"But what?"
And from the first floor to the sixth they sought and conjectured and delved in their brains. Every lodger had the preoccupied air of a man that strives with all his wits to solve an impossible cipher, and everywhere there began to be a vague disquiet, as it happens when one finds himself in the presence of a sinister mystery.
Some one went so far as to hazard:
"This man must have committed a great and still hidden crime; remorse pushes him to philanthropy."
"It was not a pleasant idea, either, the thought of living thus side by side with a rascal; no, by no means; he might be repentant, and all that, but suppose he yielded to temptation once more!"
"The house, perhaps, was badly built?" questioned another, anxiously.
"Hum-m, so-so! no one could tell; but all knew one thing—it was very, very old!"
"True! and it had been necessary to prop it when they dug the drain last year in the month of March."
"Maybe it was the roof, then, and the house is top-heavy?" suggested a tenant on the fifth floor.
"Or perhaps," said a lodger in the garret, "there is a press for coining counterfeit money in the cellar; I have often heard at night a sound like the dull, muffled thud of a coin-stamper."