For three hours he lay like a log. Then his troubled brain began to
reassert itself. At about two in the morning he sat bolt upright in
his bed. For twenty minutes or so he had been thinking rather than
dreaming, yet with his thought held captive by sleep.

He reached for his matchbox and struck a light. . . . The whole world
was after him, hunting him down, tearing down the house above his
head! . . . Well, he would go down with the house. Pamphlett, or
Government, might take his house: but there was the old
hiding-cupboard to the right of the chimney-breast. . . .

When they summoned him to-morrow, he would have vanished.
Only by uncovering his last shelter should they discover what was
left of him. He would perish with the house.

He lit the candle and carried it to the cupboard; opened this, and
peered into the well at his feet: lifted one of the loose
bottom-boards, and, holding himself steady by a grip on the scurtain,
thrust a naked leg down, feeling into vacancy.

The ball of his foot touched some substance, hard and apparently
firm. He supposed it to be a lower ceiling of the hole, and, after
pressing once or twice to make sure, put all his weight upon it.

With a creak and a rush of masonry the whole second flooring of the
cupboard gave way beneath him, leaving his invalid leg dangling, in
excruciating pain. But that the crook of his elbow caught across the
scurtain (shooting darts as of fire up the jarred funny-bone), he had
made a part of the avalanche, the noise of which was enough to wake
the dead. Luckily, too, he had set his candle on the planching