d while I cleared my eyes it
seemed to me that a man--a dark figure--something, at any rate, and
something a great deal too large to be mistaken for a cat--stole from
under the gable above which my chimney rose, and, swiftly crossing a
patch of flat leaded roof to the right, disappeared around a
chimney-stack on the far side of it.

I ceased rubbing my eyes and stared at the stack. It was a tall one,
rising from a good fifteen feet below almost to a level with mine,
and I could not possibly look over it. _Something_, I felt sure,
lurked behind it, and my ears seemed to hold the sound of a soft
footstep. I forgot Mr. Trapp. By pulling myself a little higher I
could get a better view, not of the stack, but of the stretch of roof
beyond it: nobody could break cover in that direction and escape me.
I took a firm grip on the corroded bricks and heaved on them.

Next moment they had given way under my hands, falling inwards: and I
was falling with them.

I kicked out, striving to find again with my toes the ridge where the
flue joined the shaft--missed it--and went shooting down to the right
through a smother of soot.

The total fall--or slide, rather--was not a severe one, after all;
twenty feet perhaps, though uncomfortable enough for sixty. I pulled
myself up quite suddenly, my feet resting on a ledge which, as I
shook the soot off and recovered my wits, turned out to be the upper
sill of a grate. Then, growing suddenly cautious when the need for
caution was over, I descended the next foot or two back foremost, as
one goes down a ladder, and jumped out into the room clear of the
hearthstone.

And with that, as I turned, a scream rose to my throat and died
there. I had almost jumped upon the stretched-out body of a man.

CHAPTER VII.

I ESCAPE FROM THE JEW'S HOUSE.

It was Mr. Rodriguez. He lay face downward and slantwise across the
front of the hearth, with arms spread, fingers hooked, and his neck
protruding from the collar of his dingy dressing-gown like a plucked
fowl's. He had cast a slipper in falling, and the flesh of one heel
showed through its rent stocking. For a moment I supposed him in a
fit; the next, I was recoiling towards the wall, away from a dark
moist line which ran from under his left armpit and along the uneven
boards to the far corner by the window, and there, under a disordered
truckle-bed, spread itself in a pool.

With my eyes glued upon this horrid sight I slowly straigh