“It’s far from a pleasant thing to be plotting about a dead man in the room where he died, especially when you happen to live in it.”

“But we are plotting nothing against him, Tony.”

“May be not, still I don’t like it.  Live here by yourself and see how you like it.”

“As to dead men, Tony,” proceeds Mr. Guppy, evading this proposal, “there have been dead men in most rooms.”

“I know there have, but in most rooms you let them alone, and—­and they let you alone,” Tony answers.

The two look at each other again.  Mr. Guppy makes a hurried remark to the effect that they may be doing the deceased a service, that he hopes so.  There is an oppressive blank until Mr. Weevle, by stirring the fire suddenly, makes Mr. Guppy start as if his heart had been stirred instead.

“Fah!  Here’s more of this hateful soot hanging about,” says he.  “Let us open the window a bit and get a mouthful of air.  It’s too close.”

He raises the sash, and they both rest on the window-sill, half in and half out of the room.  The neighbouring houses are too near to admit of their seeing any sky without craning their necks and looking up, but lights in frowsy windows here and there, and the rolling of distant carriages, and the new expression that there is of the stir of men, they find to be comfortable.  Mr. Guppy, noiselessly tapping on the window-sill, resumes his whispering in quite a light-comedy tone.

“By the by, Tony, don’t forget old Smallweed,” meaning the younger of that name.  “I have not let him into this, you know.  That grandfather of his is too keen by half.  It runs in the family.”

“I remember,” says Tony.  “I am up to all that.”

“And as to Krook,” resumes Mr. Guppy.  “Now, do you suppose he really has got hold of any other papers of importance, as he has boasted to you, since you have been such allies?”

Tony shakes his head.  “I don’t know.  Can’t Imagine.  If we get through this business without rousing his suspicions, I shall be better informed, no doubt.  How can I know without seeing them, when he don’t know himself?  He is always spelling out words from them, and chalking them over the table and the shop-wall, and asking what this is and what that is; but his whole stock from beginning to end may easily be the waste-paper he bought it as, for anything I can say.  It’s a monomania with him to think he is possessed of documents.  He has been going to learn to read them this last quarter of a century, I should judge, from what he tells me.”

“How did he first come by that idea, though?  That’s the question,” Mr. Guppy suggests with one eye shut, after a little forensic meditation.  “He may have found papers in something he bought, where papers were not supposed to be, and may have got it into his shrewd head from the manner and place of their concealment that they are worth something.”

“Or he may have been taken in, in some pretended bargain.  Or he may have been muddled altogether by long staring at whatever he has got, and by drink, and by hanging about the Lord Chancellor’s Court and hearing of documents for ever,” returns Mr. Weevle.