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Just the scent of camphor, and dust-motes in a sunbeam through the fanlight over the door. The little old house! A mausoleum! And, turning on his heel, he went out, and caught his train. "His foot's upon his native heath, His name's Val Dartie."
Rising ramp after ramp by broad treads and low risers, it leads first to a broad landing in front lighted by the Palladian window over the entrance, and thence upward and around to a gallery across the opposite wall, where a broad double doorway with delightful fanlight above leads into the main hall of the second floor. To the right a narrow staircase rises to the belfry.
It was already a quarter past nine, but no one was as yet in the connecting room the fanlight next door had been dark as he passed. His flashlight swept about him, located the connecting door and went out. He moved to the door, tried it, and found it locked. Again the little steel instrument came into play, released the lock, and Jimmie Dale opened the door. Again the flashlight winked.
It had the staid and comfortable stamp of the Georgian period, with its big square windows, and the unique fanlight over the door. Directly opposite the entrance, across the strip of paved quay, was a sort of a water-gate leading down to the sedgy shore of the Thames a flight of stone steps, cut out of the masonry, from the foot of which it was possible to take boat at high tide.
In the light of a street lamp we read "Laburnum Villa" upon the gate-post of one of them. The occupants had evidently retired to rest, for all was dark save for a fanlight over the hall door, which shed a single blurred circle on to the garden path. The wooden fence which separated the grounds from the road threw a dense black shadow upon the inner side, and here it was that we crouched.
"There's a lot of metal in it," he objects. "What?" I purred. "But, anyhow, whatever you can't see in that, you can, I suppose, see that it is different from anything in your world it lacks the kindly humanity of a red-brick Queen Anne villa residence, with its gables and bulges, and bow windows, and its stained glass fanlight, and so forth.
She knew that it possessed a certain charm of aspect, from the fanlight over the entrance door to the big quaint kitchen with its uneven floor dark with time. It was when one came to details that the charm sordidly vanished at least to the critical vision of the young housewife. Like the worn white paint upon its exterior, the walls and floors within called loudly for a restoring hand.
Our feet creaked and crackled over the bare planking, and my outstretched hand touched a wall from which the paper was hanging in ribbons. Holmes's cold, thin fingers closed round my wrist and led me forward down a long hall, until I dimly saw the murky fanlight over the door.
When we reached our house, I slipped my hand from his arm, and ran up the steps, turning back with my hand on the door-knob to say, "Good-night." The lamp in the hall shone through the fanlight upon his face; it looked intelligent with pain. I skipped down the steps. "Please open the door, Joe."
We went upstairs with her, and she knocked at Mr. Foggatt's door. There was no reply. Through the ventilating fanlight over the door it could be seen that there were lights within, a sign, Mrs. Clayton maintained, that Mr. Foggatt was not out. We knocked again, much more loudly, and called, but still ineffectually.
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