The appearance of this part of the house was dirty and neglected. Indeed, it afforded no evidence that the tenement was inhabited at all; but conveyed quite the contrary impression. The fan-light above the front-door was boarded over; and thus the hall itself was nearly dark, the only light it enjoyed being admitted through the ill-closed joints of the boarding just mentioned. The paper was falling away from the walls of the staircase; and dust and dirt had accumulated wherever the hand touched or the eye could penetrate. On regaining the landing on the first-floor, Tom Rain tried a door opposite to that by which he had issued from the laboratory; but it was locked. He forced it open, and found himself, as he suspected he should, in the very room where he had left Old Death; for that apartment had two doors. And, to his ineffable surprise, Old Death was still there,—still sitting in the chair to which he had been fastened with a strong cord;—and that cord had not been removed. The head of the fence was bent forward, and hung—or rather drooped, upon his breast. The highwayman was alarmed, and hastened towards him. But the moment he caught a glimpse of his features, he started back horror-stricken,—and stupefied as it were by the hideous spectacle that presented itself to his view. For the old man's countenance was fearfully distorted, and nearly black—the eyes protruded from their sockets, and seemed staring on vacancy—and the under jaw had fallen. "Holy God! he is dead!" ejaculated Rainford at length: "and I—I have killed him!" At that instant the door leading from the inner apartment was slowly and cautiously opened; and the highwayman, yielding to a natural impulse, turned and fled abruptly by the one communicating with the passage, and which he had forced open a few moments previously. This movement on his part was so sudden and so quickly executed, that he did not perceive the person who was entering the room; but whether that person observed him, or not, he was unaware. Descending the stairs three or four at a time, the highwayman quitted the house by the front door, and did not breathe freely until he had closed it behind him and found himself at length in the open street. Dauntless—daring as he was, the idea that he had caused, though unintentionally, the death of the old fence, prostrated for a time the powers of a naturally vigorous mind; and horror threw all his thoughts into chaotic confusion. He did not even pause a moment to examine, as well as the darkness of the hour would have permitted him, the outward appearance of the house which he had just left; but hurried away as quickly as he could go from the vicinity of a place where he had seen and undergone so much in such an incredibly short space of time. For it was about one o'clock when he and Old Death had entered the house in Turnmill Street; and Saint Paul's proclaimed the hour of three as Rainford crossed Smithfield Market.