From below, the upper region was reached by a private stairway of wood outside the building. Of this entrance the sailor had always kept the key. A little wooden balcony ran round the angle of the building to where, at one end, a large window had been built in the wall. Lothian went up the outside stairs noiselessly as a cat, and round the little gallery to the long window. Here he was in deep shadow. The two leaves of the window did not quite meet. The wood had shrunk, the whole affair was rickety and old. As he had anticipated, the night-comer had no difficulty in pushing the blade of his shooting knife through the crevice and raising the simple catch. He stepped into the room, long empty and ghostly. First, he closed the window again, and then let down the blue blind over it. A skylight in the sloped roof provided all the other light. Through this, now, faint and fleeting moonlights fell. By the gallery door there was a mat. Lothian stepped gingerly to it and wiped the india-rubber boots he wore. Then he took half a wax candle from a side-pocket and lit it. It was quite impossible that the light could be seen from outside, even if spectators there were, in the remote slumbering village. In the corners of the long room, black-velvet shadows lurked as the yellow candle flame moved. A huge spider with a body as big as sixpence ran up one canvas-covered wall. Despite the cold, the air was lifeless and there was a very faint aroma of chemical things in it. On all sides were long deal tables covered with a multiplicity of unusual objects. Under a big bell of glass, popped over it to keep the dust away, was a large microscope of intricate mechanism. Close by was a section-cutter that could almost make a paring of a soul for scrutiny. Leather cases stood here and there full of minute hypodermic syringes, and there was a box of thin glass tubes containing agents for staining the low protoplasmic forms of life which must be observed by those who wish to arm the world against the Fiend Alcohol. At the far end of the room, on each side of the fireplace were two glass-fronted cupboards, lined with red baize. In one of them Admiral Custance had kept his guns. These cupboards had been constructed by the village carpenter--who had also made the gun cupboard in Lothian's library. They were excellent cupboards and with ordinary locks and keys--the Mortland Royal carpenter, indeed, buying these accessories of his business of one pattern, and by the gross, from Messrs. Pashwhip and Moger's iron-mongery establishment in Wordingham. Lothian took the key of his own gun cupboard from his waistcoat pocket. It fitted the hole of the cupboard here--on the right side of the fireplace, exactly as he had expected. The glass doors swung open with a loud crack, and the contents on the shelves were clearly exposed to view. Lothian set his candle down upon the edge of an adjacent table and thought for a moment.