Alas, they were not the voices of the governing classes, they were not the voices of refinement and leisured ease. Oh! no. They were the voices of two domestics engaged in altercation, the one male, the other female; and the latter, after affirming that it was none of her partner’s business, evidently approached the door of the room in which he was. For a moment his heart stopped beating. He heard her hand upon the outer handle of the door; by what form of address could he melt that uncultivated heart? Those bitter hours of his just passed had filled him with a mixture of terror and hatred for such English men and women as work for their living. He had always regarded them as of another species: he beheld them now in the aspect of unreasoning wolves. By the grace of heaven the door was locked. He heard a female expletive, extreme in tone though mild in phrase, directed towards the domestic habits of her master, especially with regard to the privacy of his study, and he next heard her steps moving away. She was coming round by the garden; there was not a moment to lose ... and there was not a cranny in which to hide. I have expatiated on the effect of misery and of terror upon George’s brain: I have but here to add that for two seconds he was a veritable Napoleon in his survey of terrain. He grasped in a flash that if he retreated by the garden door he was full in the line of the enemy’s advance without an alternative route towards any base; and with such an inspiration as decided Jena, he made for the chimney. The eccentricities of the master of the house (for he was obviously eccentric) appeared to include a passion for old-fashioned fireplaces; at any rate there was no register nor any other devilish device for impeding the progress of the human form, and George, with a dexterity remarkable in one of his bulk, hoisted himself into the space immediately above the grate. There the chimney narrowed rapidly to a small flue, and he must perforce support himself by the really painful method of pressing with his feet against the one wall, and with his cramped shoulders against the other, lying in the attitude of a man curled up in bed upon his right side,--but in no such comfort, for where the bed should be was air. He had not gained his lair a moment too soon. He could discover from it the hearth-rug, a small strip of the carpet, and the legs of sundry tables and chairs, when he heard the garden door open, and other legs,--human legs--natty, and their extremities alone visible, passed among the legs of the inanimate things. The head which owned them far above continued, as the legs and feet bore it round the room, to criticise the habits of its master. It dusted, it went to the farther side of the apartment, the feet disappeared. They reappeared suddenly within his line of vision and stopped dead, while the invisible head remarked in a tone of curiosity: “Whatever’s that!”