Instantly he was in a dense darkness.  For five stories above him the two buildings towered, shutting out the starlight.  Looking straight up he found only a faint reflection of the glow of the city lights in the sky.

At last he found a cellar window.  He tried it and found it locked, but a little maneuvering with his knife enabled him to turn the catch at the top of the lower sash.  Then he raised it slowly and leaned into the blackness.  Something incredibly soft, tenuous, clinging, pressed at once against his face.  He started back with a shudder and brushed away the remnants of a big spider web.

Then he leaned in again.  It was an intense blackness.  The moment his head was in the opening the sense of listening, which is ever in a house, came to him.  There were the strange, musty, underground odors which go with cellars and make men think of death.

However, he must not stay here indefinitely.  To be seen leaning in at this window was as bad as to be seen in the house itself.  He slipped through the opening at once, and beneath his feet there was a soft crunching of coal.  He had come directly into the bin.  Turning, he closed the window, for that would be a definite clue to any one who might pass down the alley.

As he stood surrounded by that hostile silence, that evil darkness, he grew somewhat accustomed to the dimness, and he could make out not definite objects, but ghostly outlines.  Presently he took out the small electric torch which he carried and examined his surroundings.

The bin had not yet received the supply of winter coal and was almost empty.  He stepped out of it into a part of the basement which had been used apparently for storing articles not worth keeping, but too good to be thrown away—­an American habit of thrift.  Several decrepit chairs and rickety cabinets and old console tables were piled together in a tangled mass.  Ronicky looked at them with an unaccountable shudder, as if he read in them the history of the ruin and fall and death of many an old inhabitant of this house.  It seemed to his excited imagination that the man with the sneer had been the cause of all the destruction and would be the cause of more.

He passed back through the basement quickly, eager to be out of the musty odors and his gloomy thoughts.  He found the storerooms, reached the kitchen stairs and ascended at once.  Halfway up the stairs, the door above him suddenly opened and light poured down at him.  He saw the flying figure of a cat, a broom behind it, a woman behind the broom.

“Whisht!  Out of here, dirty beast!”

The cat thudded against Ronicky’s knee, screeched and disappeared below; the woman of the broom shaded her eyes and peered down the steps.  “A queer cat!” she muttered, then slammed the door.

It seemed certain to Ronicky that she must have seen him, yet he knew that the blackness of the cellar had probably half blinded her.  Besides, he had drawn as far as possible to one side of the steps, and in this way she might easily have overlooked him.