a. He had always been a tea-drinker, and during his
college life had sat late at work and had taken tea late. The rest
was a great luxury to him, and he enjoyed it with a sense of
delicious, voluptuous ease. The renewed fire leaped and sparkled, and
threw quaint shadows through the great old room; and as he sipped his
hot tea he revelled in the sense of isolation from his kind. Then it
was that he began to notice for the first time what a noise the rats
were making.

'Surely,' he thought, 'they cannot have been at it all the time I was
reading. Had they been, I must have noticed it!' Presently, when the
noise increased, he satisfied himself that it was really new. It was
evident that at first the rats had been frightened at the presence of
a stranger, and the light of fire and lamp; but that as the time went
on they had grown bolder and were now disporting themselves as was
their wont.

How busy they were! and hark to the strange noises! Up and down behind
the old wainscot, over the ceiling and under the floor they raced, and
gnawed, and scratched! Malcolmson smiled to himself as he recalled to
mind the saying of Mrs. Dempster, 'Bogies is rats, and rats is
bogies!' The tea began to have its effect of intellectual and nervous
stimulus, he saw with joy another long spell of work to be done before
the night was past, and in the sense of security which it gave him, he
allowed himself the luxury of a good look round the room. He took his
lamp in one hand, and went all around, wondering that so quaint and
beautiful an old house had been so long neglected. The carving of the
oak on the panels of the wainscot was fine, and on and round the doors
and windows it was beautiful and of rare merit. There were some old
pictures on the walls, but they were coated so thick with dust and
dirt that he could not distinguish any detail of them, though he held
his lamp as high as he could over his head. Here and there as he went
round he saw some crack or hole blocked for a moment by the face of a
rat with its bright eyes glittering in the light, but in an instant it
was gone, and a squeak and a scamper followed. The thing that most
struck him, however, was the rope of the great alarm bell on the roof,
which hung down in a corner of the room on the right-hand side of the
fireplace. He pulled up close to the hearth a great high-backed carved
oak chair, and sat down to his last cup of tea. When this was done he
made up the fire, and went bac