ove."

After waiting for a minute or two to make sure that everything was quiet,
he gently stepped out into a little linoleum-carpeted hall. On the right
hand was the front door, on the left two others that must, he thought,
open into rooms on the back. He chose the nearer at a venture, and entered
boldly. It was quite dark. He closed the door again softly, struck a
match, and looked round the room. It seemed to be Dr Twiddel's dining- and
sitting-room.

"Pipes, photographs, well-sat-in chairs," he observed, "_and_ a window."

He pulled aside the blind and looked out into the darkness of a strip of
back-garden. For a minute he listened intently, but no sound came from the
house. Then he threw up the sash and scrambled out. It was quite dark by
this time: he was enclosed between two rows of vague, black houses, with
bright windows here and there, and chimney-cans faintly cutting their
uncouth designs among a few pale London stars. The space between was
filled with the two lines of little gardens and the ranks of walls, and in
the middle the black chasm of a railway cutting.

A frightened cat bolted before him as he hurried down to the foot of the
strip, but that was all the life he saw. He looked over the wall right
into the deep crevasse. A little way off, on the one hand, hung a cluster
of signal-lights, and the shining rails reflected them all along to the
mouth of a tunnel on the other. Turning his head this way and that, there
was nothing to be seen anywhere else but garden wall after garden wall.

"It's a choice between a hurdle-race through these gardens, a cat-walk
along this wall, and a descent into the cutting," he reflected. "The walls
look devilish high and the cutting devilish deep. Hang me if I know which
road to take."

While he was still debating this somewhat perplexing question, he felt the
ground begin to quiver under him. Through the hum of London there
gradually arose a louder roar, and in a minute the head-lights of an
engine flashed out of the tunnel. One after another a string of bright
carriages followed it, each more slowly than the carriage in front, till
the whole train was at a standstill below him with the red signal-lamp
against it.

In an instant his decision was taken. At the peril of life and garments he
scrambled down the rocky bank, picking as he went an empty first-class
compartment, and just as the train began to move again he swung himself up
and sprang into a carriage.

Un