One of these nights a man started signalling from a house which looked upon the back of our own. We watched him from our beds. He had a lamp, and lived in a top story. The signalling continued at intervals over a period of several weeks, and what came of it all I do not know; but it made these nights more mysterious watching this lonely man and his lamp high up in the attic.
Then, one evening, Mrs. Slaney started to act in a peculiar manner. About ten o’clock she began fluttering up and down the stairs, and when I suggested locking the front door as usual, she said she would do it. A quarter of an hour later I caught her fluttering on the stairs, and this time she was unable to contain herself. She took me into the half dark of one of the landings.
“I am putting up a friend for a night or two,” she said, avoiding my glance. “He’s a Sinn Feiner, and he doesn’t want to go home. I’m giving him the little spare room at the top of the house. He has to come after dark, as he doesn’t want it known where he is. I don’t want a word said to anybody.”
“Is he on the run?” I asked brutally.
“Well, not exactly that; but he has a little work on hand, and he doesn’t want to be disturbed. He thought it was safer to come round here in case they should think of raiding his flat during the next day or two. Ah!”
A gentle knock had come to the front door. Mrs. Slaney fluttered down to the hall, where, as usual, no light was burning.
She managed successfully to manœuvre our mysterious caller into the upper reaches of the house; I heard no more of them, and nobody seemed to have noticed his incoming or his out-going next morning. But the following night Mrs. Slaney, who made the journey to the hall shorter by drifting into our rooms early in the evening, began to fidget as soon as the clock had turned ten. The gentle knock came at last, and she bustled down to the hall.
Somebody had to make the visitor’s bed, and on the morrow Mrs. O’Grady, on her knees on a piece of newspaper raking out our fire, sniffed, and said, “Terrible times!”
“What’s up, Mrs. O’Grady?” we inquired.
“Ah,” said Mrs. O’Grady, sniffing again, “the woman upstairs is always up to something or other. She’s always after keeping in with somebody.”