necessity of paying his rent a little before it was due.

He lodged in a dark street in Westminster, in a spacious old house, very
warm, being wainscoted from top to bottom, and furnished with no undue
abundance of windows, and those fitted with thick sashes and small
panes.

This house was, as the bills upon the windows testified, offered to be
sold or let. But no one seemed to care to look at it.

A thin matron, in rusty black silk, very taciturn, with large, steady,
alarmed eyes, that seemed to look in your face, to read what you might
have seen in the dark rooms and passages through which you had passed,
was in charge of it, with a solitary "maid-of-all-work" under her
command. My poor friend had taken lodgings in this house, on account of
their extraordinary cheapness. He had occupied them for nearly a year
without the slightest disturbance, and was the only tenant, under rent,
in the house. He had two rooms; a sitting-room and a bed-room with a
closet opening from it, in which he kept his books and papers locked up.
He had gone to his bed, having also locked the outer door. Unable to
sleep, he had lighted a candle, and after having read for a time, had
laid the book beside him. He heard the old clock at the stairhead strike
one; and very shortly after, to his alarm, he saw the closet-door, which
he thought he had locked, open stealthily, and a slight dark man,
particularly sinister, and somewhere about fifty, dressed in mourning of
a very antique fashion, such a suit as we see in Hogarth, entered the
room on tip-toe. He was followed by an elder man, stout, and blotched
with scurvy, and whose features, fixed as a corpse's, were stamped with
dreadful force with a character of sensuality and villany.