For half an hour Boyne sat listening while the old woman shouted to him excitedly her description of the fire. He adopted that mealy-mouthed attitude which he could assume at will—that attitude he adopted so cleverly when he went to church so regularly—and condoled with her. "Of course, Mrs. Felmore, all this horrible catastrophe shall not make any difference to you. I hear you had Miss Marigold to keep you company. Quite right! But I’m so very sorry about it all. The poor girl must have been very frightened. Where is she?" "She went back to Wimbledon Park about an hour ago, sir. She telegraphed to the bank excusing herself for to-day, as she only had clothes that were lent her." "Ah! I am so sorry about that. But have you any idea how it all happened?" Boyne asked the old woman. "No, sir, I haven’t. I’m always so careful about fire," she answered. "I was burnt when I was a child, and therefore I always look at the kitchen grate and rake the cinders out before I goes to bed." "But it seems to have been upstairs where the fire originated." "Yes, sir," replied the old woman. "I expect it was the kitchen flue. I asked old Mr. Morgan, the sweep, to do it three weeks ago, but he was very busy, and he didn’t come. I’ve cleaned out the range all right—but that’s what I think. I’m sorry, sir, but it wasn’t my fault, really it wasn’t." "Of course not, Mrs. Felmore. Morgan should have come when you ordered him," Boyne said. Afterwards he succeeded in entering the gaunt blackened wreck of his home. With satisfaction he saw the frameless windows of the two upper floors, but inside a spectacle of utter ruin met his gaze. The water had come through the ceiling of his sitting-room, half of which was down, the stairs consumed, and all the remaining furniture ruined beyond repair. From the cupboard, however, he took his pet "Nibby," who was still alive, and probably wondering at all the commotion. "Poor little fellow!" he exclaimed, stroking the rat’s pointed pink nose, and afterwards placing him in his pocket, as he did sometimes. "I shall give you to Mrs. Felmore." And after a final look round at the scene of the wreckage, he returned to where his deaf old housekeeper was staying, and presented her with the tame rat. Late that same afternoon Boyne hurried along Theobald’s Road, past the railings of Gray’s Inn, and crossing the busy road with its procession of tramcars, turned the corner into Harpur Street, a short, dingy thoroughfare of smoke-grimed, old-fashioned houses, once the residences of well-to-do people, but now mostly let out in tenements. Before one of the houses on the left-hand side he halted, and pulled the bell. The door was opened by a young girl wearing a dirty apron and whose hair was in curlers. "Good-afternoon, Mr. Bennett. Yes, ’e’s upstairs," she exclaimed. So up the uncarpeted stairs Boyne went to the top of the house.