laborious degrees. He leant out as he had done that
first morning, it might have been a month ago; and this scene must have
challenged comparison with that, had his mind been even as free from dread
and terror as it had been then. But all he saw was the few remaining
lighted windows in the backs of those other houses; he could not have
sworn there was a moon. The moon poured no beam of comfort on his aching
head; but the lighted windows were as the open eyes of honest men, who
would not see him come to harm; and the last rumble in the streets was a
faint but cheering chorus for lonely ears.

Once a motor-horn blew a solo near at hand, and Pocket half recognised its
note; but he did not connect it with quite another set of sounds, which
grew but gradually on his ear out of the bowels of the house. Somebody
was knocking and ringing at the doctor's door, not furiously, but with
considerable pertinacity. Pocket was thrilled to the marrow just at
first, and flew from the open window to the landing outside his door. The
house was in perfect darkness, and still as death in the patient intervals
between each measured attempt to rouse the inmates without disturbing the
street. It came to Pocket that it must be Baumgartner himself, gone out
for something without his key; and the boy was about to run down and let
him in, when he distinctly heard the retreat of feet down the front steps,
and then a chuckle on the next landing as the doctor closed his bedroom
door.

Who could it have been? Baumgartner's chuckle suggested the police; but
in that case it was the boy upstairs who was going to have the last laugh,
though a grim one, and very terribly at his own expense. He could not
close an eye for thinking of it, and listening for another knocking and
ringing down below. But nothing happened until the doctor returned
between five and six, still with his meerschaum pipe, still in his alpaca
jacket, but wearing also the goblin hat and cloak of their first meeting,
to renew and intensify the animal fear that glued the boy to his bed.

"It is a pity," said Baumgartner, standing at the window which Pocket had
left open. "The air is like champagne at this hour, and not a cloud in
the sky! It would do you more good than lying there. It is you who are
making yourself ill. If I thought you were doing it on purpose '--and his
eyes blazed--'I'd feed you like a fowl!"

"It's so likely that I should do it on purpose," muttered Pock