o blow up the house?" he croaked. "Can't you smell it for
yourself?"

Then I realised that the breath which I had just drawn was acrid with
escaped gas.

"It's that asbestos stove again!" I exclaimed, recalling my first visit
to the house.

"Which asbestos stove?"

"It's in the dining-room. It was leaking as far back as June."

"Well, we'd better go in there first and open the window. Stop a bit!"

The dining-room was just opposite the kitchen, and I was on the
threshold when he pulled me back to tie my handkerchief across my nose
and mouth. I did the same for Delavoye, and thus we crept into the room
where I had been induced to drink with Royle on the night he went away.

The full moon made smouldering panels of the French window leading into
the garden, but little or no light filtered through the long red blind.
Delavoye went round to it on tip-toe, and I still say it was a natural
instinct that kept our voices down and our movements stealthy; that any
other empty house, where we had no business at dead of night, would have
had the same effect upon us. Delavoye speaks differently for himself;
and I certainly heard him fumbling unduly for the blind-cord while I
went over to the gas-stove. At least I was going when I stumbled against
a basket chair, which creaked without yielding to my weight, and creaked
again as though some one had stirred in it. I recoiled, panic-stricken,
and so stood until the blind flew up. Then the silence was sharply
broken by a voice that I can still hear but hardly recognise as my own.

It was Abercromby Royle who was sitting in the moonlight over the
escaping stove; and I shall not describe him; but a dead flower still
drooped from the lapel of a flannel jacket which the dead man had
horribly outgrown.

I drove Delavoye before me through the window he had just opened; it was
he who insisted on returning, ostensibly to turn off the gas, and I
could not let him go alone. But neither could I face the ghastly
occupant of the basket chair; and again it was Uvo Delavoye who was busy
disengaging something from the frozen fingers when a loud rat-tat
resounded through the house.

[Illustration: I drove Delavoye before me.]

It was grim to see how the corpse sat still and let us jump; but Uvo was
himself before the knock was repeated.

"You go, Gillon!" he said. "It's only somebody who's heard or seen us.
Don't you think we smelt the gas through the letter-box, and wasn't it
your duty---