin white hands held out to the blaze. At ten o'clock Jane brought in
the joint of cold meat and laid his place for supper, but he could not
bring himself to touch it. He drank a glass of the beer, however, and
felt the better for it. The tension of his nerves seemed to have
reacted upon his hearing, and he was able to follow the most trivial
things in the room above. Once, when the beer was still heartening
him, he nerved himself to creep on tiptoe up the stair and to listen to
what was going on. The bedroom door was half an inch open, and through
the slit he could catch a glimpse of the clean-shaven face of the
doctor, looking wearier and more anxious than before. Then he rushed
downstairs like a lunatic, and running to the door he tried to distract
his thoughts by watching what; was going on in the street. The shops
were all shut, and some rollicking boon companions came shouting along
from the public-house. He stayed at the door until the stragglers had
thinned down, and then came back to his seat by the fire. In his dim
brain he was asking himself questions which had never intruded
themselves before. Where was the justice of it? What had his sweet,
innocent little wife done that she should be used so? Why was nature