an astonishing and vivid experience happened to them.
One might have supposed that, in the life of Priam Farll at least,
enough of the astonishing and the vivid had already happened.
Nevertheless, what had already happened was as customary and unexciting
as addressing envelopes, compared to the next event.

The next event began at the instant when Alice was sticking the long
fork into a round of bread. There was a knock at the front door, a knock
formidable and reverberating, the knock of fate, perhaps, but fate
disguised as a coalheaver.

Alice answered it. She always answered knocks; Priam never. She shielded
him from every rough or unexpected contact, just as his valet used to
do. The gas in the hall was not lighted, and so she stopped to light it,
darkness having fallen. Then she opened the door, and saw, in the gloom,
a short, thin woman standing on the step, a woman of advanced
middle-age, dressed with a kind of shabby neatness. It seemed impossible
that so frail and unimportant a creature could have made such a noise on
the door.

"Is this Mr. Henry Leek's?" asked the visitor, in a dissatisfied, rather
weary tone.

"Yes," said Alice. Which was not quite true. 'This' was assuredly hers,
rather than her husband's.

"Oh!" said the woman, glancing behind her; and entered nervously,
without invitation.

At the same moment three male figures sprang, or rushed, out of the
strip of front garden, and followed the woman into the hall, lunging up
against Alice, and breathing loudly. One of the trio was a strong,
heavy-faced heavy-handed, louring man of some thirty years (it seemed
probable that he was the knocker), and the others were curates, with the
proper physical attributes of curates; that is to say, they were of
ascetic habit and clean-shaven and had ingenuous eyes.

The hall now appeared like the antechamber of a May-meeting, and as
Alice had never seen it so peopled before, she vented a natural
exclamation of surprise.

"Yes," said one of the curates, fiercely. "You may say 'Lord,' but we
were determined to get in, and in we have got. John, shut the door.
Mother, don't put yourself about."

John, being the heavy-faced and heavy-handed man, shut the door.

"Where is Mr. Henry Leek?" demanded the other curate.

Now Priam, whose curiosity had been excusably excited by the unusual
sounds in the hall, was peeping through a chink of the sitting-room
door, and the elderly woman caught the glint of his eyes.