The fog was thicker than ever, settling down upon the city for such a night as the three confederates loved. Only a little bit of sky was visible at all from this ground floor room, for the backs of the houses behind came very close, leaving between the two walls of blackened brick nothing but a passage paved with worn and irregular flags. When a good look to right and left had assured the three men that no one was about and that the fog was thick enough to hide them from a chance observer at any of the adjacent windows, one by one they dropped through their own window into the passage, turned to the right, and over the wall at the end into a second and much narrower passage, which ran at right angles to the first, along the backs of the deserted houses which had struck Deborah Audaer with such a sense of poverty and desolation. The back doors of all these houses were boarded up as carefully as the windows and doors in front. But Rees, who was the first of the three to venture on this errand, stopped at the door of the fourth house, with one strong pull wrenched off the two lowest boards, and crawled through the opening thus made. For the door itself had been taken bodily away. A minute later, Sep, and then Goodhare, had passed through also. As soon as they were all inside they drew up the displaced boards, which were joined together, fastened them in their place with bolts, and proceeded together along the passage which ran from the back to the front of the house. Without striking a light they felt for and found, about half way along the passage, an opening in the floor which led, by a narrow ladder-staircase, into the cellars. The first they entered was at the front, underneath that part of the house which had once been a shop. It was very dimly lighted through a rusty grating just below the shop window, and was full of scraps of paper, heaps of dust, and rubbish of the most worthless kind, such as not even the poorest rag-picker would find it worth while to carry away. Behind this miserable and mouldy-smelling cellar was a second, more miserable and mouldy still. It had been sunk some three feet deeper into the earth than the front one, from which it was divided by a brick wall, in which a wooden door had been inserted, artfully painted so as to be undistinguishable, except by an experienced eye, from the brickwork on either side. Into this lower cellar all three men dropped and shut the door behind them. Then Goodhare struck a light. The cellar was small, and ventilated only by a hole about a foot square in the floor of the back shop above. Immediately under this hole was a small, roughly-made square grate, and above the grate there swung a huge melting-pot. The rest of the furniture consisted of a couple of benches, a dirty table on which was a piece of brown paper containing tools, a large collection of wine and spirit bottles, both empty and full, and a wide, comfortable-looking, old-fashioned couch.