When it flared, he raised it above his head and strode on before her, grim shadows falling round him, following him like noiseless ghosts.

Sally kept close behind.
"I used to live on the top floor," he said, "until the day before yesterday; I've moved down now to the first.

There's not so much difference in the rooms, but those four flights of stairs in this sort of light were a bit too much." He thought of the last woman who had climbed the stairs with him.

All she had said that evening, the first day he had met Sally, trooped through his mind in slow and vivid procession.

He compared her life with that of Sally's, the ghastly hollowness of it in contrast with this child's simplicity of faith.
The picture was an ugly one.