The handle was turned, and the door opened with a considerable amount of caution (the Professor did not permit interruptions). It was evidently, however, the caution of one who was suppressing badly a wild desire to make a rush into the room, and presently a man’s head appeared round the corner of the door, and after it his body. He came a yard or two beyond the threshold, and then stood still. His reddish hair was standing out a little, and his small twinkling Irish eyes were blinking nervously. He looked eagerly first at the younger man, who was his master, and then at the Professor, and then back again at Wyndham. ‘Well, Denis?’ said the latter, a little impatiently. ‘If ye plaze, sir, there’s an unfortunate young faymale on the steps below.’ The Professor frowned. As if such an ordinary occurrence as that should be allowed to interfere with a discussion on the great discovery! Wyndham spoke. ‘If she is noisy or troublesome, you had better call a policeman,’ he said indifferently. ‘Noisy! Divil a sound out of her,’ said Denis. ‘She looks for all the world, yer honour, as if there wasn’t a spark o’ life left in her. Sthretched in the hall she is, an’ the colour o’ death.’ ‘In the hall?’ said Wyndham quickly. ‘I thought you said she was on the steps.’ ‘She was. She’—cautiously—‘was. But——’ He paused and scanned anxiously the two faces before him. ‘It’s bitther cowld outside to-night, so I tuk her in.’ And, indeed, though the month was May, a searching wind was shaking the city, and biting into the hearts of young and old. As often happens in that ‘merrie month,’ a light fall of snow was whitening the tops of the houses. ‘I had better see to this,’ said the young man, rising. He left the room, followed by Denis (who had stopped to throw a few more coals on the now cheerful fire), and went down to the cold, bare, hideous hall below. The light from the solitary gas-lamp scarcely lit it, and it took him a few seconds to discern something that lay on the worn tarpaulin at the lower end of it. At last he made it out, and, stepping nearer, saw that it was the figure of a young and very slight girl. She was lying on the ground, her back supported against a chair, and Wyndham could see that Denis had folded an old coat of the Professor’s that usually hung on the hat-stand, and placed it behind her head. The light was so dim that he could not see what she was like; but stooping over her, he felt her hands, and found that they were cold as ice. Instinct, however, told him that life still ran within her veins, and lifting her quickly in his arms, he carried her upstairs to the room he had just left, and where the Professor still sat, so lost in fresh dreams of the experiment yet to be made that he started as Wyndham re-entered the room with his strange burden; it was, indeed, with difficulty that he brought his mind back to the present moment. He had forgotten why the young man had left the room.