"Was there a accident?" he asked.
The boy on the cycle, having no more information to give, said nothing, but nodded again towards the house. Someone within had struck a light, and the constable could be plainly seen standing in the middle of the empty ground-floor room.
A hansom driver, crawling from the westwards in the hope of picking up a fare to the Strand, paused in the act of lighting his pipe and pulled up just in front of the cycle. A servant girl who had been sent out to post a letter noticed an errand boy set down his basket upon the ground and balance himself upon the rim, whereby he was enabled to peer over the top of the railings, and she stood still to watch him; while three sandwich men mournfully advertising a concert at the Town Hall halted in the roadway and looked with dull curiosity at the cabman, who had hitched himself round on his seat, and with one leg swinging in mid-air was wondering what he could charge for a really urgent case to St. George's Hospital.
"What's matter?" asked a homeward-bound workman who was vaguely conscious of an unusual obstruction, and found the railings a convenient support.
"Ain't nothing the matter," said the boy on the basket, looking round. "You tike that fice 'ome."
The workman, finding it easier to stand still by the railings than to walk, remained where he was.
"I stops where I am," he murmured; "see what's matter. All kinds things happen in mighty metrolo—metrolopus."
The old gentleman who takes the air every evening along a beat of a hundred yards or so of pavement in Phillimore Place halted and looked inquiringly at the boy on the basket, disgustedly at the workman clinging to the railings. Then, over the shoulder of the workman the old gentleman caught sight of the policeman, who was now standing in full light back to the window; while Susie, bending down with tape-measure to calculate the amount of carpet required, could be dimly seen by those outside to be busied with something on the floor.
"Dear me!" said the old gentleman.
"There's—body in there," said the workman. "That's what 'tis. Body."