The old man wrinkled up his monkey-like face into a grimace of surprise and misery. He cast a terrified look at the haggard face of McPhillip, that peered at him out of the angle of the wall to the left of the door. Then he mumbled something and set off down the lane at a broken trot. The other two old men in the hall began to whisper to one another as soon as the clerk turned his back and walked back into the office. “Be the holy,” said one, “he should be shot, wha?” “So he should,” whined the other old man, “the dirty, rotten—to be goin’ about like that.” Then they shuffled up to the window for their bed tickets. The clerk swore at them and called them filthy names, but they kept apologizing to him and sniggering. While the two old men were getting their bed tickets at the window, McPhillip pushed through the door quietly and slipped along the hall. He turned to the right at the far end. He stopped there. He leaned up against the wall casually, took a cigarette from his pocket and lit it. He looked around examining the passage. It was a wide corridor with a concrete floor and walls of glazed brick. There were windows at regular intervals opening on a large yard at the rear of the building. In the alcoves formed by the windows seats were placed. By the opposite wall there were spittoons placed at equal distances of three yards or so. Men were strewn along the passage in groups, some sitting on the seats conversing in low voices, others walking up and down singly or in pairs, with their eyes on the ground and their hands muffed behind their backs in their coat sleeves. They were all wretchedly dressed and melancholy. Some were quite young, but their faces had already assumed the dejected appearance that is usually found only in the faces of old men who have been disappointed in life. Puffing at his cigarette slowly, McPhillip examined the hall and the men who passed, with the same quick, sharp cunning with which he had examined the street. Again he could see nobody that aroused his interest. Again he sighed gently and moved away to the right. He entered a large room through a swing door. The room was crowded. It was furnished with long tables and wooden forms, like a café for the working class. There were newspapers on some tables. On others there were games or draughts and dominoes. Men sat at all the tables. Some read. Others played games. The majority, however, sat in silence, their eyes staring vacantly in front of them, contemplating the horror of their lives. Those who could find no seat stood about the tables, watching the progress of the games, with their hands in their pockets and their faces set in an expression of stolid and absent-minded indifference.