“He’s mine!” interjected Dollops, stripping up his sleeves.  “Glue to the eyebrows and warranted to stick!  Nip away, Gov’nor, and leave it to the tickle tootsies and me!” Then, as Cleek moved swiftly and silently down the passage and slipped out into a sort of yard at the back of the house, he pulled out his roll of brown paper squares and his tube of adhesive, and crawling upstairs on his hands and knees, began operations at the top step.  But he had barely got the first “plaster” fairly made and ready to apply when there came a rush of footsteps behind him and he was obliged to duck down and flatten himself against the floor of the landing to escape being run down by a man who dashed in through the lower floor, flew at top speed up the stairs, and, with a sort of blended cheer and yell, whirled open a door on the landing above and vanished.  In a twinkling other cheers rang out, there was the sound of hastily moving feet and the uproar of general excitement.

“Oh, well, if you won’t stop to be waited on, gents, help yourselves!” said Dollops with a chuckle.  Then he began backing hastily down the stairs, squirting the contents of the tube all over the steps, and concluded the operation by scattering all the loose sheets of paper on the floor at the foot of them before slipping out into the street and composedly waiting.

Meantime Cleek, sneaking out through the rear door, found himself in a small, brick-paved yard hemmed in by a high wall thickly fringed on the top with a hedge of broken bottles.  At one time in its history the house had been occupied by a catgut maker, and the rickety shed in which he had carried on his calling still clung, sagging and broken-roofed, to the building itself, its rotten slates all but vanished, and its interior piled high with mildewed bedding, mouldy old carpet, broken furniture, and refuse of every sort.

A foot or two above the roof-level of this glowed—­two luminous rectangles in the blackness of darkness—­the windows of the back room on the second storey; and out of these came floating still the song, the laughter, and the jabbered French he had heard in the house next door.  It did not take him long to make up his mind.  Gripping the swaying supports of the sagging shed, he went up it with the agility of a monkey, crawled to the nearer of the two windows, and, cautiously raising himself, peeped in.  What he saw made him suck in his breath sharply and sent his heart hammering hard and fast.

A dozen men were in the room—­men whose faces, despite an inartistic attempt to appear Oriental, he recognized at a glance and knew better than he knew his own.  About them lay discarded portions of Cingalese attire, thrown off because of the heat, and waiting to be resumed at any moment.  The air was thick with tobacco smoke and rank with spirituous odours.  Sprawled figures were everywhere, and on a sort of couch against the opposite wall, a cigarette between her fingers, a glass of absinthe at her elbow, her laughter and badinage ringing out as loudly as any, lay the lissom figure of Margot!