hile. He looked at me queerly for a
minute, and told me the Herberts had left immediately after the
unpleasantness, as he called it, and since then the house had been
empty."

Mr. Villiers paused for a moment.

"I have always been rather fond of going over empty houses; there's a
sort of fascination about the desolate empty rooms, with the nails
sticking in the walls, and the dust thick upon the window-sills. But I
didn't enjoy going over Number 20, Paul Street. I had hardly put my
foot inside the passage when I noticed a queer, heavy feeling about the
air of the house. Of course all empty houses are stuffy, and so forth,
but this was something quite different; I can't describe it to you, but
it seemed to stop the breath. I went into the front room and the back
room, and the kitchens downstairs; they were all dirty and dusty
enough, as you would expect, but there was something strange about them
all. I couldn't define it to you, I only know I felt queer. It was
one of the rooms on the first floor, though, that was the worst. It
was a largish room, and once on a time the paper must have been
cheerful enough, but when I saw it, paint, paper, and everything were
most doleful. But the room was full of horror; I felt my teeth
grinding as I put my hand on the door, and when I went in, I thought I
should have fallen fainting to the floor. However, I pulled myself
together, and stood against the end wall, wondering what on earth there
could be about the room to make my limbs tremble, and my heart beat as
if I were at the hour of death. In one corner there was a pile of
newspapers littered on the floor, and I began looking at them; they
were papers of three or four years ago, some of them half torn, and
some crumpled as if they had been used for packing. I turned the whole
pile over, and amongst them I found a curious drawing; I will show it
to you presently. But I couldn't stay in the room; I felt it was
overpowering me. I was thankful to come out, safe and sound, into the
open air. People stared at me as I walked along the street, and one
man said I was drunk. I was staggering about from one side of the
pavement to the other, and it was as much as I could do to take the key
back to the agent and get home. I was in bed for a week, suffering
from what my doctor called nervous shock and exhaustion. One of those
days I was reading the evening paper, and happened to notice a
paragraph headed: 'Starved to Death.'