nt
had only lain down in his clothes, as if fearing to miss the early
train. She had not for a moment expected to find him in the room; yet
somehow the consciousness that she was alone in the house with the
sleeping Constant seemed to flash for the first time upon her, and the
clammy snake tightened its folds round her heart.

She opened the street door, and her eye wandered nervously up and down.
It was half-past eight. The little street stretched cold and still in
the gray mist, blinking bleary eyes at either end, where the street
lamps smoldered on. No one was visible for the moment, though smoke was
rising from many of the chimneys to greet its sister mist. At the house
of the detective across the way the blinds were still down and the
shutters up. Yet the familiar, prosaic aspect of the street calmed her.
The bleak air set her coughing; she slammed the door to, and returned to
the kitchen to make fresh tea for Constant, who could only be in a deep
sleep. But the canister trembled in her grasp. She did not know whether
she dropped it or threw it down, but there was nothing in the hand that
battered again a moment later at the bedroom door. No sound within
answered the clamor without. She rained blow upon blow in a sort of
spasm of frenzy, scarce remembering that her object was merely to wake
her lodger, and almost staving in the lower panels with her kicks. Then
she turned the handle and tried to open the door, but it was locked. The
resistance recalled her to herself--she had a moment of shocked decency
at the thought that she had been about to enter Constant's bedroom. Then
the terror came over her afresh. She felt that she was alone in the
house with a corpse. She sank to the floor, cowering; with difficulty
stifling a desire to scream. Then she rose with a jerk and raced down
the stairs without looking behind her, and threw open the door and ran
out into the street, only pulling up with her hand violently agitating
Grodman's door-knocker. In a moment the first floor window was
raised--the little house was of the same pattern as her own--and
Grodman's full, fleshy face loomed through the fog in sleepy irritation
from under a nightcap. Despite its scowl the ex-detective's face dawned
upon her like the sun upon an occupant of the haunted chamber.

"What in the devil's the matter?" he growled. Grodman was not an early
bird, now that he had no worms to catch. He could afford to despise
proverbs now, for the house in