As this tall man with the lean, ascetic face moved about his new abode,
arranging, changing, altering, hardly yet into his working-stride again,
he gave the impression of almost spinster-like precision and nicety. For
twenty years past, in a score of lodgings, garrets, flats, and rooms
furnished and unfurnished, he had been accustomed to do many things for
himself, and he had discovered that it saves time and temper to be
methodical. He had arranged with the wife of the long-nosed Barrett, a
stout Welsh woman with a falsetto voice, the Merionethshire accent of
which long residence in London had not perceptibly modified, to come
across the square each morning to prepare his breakfast, and also to
"turn the place out" on Saturday mornings; and for the rest, he even
welcomed a little housework as a relaxation from the strain of writing.

His kitchen, together with the adjoining strip of an apartment into
which a modern bath had been fitted, overlooked the alley at the side of
the house; and at one end of it was a large closet with a door, and a
square sliding hatch in the upper part of the door. This had been a
powder-closet, and through the hatch the elaborately dressed head had
been thrust to receive the click and puff of the powder-pistol. Oleron
puzzled a little over this closet; then, as its use occurred to him, he
smiled faintly, a little moved, he knew not by what.... He would have to
put it to a very different purpose from its original one; it would
probably have to serve as his larder.... It was in this closet that
he made a discovery. The back of it was shelved, and, rummaging on an
upper shelf that ran deeply into the wall, Oleron found a couple of
mushroom-shaped old wooden wig-stands. He did not know how they had come
to be there. Doubtless the painters had turned them up somewhere or
other, and had put them there. But his five rooms, as a whole, were
short of cupboard and closet-room; and it was only by the exercise of