* * * * *

Two of the children were awake after all.

Jimmie lay, black-eyed and alert, beside his brother, and looked at his mother reflectively as she came in.  He was still thinking about the sixpence that might conceivably have been his.  ’Erb’s lamentation stopped as she came in, and she went to the table first to turn down the smoking lamp.

She was quite a kindly mother, a great deal more tender than she seemed, and ’Erb knew it well enough.  But he respected her sufficiently to stop crying when she came in.

“Now then,” she said with motherly sternness.  “I can’t ’ave—­”

Then she stopped abruptly.  She had heard steps on the pavement outside as she came into the room, and now she heard the handle of the street door turned and someone come into the passage.  She stood wondering, and in that pause she missed her chance, for the steps came straight past the door and began to go upstairs.  It might, of course, conceivably be one of the lodgers on the top-floor, and yet she knew it was not.  She whisked to the door a moment later, but it was too late, and she was only just in time to see the figure she knew turn the corner of the four stairs that led to the first-floor landing.

“Is that Frankie?” asked Jimmie, suddenly sitting up in bed.  “Oh! mother, let me—­”

“You be quiet!” snapped the woman, and stood listening; with parted lips.

(II)

From that point Mrs. Partington seems to have been able to follow very closely what must have taken place upstairs.

It was a very quiet night, here in Turner Road:  the roysterers were in the better-lighted streets, and the sober folk were at home.  And there was not a footstep on the pavements outside to confuse the little drama of sound that came down to her through the ill-fitting boards overhead.  She could not explain afterwards why she did not interfere.  I imagine that she hoped against hope that she was misinterpreting what she heard, and also that a kind of terror seized her which she found it really impossible to shake off.

First, there was the opening and closing of the door; two or three footsteps, and then dead silence.

Then she heard talking begin, first one voice, then a crescendo, as if two or three clamored together; then one voice again. (It was impossible, so far, to distinguish which was which.)

This went on for a minute or two; occasionally there was a crescendo, and once or twice some voice rose almost into a shout.

Then, without warning, there was a shuffling of feet, and a crash, as of an overturned chair; and, instant upon the noise, ’Erb set up a prolonged wail.

“You be quiet!” snapped the woman in a sharp whisper.

The noises went on:  now the stamp of a foot; now the scraping of something overhead and a voice or two in sharp deep exclamation, and then complete silence once more.  ’Erb was sobbing now, as noiselessly as he could, terrified at his mother’s face, and Jimmie was up, standing on the floor in his flannel shirt, listening like his mother.  Maggie still slept deeply on the further side of the bed.