f rubbish, perhaps a leprous beggar. Lindsay, when he had surmounted
these, found himself at the entrance to a quadrangle which was
positively dark. He waylaid a sweeper slinking out, and the man showed
him where an open staircase ran down against the wall in one corner. It
was up there, he said, that the "tamasho-mems"* lived. There were three
tamasho-mems, he continued, responding to Lindsay's trivial coin, and
one sahib, but this was not the time for the tamasho--it was finished.
Lindsay mounted the first flight by faith, and paused at the landing to
avoid collision with a heavy body descending. He inquired Miss Filbert's
whereabouts from this person, who providentially lighted a cigar,
disclosing himself a bald Armenian in tusser silk trousers and a dirty
shirt, presumably, Lindsay thought, the landlord. At all events he
had the information, Lindsay was to keep straight on, it was the third
storey. Duff kept straight on in a spirit of caution, and just missed
treading upon the fattest rat in the heathen parish of St. John's. At
the top he saw a light and hastened; it shone from an open door at the
side of a passage. The partition in which the door was came considerably
short of the ceiling, and from the top of it to the window opposite
stretched a line of garments to dry, of pungent odour and infantile
pattern. Lindsay dared no farther, but lifted up his voice in the Indian
way to summon a servant, "Qui hai?"# he called, "Qui hai?"

* Festival-making women.

# "Whoever is there?"

He heard somewhere within the noise of a chair pushed back, and a door
farther down the passage opened outwards, disclosing Laura Filbert
with her hand upon the handle. She made a supple, graceful picture.
"Good-evening, Mr. Lindsay," she said as he advanced. "Won't you come
in?" She clung to the handle until he had passed into the room, then she
closed the door after him. "I was expecting you," she said. "Mr. Harris,
let me make you acquainted with Mr. Lindsay. Mr. Lindsay, Mr. Harris."

Mr. Harris was sitting sideways on one of the three cheap little chairs.
He was a clumsily built youth, and he wore the private's garb of the
Salvation Army. It was apparent that he had been reading a newspaper; he
had a displeasing air of possession. At Laura's formula he looked up
and nodded without amiability, folded his journal the other side out and
returned to it.

"Please take a seat," Laura said, and Lindsay took one. He had a de