The train arrived an hour late, as slow trains are apt to do, and it was nearly half-past eleven when he reached his house in Russell Square. He opened the door with his latchkey. The hall was dark, contrary to custom. He switched on the light, and, turning, saw that the letter-box had not been cleared. Mechanically he took out the letters, and beneath the hall lamp glanced at the outside of the envelopes. Among them was the telegram he had sent from Devonshire. Even a man wallowing in the deepest abysses of spiritual misery needs food; and when he finds that a telegram ordering supper (for his return was unexpected) has not been opened, he may be pardoned purely material disappointment and irritation. Mrs. Pennycook, the housekeeper, must have profited by his absence to take a holiday. But what business had she to take a holiday and leave the house uncared for at that time of night? For, if she had returned, she would have lit the hall-light, and cleared the letter-box. He resigned himself peevishly to the prospect of a biscuit and a whisky-and-soda in the little back room where he ate his meals. He strode down the passage to the head of the kitchen stairs and opened the study door. A glare of light met his eyes, and a moment afterwards something else. This was Mrs. Pennycook in an armchair, sleeping a bedraggled sleep with two empty quart bottles of champagne and an empty bottle of whisky by her side. He shook her hard by the shoulders; but beyond stertorous and jerky breaths the blissful lady showed no signs of animation. It was then that a constricting thread snapped in Quixtus’s brain. It was then, as if by a trick of magic, that all the vaguely billowing horrors, disillusions, disgusts, resentments and hatreds co-ordinated themselves into a scheme of fierce vividness. Just as the boils made Job, who had borne the annihilation of his family with equanimity, open his mouth and curse his day, so did a drunken servant, who neglected to give him his supper, awaken Ephraim Quixtus to the glorious thrill of a remorseless, relentless malignity. He threw up his hands and laughed aloud, peals of unearthly laughter that woke the echoes of the empty house, that woke the canary in its cage by the window, causing it to utter a few protesting “cheeps,” that arrested the policeman on his beat outside, that did everything human laughter in the way of noise can do, even stimulating the blissful lady to open half a glazed eye for the fraction of a second. After his paroxysm had subsided, he looked at the woman for a moment, and then with an air of peculiar malevolence took a sheet of note-paper from a small writing-table beneath the canary’s cage and wrote on it: “_Let me never see your face again.—E. Q._”