. He was not a lodger. The lodger was Mr Verloc,
indolent, and keeping late hours, sleepily jocular of a morning from
under his bed-clothes, but with gleams of infatuation in his heavy lidded
eyes, and always with some money in his pockets. There was no sparkle of
any kind on the lazy stream of his life. It flowed through secret
places. But his barque seemed a roomy craft, and his taciturn
magnanimity accepted as a matter of course the presence of passengers.

Mrs Verloc pursued the visions of seven years' security for Stevie,
loyally paid for on her part; of security growing into confidence, into a
domestic feeling, stagnant and deep like a placid pool, whose guarded
surface hardly shuddered on the occasional passage of Comrade Ossipon,
the robust anarchist with shamelessly inviting eyes, whose glance had a
corrupt clearness sufficient to enlighten any woman not absolutely
imbecile.

A few seconds only had elapsed since the last word had been uttered aloud
in the kitchen, and Mrs Verloc was staring already at the vision of an
episode not more than a fortnight old. With eyes whose pupils were
extremely dilated she stared at the vision of her husband and poor Stevie
walking up Brett Street side by side away from the shop. It was the last
scene of an existence created by Mrs Verloc's genius; an existence
foreign to all grace and charm, without beauty and almost without
decency, but admirable in the continuity of feeling and tenacity of
purpose. And this last vision has such plastic relief, such nearness of
form, such a fidelity of suggestive detail, that it wrung from Mrs Verloc
an anguished and faint murmur, reproducing the supreme illusion of her
life, an appalled murmur that died out on her blanched lips.

"Might have been father and son."

Mr Verloc stopped, and raised a care-worn face. "Eh? What did you say?"
he asked. Receiving no reply, he resumed his sinister tramping. Then
with a menacing flourish of a thick, fleshy fist, he burst out:

"Yes. The Embassy people. A pretty lot, ain't they! Before a week's
out I'll make some of them wish themselves twenty feet underground. Eh?
What?"

He glanced sideways, with his head down. Mrs Verloc gazed at the
whitewashed wall. A blank wall--perfectly blank. A blankness to run at
and dash your head against. Mrs Verloc remained immovably seated. She
kept still as the population of half the globe would keep still in
astonishment and despair, were the su