Mr. Hall met Mrs. Hall in the passage.

“Carrier’s dog,” he said, “bit the stranger.”

He went straight upstairs, and the stranger’s door being ajar, he pushed it open and was entering without any ceremony.

The curtain was down and the room dim. He noticed something strange, what seemed a handless arm waving towards him, and a face of three huge indeterminate spots on white. Then he was struck violently in the chest, hurled back, and the door slammed and locked. It was so rapid that it gave him no time to observe. He was wondering what it might be that he had seen.

A couple of minutes after, he rejoined the little group that had formed outside the “Coach and Horses.” There was Fearenside telling about it all over again for the second time; there was Mrs. Hall saying his dog didn’t have the right to bite her guests; besides women and children, all of them saying fatuities.

Mr. Hall, staring at them from the steps and listening, found it incredible that he had seen anything so very remarkable happen upstairs. Besides, his vocabulary was too limited to express his impressions.

“He doesn’t want to get help, he says,” he said in answer to his wife’s inquiry.

“I’d shoot the dog, that’s what I’d do,” said a lady in the group.

Suddenly the dog began growling again.

“Come along!” cried an angry voice in the doorway, and there stood the muffled stranger with his collar turned up. “The sooner you get those things in the better!”

His trousers and gloves had been changed.

“Were you hurt, sir?” said Fearenside. “I’m sorry the dog-”

“Not a bit,” said the stranger. “Never mind. Hurry up with those things.”

He then swore to himself, so Mr. Hall asserts.

The first crate was carried into the parlour, and the stranger began to unpack it, scattering the straw on Mrs. Hall’s carpet. And from it he began to take bottles-little fat bottles containing powders, small and slender bottles containing coloured and white fluids, fluted blue bottles labeled “Poison”, bottles with round bodies and slender necks, large green-glass bottles, large white-glass bottles, bottles with corks, bottles with bungs, bottles with wooden caps, wine bottles, salad-oil bottles-putting them in rows on the chiffonnier, on the mantel, on the table under the window, round the floor, on the bookshelf-everywhere. Quite a sight it was! Crate after crate yielded bottles. Besides the bottles were test-tubes and a carefully packed balance.

And directly the crates were unpacked, the stranger went to the window and set to work, not troubling about the box of books outside, nor for the trunks and other luggage that had gone upstairs.

When Mrs. Hall took his dinner in to him, he was already so absorbed in his work, pouring little drops out of the bottles into test-tubes, that he did not hear her. Then he half turned his head and immediately turned it away again. But she saw he had removed his glasses; they were beside him on the table, and it seemed to her that his eye sockets were extraordinarily hollow. He put on his spectacles again, and then turned and faced her. She was about to complain of the straw on the floor when he anticipated her.

“I wish you wouldn’t come in without knocking,” he said in the tone of abnormal exasperation.

“I knocked, but seemingly-”

“Perhaps you did. But in my investigations-my really very urgent and necessary investigations-the slightest disturbance, the jar of a door-I must ask you-”

“Certainly, sir. You can turn the lock if you’re like that, you know. Any time.”

“A very good idea,” said the stranger.

“This straw, sir, if I might remark-”

“Don’t. If the straw makes trouble put it down in the bill.”

And he mumbled at her-words suspiciously like curses.

He was so odd, standing there, so aggressive and explosive, bottle in one hand and test-tube in the other, that Mrs. Hall was quite alarmed. But she was a resolute woman.

“In which case, I should like to know, sir, what you consider-”

“A shilling-put down a shilling. Surely a shilling is enough?”

“So be it,” said Mrs. Hall, taking up the table-cloth and beginning to spread it over the table.

He turned and sat down, with his coat-collar toward her.

All the afternoon he worked with the door locked and, as Mrs. Hall testifies, for the most part in silence. But once there was a smash of a bottle and then a rapid pacing athwart the room. She went to the door and listened.

“I can’t go on,” he was raving. “I can’t go on. Three hundred thousand, four hundred thousand! Cheated! All my life it may take me!.. Patience! Patience indeed!.. Fool! fool!”

There was a noise in the bar, and Mrs. Hall had very reluctantly to leave. When she returned the room was silent again. It was all over; the stranger had resumed work.