To his surprise, all was still there, and though a lamp burned in the little stone lodge, it was certainly untenanted.

The gate was ajar; there was no fear of the tenants flitting out bodily for a night's excursion.
Claudius was dying for refreshment and he was not fastidious about intruding.

A man who has traversed the underlying catacombs need not be delicate about taking a nip of spirits or a hunch of bread.

Both were in a cupboard in the little domicile, supplied with a porter's chair so ample as to be the watcher's bed, and a stove where a fire merrily burned, crackling with billets of pine wood.
The disappearance was the more strange, as on a framed placard, at the base of which was a row of brazen knobs, there was a formal injunction for the gatewarder never to go away without his place being taken by another "from sunset to sunrise and an hour after!" Claudius knew what those knobs and the instructions portended in this adjunct to the charnel house.

The public mortuary was at the other end of the wires from those bells; the custom was to attach them to the dead so that, if their slumbers were not that knowing no waking and they stirred even so little as a finger, the electric transmitter which they agitated would sound the appeal.
And now the watcher, on whom perhaps depended the duration of a worthier life than his, had paltered with his trust, while drinking at the beer-house or chattering with a sweetheart, the bell might ring unheeded, and the unhappy creature, falling with the last tremor of vitality, to obtain a desperate succor, would become indeed the corpse like which he had been laid out in the morgue.
Claudius smiled grimly and sadly.