By day, when its residents are asleep, this street is loud with straining Norman horses, and clattering vans, and whip-cracking carters from the docks; but by night--and the nights are very dark down there--it becomes the haunt of sailors and longshoremen, drunk and shouting, or still and drugged. Then the blue electric lamps snap hysterically at distant corners; the uneven pavement mounts steeply upward, or dashes precipitately downward, with no warning; laughter and curses and the crash of breaking glass or spluttering oaths issue now and again from the blackness at one's elbow, where, hidden among the warehouses, stand the houses for the storing of another sort of wares: the slave-houses maintained for mariners. Grotesque men, could you see them, stagger into dim entrances; terrible caricatures of women, if the light would show them, steal out and dart upon gutter-couched drunkards to paw their pockets. The night is alive with shadows, and the whole street a hungry, quivering quicksand. Only by urging her eyes to their utmost could Mary make out anything of the house before which she and her unsteady companion came to pause. Even then all of which she could be sure was that, cowering under the shadow of some huge brick building, and skulking beneath its own rotting eaves, it was a half-sunken, old, narrow house, long since abandoned as unfit for legitimate purposes, and leaning rakishly to one side, like an ancient libertine that knows his evil and grins at it. The sailor knocked lightly at an almost unseen door. A panel of it slid open and threw a ray of light on his face. "Who's there?" asked a voice that was like the rasping of a file. "It's Billy," said the sailor. "Billy who?" "Billy Stevens. Le'me in, Lou." A pair of swollen eyes came to the open panel and looked, down the shaft of light, into the sinister face of Bill. "Who's that with you?" croaked the voice. "A gal I got for you." "Is she all right?" "O' course she is, Lou; else what in hell'd she be doin' with me? Come on; le'me in." The swollen eyes disappeared, and the panel was shut. There was a sound of the withdrawal of several bolts. Then the door swung open, was closed and relocked behind the newcomers, and Mary found herself in an unfurnished hall, not more than fifteen feet square, lighted by a dim lamp standing on the lowest step of a steep flight of stairs, and guarded by the owner of the swollen eyes.