on the staircase, but we examined the staircase from the bottom to
the top and found no one there. It then occurred to me as possible
that the man might have slipped into my rooms; so, lighting my
candle at the watchman's, and leaving him standing at the door,
I examined them carefully, including the room in which my dread-
ed guest lay asleep. All was quiet, and assuredly no other man was
in those chambers.

It troubled me that there should have been a lurker on the stairs,
on that night of all nights in the year, and I asked the watchman,
on the chance of eliciting some hopeful explanation as I handed
him a dram at the door, whether he had admitted at his gate any
gentleman who had perceptibly been dining out? Yes, he said;
at different times of the night, three. One lived in Fountain Court,
and the other two lived in the Lane, and he had seen them all go
home. Again, the only other man who dwelt in the house of which
my chambers formed a part, had been in the coutntry for some
weeks; and he certainly had not returned in the night, because
we had seen his door with his seal on it as we came upstairs.

'The night being so bad, sir,' said the watchman, as he gave me
back my glass, 'uncommon few have come in at my gate. Besides
them three gentlemen that I have named, I don't call to mind an-
other since about eleven o'clock, when a stranger asked for you.'

'My uncle,' I muttered. 'Yes.'

'You saw him, sir?'

'Yes. Oh yes.'

'Likewise the person with him?'

'Person with him!' I repeated.

'I judged the person to be with him,' returned the watchman.
'The person stopped, when he stopped to make inquiry of me, and
the person took this way when he took this way.'

'What sort of person?'

The watchman had not particularly noticed; he should say a
working person; to the best of his belief, he had a dust-coloured
kind of clothes on, under a dark coat. The watchman made more
light of the matter than I did, and naturally; not having any rea-
son for attaching weight to it.

When I had got rid of him, which I thought it well to do with-

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