The light of day made this room more hideous than it had been by lamplight. The shattered lamp lay in the grate, and there was a charred place on the floor near the hearth, where the oil had burned itself out, when Wint threw down the lamp the night before. Above the mantel hung the cracked mirror. In it from where he sat, Wint could see a distorted reflection of the ceiling of the room, and an angle of the wall. There had once been paper on this wall, and it had been cracked by the shrinking of the plaster, and picked away by casual fingers, and here and there it hung in short, ragged strips. The bare floor was unclean; the chair near the bed where Wint’s two shoes now reposed was decrepit and lacked paint. One door of the big wardrobe hung awkwardly from weakened hinges. It was a little ajar, and Wint could see a disorder of rubbish inside. On the floor near the chair lay his hat and coat and one sock, where he had dropped them when he had come here and stumbled drunkenly to bed. He held his head in his hands, and his fingers clenched in his crisp hair. For some time, his senses had been catching hints of life in the building below him. The smell of burning grease had come up the stairs from the kitchen; and the grumble of voices now and then upraised in protest or abuse had reached his ears. Once he heard, from a distance and muffled by intervening doors and walls, the clamor of quarreling dogs. But these things did not penetrate his consciousness until a new and louder disturbance broke out somewhere below. A dog barked, snarling and angry; another yelped. The two joined their voices in an angry tumult of sound. Then a woman’s voice, the voice of Mrs. Moody, shouted abuse, and a door opened and cries and barks and snarls redoubled. Wint lifted his head, in sudden recognition. He heard the thud of some missile that had missed its mark and clattered against the floor; and then he heard the scramble of hard-toed feet racing up the stairs, and the snuffing of eager nostrils. His eyes lighted softly; and he called: “Muldoon!” There was a yelp of delight and a new scuffle of feet, and Muldoon plunged in through the open door and was all over Wint in a delirious joy at this reunion. The dog leaped up on Wint’s knees; it tried to climb on his shoulders; its tongue sought to caress his cheeks; it nipped his hands lovingly; and all the time it whined a low whine of happiness. Wint, cuffing the hard and eager head, smiled in spite of himself at the dog’s caresses; he smiled, and caught Muldoon by the ears and held him away and shook him affectionately. “You, dog!” he scolded. “How did you come here? Eh, you?”