a saddening kind of street; the houses are old enough to be mean
and dreary, but not old enough to be quaint. As far as I could
see most of them are let in lodgings, furnished and unfurnished,
and almost every door has three bells to it. Here and there the
ground floors have been made into shops of the commonest kind;
it's a dismal street in every way. I found Number 20 was to
let, and I went to the agent's and got the key. Of course I
should have heard nothing of the Herberts in that quarter, but
I asked the man, fair and square, how long they had left the
house and whether there had been other tenants in the meanwhile.
He looked at me queerly for a minute, and told me the Herberts
had left immediately after the unpleasantness, as he called it,
and since then the house had been empty."

Mr. Villiers paused for a moment.

"I have always been rather fond of going over empty
houses; there's a sort of fascination about the desolate empty
rooms, with the nails sticking in the walls, and the dust thick
upon the window-sills. But I didn't enjoy going over Number 20,
Paul Street. I had hardly put my foot inside the passage when I
noticed a queer, heavy feeling about the air of the house. Of
course all empty houses are stuffy, and so forth, but this was
something quite different; I can't describe it to you, but it
seemed to stop the breath. I went into the front room and the
back room, and the kitchens downstairs; they were all dirty and
dusty enough, as you would expect, but there was something
strange about them all. I couldn't define it to you, I only
know I felt queer. It was one of the rooms on the first floor,
though, that was the worst. It was a largish room, and once on