speed up the stairs, and, with a sort of blended cheer and
yell, whirled open a door on the landing above and vanished. In a
twinkling other cheers rang out, there was the sound of hastily moving
feet and the uproar of general excitement.

"Oh, well, if you won't stop to be waited on, gents, help yourselves!"
said Dollops with a chuckle. Then he began backing hastily down the
stairs, squirting the contents of the tube all over the steps, and
concluded the operation by scattering all the loose sheets of paper on
the floor at the foot of them before slipping out into the street and
composedly waiting.

Meantime Cleek, sneaking out through the rear door, found himself in a
small, brick-paved yard hemmed in by a high wall thickly fringed on the
top with a hedge of broken bottles. At one time in its history the house
had been occupied by a catgut maker, and the rickety shed in which he
had carried on his calling still clung, sagging and broken-roofed, to
the building itself, its rotten slates all but vanished, and its
interior piled high with mildewed bedding, mouldy old carpet, broken
furniture, and refuse of every sort.

A foot or two above the roof-level of this glowed--two luminous
rectangles in the blackness of darkness--the windows of the back room on
the second storey; and out of these came floating still the song, the
laughter, and the jabbered French he had heard in the house next door.
It did not take him long to make up his mind. Gripping the swaying
supports of the sagging shed, he went up it with the agility of a
monkey, crawled to the nearer of the two windows, and, cautiously
raising himself, peeped in. What he saw made him suck in his breath
sharply and sent his heart hammering hard and fast.

A dozen men were in the room--men whose faces, despite an inartistic
attempt to appear Oriental, he recognized at a glance and knew better
than he knew his own. About them lay discarded portions of Cingalese
attire, thrown off because of the heat, and waiting to be resumed at any
moment. The air was thick with tobacco smoke and rank with spirituous
odours. Sprawled figures were everywhere, and on a sort of couch against
the opposite wall, a cigarette between her fingers, a glass of absinthe
at her elbow, her laughter and badinage ringing out as loudly as any,
lay the lissom figure of Margot!

But even as Cleek looked in upon it the picture changed. Swift, sharp,
and sudden came the rattle of flying feet on the out