Mr. Guppy sitting on the window-sill, nodding his head and balancing all these possibilities in his mind, continues thoughtfully to tap it, and clasp it, and measure it with his hand, until he hastily draws his hand away.

“What, in the devil’s name,” he says, “is this!  Look at my fingers!”

A thick, yellow liquor defiles them, which is offensive to the touch and sight and more offensive to the smell.  A stagnant, sickening oil with some natural repulsion in it that makes them both shudder.

“What have you been doing here?  What have you been pouring out of window?”

“I pouring out of window!  Nothing, I swear!  Never, since I have been here!” cries the lodger.

And yet look here—­and look here!  When he brings the candle here, from the corner of the window-sill, it slowly drips and creeps away down the bricks, here lies in a little thick nauseous pool.

“This is a horrible house,” says Mr. Guppy, shutting down the window.  “Give me some water or I shall cut my hand off.”

He so washes, and rubs, and scrubs, and smells, and washes, that he has not long restored himself with a glass of brandy and stood silently before the fire when Saint Paul’s bell strikes twelve and all those other bells strike twelve from their towers of various heights in the dark air, and in their many tones.  When all is quiet again, the lodger says, “It’s the appointed time at last.  Shall I go?”

Mr. Guppy nods and gives him a “lucky touch” on the back, but not with the washed hand, though it is his right hand.

He goes downstairs, and Mr. Guppy tries to compose himself before the fire for waiting a long time.  But in no more than a minute or two the stairs creak and Tony comes swiftly back.

“Have you got them?”

“Got them!  No.  The old man’s not there.”

He has been so horribly frightened in the short interval that his terror seizes the other, who makes a rush at him and asks loudly, “What’s the matter?”

“I couldn’t make him hear, and I softly opened the door and looked in.  And the burning smell is there—­and the soot is there, and the oil is there—­and he is not there!” Tony ends this with a groan.

Mr. Guppy takes the light.  They go down, more dead than alive, and holding one another, push open the door of the back shop.  The cat has retreated close to it and stands snarling, not at them, at something on the ground before the fire.  There is a very little fire left in the grate, but there is a smouldering, suffocating vapour in the room and a dark, greasy coating on the walls and ceiling.  The chairs and table, and the bottle so rarely absent from the table, all stand as usual.  On one chair-back hang the old man’s hairy cap and coat.

“Look!” whispers the lodger, pointing his friend’s attention to these objects with a trembling finger.  “I told you so.  When I saw him last, he took his cap off, took out the little bundle of old letters, hung his cap on the back of the chair—­his coat was there already, for he had pulled that off before he went to put the shutters up—­and I left him turning the letters over in his hand, standing just where that crumbled black thing is upon the floor.”