, and its
rear elevation rests against the side wall of a still higher
building than ours, next door--the premises of Storminger the
carriage builder, to be exact. But look here: perhaps I can make
the situation clearer by a rough sketch. Got a lead pencil and a bit
of paper, anybody? Oh, thanks very much, dear. One can always rely
upon _you_. Now, look here, Mr. Cleek--this is the way of it. You
mustn't mind if it's a crude thing, because, you know, I'm a rotten
bad draughtsman and can't draw for nuts. But all the same, this will
do at a pinch."

Here he leaned over the table in the centre of the room and, taking
the pencil and the blank back of the letter which Miss Larue had
supplied, made a crude outline sketch thus:

[Illustration of a group of houses]

"There you are," he said suddenly, laying the crude drawing on
the table before Cleek, and with him bending over it. "You are
supposed to be looking at the houses from the main thoroughfare,
don't you know, and, therefore, at the front of them. This tall
building on the left marked 1 is Storminger's; the low one, number
2, adjoining, is ours; and that cagelike-looking thing, 3, on
the top of it, is the glass-room. Now, along the front of it here,
where I have put the long line with an X on the end, there runs a
wooden partition with a door leading into the room itself, so that
it's impossible for anybody on the opposite side of the main
thoroughfare to see into the place at all. But that is not the
case with regard to people living on the opposite side of the short
passage (this is here, that I've marked 4), because there's nothing
to obstruct the view but some rubbishy old lace curtains which Loti,
in his endeavour to make the place what he calls homelike, would
insist upon hanging, and _they_ are so blessed thin that anybody can
look right through them and see all over the place. Of course,
though, there are blinds, which he can pull down on the inside if
the sun gets too strong; and when they are down, nobody can see into
the glass-room at all. Pardon? Oh, we had it constructed of glass,
Mr. Narkom, because of the necessity for having all the light
obtainable in doing the minute work on some of the fine tableaux
we produce for execution purposes. We are doing one now--The Relief
of Lucknow--for the big exhibition that's to be given next month
at Olympia and----The place marked 6 at the back of our building?
Oh, that's the narrow alley of which I spoke. We've