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Mr. Bensington sat at his window on a hard horse-hair-stuffed arm-chair,
covered by a grubby antimacassar that had given a touch of social
distinction to the Skinners' sitting-room for many years. His
unaccustomed rifle rested on the sill, and his spectacles anon watched
the dark bulk of the dead rat in the thickening twilight, anon wandered
about him in curious meditation. There was a faint smell of paraffin
without, for one of the casks leaked, and it mingled with a less
unpleasant odour arising from the hacked and crushed creeper.
Within, when he turned his head, a blend of faint domestic scents, beer,
cheese, rotten apples, and old boots as the leading motifs, was full
of reminiscences of the vanished Skinners. He regarded the dim room for
a space. The furniture had been greatly disordered--perhaps by some
inquisitive rat--but a coat upon a clothes-peg on the door, a razor and
some dirty scraps of paper, and a piece of soap that had hardened
through years of disuse into a horny cube, were redolent of Skinner's
distinctive personality. It came to Bensington's mind with a complete
novelty of realisation that in all probability the man had been killed
and eaten, at least in part, by the monster that now lay dead there in
the darkling.
To think of all that a harmless-looking discovery in chemistry may lead
to!
Here he was in homely England and yet in infinite danger, sitting out
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