But the blackness was absolute.  Strain his eyes as he might, there was no glimmer of light in any direction to guide him, and he had used up his last match.  So he went to work again with his hands.  These rough planks were placed perpendicularly against the wall to a width of about three feet—­the width of the door.  Passing his fingers slowly all round them, he ascertained that they reached to the floor, and to a height of about seven feet above it.  Evidently, thought he, it was the door itself which opened into the shop which had been carefully boarded up.  As soon as he felt sure of this, he dealt at the planks a tremendous blow with his fist.  He hurt his hand, but did no apparent injury to the door, which scarcely shook.  Then he tried to tear one of the boards away from the framework to which it was attached, but without result.  The nails which had been used to fasten it were of the strongest make, and had been well driven in.

Foiled in his attempt to get out of the room by the way he had come, Max moved slowly to the left, and at the distance of only a couple of feet from the door found the angle of the wall, and began to creep along, still feeling with hands and feet most carefully, in the direction of the front of the shop.

This side of the room presented no obstacles.  The wall-paper was torn here and there; the plaster fell down in some places at his touch.  A board shook a little under his tread when he had taken a few paces, but at the next step he made the floor seemed firm enough.

On turning the next angle in the wall he came to the shop door—­the one leading into the stone passage outside.  Here he made another attempt to force an exit, but it was boarded up as securely as the inner one, and the window, which was beside it, was in the same condition.

It by no means increased the confidence of Max as to his own safety to observe what elaborate precautions had been used by the occupants of the house to secure themselves from observation.  He could no longer doubt that he was in a house which was the resort of persons of the worst possible character, and in a position of the gravest danger.

While opposite the window, he listened eagerly for some sound in the passage outside.  If a foot-passenger should pass, he would risk everything and shout for help with all the force of his lungs.

Even while he indulged this hope, he felt that it was a vain one.  It was now late; traffic on the river had almost ceased; there was no attraction for idlers on the landing-stage in the cold and the darkness.

He continued his investigations.

At the next angle in the wall he came to more shelves, decayed, broken, left by the last tenant as not worth carrying away.  And presently his feet came upon something harder, colder than the boards; it was a hearthstone, and it marked the place where, before the room was turned into a shop, there had been a small fireplace.  And on the other side of this, near the wall, was a collection of rubbish, over the musty items of which Max stumbled as he went.  Old boxes, bits of carpet, broken bricks; every sort of worthless lumber.