water. Hunter noiselessly opened the gate and crept quietly along the
grass border of the garden path. His idea was to reach the front
door without being seen, so that Linden could not give notice of his
approach to those within. In this he succeeded and passed silently
into the house. He did not speak to Linden; to do so would have
proclaimed his presence to the rest. He crawled stealthily over the
house but was disappointed in his quest, for everyone he saw was hard
at work. Upstairs he noticed that the door of one of the rooms was
closed.

Old Joe Philpot had been working in this room all day, washing off the
old whitewash from the ceiling and removing the old papers from the
walls with a broad bladed, square topped knife called a stripper.
Although it was only a small room, Joe had had to tear into the work
pretty hard all the time, for the ceiling seemed to have had two or
three coats of whitewash without ever having been washed off, and
there were several thicknesses of paper on the walls. The difficulty
of removing these papers was increased by the fact that there was a
dado which had been varnished. In order to get this off it had been
necessary to soak it several times with strong soda water, and
although Joe was as careful as possible he had not been able to avoid
getting some of this stuff on his fingers. The result was that his
nails were all burnt and discoloured and the flesh round them cracked
and bleeding. However, he had got it all off at last, and he was not
sorry, for his right arm and shoulder were aching from the prolonged
strain and in the palm of the right hand there was a blister as large
as a shilling, caused by the handle of the stripping knife.

All the old paper being off, Joe washed down the walls with water, and
having swept the paper into a heap in the middle of the floor, he