was coming out of a restaurant one nasty winter night about three months
ago; I had had a capital dinner and a good bottle of Chianti, and I
stood for a moment on the pavement, thinking what a mystery there is
about London streets and the companies that pass along them. A bottle of
red wine encourages these fancies, Clarke, and I dare say I should have
thought a page of small type, but I was cut short by a beggar who had
come behind me, and was making the usual appeals. Of course I looked
round, and this beggar turned out to be what was left of an old friend
of mine, a man named Herbert. I asked him how he had come to such a
wretched pass, and he told me. We walked up and down one of those long
dark Soho streets, and there I listened to his story. He said he had
married a beautiful girl, some years younger than himself, and, as he
put it, she had corrupted him body and soul. He wouldn't go into
details; he said he dare not, that what he had seen and heard haunted
him by night and day, and when I looked in his face I knew he was
speaking the truth. There was something about the man that made me
shiver. I don't know why, but it was there. I gave him a little money
and sent him away, and I assure you that when he was gone I gasped for
breath. His presence seemed to chill one's blood.'

'Isn't all this just a little fanciful, Villiers? I suppose the poor
fellow had made an imprudent marriage, and, in plain English, gone to
the bad.'

'Well, listen to this.' Villiers told Clarke the story he had heard from
Austin.

'You see,' he concluded, 'there can be but little doubt that this Mr.
Blank, whoever he was, died of sheer terror; he saw something so awful,
so terrible, that it cut short his life. And what he saw, he most
certainly saw in that house, which, somehow or other, had got a bad name
in the neighbourhood. I had the curiosity to go and look at the place
for myself. It's a saddening kind of street; the houses are old enough
to be mean and dreary, but not old enough to be quaint. As far as I
could see most of them are let in lodgings, furnished and unfurnished,
and almost every door has three bells to it. Here and there the ground
floors have been made into shops of the commonest kind; it's a dismal
street in every way. I found Number 20 was to let, and I went to the
agent's and got the key. Of course I should have heard nothing of the
Herberts in that quarter, but I asked the man, fair and square, how long
they had