d, the wretched creature and
all that he carried in a single flight to the bottom of the stair.

After a little clash of plates and cups on the impact of the kick, there
was a sensible silence before the appalling crash and thud at the
stair's foot. Amaryllis held back a scream, but reeled as if fainting.

Dick caught her by the shoulders and shook her, as women will shake a
child.

"Buck up," he said; and she clung to his hands a moment. Then,

"I'm all right," she murmured, and stood alone.

Even as she spoke it seemed that in the hall below three doors opened at
once, and that from each rushed a man, clamouring questions; and then,
having seen the clutter of tray and crockery, stood aghast.

Dick, after one glimpse of the three so standing, took cover again,
drawing the girl with him.

"Looks as if he fell backwards right from the top," said a bass voice,
which Dick ascribed to the big man with the black beard who had seemed
to carry himself somewhat above the others.

"Slipped 'is foot and pitched backwards, and 'e ain't 'arf copped it."

"But why backwards?" asked Black Beard. And Dick imagined a suspicious
glance at the stairhead.

"I guess 'e try save tray and lose _balanza_ of 'eemself," said a third,
whose exotic voice and uneasy English affected Dick with an undefined
reminiscence.

"Carry the fool to his kennel, you two," said Black Beard. And Dick
heard the crushing under foot and the kicking aside of broken china, and
a shuffling of two pairs of feet.

But they had not gone many yards with their burden, when he heard a
fourth man enter the hall, and a voice in which langour strove in vain
against asperity--Melchard's voice, which he had heard for the first
time while he clung with his fingers to the window-sill of the bedroom
and with his shoe-tips to the string-course below it, sinking his head
even below his defenceless knuckles.

At the sound of this voice Dick now stretched himself prone, and
wriggled, Amaryllis thought, like some horrid worm, laying his left
cheek to the floor until he reached a point where his right eye got its
line of sight, between the uprights of the gallery's balustrade, on the
four live men and the inert, midway between the door out of sight
beneath him, and the place where the broken tea-pot had spilt its
contents in an ugly pool near the lowest tread of the stair.

"What's that?" Melchard had said. "Oh, put it down." And they laid the
body on the floor.

Melc