He knocked, and waited for two or three minutes, but, although the door stood open, received no answer.  He was knocking again when a long-nosed man in shirt-sleeves appeared.

“I was arsking a blessing on our food,” he said in severe explanation.

Oleron asked if he might have the key of the old house; and the long-nosed man withdrew again.

Oleron waited for another five minutes on the step; then the man, appearing again and masticating some of the food of which he had spoken, announced that the key was lost.

“But you won’t want it,” he said.  “The entrance door isn’t closed, and a push’ll open any of the others.  I’m a agent for it, if you’re thinking of taking it—­”

Oleron recrossed the square, descended the two steps at the broken gate, passed along the alley, and turned in at the old wide doorway.  To the right, immediately within the door, steps descended to the roomy cellars, and the staircase before him had a carved rail, and was broad and handsome and filthy.  Oleron ascended it, avoiding contact with the rail and wall, and stopped at the first landing.  A door facing him had been boarded up, but he pushed at that on his right hand, and an insecure bolt or staple yielded.  He entered the empty first floor.

He spent a quarter of an hour in the place, and then came out again.  Without mounting higher, he descended and recrossed the square to the house of the man who had lost the key.

“Can you tell me how much the rent is?” he asked.

The man mentioned a figure, the comparative lowness of which seemed accounted for by the character of the neighbourhood and the abominable state of unrepair of the place.

“Would it be possible to rent a single floor?”

The long-nosed man did not know; they might....

“Who are they?”

The man gave Oleron the name of a firm of lawyers in Lincoln’s Inn.

“You might mention my name—­Barrett,” he added.

Pressure of work prevented Oleron from going down to Lincoln’s Inn that afternoon, but he went on the morrow, and was instantly offered the whole house as a purchase for fifty pounds down, the remainder of the purchase-money to remain on mortgage.  It took him half an hour to disabuse the lawyer’s mind of the idea that he wished anything more of the place than to rent a single floor of it.  This made certain hums and haws of a difference, and the lawyer was by no means certain that it lay within his power to do as Oleron suggested; but it was finally extracted from him that, provided the notice-boards were allowed to remain up, and that, provided it was agreed that in the event of the whole house letting, the arrangement should terminate automatically without further notice, something might be done.  That the old place should suddenly let over his head seemed to Oleron the slightest of risks to take, and he promised a decision within a week.  On the morrow he visited the house again, went through it from top to bottom, and then went home to his lodgings to take a bath.