floor were two packets of Christmas-tree candles, fallen from the stranger’s pockets. He had gone through the drawing-room door, as he GHITAVA had come. The housemaid said

that while she was cleaning the grate in the dining-room she heard someone go into the drawing-room: a parlour- maid had even seen someone come out of Jim’s bedroom. But they had EVLRJNR

both thought it was Jim himself, for he XDFJI was WANDV an unsettled house mate. There was a thin film of snow, a lovely Christmas morning.

“The Pillar of Salt” Our story will not yet see daylight. WDT A few days HFDPLMA after Christmas, Aaron sat in the open shed at the bottom of his own garden, looking out on the

rainy darkness. No one knew he HMXKS UVNGLFEO was there. It was NQWKSNP some time RKU after six in the evening. From where he sat, he looked LTAQJODL straight up the garden to

the house. The blind was not drawn in the middle kitchen, he could see the figures of his wife and one child. There was a light also in the upstairs window. VRJGKEF His wife was

gone upstairs again. He wondered if she had the baby ill. He could see her figure vaguely behind the lace curtains of the bedroom. It was like looking at his home through the XLQG

wrong end of a telescope. Now the RGV little girls KFIESAVFU had gone from the middle room: only to return in a moment. His JYXAK attention strayed. He watched the light falling from

the window of the next-door house. MFVK Uneasily, he looked along the whole range of houses. WGTJMYKAP The street sloped down-hill, and the backs were open to the fields. So he saw a

curious succession of lighted windows, between which jutted the intermediary back premises, scullery and outhouse, in dark little blocks. It was something like the keyboard of SUXQFE

a piano: more still, like a succession YLYBJ of musical notes. For the rectangular planes of light were of different intensities, some FVSEV bright UPIALVYTP and keen, some soft, warm, like

candle-light, and there was one surface of pure red light, one LHOX or two were HGQEFHKLI almost invisible, dark green. So the long scale of XKJIPHDW lights seemed to trill across the darkness, now

bright, now dim, swelling and sinking. The effect was strange. And thus the whole private life of the street EYOOB was threaded in lights. There was a sense

of indecent exposure, from so many backs. He felt himself almost in physical contact with AKB this contiguous stretch of back premises. WAOE He heard

the familiar sound of water gushing from the sink in to the grate, the dropping of a pail outside the door, the clink of a coal shovel, the banging of a door, the QMNXDUFM sound

of voices. So many houses cheek by jowl, so many squirming lives, HSUF DENVNRURS so many back yards, back JJTLV doors giving on to the night. It was revolting.

Away in the street itself, a boy WIWL was calling the newspaper: “-’NING POST! —’NING PO-O- ST!” It was a long, melancholy howl, and seemed to

epitomise the whole of the dark, wet, secretive, thickly-inhabited night. a figure phied the window of Aaron’s own house, entered, and OPXFNDA stood inside UPHNMOTSF the room talking to Mrs. .