In single file, the janitor leading, they mounted the stairs. To the aristocratic senses of George the place seemed abominable. The staircase, narrow and without balustrade, ran up steeply between walls once painted green, now blotched and smeared. At the end of the first flight there was a small landing, a gas bracket holding aloft a tiny point of flame. It was as hot as an oven, the stifling atmosphere impregnated with mingled odors of cooking, stale cigar smoke, and the mustiness of close, unaired spaces. On the second landing one of the doors was open, affording a glimpse of a squalid interior, and a man in his shirt sleeves bent over a table writing. He did not look up as they creaked by. From somewhere near, muffled by walls, came the thin, frail tinkling of guitar strings. As they ascended the temperature grew higher, the air held in the low attic story under the roof, baked to a sweltering heat. The janitor muttered an excuse—the top floor being vacant the windows were kept shut—it would be cool enough when they were opened. He had gained the last landing, which broadened into a small square of hall cut by three doors. As he turned to one on the left, O’Malley slipped by him and drew away toward that on the right. There was a moment of silence, broken by the clinking of the man’s keys. He had trouble in finding the right one and set his lamp down on a chair, his head bent over the bunch. George was aware of O’Malley’s figure casting a huge wavering shadow up the wall, edging closer to the right hand door. The key was found and inserted in the lock and the janitor entered the room, his lamp diffusing a yellow aura in the midst of which he moved, a black, retreating shape. With his withdrawal the light in the hall, furnished by a bead of gas, faded to a flickering obscurity. O’Malley’s shadow disappeared, and George could see him as a formless oblong, pressed against the panel. There was a moment of intense stillness, the guitar tinkling faint as if coming through illimitable distances. The detective’s voice rose in a whisper, vital and intimate, against the music’s spectral thinness: "Queer. There’s not a sound." His hand stole to the handle, clasped it, turned it. Noiselessly the door opened upon darkness into which he slipped equally noiseless. That slow opening was so surprising, so dreamlike in its quality of the totally unexpected, that George stood rooted. He stared at the square of the door, waiting for voices, clamor, the anticipated in some form. Then he saw the darkness pierced by the white ray of an electric torch and heard a sound—a rumbled oath from O’Malley. It brought him to the threshold. In the middle of the room, his torch sending its shaft over walls and floor, stood the detective alone, his face, the light shining upward on the chin and the tip of his nose, grotesque in its enraged dismay. "Not here—d——n them!" and his voice trailed off into furious curses. "Gone?" The surprise had made George forgetful.