Page:William Le Queux - The Temptress.djvu/78

63

, frowsy room, with furniture old and rickety, a ceiling blackened, and a faded carpet full of holes.

Its two occupants, dark, sallow-looking foreigners in shabby-genteel attire, sat conversing seriously in French, between frequent whiffs of caporal cigarettes of the most rank description.

Bateman's Buildings, Soho—where, on the second floor of one of the houses, this apartment was situated—is a thoroughfare but little known, even to dwellers in the immediate vicinity. The wandering Londoner, whose peregrinations take him into the foreign quarter, might pass a dozen times between Frith and Greek Streets without discovering its existence. Indeed, his search will not be rewarded until he pauses half-way down Bateman Street and turns up a narrow and exceedingly uninviting passage between a marine-store dealer's and the shop of a small vendor of vegetables and coals. He will then find himself at Bateman's Buildings, a short, paved court, lined on each side by grimy, squalid-looking houses, the court itself forming the playground of a hundred or so spirited juveniles of the unwashed class.

It is altogether a very undesirable place of abode. The houses, in comparison with those of some neigh-