"Go round and see it, I think," said Mr. Kirby, "and you come with me."
Mr. Postlethwaite was somewhat mollified. His lawyer was taking a little trouble. It was as it should be.
They took a taxi and found themselves, twenty minutes or so outside the town, passing the deserted lodge and the scarecrow, mouldy gate, and drawing up before the stone steps of that deserted, unfurnished, ramshackle house which had been Professor Higginson's purgatory for three long days. The two men went in together, and Mr. Kirby noted that old Postlethwaite had been accurate enough. There were the dirty windows, the uncarpeted staircase, the bench and table in the right-hand ground-floor room which were the sole furniture of the lower part of the house; and there, when they came upstairs to it, was the wreckage in the studio—the broken skylight, the scraps of food, the wooden chairs lying smashed on the floor.
"Where did you find the third chair? Funny sort of house. Silly of you not to mend it!" he said, with a return to his habit of irrelevance.
"Told you!" said Mr. Postlethwaite. "Outside on the ground. Lot of sheets tied to it like the tail of a kite."
