Priam was rolling cigarettes, many of them, and placing them, as he rolled them, in order on the mantelpiece.  A happy, mild couple!  And a couple, one would judge from the richness of the tea, with no immediate need of money.  Over two years, however, had passed since the catastrophe to Cohoon’s, and Cohoon’s had in no way recovered therefrom.  Yet money had been regularly found for the household.  The manner of its finding was soon to assume importance in the careers of Priam and Alice.  But, ere that moment, an astonishing and vivid experience happened to them.  One might have supposed that, in the life of Priam Farll at least, enough of the astonishing and the vivid had already happened.  Nevertheless, what had already happened was as customary and unexciting as addressing envelopes, compared to the next event.

The next event began at the instant when Alice was sticking the long fork into a round of bread.  There was a knock at the front door, a knock formidable and reverberating, the knock of fate, perhaps, but fate disguised as a coalheaver.

Alice answered it.  She always answered knocks; Priam never.  She shielded him from every rough or unexpected contact, just as his valet used to do.  The gas in the hall was not lighted, and so she stopped to light it, darkness having fallen.  Then she opened the door, and saw, in the gloom, a short, thin woman standing on the step, a woman of advanced middle-age, dressed with a kind of shabby neatness.  It seemed impossible that so frail and unimportant a creature could have made such a noise on the door.

“Is this Mr. Henry Leek’s?” asked the visitor, in a dissatisfied, rather weary tone.

“Yes,” said Alice.  Which was not quite true.  ‘This’ was assuredly hers, rather than her husband’s.

“Oh!” said the woman, glancing behind her; and entered nervously, without invitation.

At the same moment three male figures sprang, or rushed, out of the strip of front garden, and followed the woman into the hall, lunging up against Alice, and breathing loudly.  One of the trio was a strong, heavy-faced heavy-handed, louring man of some thirty years (it seemed probable that he was the knocker), and the others were curates, with the proper physical attributes of curates; that is to say, they were of ascetic habit and clean-shaven and had ingenuous eyes.

The hall now appeared like the antechamber of a May-meeting, and as Alice had never seen it so peopled before, she vented a natural exclamation of surprise.

“Yes,” said one of the curates, fiercely.  “You may say ‘Lord,’ but we were determined to get in, and in we have got.  John, shut the door.  Mother, don’t put yourself about.”

John, being the heavy-faced and heavy-handed man, shut the door.

“Where is Mr. Henry Leek?” demanded the other curate.

Now Priam, whose curiosity had been excusably excited by the unusual sounds in the hall, was peeping through a chink of the sitting-room door, and the elderly woman caught the glint of his eyes.  She pushed open the door, and, after a few seconds’ inspection of him, said: