Lighting yet another match, and making a great effort to pull myself together, I slowly and carefully rose and crept away from that dangerous spot.
Why need I go into further detail? Let it suffice for me to state that, with care and eagerness, I searched every room I could find, till my patience and my matches were exhausted—yet without avail.
Evidently I had entered the wrong house!
On the bottom flight I had to encounter and pass over the débris which had fallen from above. The task was a difficult and perilous one, but eventually reaching the bottom, I stood on firm ground.
My journey had been for naught; my clothes were covered with a white powder which all my resources failed to remove; and the task of regaining the street unobserved and unsuspected remained to be accomplished.
I listened attentively. There was not a sound to be heard. All was silent and gloomy, save where the light from a street-lamp shone through a distant window in another room, making the outline of the door dimly visible.
Cautiously and carefully I essayed to reach the pavement by the window which had afforded me an entrance.
Suddenly I was startled by my wrists being seized from the outside, the hoarding removed in a trice, and ere an exclamation could escape me, I found myself in the grasp of a couple of stalwart constables.
“What are you doing here—eh?” one asked, roughly, turning the insufferable glare of his lantern into my eyes.
I tried to answer, but a dimness seemed to come over me, and the only recollection that remains of what followed was of darting across a road accompanied by my two captors, one of whom held me on each side.