out, if human ingenuity can compass the means, what Doctor Dulcifer's
occupation really is, on the other side of that iron door.

Having come to this resolution (and deriving, let me add,
parenthetically, great consolation from it), the next subject of
consideration was the best method of getting safely into the top regions
of the house.

Picking the lock of the iron door was out of the question, from the
exposed nature of the situation which that mysterious iron barrier
occupied. My only possible way to the second floor lay by the back of
the house. I had looked up at it two or three times, while walking
in the garden after dinner with Alicia. What had I brought away in
my memory as the result of that casual inspection of my host's back
premises? Several fragments of useful information.

In the first place, one of the most magnificent vines I had ever seen
grew against the back wall of the house, trained carefully on a strong
trellis-work. In the second place, the middle first-floor back window
looked out on a little stone balcony, built on the top of the porch
over the garden door. In the third place, the back windows of the
second floor had been open, on each occasion when I had seen them--most
probably to air the house, which could not be ventilated from the front
during the hot summer weather, in consequence of the shut-up condition
of all the windows thereabouts. In the fourth place, hard by the
coach-house in which Doctor Dulcifer's neat gig was put up, there was a
tool-shed, in which the gardener kept his short pruning-ladder. In the
fifth and last place, outside the stable in which Doctor Dulcifer's
blood mare lived in luxurious solitude, was a dog-kennel with a large
mastiff chained to it night and day. If I could only rid myself of the
dog--a gaunt, half-starved brute, made savage and mangy by perpetual
confinement--I did not see any reason to despair of getting in
undiscovered at one of the second-floor windows--provided I waited until
a sufficiently late hour, and succeeded in scaling the garden wall at
the back of the house.

Life without Alicia being not worth having, I determined to risk the
thing that very night.

Going back at once to the town of Barkingham, I provided myself with a
short bit of rope, a little bull's-eye lantern, a small screwdriver, and
a nice bit of beef chemically adapted for the soothing of troublesome
dogs. I then dressed, disposed of these things neatly in my coat
pockets,