The gas was always badly lit in the passages, spitting and muttering like an imprisoned animal. The house was so quiet when Maggie came out on to the stairs that there seemed to be no one in it. She found her way down into the hall and saw Thomas the cat there, moving like a black ghost along the floor. He came up to her and rubbed himself in his sinister, mysterious way against her dress. When she turned towards the green baize door that led towards the kitchen regions he stood back from her, stole on to the lower steps of the staircase and watched her with steady, unblinking eyes. She pushed the door and went through into the cold passage that smelt of cheese and bacon and damp earth. There seemed to be no one about, and then suddenly the pantry door opened and Jane came out. She stopped when she saw Maggie. "Where's Martha?" asked Maggie in a low voice. The whisper seemed to tell Jane at once that this was to be a confidential matter. She jerked with a dirty thumb in the direction of the kitchen. "In there. Cooking the dinner," she whispered back. She was untidy, there were streaks of black on her face, but her eyes looked up at Maggie with a friendly, roguish glance, as though they had already something in common. Maggie saw that she had no time to lose. She came close to her. "Jane," she said, "I'm in trouble. It's only you who can help me. Here's a letter that I want posted--just in the ordinary way. Can you do that for me?" Jane, suddenly smiling, nodded her head. "And there's something else," Maggie went on. "To-morrow morning, before you come here, I want you to go to the Strand post-office--you know the one opposite the station--and ask for a letter addressed to me. I've written on a piece of paper here that you're to be given any letters of mine. Give it to me somehow when no one's looking. Do you understand?" Jane nodded her head. Maggie gave her the note and also half-a-crown, but Jane pushed back the money. "I don't want no money," she said in a hoarse whisper. "You're the only one here decent to me." At that moment the kitchen door opened and Martha appeared. When she saw Jane she came up to her and said: "Now then, idling again! What about the potatoes?" She looked at Maggie with her usual surly suspicion. "I came down for a candle," Maggie said, "for my room. Will you give me one, please?" Jane had vanished. Martin, meanwhile, after Maggie left him, had returned home in no happy state. There had leapt upon him again that mood of sullen impatient rebellion that he knew so well--a mood that really was like a possession, so that, struggle as he--might, he seemed always in the grip of some iron-fingered menacing figure.