Suddenly, under the influence of a common impression, both men stood still and looked about them.  There was a stir in the street.  Windows had been thrown open, and scores of heads were looking out.  People emerged from all quarters, seemed to spring from the ground or drop from the skies, and in a few seconds, as it were, the street, so dead-alive before, was full of a running and shouting crowd.

“It’s a fight!” said Peabody, as the crowd came up with them.  “Listen!”

Shrieks—­of the most ghastly and piercing note, rang through the air.  The men and women who rushed past the two strangers—­hustling them, yet too excited to notice them—­were all making for a house some ten or twelve yards in front of them, to their left.  Aldous had turned white.

“It is a woman!” he said, after an instant’s listening, “and it sounds like murder.  You go back for that policeman!”

And without another word he threw himself on the crowd, forcing his way through it by the help of arms and shoulders which, in years gone by, had done good service for the Trinity Eight.  Drink-sodden men and screaming women gave way before him.  He found himself at the door of the house, hammering upon it with two or three other men who were there before him.  The noise from within was appalling—­cries, groans, uproar—­all the sounds of a deadly struggle proceeding apparently on the second floor of the house.  Then came a heavy fall—­then the sound of a voice, different in quality and accent from any that had gone before, crying piteously and as though in exhaustion—­“Help!”

Almost at the same moment the door which Aldous and his companions were trying to force was burst open from within, and three men seemed to be shot out from the dark passage inside—­two wrestling with the third, a wild beast in human shape, maddened apparently with drink, and splashed with blood.

“Ee’s done for her!” shouted one of the captors; “an’ for the Sister too!”

“The Sister!” shrieked a woman behind Aldous—­it’s the nuss he means!  I sor her go in when I wor at my window half an hour ago.  Oh! yer blackguard, you!”—­and she would have fallen upon the wretch, in a frenzy, had not the bystanders caught hold of her.

“Stand back!” cried a policeman.  Three of them had come up at Peabody’s call.  The man was instantly secured, and the crowd pushed back.

Aldous was already upstairs.

“Which room?” he asked of a group of women crying and cowering on the first landing—­for all sounds from above had ceased.

“Third floor front,” cried one of them.  “We all of us begged and implored of that young person, sir, not to go a-near him!  Didn’t we, Betsy?—­didn’t we, Doll?”

Aldous ran up.

On the third floor, the door of the front room was open.  A woman lay on the ground, apparently beaten to death.