capital dinner and a good bottle of
Chianti, and I stood for a moment on the pavement, thinking what a
mystery there is about London streets and the companies that pass along
them. A bottle of red wine encourages these fancies, Clarke, and I
dare say I should have thought a page of small type, but I was cut
short by a beggar who had come behind me, and was making the usual
appeals. Of course I looked round, and this beggar turned out to be
what was left of an old friend of mine, a man named Herbert. I asked
him how he had come to such a wretched pass, and he told me. We walked
up and down one of those long and dark Soho streets, and there I
listened to his story. He said he had married a beautiful girl, some
years younger than himself, and, as he put it, she had corrupted him
body and soul. He wouldn't go into details; he said he dare not, that
what he had seen and heard haunted him by night and day, and when I
looked in his face I knew he was speaking the truth. There was
something about the man that made me shiver. I don't know why, but it
was there. I gave him a little money and sent him away, and I assure
you that when he was gone I gasped for breath. His presence seemed to
chill one's blood."

"Isn't this all just a little fanciful, Villiers? I suppose the poor
fellow had made an imprudent marriage, and, in plain English, gone to
the bad."

"Well, listen to this." Villiers told Clarke the story he had heard
from Austin.

"You see," he concluded, "there can be but little doubt that this Mr.
Blank, whoever he was, died of sheer terror; he saw something so awful,
so terrible, that it cut short his life. And what he saw, he most
certainly saw in that house, which, somehow or other, had got a bad
name in the neighbourhood. I had the curiosity to go and look at the
place for myself. It's a saddening kind of street; the houses are old
enough to be mean and dreary, but not old enough to be quaint. As far
as I could see most of them are let in lodgings, furnished and
unfurnished, and almost every door has three bells to it. Here and
there the ground floors have been made into shops of the commonest
kind; it's a dismal street in every way. I found Number 20 was to let,
and I went to the agent's and got the key. Of course I should have
heard nothing of the Herberts in that quarter, but I asked the man,
fair and square, how long they had left the house and whether there had
been other tenants in the meanw