poked through
the bottom of an unadorned, sleeved calico sack buttoned tightly at neck
and wrists, felt over the rug for the slippers while she looked upward
into her husband's face.

"I don't know how to manage him," Mr Verloc explained peevishly. "Won't
do to leave him downstairs alone with the lights."

She said nothing, glided across the room swiftly, and the door closed
upon her white form.

Mr Verloc deposited the cash-box on the night table, and began the
operation of undressing by flinging his overcoat on to a distant chair.
His coat and waistcoat followed. He walked about the room in his
stockinged feet, and his burly figure, with the hands worrying nervously
at his throat, passed and repassed across the long strip of looking-glass
in the door of his wife's wardrobe. Then after slipping his braces off
his shoulders he pulled up violently the venetian blind, and leaned his
forehead against the cold window-pane--a fragile film of glass stretched
between him and the enormity of cold, black, wet, muddy, inhospitable
accumulation of bricks, slates, and stones, things in themselves unlovely
and unfriendly to man.

Mr Verloc felt the latent unfriendliness of all out of doors with a force
approaching to positive bodily anguish. There is no occupation that
fails a man more completely than that of a secret agent of police. It's
like your horse suddenly falling dead under you in the midst of an
uninhabited and thirsty plain. The comparison occurred to Mr Verloc
because he had sat astride various army horses in his time, and had now
the sensation of an incipient fall. The prospect was as black as the
window-pane against which he was leaning his forehead. And suddenly the
face of Mr Vladimir, clean-shaved and witty, appeared enhaloed in the
glow of its rosy complexion like a sort of pink seal, impressed on the
fatal darkness.

This luminous and mutilated vision was so ghastly physically that Mr
Verloc started away from the window, letting down the venetian blind with
a great rattle. Discomposed and speechless with the apprehension of more
such visions, he beheld his wife re-enter the room and get into bed in a
calm business-like manner which made him feel hopelessly lonely in the
world. Mrs Verloc expressed her surprise at seeing him up yet.

"I don't feel very well," he muttered, passing his hands over his moist
brow.

"Giddiness?"

"Yes. Not at all well."

Mrs Verloc, with all the placidity of an e