When next they came to close quarters with the four-wheeler it was leisurely driving away empty from a small semi-detached house which was separated from the road by a tiny garden.  They ran into the garden.  The one thing that flourished in it was a ‘To Let’ notice.  The front-door, shaded by unpruned trees, was shut, and there were cobwebs on the handle, as Hugo plainly saw when he struck a match.  They hastened round to the back of the house, where was a larger garden.  A French window gave access to the house.  This French window yielded at once to a firm push.  The three men searched the ground-floor and found nothing.  They then ascended the stairs and equally found nothing.  The house must have been empty for many months.  From the first-floor window at the back Hugo gazed out, baffled.  Far off he could see lights of houses, but the foreground was all darkness and mystery.

‘What lies between us and those lights?’ he asked.

‘It must be Brompton Cemetery, sir,’ said Albert.  ’The garden gives on the cemetery, I expect.’

As if suddenly possessed by a demon, Hugo flew out of the room, down the stairs, into the garden.  At the extremity of the garden was a brick wall, and against the wall were two extremely convenient barrels; they might have been placed there specially for the occasion.  In an instant he was in the cemetery.

* * * * *

The remainder of the adventure survives in Hugo’s memory like a sort of night-picture in which all the minor details of life are lost in large, vague glooms, and only the central figures of the composition emerge clearly, in a sharp and striking brilliance, against the mysterious background.

He knew himself in the cemetery, and immediately, by a tremendous effort of the brain, he had arranged his knowledge of the place and decided exactly where he was.  Instinctively he ran by side-alleys till he came to the broad central way which cuts this vast field of the dead north and south.  He hurried northwards, and when he had gone about a hundred and fifty yards he turned to the left, and then went north again.

‘It’s here,’ he muttered.

He was in the middle of that strange and sinister city within a city, that flat expanse of silence, decay, and putrefaction which is surrounded on every side by the pulsating arteries of London.  The living visit the dead during the day, but at night the dead are left to themselves, and the very flowers which embroider their dissolution close up and forget them.  Round about him everywhere trees and shrubs moved restlessly and plaintively in the night breeze; the angular grave-stones raised their kindly lies in the darkness.  A few stars flickered in the sky; no moon.  And miles off, so it seemed, north, south, east, and west, the yellow lights of human habitations, the lights of warm rooms where living people were so engaged in the business of being alive that they actually forgot death—­these lights winked to each other across the waste and desolation of a hundred thousand tombs.