Front matter (continued 2)

As though this offered food for reflection, he descended by means of the main stairway to the lower floor; sat on the doorsteps a while. He mused—gazing out into the green-colored, sweet-scented June afternoon. After an interval he arose and repeated his voyage of exploration.

Again he was struck with the friendly quality of the old place. That physical dampness, which long vacant houses hold in solution, seemed entirely to have disappeared before the flood of June sunshine. The spiritual chill, which always accompanies it—that sinister quality so connotative of congregations of evil spirits—he again observed was completely lacking. As he emerged from one room to enter another, it seemed to him that the one back of him filled with—companionship, he described it to himself. As he continued his explorations, it seemed to him that the room he was about to enter would offer him not ghostly but human welcome. That human welcome did not come, of course. Instead, there surged upon him the rich odors of the lilacs and syringas; the staccato greetings of the birds.

After a while he went downstairs again. Sitting in the front doorway, he fell into a rich revery.

This was where Lutetia Murray wrote the books which had so intrigued his boyish fancy. Mentally he ran over the list: The Sport of the Goddesses, The Weary Time, Mary Towle, Old Age, Intervals, With Pitfall and with Gin, Cynthia Ware— Details came up before his mental vision which he had entirely forgotten and now only half remembered; dramatic moments; descriptive passages; conversational interludes; scenes; epigrams.... He tried to imagine Lutetia Murray at Blue Meadows. The picture which, in college, he had cut from a book-house catalogue, flashed before him; he had found it among his papers. The figure was standing.... He had looked at it only yesterday, but his masculine observation retained no details of the gown except that it left her neck and arms bare. The face was in profile. The curling hair rose to a high mass on her head. The delicate features were mignonne, except for the delicious, warm, lusciously cut mouth— Was she blonde or brunet he wondered. She died at forty-five. To David Lindsay at twenty-two, forty-five had seemed a respectable old age. To David Lindsay at twenty-eight, it seemed almost young. She was dead, of course, when he began to read her. Oh, if he could only have met her! It was a great pity that she had died so young. Her work—he had made a point of this in his thesis—had already swung from an erratic, highly colored first period into a more balanced, carefully characterized second period; was just emerging into a third period that was the union of these two; big and rounded and satisfying. But death had cut that development short. In the last four years Lindsay had seen a great deal of death and often in atrocious form. He had long ago concluded that he had thought on the end of man all the thoughts that were in him. But now, sitting in the scented warmth of Lutetia’s trellised doorway, he found that there were still other thoughts which he could think.

The runabout chugged up the road presently. “Ben waiting long?” the freckled Dick asked with a cheery shamelessness.

“No, I’ve been looking the house over. Wonderful old place, isn’t it?”

“Don’t care much for it myself,” Dick answered. “I don’t like anything old—old houses or that old truck the summer folks are always buying. Things can’t be too new or up-to-date for me.”

Lindsay did not appear at first to hear this; he was still bemused from the experiences of the afternoon. But as they approached the Arms, he emerged from his daze with a belated reply. “Well, I suppose a lot of people feel the way you do,” he remarked vaguely. “Mr. Hyde tells me that the Murray place hasn’t been let for fifteen years. I expect the rest of the people around here don’t like old houses.”

“Oh, that ain’t the reason the Murray house hasn’t let,” Dick explained with the scorn of rustic omniscience. “They say it’s haunted.”

“What rent do they ask for the Murray house?” Lindsay asked Hyde that evening.

Hyde scratched the back of his head. His face contracted with that mental agony which afflicts the Yankee when an exact statement is demanded of him. “Well, I shouldn’t be surprised if you could get it for two hundred dollars the season,” he finally brought out.

Lindsay considered, but apparently not Hyde’s answer; for presently he came out with a different question. “Why do they say it’s haunted?”

Hyde emitted a short contemptuous laugh. “Did you ever hear of any house in the country that’s been empty for a number of years that worn’t considered haunted?”

“No,” Lindsay admitted. “I am disappointed, though. I had hoped you would be able to tell me about the ghost.”

“Well, I can’t,” Hyde asserted scornfully, “nor nobody else neither.”

The two men smoked in silence.

After a while Lindsay made the motions preliminary to rising. He knocked the ashes out of his pipe; put his pipe in his pocket; withdrew his feet from their comfortable elevation on the piazza rail. Finally he assembled his full height on the floor, but not without a prolonged stretching movement. “Well,” he said, halfway through the yawn, “I guess you can tell that brother of yours that I’m going to hire the Murray house for the season.”

Hyde was equally if not more dégagé. He did not move; nor did he change his expression. “All right,” he commented without enthusiasm, “I’ll let him know. How soon would you like to go in, say?”

“As soon as I can buy a bed.” Lindsay disappeared through the doorway.

Two days later Lindsay found himself comfortably settled at Blue Meadows. Upstairs—he had of course chosen Lutetia’s room—was a cot and a bureau of soft wood. Downstairs was a limited assortment of cheap china; cheaper cutlery; the meagerest possible cooking equipment.

But there was an atmosphere given to Lindsay’s room by Lutetia’s own picture hanging above the bureau. And another to the living-room by Lutetia’s own works—a miscellaneous collection of ugly-proportioned, ugly-colored, late-nineteenth-century volumes—ranged on the broad shelf above the fireplace; by Lindsay’s writing materials scattered over the refectory table. Economical as he had been inside, he had exploded into extravagance outside. A Gloucester hammock swung at the back. A collection of garden materials which included a scythe, a spade, a sickle, a lawn-mower, and a hose filled one corner of the barn. Already—his back still complained of the process—he had cut the spacious lawn.

He was at one and the same time sanely placid and wildly happy.

Every morning he awoke with the sun and the birds. Adapting himself with an instant spiritual content to the fact that he was no longer in France and would not have to fly, he turned over to take another nap. An hour or two later, he was up and eating his self-prepared breakfast. The rest of the day was reading Lutetia; musing on Lutetia; “scything” or “sickling,” as he called it in his letters to Spink, in the garden; reflecting on Lutetia; exploring the neighborhood on foot; meditating on Lutetia; reading and rereading the mass of Spink’s data on Lutetia; hosing the garden; making notes on Spink’s data on Lutetia and thinking of his notes on Spink’s data on Lutetia. He awoke in the morning with Lutetia on his mind. He fell asleep at night with Lutetia in his heart. He had come to realize that Lutetia, the author, was even better than he had supposed her. His college thesis had described her merely as the Mrs. Gaskell of New England. Now, mentally, he promoted her to its Jane Austen. His youth had risen to the lure of her color and fecundity, but his youngness had not realized how rich she was in humor; how wise; what a tenderness for people informed her careful, realistic detail. It was a triumph to find her even better than the flattering dictum of his boyish judgment.

Exploring Lutetia’s domain gave results only second in satisfaction to exploring Lutetia’s mind. It was obvious at his first inspection that the garden had once stretched contrasting glories of color and perfume. A careful study from the windows was even more productive than a close survey. There, definitely, he could trace the remains of flower-plots; pleached paths; low hedges and lichened rocks. Resurrecting that garden would be an integral part of the joy of resurrecting Lutetia. By this time also, he had explored the barn. There, a big roomy lower floor sustained only part of a broken stairway. The equally roomy upper floor seemed, from such glimpses as he could get below, to be piled with rubbish. Some day, he promised himself, he would clean it out. Beyond, and to the right of the barn, bounded by the stone wall, scrambled a miniature wilderness. That wilderness evaded every effort of exploration. Only an axe could clear a trail there. Another day he would tackle the wilderness. But in the meantime he would devote himself to garden and lawn; in the meantime also loaf and invite his soul. After all, that was his main reason for coming to Quinanog. Whenever he thought of this, he took immediately to the Gloucester hammock.

Every morning he walked briskly over the long mile of road, shaded with wine-glass elms, slashed with vistas of pasture, pond, and brook which lay between Blue Meadows and the Quinanog post-office. When he had inquired for his mail—usually he had none—he strolled over to the general store and made his few simple purchases. He had followed this routine for ten days before it occurred to him that he had not seen a newspaper since he settled himself at Blue Meadows. “I’ll let it go that way, I guess,” he said to himself. He noticed at first with a little embarrassment and then with amusement that the groups in the post-office waiting for mail, the customers at the general store, were all quietly watching him. And one morning this floated to him from behind a pile of cracker boxes:

“He’s the nut that’s taken the Murray place. Lives all alone—batching it. Some sort of highbrow.”

Gradually, however, he made acquaintance. Silas Turner, who owned the next farm to Blue Meadows, offered him a ride one morning on the road. Out of a vague conversation on the weather and real estate, Mr. Turner dropped one interesting fact. He had known Lutetia Murray. This revelation kept Lindsay chatting for half an hour while Mr. Turner spilled a mass of uncorrelated details. Such as Miss Murray’s neighborliness; the time her cow ran away and Art Curtis brought it back; how Miss Murray admired Mis’ Turner’s beach plum jelly so much that Mis’ Turner always made some extra just for her. As they parted he let fall dispassionately: “She was a mighty handsome woman. Fine figure!” He added, still dispassionately but with an effect somehow of enthusiastic conviction, “She kept her looks to the last day of her life.”

Useless, all this, for a biography, Lindsay reflected; but it gave him an idea. He bought that day a second-hand bicycle at the Quinanog garage; and thereafter, when the devil of restlessness stirred in his young muscles, he trundled about the countryside in search of those families mentioned in Lutetia’s letters. Some were utterly gone from Quinanog, some were not affording, and some added useful detail; as when old Mrs. Apperson produced a dozen letters written from Europe during Lutetia’s first trip abroad. “I’d have admired to go to Europe, but it never came so’s I could,” said Mrs. Apperson. “When Miss Murray went, she wrote me from every city, telling me all about it. I read ’em over a lot—makes me feel as though I’d been there too. And every Decoration Day,” she added inconsequently, “I put a bunch of heliotrope on her grave. She just loved the smell of heliotrope.”

Somehow, Lindsay had never even thought of Lutetia’s grave. The next day he made that pilgrimage. The graveyard lay near the town center, overtopped by the pine-covered hill which bore three austere white buildings—church, town-hall, and grange. The grave itself was in a patch of modern tombstones, surrounded by the flaking slabs of two centuries ago. The stone was featureless, ill-proportioned; the inscription recorded nothing but her name and the dates of her birth and death.

The note which most often came out of these wayside gossipings was a high one—of the gaiety and the brilliancy of the Blue Meadows hospitality. Apparently people were coming and going all the time; some distinguished; some undiscovered: but all with personality. When Lindsay returned from such a talk, the old house glowed like an opal—so full did it seem of the colors of those vivacious days.

But he was not quite content to be long away from his own fireside. The friendly atmosphere of the Murray house continued to exercise its enchanting sway. He always felt that one room became occupied the instant he left it, that the one he was about to enter was already occupied—and this feeling grew day by day, augmented. It brought him back to the house always with a sense of expectancy. “Lutetia’s house is my hotel-lobby, my movie, my theater, my grand opera, my cabaret,” he wrote Spink. “There’s a strange fascination about it—a fascination with an element of eternal promise.”

At times, when he entered the trellised doorway, he found himself expecting someone to come forward to greet him. It kept occurring to him that a neighbor had stopped to call, was waiting inside for him. Sometimes in the middle of the night he would drift slowly out of a delicious sleep to a sense, equally delicious, of being most gently and lovingly companioned in the room; sometimes in the morning he would wake up with a snap, as though the house were full of company. For a moment the whole place would seem brilliant and gay, and then—it was as though a bubble burst in the air—he was alone. “It’s almost as good,” he wrote Spink, “as though you were here yourself, you goggle-eyed hick, you!” Once or twice he caught himself talking aloud; addressing the empty air. He stifled this impulse, however. “People always have a tendency to get bughouse,” he explained to Spink, “when they live alone. I used to do that in your rooms. I’m going to try to keep sane as long as possible.”

Ten days increased rather than diminished this impression. By this time he had burned his thesis and was now making notes that were part the direct product of Spink’s data and part the byproduct of Lutetia’s own works. The syringas were beginning to run down; but the roses were coming out in great numbers. The hollyhocks had opened flares of color under the living-room window. The lawn was as close to plush as constant care could make it. The garden was not yet quite cleaned out. He was glad, for he liked working there. It was not a whit less friendly than the house. Indeed, he felt so companioned there that sometimes he looked up suddenly to see who was watching his efforts to resurrect a neglected rosebush; or to uproot a flourishing patch of poison ivy. The evenings were long, and as—consciously girlish and in quotation marks he wrote Spink—“lovely.” His big lamp made a spot of golden color in the shadowy long room. One northeaster, which lasted three days, gave him dark and damp excuse for three days of roaring fire. Much of that time he sat opposite the blazing logs in the big, rush-bottomed piazza chair which he had purchased, smoking and reading Lutetia. Now and then, he looked up at Lutetia’s picture, which he had finally brought down from his bedroom.

Perhaps it was the picture which made him feel more companioned here than anywhere in the house or out. The living-room was peculiarly rich with presence, so rich that he left it reluctantly at night and returned to it as quickly as possible in the morning; so rich that often he smiled, though why he could not have said; so rich that in the evening he often looked up suddenly from his book and stared into its shadowy length for a long, moveless—and breathlessly expectant—interval.

Indeed that sensation so concretely, so steadily, so persistently augmented that one evening—

He had been reading ever since dark; and it was getting late. Finally he arose; closed the door and windows. He came back to the table and stood leaning against it, idly whistling the Sambre et Meuse through his teeth, while he looked at Lutetia’s portrait.

He took up The Sport of the Goddesses just to look it over ... turned a page or two ... became immersed.... Suddenly ... he realized that he was not alone....

He was not alone. That was conclusive. That he suddenly and absolutely knew; though how he knew it he could not guess. His eyes stopped, in the midst of Lutetia’s single grim murder, fixed on the printed line. He could not move them along that line. He did not mind that. But he could not move them off the page. And he did mind that; for he wanted—most intensely wanted—to lift his gaze. After lifting it, he presently discovered, he would want to project it to the left. Whoever his visitor was, it sat at the left. That he knew, completely, absolutely, and conclusively; but again, how he knew it, he did not know.

An immeasurable interval passed.

He tried to raise his eyes. He could not accomplish it. The air grew thick; his hands, still holding the book, turned cold and hard as clamps of iron. His eyes smarted from their unwinking immobility. This was absurd. Breaking this deathly ossification was just a matter of will. He made himself turn a page. Five lines down he decided; he would look up. But he did not look up. He could not. He wanted to see ... but something stronger than desire and will withheld him. He read; turned another page. Five lines down....

Ah ... the paralysing chill was moving off.... In a moment ... he was going to be able.... In a moment....

He lifted his eyes.... He gazed steadily to the left....

IV

Before night Susannah had found a room which exactly suited her purpose. This was as much a matter of design as of luck. She had heard of the place before. It was a large building in the West Twenties which had formerly been the imposing parsonage of an imposing and very important church. The church had long ago gone the way of all old Manhattan buildings. But the parsonage, divided into an infinite number of cubby-hole rooms, had become a lodging-house. A lodging-house with a difference, however. For whereas in the ordinary establishment of this kind, one paid rent to a landlady who lived on the spot, here one paid it to an agent who came from somewhere, promptly every Monday morning, for the purpose of collection. It was a perfect hiding-place. You did not know your neighbor. Your neighbor did not know you. With due care, one could plan his life so that he met nobody.

Susannah, except for a choice of rooms, did not for an interval plan her life at all. She made that choice instantly, however. Of two rooms situated exactly opposite each other at the back of the second floor, she chose one because it overlooked a yard containing a tree. It was a tiny room, whitewashed; meagerly and nondescriptly furnished. But the door-frame and window-frame offered decoration. Following the ecclesiastical design of the whole house, they peaked into triangles of carved wood.

Susannah gave scant observation to any of these things. Once alone in her room, she locked the door. Then she removed two things from her suitcase—a nightgown and the miniature of Glorious Lutie. The latter she suspended by a thumbtack beside the mirror of her bureau. Then she undressed and went to bed. She slept fitfully all the rest of that day and all that night. Early in the morning she crept out, bought herself, at a Seventh Avenue delicatessen shop, a jar of milk and a loaf of bread. She lunched and dined in her room. She breakfasted next morning on the remains.

Her sleep was deep and dreamless; but in her waking moments her thoughts pursued the same treadmill.

“Glorious Lutie,” she began one of the wordless monologues which she was always addressing to the miniature, “I ought to have known long ago that they were a gang of crooks! Why don’t we trust our intuitions? I suppose it’s because our intuitions are not always right. I can’t quite go with anything so magic, so irrational as intuition! And then again I’m afraid I’m too logical. But I’m always having the same thing happen to me. Perhaps I’m talking with somebody I have met for the first time. Suddenly that person makes a statement. Instantly—it’s like a little hammer knocking on my mind—something inside me says: ‘That is a lie. He is lying deliberately and he knows he lies.’ Now you would think that I would trust that lead, that I would follow it implicitly. But do I? No! Never! I pay no more attention to it than as though it never happened. And generally my intuition is right. But always I find it out too late. Now that little hammer has been knocking its warnings about the Warner-Byan-O’Hearn bunch ever since I started to work for them. But I could not make myself pay any attention to it. I did not want to believe it, for one thing. And then of course the work was awfully interesting. I kept calling myself all kinds of names for thinking— And they were kind. I wouldn’t believe it. But my intuition kept telling me that Warner was a hypocrite. And as for Byan—”

Perhaps Susannah could not voice, even to Glorious Lutie, the thoughts that flooded her mind when she conjured up the image of Byan. For in her heart Susannah knew that Byan admired her overmuch, that he would have liked to flirt with her, that he had started— But Warner had called him off. The enigmatic phrase, which had come to her from Warner’s office and in Warner’s voice, recurred. “Keep off clients and office employ—” Susannah knew the end of it now—“employees” of course. Warner’s rule for his fellow crooks was that they must not flirt with clients or the office force. Again and again in her fitful wakefulness she saw Byan standing before her; slim, blade-like; his smartly cut suit adhering, as though pasted there, to the lithe lines of his active body. And then suddenly that revolver which came from—where? Byan was of course the most attractive of them all. That floating, pathetic smile revealed such white teeth! That deep look came from eyes so long-lashed! Warner with his pseudo-clergyman, pseudo-actor oratory, deep-voiced and vibrant, was the most obvious. O’Hearn, his lids perpetually down, except when they lifted swiftly to let his glance lick up detail, was the most mysterious. But Byan was the most attractive—

“Yes, Glorious Lutie, I was always receiving letters which started that little hammer of intuition knocking. I was always overhearing bits of conversation which started it; although often I could not understand a word. I was always trying to piece things together—wondering— Well, the next time I’ll know better. I’ve learned my lesson. But oh—think, think, think what I’ve helped to do. They robbed widows and orphans and all kinds of helpless people. Of course I didn’t know I was doing it. But that’s going to haunt me for a long, long time. I wish there were some way I could make up. I’ve come out of it safe. But they—oh, I mustn’t think of this. I mustn’t. I can’t stand it if I do. Oh, Glorious Lutie, believe me, my guardian angel was certainly on that job. Otherwise I don’t know what would have become of me. Are you my guardian angel, I wonder?”

When Susannah finally arose for good, she discovered, naturally enough, that she was hungry. She went out immediately and, in the nearest Child’s restaurant, ordered a dinner which she afterward described to Glorious Lutie as “magnanimously, munificently, magnificently masculine.” It consisted mainly of sirloin steak and boiled potatoes, “and I certainly ate my fill of them both.” Then she took a little aimless, circumscribed walk; returned to her room. She unpacked her tightly stratified suitcase; hung her clothes in her little closet; ranged her small articles in the bureau drawer. As though she were going to start clean in her new career, she bathed and washed her hair in the public bathroom on the second floor. Coming back into her room, she sat for a long time before the window while her dripping locks dried. She sat there through the dusk.

“After all, Glorious Lutie,” she reflected contentedly, “why do I ever live in anything bigger than a hall bedroom? All a girl needs is a bed, a bureau, one chair and a closet, and that is exactly what I’ve got. And for full measure they have thrown in all those ducky little backyards and a tree. I don’t expect you to believe it, but I tell you true. A tree in Manhattan. How do you suppose it got by the censor! And just now, if you please, a tiny new moon all tangled up in its branches. It’s trying its best to get out, but it can’t make it. I never saw a new moon struggle so hard. Honest, I can hear it pant for breath. It looks like a silver fish that tried to leap out of this window and got caught in a green net. I suppose your Glorious Susie must be thinking of annexing a job sometime, Glorious Lutie. Or else we’ll cease to eat. But for a few days I won’t, if you don’t mind; I’m fed up on jobs. And I’ve lost my taste for offices. No, I think I’ll take those few days off and do a rubberneck trip around Manhattan. I feel like looking on innocent objects that can’t speak or think. And for a time I don’t want to go any place where I’d be likely to see my friends of the Carbonado Mining Company. After a while the thought of them won’t bother me so. Probably by this time they have hired some other poor girl. Perhaps she won’t mind Mr. Cowler though. Anyway, I’m free of them.”

When Susannah awoke the next morning, which was the third of her occupancy of the little room, some of her normal vitality had flowed back, her spirits began to mount. She sang—she even whistled—as she bathed and dressed; and she indulged in no more than the usual number of exasperated exclamations over the uncoilableness of her freshly shampooed, sparkling hair. “Why do we launder our tresses, I ask you, Glorious Lutie?” she questioned once. “And oh, why didn’t I have regular gold hair like yours instead of this garnet mane? I look like—I look like—Azinnia! But oh, I ought never to complain when I reflect that I’ve escaped the curse of white eyelashes.”

A consideration first of the shimmery day outside, and next of the clothes hanging in her closet, deflected her attention from this grievance. She chose from her closet a salmon-colored linen gown, slightly faded to a delicate golden rose. It was a long, slim dress and it made as much as possible of every inch of Susannah’s long slimness. Moreover, it was notably successful in bringing out the blue of her brilliant eyes, the red of her brilliant hair, the contrasting white of her smooth warm skin. That face now so shone and smelled of soap that, the instant she caught sight of it in the glass, she pulled open the top drawer of her bureau and powdered it frantically.

“I always shine, Glorious Lutie, as though I had washed with brass polish. I don’t remember that you ever glistened. But I do remember that you always smelled as sweet as—roses, or new-mown hay, or heliotrope. I wonder what powder you did use? And it was a very foxy move on your part, to have yourself painted in just that soft swirl of blue tulle. You look as though you were rising from a cloud. I wonder what your dresses were like? I seem to remember pale blues and pinks; very delicate yellows and the most silvery grays. It seems to me that tulle and tarlatan and maline were your dope. Do you think, Glorious Lutie, when I reach your age, I shall be as good-looking as you?”

Glorious Lutie, with that reticence which distinguishes the inhabitants of portraits, made no answer. But an observer might have said that the young face, staring alternately at the mirror and at the miniature, would some day mature to a face very like the one which stared back at it from the gold frame. Both were blonde. But where Glorious Lutie’s eyes were a misty brown-lashed azure, Glorious Susie’s were a spirited dark-lashed turquoise. Glorious Lutie’s hair was like a golden crown, beautifully carved and burnished. Glorious Susie’s turbulent mane was red, and it made a rumpled, coppery bunch in her neck. However, family resemblances peered from every angle of the two faces, although differences of temperament made sharp contrast of their expressions. Glorious Lutie was all soft, dreamy tenderness; Susannah, all spirit, active charm, resolution.

Susannah spent three days—almost carefree—of of what she described to the miniature as “touristing.” She had very little time to converse with Glorious Lutie; for the little room saw her only at morning and night. But she gave her confidante a detailed account of the day’s adventures. “It was the Bronx Zoo this morning, Glorious Lutie,” she would say. “Have you ever noticed how satisfactory little beasties are? They don’t lay traps for you and try to put you in a tortured position that you can’t wriggle out of?” Though her question was humorous in spirit, Susannah’s eyes grew black, as with a sudden terror. “No, we lay traps for them. I guess I’ve never before even tried to guess what it means to be trapped?” Or, “It was the Art Museum this afternoon, Glorious Lutie. I’ve looked at everything from a pretty nearly life-size replica of the Parthenon to a needle used by a little Egyptian girl ten million years ago. I’m so full of information and dope and facts that, if an autopsy were to be held over me at this moment, it would be found that my brain had turned into an Encyclopædia Britannica. In fact, I will modestly admit that I know everything.” Or, “It was the Aquarium this morning, Glorious Lutie. Why didn’t you tell me that fish were interesting? I’ve always hated a fish. They won’t roll over or jump through for you and practically none of them bark or sing—or anything. I have always thought of them only as something you eat unwillingly on Fridays. But some of them are really beautiful; and interesting. I stayed there three hours; and I suppose if it hadn’t been for the horrid stenchy smell I’d be there yet.”

But in spite of these vivacious, wordless monologues, her spirits were a long time rising to their normal height. The frightened look had not completely left her eyes; and often on her long, lonely walks, she would stop short suddenly, trembling like a spirited horse, as though some inner consideration harassed her. Then she would take up her walk at a frantic pace. Ultimately, however, she succeeded in leaving those terrifying considerations behind. And inevitably in the end, the resilience of youth conquered. The day came when Susannah leaped out of bed as lightly as though it were her first morning in New York.

“Glorious Lutie,” began her ante-breakfast address, “we are not a millionairess; ergo, today we buy all the morning papers and read them at breakfast in order to hunt for a job via the ads. And perhaps the next time your Glorious Susie begins to earn money, you might advise her to save a little against an unexpected situation. Of course I shouldn’t have squandered my money the way I did. But I never had had so much before in my life—and oh, the joy of having cut-steel buckles and a perfectly beautiful raincoat—and my first set of furs—and perfumery and everything.”

The advertising columns were not, she found (and attributed it to the return of so many men from France), very fecund. Each newspaper offered only from two to six chances worth considering. One, which appeared in all of them, seemed to afford the best opening. It read:

“Wanted: A stenographer, lady-like appearance and address, with some executive experience. Steady job and quick advancement to right woman. Apply between 9 and 11, room 1009, Carman Building.”

“I am requested to apply for this spectacular job at the office itself, Glorious Lutie,” she confided on her return to her room, “and I’m going out immediately after it. It’s a romantic thing, getting a job through an advertisement. I hope I float up to the forty-sixth floor of a skyscraper, sail into a suite of offices which fill the entire top story; all Turkish rugs on the highly polished floor; all expensive paintings on the delicately tinted walls; all cut flowers with yard-long stems in the finely cut crystal vases. I should like to find there a new employer; tall, young, handsome, and dark. Dark he must be, Glorious Lutie. I cannot marry a blond; our children would be albinos. He would address me thus: ‘Most Beauteous Blonde—you arrive at a moment when we are so much in need of a secretary that if you don’t immediately seat yourself at yon machine, we shall go out of business. Your salary is one hundred dollars a week. This exquisite rose-lined boudoir is for your private use. You will find a bunch of fresh violets on your desk every morning. May I offer you my Rolls-Royce to bring you back and forth to work? And,’ having fallen in love with me instantly, ‘how soon may I ask you to marry me?’”

Susannah took the Subway to Wall Street; walked through that busy city-cañon to the Carman Building. She strode into the elevator, almost empty in the hour which followed the morning rush; started to emerge, as directed by the elevator-man, at the tenth floor. But she did not emerge. Instead, her face as white as paper, she leaped back into the elevator; ascended with it to the top floor; descended with it; hurriedly left the building.

That first casual glance down the corridor had given her a glimpse of H. Withington Warner sauntering slowly away from the elevator.

“Say, Eloise,” she said late that afternoon over the telephone to the friend she had made at the Dorothy Dorr Home. “When can I see you?... Yes.... No.... Well, you see I’m out of a job at present.... No, I can’t tell you about it. This is a rooming-house. There is no telephone in my room. I am telephoning from the hall. And so I’d rather wait until I see you. But in brief, I’m eating at Child’s, soda-fountains and even peanut stands. I’m really getting back my girlish figure. Only I think I’m going to be a regular O. Henry story. Headlines as follows: Beautiful Titian-haired (mark that Titian-haired, Eloise) Blonde Dead of Starvation. Drops Dead on Fifth Avenue. Too Proud to Beg. I hope that none of those wicked reporters will guess that my new shoes with the cut-steel buckles cost thirty-five dollars. All right! All right.... The ‘Attic’ at seven. I’ll be there promptly as usual and you’ll get there late as usual.... Oh yes, you will! Thanks awfully, Eloise. I feel just like going out to dinner.”

Eloise, living up to her promise, made so noble an effort that she was only ten minutes late. Then, as usual, she came dashing and sparkling into the room; a slim brown girl, much browner than usual, for her coat of seashore tan; with narrow topaz eyes and deep dimples; very smart in embroidered linen and summer furs. The Attic restaurant occupied the whole top floor of a very high, downtown West Side skyscraper. Its main business came at luncheon, so the girls sat almost alone in its long, cool quiet. They found a table in a little stall whose window overhung the gray, fog-swathed river which seamlessly joined gray fog-misted sky. A moon, opaque as a scarlet wafer, seemed to be pasted at a spot that could be either river or sky. The girls ordered their inconsequent dinner. They talked their inconsequent girl chatter. They drank each a glass of May wine.

Susannah had quite recovered her poise and her spirit. She described her new room with great detail. She suggested that Eloise, whom she invariably addressed as, “you pampered minion of millions, you!” should call on her in that scrubby hall bedroom. In fact, her narrative went from joke to joke in a vein so steadily and so augmentingly gay that, when Eloise had paid the bill and they sat dawdling over their coffee, suddenly she found herself on the verge of breaking her vow of secrecy, of relating the horrors of the last week.

“Eloise,” she began, “I’m going to tell you something that I don’t want you ever to—”

And then the words dried on her lips. Her tongue seemed to turn to wood. She paled. She froze. Her eyes set on—

O’Hearn was walking into the Attic.

He did not perceive that instant terror of petrification; for it happened he did not even glance in their direction. He walked, self-absorbed apparently, to the other end of the room. But his face—Susannah got it clearly—was stony too. It had the look somehow of a man about to perform a deed repugnant to him.

“What’s the matter, Sue?” Eloise asked in alarm. “You look awfully ill all of a sudden.”

“The fact is,” Susannah answered with instant composure, “I feel a little faint, Eloise. Do you mind if we go now? I really should like to have a little air.”

“Not at all,” Eloise answered. “Any time you say. Come on!”

They made rapidly for the elevator. Susannah did not glance back. But inwardly she thanked her guardian-angel for the fortuitous miracle by which intervening waiters formed a screen. Not until they had walked block after block, turning and twisting at her own suggestion, did Susannah feel safe.

“Oh, what was it you were going to tell me, Susannah,” Eloise interrupted suddenly, “just before we left the Attic?”

“I don’t seem to remember at this moment,” Susannah evaded. “Perhaps it will come to me later.”

Susannah did not sleep very well that night. But by morning she had recovered her poise. “Glorious Lutie,” she said wordlessly from her bed, “I think I’ll go seriously to the business of getting a job. It’ll take my mind off—things. I’m going to ignore that little rencontre of yesterday. Don’t you despair. The handsome young employer with his romantic eyes and movie-star eyelashes awaits me somewhere. And just as soon as we’re married, you shall be hung in a manner befitting your birth and station in a drawing-room as big as Central Park. I wish it weren’t so darn hot. Somehow too, I don’t feel so strong about answering ads in person as I did two days ago.”

On her way to breakfast she bought all the newspapers. She spent her morning answering advertisements by letter. She received no replies to this first batch; but she pursued the same course for three days.

“Glorious Lutie,” she addressed the miniature a few days later, “this is beginning to get serious. I am now almost within sight of the end bill in my wad. In point of fact I will not conceal from you that today I pawned my one and only jewel—my jade ring. You don’t know how naked I feel without it. It will keep us for—perhaps it will last three weeks. And after that— However, I don’t think we’ll either of us starve. You don’t take any sustenance and I take very little these days. I wish this weather would change. You are so cool living in that blue cloud, Glorious Lutie, that you don’t appreciate what it’s like when it’s ninety in the shade and still going up. I’m getting pretty sick of it. I guess,” she concluded, smiling, “I’ll make out a list of the friends I can appeal to in case of need.”

The idea seemed to raise her spirits. She sat down and turned to the unused memorandum portion of her diary. Her list ran something like this:

New York—

No. 1—First and foremost—Eloise, who, being an heiress and the owner of a check-book, never has any real cash and always borrows from me.

Providence—

No. 2—Barty Joyce—Always has money because he’s prudent—and the salt of the earth—

P.S. Eloise never pays the money back that she borrows from me—

“Will you tell me, Glorious Lutie, why I don’t fall in love with Barty and why he doesn’t fall in love with me? There’s something awfully out about me. I don’t think I’ve been in love more than six times; and the only serious one was the policeman on the beat who had a wife and five children.”

Providence again—

No. 3—The Coburns—nice, comfy, middle-aged folks; not rich; the best friends a girl could possibly have.

No. 4—

But here she yawned loudly and relinquished the whole proceeding.

That afternoon Susannah visited several employment agencies which dealt with office help. She answered all the inquiries that their questionnaires put to her; omitting any reference to the Carbonado Mining Company. It was late in the afternoon when she finished. She walked slowly homeward down the Avenue. Outside of her own door, she tried to decide whether she would go immediately to dinner or lie down first. A sudden fatigue forced decision in favor of a nap. She walked wearily up the first flight of stairs. Ahead, someone was ascending the second flight—a man. He turned down the hall. She followed. He stopped at the room opposite hers; fumbled unsuccessfully with the key. As she approached, she glanced casually in his direction.

It was Byan.

V

Dear Spink:

This is the kind of letter one never writes. But if you knew my mental chaos.... And I’ve got to tell somebody about the thing that I can speak about to nobody. If I don’t.... What do you suppose I’ve done? I’ve bought a house. Yep— I’m a property owner now. Of course you guess! Or do you guess? It’s the Murray place. I could just make it and have enough left over for a year or two or three. But after that, Spink, I’m going to work because I’ll have to.

I suppose you’re wondering why I did it. You’re not puzzled half as much as I am; although in one way I know exactly why I did it. Perhaps I didn’t do it at all. Anyway, I didn’t do it of my own volition. Somebody made me. I’m going to tell you about that presently.

Yes, it’s all mine: beautiful old square-roomed house with its carved panelings and its generous Colonial fireplaces; its slender doors and amusing door-latches; an upstairs of ample bedrooms; an old garret with slave quarters; the downstairs with that little, charmingly incongruous, galleried, mid-Victorian addition; barn; lawn; flower-garden. And how beautiful I’m making that flower-garden you’ll never suspect till you see it. But you won’t see it for quite a while—I withdraw all my invitations to visit me. I don’t want you now, Spink; although I never wanted you so much in my life. I’ll want you later, I think. Of course it isn’t from you personally—you beetle-eyed old scout—that I’m withdrawing my invitation; it’s from any flesh-and-blood being. If you had an astral self— I don’t want anybody. I never wanted to be alone so much in my life. In a moment I’m going to tell you why.

And the wine-glass elms are mine; and the lilacs and syringas and the smoke-bush and the hollyhocks; and all the things I’ve planted; my Canterbury bells (if they come up); my deep, rich dahlias and my flame-colored phlox (if ditto). All mine! Gee, Spink, I never felt so rich in my life, because what I’ve enumerated isn’t twenty-five per cent of what I own. In a minute I’m going to tell you what the remaining seventy-five per cent is.

This place is full of birds and bees. I watch them from the house. Spink, we flying-men are boobs. Have you ever watched a bee fly? I spend hours, it seems to me, just studying them—trying to crab their act. And the other day there was an air-fight just over my roof. A chicken-hawk attacked by the whole bird population. It was a reproduction in miniature of a bombing-machine pursued by a dozen combat-planes. Spink, it was the best flying I’ve ever seen. You should have seen the sparrows keeping on his tail! The little birds relied on their quickness of attack, just as combat planes do. They attacked from all angles with such rapidity that the hawk could do nothing but run for his life. The little birds circled about, waiting for the moment to dive. A combat-plane dives; its machines go ta-ta-ta-ta-ta-ta and it turns off before the gunner can swing his guns over. The birds dived, picked furiously at his eyes while the hawk turned bewildered from one attack to another. But the little birds did something that planes can’t even attempt—they hovered over him almost motionless, waiting their moment to attack. Here I am talking of flying! Flying! Did I ever fly? When I got to New York, Greenwich Village seemed strange and unnatural, just a pasteboard dream. Pau—Avord—Verdun—were the only real things in my life. Now they’re shadows like Greenwich Village. Quinanog—the Murray place—and Lutetia—seem the only real things.

I’m going to tell you all about it in a moment. I sure am. The world seems to be full of landing-places, but for some reason I can’t land. Every time, I seem to come short on the field; or overshoot it. Perhaps it’s because I feel it ought not to be told— Perhaps it’s because I feel you won’t believe me—

But I’ve got to do it. So here goes!

Spink, the remaining seventy-five per cent that I own in this place is— This place is haunted. Not by a ghost, but by ghosts! There are not one of them, but four. Three I see occasionally. But one of the quartet—I see her all the time. She is Lutetia.

It began— Well, it all goes back to your rooms in New York. They’re haunted too, but you don’t know it, you wall-eyed old grave-digger, you. Not because you’re inept or unsensitive or anything stupid— It’s because there’s something they want to say to me—a message they want to give to me alone. But I can’t stop to go into that now. To return to your apartment, something ... used to come ... to my bed at night ... and bend over me ... I don’t know who it was or what it was, except that it was masculine. And how I knew that, I dunno.

It bothered me. One reason why I came down here was that I thought I was going crazy. Perhaps I have gone crazy. Anyway, if I have I like it. But here I am again! It’s as though the world slipped out from under me. I can fly on and on or climb, but it’s the coming down that baffles me. When I cut the motor off and the noise dies away, I feel sick and afraid; the bus seems to take its own head. Now for a landing—even if I do smash.

From the moment I entered this house, I felt as though there were others here. Not specifically, you understand. At first, it was only a sensation of warmth in the atmosphere that grew to a feeling of friendliness that deepened to a sense of companionship until— Well, I found myself in a mood of eternal expectancy. Something was going to happen but I didn’t know what or how or when.... Oh yes, in a way I knew what. I was going to see something. Some time—I felt dimly—when I should enter one of these rooms, so stark and yet so occupied, somebody would be there to greet me ... or some day turning a corner I should come suddenly on.... I did not dread that experience, Spink, I give you my word. I reveled in the expectancy of it. It was beautiful; it was rich. I wasn’t anything of what you call afraid. I wanted it to happen.

And it did happen.

One evening, as usual, I was reading Lutetia. I was sitting in my big chair beside the refectory table. Outside, it was a perfect night I remember; dark and still, and the stars so big that they seemed to spill out of the heavens. Inside, the lamp was bright. My eyes were on my book. Suddenly.... I was not alone. Don’t ask me how I knew it. Only take it from me that I did. I knew it all right. For—oh, Spink—(I’ve underlined that just like a girl) all in a flash I didn’t want—to look up. I wanted to go away from this place and to go with considerable speed, not glancing back. It was the worst sensation that I have ever known—worse even than a night raid. After a while something came back; courage I suppose you’d call it; a kind of calm, a poise. Anyway, I found that I was going to be able to look up presently and not mind it....

Of course I knew whom I was going to see....

I did look up. And I did see— It was Lutetia. Spink, if you try to say those things that people always say—that it was imagination, that I was overwrought, that my mind, moving all the day among the facts and realities of Lutetia’s life, suddenly projected a picture—I’ll never speak to you again. There she sat, her elbow resting on the arm of her chair, her chin in her hand, looking at me. I can’t tell you how long she stayed. But all the time she was there she looked at me. And all that time I looked at her. I don’t think, Spink, I have ever guessed how much eyes can say. Her eyes said so much that I think I could write the whole rest of the night about them. Except that I’m not quite sure what they said. It was all entreaty; oh, blazing, blasting, blinding entreaty.... Of that I am sure. But what she asked of me I haven’t the remotest idea. After a while ... something impelled me to look down at my book again. When I lifted my eyes Lutetia was gone.

That wasn’t all, Spink; for that night, or the next day— But I’m going to try to keep to a consecutive story. I didn’t go to bed immediately. I didn’t feel like sleeping. You can understand it was considerable of a shock. And very thrilling. Literally thrilling! I shook. It didn’t bother me an atom after it was over. I wasn’t the least afraid. But I vibrated for hours. I walked four or five miles—where, I don’t know. I must have passed the Fallows place, because I recall the scent of honeysuckle. But I assure you I seemed to be walking through the stars.... She is beautiful. I can’t tell you how beautiful because I have no colors to give you; no flesh to go by. Perhaps she is not beautiful, but lovely. What queer things words are! I have called females pretty and stunning and even fascinating and beautiful. I think I never called any woman lovely before. I’ve been that young. But I’m not as young as I was yesterday. I’m a century, an age, an æon older. I was obsessed though. If you believe it, when I went to bed, I had only one idea in my mind—a hope that she would come back soon.

She didn’t come back soon—at least not that night. But somebody else did....

In the middle of the night, I suddenly found myself, wide-eyed and clear-minded, sitting upright in bed and listening to something. I don’t know what I had heard, but I remember with perfect clearness—Spink, you tell me this is a dream and I’ll murder you—what I immediately did and what I subsequently saw. I got up quite calmly and lighted a candle. Then I opened the door.

Do you remember my writing you that the chamber, just back of the one I occupy, must have been the room of a child—Lutetia’s little niece? The door of that room, of course, leads into the hall as mine does. As I stood there, shading my candle from the draft, that door opened and there emerged from the room—what do you suppose?

A little girl.

I say—a little girl. She wasn’t, you understand, a real little girl. Nor was she a dead little girl. Instantly I knew that—just as instantly as I had known that Lutetia was dead. I mean, and I hope this phraseology is technically correct, that Lutetia, as I saw her, was the ghost of someone who had once lived. This little girl was an apparition; an appearance projected through space of some one who now lives. That or—oh, how difficult this is, Spink—a sloughed-off, astral self left in this old place; or—but I won’t go into that.

I stood there, as I said, shading my candle. The little girl closed her door with a meticulous care. Did I hear the ghost of a click? Perhaps my ear supplied that. By one hand she was dragging a big doll—one of those rag-dolls children have. I couldn’t tell you anything about Lutetia—except that she was lovely—ineffably lovely. But I can tell you all about this little girl. She was pigtailed and freckled. The pigtails were short, very thick, so tight that their ends snapped upwards, like hundreds of little-girl pigtails that I have seen. There was a row of tangled little ringlets on her forehead. She didn’t look at me. She didn’t know that I was there. She proceeded straight across the hall, busily stub-toeing her way like any freckled, pigtailed little girl, the doll dragging on the floor behind her, until she reached the garret stairs. She opened the garret door, closed it with the same meticulous care. The last I got was a little white glimpse of her down-dropped face, as she pulled the rag-doll’s leg away from the shutting door.

I waited there a long time—until my candle guttered to nothing. She did not return. I did not see her or anybody else again that night.

I went back to bed and fell immediately into a perfectly quiet, dreamless sleep. The next morning early, I went over to Hyde’s brother—his name is Corning—and bought this house. Perhaps you can tell me why I did it. I don’t exactly know myself; for of course I couldn’t afford it. I realized only that I could not—I simply and absolutely could not—let anybody else buy Lutetia.

You think, of course, that I’ve finished now, Spink. But that isn’t all. Not by a million Persian parasangs—all. She has come again. I mean Lutetia. For that matter, they both have come again. But I’ll try to tell my story categorically.

It was a night or two later; another dewy, placid large-starred night— Strange how this beautiful weather keeps up! I had been reading as usual; but my mind was as vacant as a glass bell from which you have exhausted the air. I was rereading, I remember, Lutetia’s The Sport of the Goddesses. Spink, how that woman could write! And.... Again I became aware that I wasn’t alone. Just as definitely, I knew that it was not Lutetia this time; nor even Little Pigtails. This time, and perhaps it’s because I’m getting used to this sort of thing, I had a sense of—not fear—but only of what I’ll call a spiritual diffidence.

Yet instantly I looked up.

He—it was a he this time—was standing in the doorway, which leads from this big living-room into the front hall. We were vis-à-vis—tête-à-tête one might say. He was looking straight at me and I—I assure you, Spink—I looked straight at him.

Spink, you have never heard of a jovial ghost, have you? I’m sure I haven’t. But this was or could have been a jovial ghost. He was big—not fat but ample—middle-aged, more than middle-aged. He wore an enormous beard cut square like the men in Assyrian mural tablets. Hair a little long. I assure you he was the handsomest old beggar that I have ever seen. He looked like a portrait by Titian. I got—it’s like holding a photographic negative up to the light and trying to get the figures on it—that he wore a sort of flowing gown; it made him stately. And one of those little round caps that conceal or protect baldness. I can’t describe him. How the devil can you describe a ghost? I mean an apparition. For he isn’t dead either—any more than the little girls is. He’s alive somewhere.

Well, our steady exchange of looks went on and on and on. If I could have said anything it would have been: “What do you want of me, you handsome old beggar?” What he would have said to me I don’t know; although he was trying with all his ghostly strength to put some message over. How he was trying! It was that effort that kept him from being what he was—is—jovial. God, how that gaze burned—tore—ate. It grew insupportable after a while—it was melting me to nothingness. I dropped my eyes. Suddenly I could lift them, for I knew he was gone. Somehow I had the feeling that a monstrous bomb had noiselessly exploded in the room. His going troubled me no more than his coming. I remember I said aloud: “I’m sorry I couldn’t get you, old top! Better luck next time!”

I got up from my chair after a few minutes to take my usual before-going-to-bed walk. I walked about the room; absent-mindedly putting things to rights—the way women do. My mind—and I suspect my eyes too—were still so full of him that when, on stepping outside, I came across another—I was conscious of some shock. Again not of fear, but of a terrific surprise.

Are you getting all this, Spink? Oh, of course you’re not, because you don’t believe it. But try to believe it. Put yourself in my place! Try to get the wonder, the magic, the terror, the touch now and then of horror, but above all the fierce thrill—of living with a family of ghosts?

This one—the fourth—was a man too. About thirty, I should say. And awfully charming. Yes, you spaniel-eyed fish, you, one man is saying this of another man. He was awfully charming. Short, dark. He wore—again it is like holding a negative up to the light—he wore white ducks or flannels. He stood very easily, his weight—listen to me, his weight—mainly on one foot and one hand curved against his hip. In the other hand, he carried his pipe. He looked at me—God, how he looked at me! How, for that matter, they all look at me! They want something, Spink. Of me. They’re trying to tell me. I can’t get it, though. But, believe me, I’m trying. This was worse than the old fellow. For this one, like Lutetia, was dead. And he, like her, was trying to put his message across a world, whereas the old fellow had only to pierce a dimension. How he looked at me; held me; bored into me. It was like sustaining visual vitriol.... How he looked at me! It became horrible.... Pretty soon I realized I wasn’t going to be able to stand it....

Yet I stayed with it as long as he did, and of course we continued to glare at each other. I don’t exactly know what the etiquette of these meetings is; but I seem to feel vaguely that it’s up to me to stay with them as long as they’re here. This time, it must have been all of five minutes, although it seemed longer ... much longer ... and I, all the time, trying to hold on. Then suddenly something happened. I don’t know what it was, but one instant he was there, and another he wasn’t. Don’t ask me how he went away. I don’t know. He simply ceased to be; and yet so swifter-than-instantly, so exquisitely, so subtly that my only question was—even though my mind was still stinging from his gaze—had he been there at all. It was as though the tree back of him had instantaneously absorbed him. It was a shock too—that disappearance.

Well, again I went out for a hike. I walked anywhere—everywhere. How far I don’t know. But half the night. Again it was as though I marched through the stars....

I haven’t seen the old painter again—I call him painter simply because he wore that long robe. And I haven’t seen the young guy again. But I see Lutetia all the time. She comes and goes. Sometimes when I enter the living-room, I find her already there.... Sometimes when I leave it, I know she enters by another door.... We spend long evenings together.... I can’t write when she’s about; but curiously enough I can sometimes read; that is to say, I can read Lutetia. I try to read because moments come when I realize that she prefers me not to look at her. It’s when she’s exhausted from trying to give me her message. Or when she’s girding herself up for another go. At those moments, the room is full of a frightful struggle; a gigantic spiritual concentration. It seems to me I could not look even if she wanted me. Oh, how she tries, Spink! It wrings my heart. She’s so helpless, so hopeless—so gentle, so tender, so lovely! It’s all my own stupidity. The iron-wall stupidity of flesh and blood. Perhaps, if I were to kill myself—and I think I could do that for her.... Only she doesn’t want me to do that.... But what does she want me to do? If I could only....

Lindsay had written steadily the whole evening; written at a violent speed and with a fierce intensity. Now his speed died down. His hands dropped from the typewriter. That mental intensity evaporated. He became aware....

He was not alone.

The long living-room was doubly cheerful that night. The inevitable tracks of living had begun to humanize it. A big old bean-pot full of purple iris sat on one end of the refectory table. Lindsay’s books and notebooks; his paper and envelopes; his pens and pencils sprawled over the length of table between him and the iris. That the night was a little cool, Lindsay had seized as pretext to build a huge fire. The high, jagged flames conspired with the steady glow of the big lamp to rout the shadows from everywhere but the extreme corners.

No more than—after her coming—he was alone was Lutetia alone. It was, Lindsay reflected, a picture almost as posed as for a camera. Lutetia sat; and leaning against her, close to her knee, stood a pigtailed little girl. She might have been listening to a story; for her little ear was cocked in Lutetia’s direction. That attitude brought to Lindsay’s observation a delicious, snub-nosed child profile. She gazed unseeingly over her shoulder to a far corner. And Lutetia gazed straight over the child’s head at Lindsay—

They sat for a long time—a long long time—thus. The little girl’s vague eyes still fixed themselves on the shadows as on magic realms that were being constantly unrolled to her. Lutetia’s eyes still sought Lindsay’s. And Lindsay’s eyes remained on Lutetia’s; held there by the agony of her effort and the exquisite torture of his own bewilderment.

After a while he arose. With slow, precise movements, he gathered up the pages of his letter to Spink. He arranged them carefully according to their numbers—twelve typewritten pages. He walked leisurely with them over to the fireplace and deposited them in the flames.

When he turned, the room was empty.

The next day brought storm again.

The coolness of the night vanished finally before the sparkling sunshine of a wind-swept day. Lindsay wrote for an hour or two. Then he gave himself up to what he called the “chores.” He washed his few dishes. He toiled on the lawn and in the garden. He finished the work of repairing the broken stairway in the barn. At the close of this last effort, he even cast a longing look in the direction of the rubbish collection in the second story of the barn. But his digestion apprised him that this voyage of discovery must be put off until after luncheon. He emerged from the back entrance of the barn, made his way, contrary to his usual custom, by a circuitous route to the front of the house. He stopped to tack up a trail of rosebush which had pulled loose from the trellis there. He felt unaccountably tired. When he entered the house he was conscious for the first time of a kind of loneliness....

He had not seen Lutetia, nor any of her companions, for three days. He admitted to himself that he missed the tremendous excitement of the last fortnight. But particularly he missed Lutetia. He paused absently to glance into the two front rooms, still as empty as on the day he had first seen them. He wandered upstairs into his bedroom. From there, he journeyed to the child’s room beyond; examined again the dim drawings on the wall. It occurred to him that, by going over them with crayons, he could restore some of their lost vividness. The idea brought a little spurt of exhilaration to his jaded spirit. He returned to his own room, just for the sake of descending Lutetia’s little private stairway to what must have been her private living-room below. He walked absently and a little slowly; still conscious of loneliness. He did not pause long in the living-room, although he made a tentative move in the direction of the kitchen. Still absently and quite mechanically he opened the back door; started to step out onto the broad flat stone which made the step....

Most unexpectedly—and shockingly, he was not alone. A tiny figure ... black ... sat on the doorstep; sat so close to the door that, as it rose, his curdling flesh warned him he had almost touched it. A curious thing happened. Lindsay swayed, pitched; fell backwards, white and moveless.

VI

“How did they find me, Glorious Lutie?” Susannah asked next morning. “How did they find me? If I could only teach myself to listen to the warning of those little hammers. Something told me when I saw Warner walking along the corridor of the Carman Building that he was not there by accident. Something told me when I ran into O’Hearn at the Attic the other night that he was not there by accident. They have been following me all the time. They’ve known what I’ve been doing every moment. Just as Byan knows where I am now. How did they do it? I’ve never suspected it for a moment. I’ve never seen anybody. I’m frightened, Glorious Lutie; I’m dreadfully frightened. I don’t know where to turn. If I only had a real friend— But perhaps that wouldn’t help as much as I think. For I’m afraid—I’m too afraid to tell anybody—”

All this, she said as usual, wordlessly. But she said it from her bed, her eyes fixed in a lackluster stare on the little oval gleam of the miniature.

“I don’t know what I’d do without you, Glorious Lutie, to tell my troubles to. You’re a great deal more than a picture to me. You’re a real presence— Oh, if you could only see for me now. I wonder if Byan is still in his room? I wonder what he’s going to do. I mean—what is the next move? Oh, of course he’s there! He wants to talk with me. But I won’t let him talk with me. I’ll stay in this room until I starve! And he can’t telephone. How can he put over what he wants to say?”

That question answered itself automatically when she dragged herself up from bed. A white square glimmered beside her door. She pounced upon it.

“Dear Miss Ayer:

“Of course we have known where you were and what you were doing every instant since you left the office. We did not interfere with your quitting your boarding-house because we preferred to give you a few days to think things over. I hope you’ve been enjoying your little excursions to the Museum and the Aquarium. We knew you’d come to your senses after a while and be ready to talk business. That is why you’ve had those little, accidental meetings from time to time. That advertisement for a job in the Carman Building was a decoy ad. It is useless for you to try to get away from us.

“And in the meantime the situation is getting more and more desperate. You know why. Now listen. We can clean up on that little business deal in three days. Do you know what that means? Maybe a hundred thousand dollars. We’ll let you in. Your share would be twelve thousand five hundred. Don’t that sound pretty good to you? You can avoid any trouble by going away with us. Or you can go alone and nobody will bother you. We’ll give you the dope on that; for believe me, we know how. And you wouldn’t have to do a thing you don’t want to do. We’ve got grandpa tamed now in regard to you. We’ve told him that you’re a lady, and won’t stand for that rough stuff. He’s wild about you, and crazy to see you, and make it all right again. Now why not use a little sense? Slip a note under my door across the way and tell me that you’ll doll yourself up and be ready to go to dinner with him tonight at seven.”

A postscript added: “This is unsigned and typewritten on your own typewriter and so couldn’t be used by anyone who didn’t like our way of doing business. For your own safety though, I advise you to burn it.”

This last was the one bit of advice in the letter which Susannah followed. She lighted a match and burned it over her water basin. Then she forced her protesting throat to swallow a glass of milk. She ate some crackers. After that she went to bed.

What to do and where to go! Over and over again, she turned the meager possibilities of her situation. Nothing offered escape. A hackneyed phrase floated into her mind—“woman’s wit.” From time immemorial it had been a bromidiom that any woman, however stupid, could outwit any man, however clever. Was it true? Perhaps not all the time, and perhaps sometimes. That was the only way though—she must pit her nimble, inexperienced woman’s wit against their heavier but trained man’s wit. Her problem was to get out of this house, unseen. But how? All kinds of fantastic schemes floated through her tired mind. If she could only disguise herself— But she would have to go out first to get the disguise. And Byan was across the hall, waiting for just that move. If there were only a convenient fire-escape! But of course he would anticipate that. If she could only summon a taxi, leap into it and drive for an hour! But she would have to telephone for the taxi in the outside hall, where Byan could hear her. On and on, she drove her tired mind; inventing schemes more and more impracticable. For a long time, that woman’s wit spawned nothing—

Then suddenly a curious idea came to her. It was so ridiculous that she rejected it instantly. Ridiculous—and it stood ninety-nine per cent chance of failure; offered but one per cent chance of success. Nevertheless it recurred. It offered more and more suggestion, more and more temptation. True, it was a thing barely possible; true also, that it was the only thing possible. But could she put it through? Had she the nerve? Had she the strength?

She must find both the nerve and the strength.

She bathed and dressed quickly and with a growing steadiness. She packed her belongings into her suitcase, put Glorious Lutie’s miniature in her handbag.

She sat down at her bureau and wrote a note:

“If you will come to my room, after you have had your breakfast, I will talk the matter over with you. I will not leave the building before you return. I will be ready to see you at ten o’clock.”

She opened her door, walked across the corridor; slipped the note under the door of Byan’s room. Then she hurried back; locked her door; sat down and waited, her hands clasped. Her hands grew colder and colder until they seemed like marble, but all the time her mind seemed to steady and clarify.

After a long while she heard Byan’s door open. She heard his steps retreating down the hall and over the stairs.

Ten minutes later, Susannah appeared, suitcase in hand, at the janitor’s office on the first floor. “I’m Miss Ayer in No. 9, second floor,” she said. “May I leave this suitcase here? I’ve just thought that I wanted to go to a friend’s room on the fifth floor and I don’t want to lug it up all those stairs.”

The janitor considered her for a puzzled second. Of course he was in Byan’s pay, Susannah reflected.

“Sure,” he answered uncertainly after a while.

“I’m expecting a gentleman to call on me,” Susannah went on steadily. “Tell him I’ll be on the fifth floor at No. 9. My friend is out,” she ended in glib explanation, “but she’s left her key with me. There’s a little work that I wanted to do on her typewriter.” The janitor—she had worked this out in advance—must know that Room 9, fifth floor—was occupied by a woman who owned a typewriter. Susannah established that when, a few days before, she had restored to its owner a letter shoved by mistake under her own door.

Susannah deposited her bag on the floor in the janitor’s office. She walked steadily up the stairs to the second floor. She felt the janitor’s gaze on the first flight of her progress. She stopped just before she reached her own room, glanced back. She was alone there. The janitor had not followed her. Perhaps Byan’s instructions to him were only to watch the door. With a swift pounce, she ran to Byan’s door, turned the knob.

It opened.

She ran to the closet; opened that. As she suspected, it was empty. Indeed, her swift glance had discovered no signs of occupancy in the room. Even the bed was undisturbed. Byan had hired it, of course, just for the purpose of being there that one night. Susannah closed the closet door after her, so that the merest crack let in the air she should demand—and waited. In that desperate hour when she lay thinking, the idea had suddenly flashed into her mind that there was only one place in the house where Byan would not look for her. That place was his own room. But it would not have occurred to her to take refuge there if she had not noted, even in her taut terror of the night before, that when Byan entered his own room he had omitted to lock the door after him. As indeed, why should he? There was nothing to steal in it but Byan. Moreover, of course Byan had sat up all night—his door unlocked—ready to forestall any effort of hers to escape.

An hour later Susannah heard a padded, rather brisk step ascending the stairs, coming along the hall. It was Byan, of course—no one could mistake his pace. He knocked on the door of her room; at first gently, then insistently. A pause. Then he tried the knob, again at first gently, then insistently. His steps retreated down the hall and the stairs. He must have got a pass-key from the janitor, for when, a long minute later, she heard his steps return, the scraping of a lock sounded from across the hall. She heard her somewhat rusty door-hinges creak. There followed a low whistle as of surprise, then an irregular succession of steps and creaks proving that he was looking under the bed, was inspecting the closet. She heard him retreat again down the stairs, and braced herself to endure a longer wait. At last, two pairs of feet sounded on the stairs. Had her ruse fully succeeded—would they mount at once to Room 9, fifth floor? No—they were coming again along the second-floor corridor. With a tingle of nerves in her temples and cheeks, she realized that she had reached the supreme moment of peril. They began knocking at every door on the second-floor corridors. Once she heard a muffled colloquy—the impatient tones of some strange man, the apologetic voice of the janitor. At other doors she heard, shortly after the knock, the scraping of the pass-key. Now they were in the room just beyond the wall of the closet where she was crouching. She heard them enter and emerge—the moment had come! But their footsteps passed her door; an instant later, she heard the pass-key grate in the door of the room on the other side. Then—one hand shaking convulsively on the knob of Byan’s closet door—she heard them go flying up the stairs to the third story—the fourth—

Before noon of that haunted, hunted morning, Susannah found a room in a curious way. When she escaped from the house in the West Twenties, she had walked westward almost to the river. In a little den of a restaurant just off the docks, she ordered breakfast and the morning newspapers. But when she tried to look over the advertising columns with a view to finding a room, she had a violent fit of trembling. The members of the Carbonado Mining Company, she recalled to herself, were studying those advertisements just as closely as she; and perhaps at that very moment.

Hiding in a great city! Why, she thought to herself, it’s the only place where you can’t hide!

Susannah dawdled over breakfast as long as she dared. She found herself wincing as she emerged onto the busy dingy street of docks. She stopped under the shade of an awning and controlled the abnormal fluttering of her heart while she thought out her situation. She dared no longer walk the streets. She dared not go to a real-estate agent. How, then, might she find a room and a hiding-place?

Then a Salvation Army girl came picking her way across the crowded, cluttered dock-pavement toward her awning. And Susannah had a sudden impulse which she afterwards described to Glorious Lutie as a stroke of genius. She came out to the edge of the pavement and accosted the Blue Bonnet.

“Do you know of any place where a girl who’s a stranger in New York may find a cheap and respectable lodging?” she asked.

The Salvation Army girl gave her a long, steady scrutiny from under the scoop of her bonnet.

“My sister keeps a rooming-house up on Eighth Avenue,” she said finally. “She always has an extra room, and she will take you in, I guess. Have you a bit of paper? I’ll write her a note.”

Susannah flew, swift as a homing dove, to the address. The landlady, a shapeless, featureless, middle-aged blonde, read the note; herself gave a long glance of scrutiny, and showed the room. Susannah’s examination was merely perfunctory. In fact, she looked with eyes which saw not. Probably never before did a shabby, battered bedchamber, stained as to ceiling, peeling as to wallpaper, carelessly patched as to carpet, indescribably broken-down and nondescript as to furniture, seem a very paradise to the eyes of twenty-five.

The bed was humpy, but it was a double bed; and clean. Susannah sank on to it. She did not rise for a long time. Then, true to her accepted etiquette on occasions of this kind, she drew the miniature from her handbag and pinned it on to the wall beside her bureau.

“Glorious Lutie,” her thoughts ran, “I’m as weak as a sick cat. If there was ever a girl more terrified, more friendless, more worn-out than I feel at this moment, I’d like to know how she got that way. I want to crawl into that bed and stay there for a week just reveling in the thought that I’m safe. Safe, Glorious Lutie. Safe! Alone with you. And nobody to be afraid of. Our funds are running low of course. I’ve nothing to pawn except you. But don’t be afraid—I’ll never pawn you. If we have to go down, we’ll go down together and with all sails set. I’ve got an awful hate and fear on this job-hunting business now. Heaven knows I don’t want much money; only enough to live on. I guess I won’t try to be a high-class queen of secretaries any longer—or at least for the present. My lay is to lie low for a month or two. I’ll rest for a few days. Then I’ll go into—what? What, Glorious Lutie, tell me what? I’ve got it! Domestic service. That’s my escape. I’ve certainly got brains enough to be a second girl and they never could find me tucked away in somebody’s house, especially if I never take my afternoons out. Which, believe me, Glorious Lutie, I won’t. I’ll spend them all with you. Oh, what an idea that is! I’ll wait around here for about a week and then I’ll tackle one of the domestic service agencies. If I know anything about after-the-war conditions, I’ll be snapped up like hot cakes.”

Keeping her promise to herself, Susannah stayed as much as possible indoors. The landlady consented to give her breakfast, but she would do no more—even that was an accommodation. In gratitude, Susannah took care of her own room. She kept it in spotless order; she even pottered with repairs. With breakfast at home, she had no need to leave the house of mornings. She went without luncheon; and late in the afternoon, before the home-going flood from the offices, she had dinner in a Child’s restaurant round the corner. For the rest of the time, she read the landlady’s books—few, and mostly cheap. But they included a set of Dickens; and she renewed acquaintance with a novelist whom she loved for himself and who called up memories of her happiest times. But her mood with Dickens was curiously capricious. His deaths and persecutions and poignant tragedies she could no longer endure—they swept her into a gulf of black melancholy. On the second day of her voluntary imprisonment, she glanced through Bleak House; stumbled into the wanderings of Little Jo through the streets of London. Suddenly she surprised herself by a fit of hysterical, trembling tears. This explosion cleared her mental airs; but afterward she skipped through Dickens, picking and choosing his humors, his love-passages, his gargantuan feasts in wayside inns.

When her eyes grew weary with reading, or when she ran into one of those passages which brought the black cloud, Susannah gazed vacantly out of the window.

Her lodging-house stood on a corner; she had a back, corner room on the third floor. The house next door, on the side street, finished to the rear in a two-story shed. Its roof lay almost under her window. The landlady, upon showing the room, had called her attention to this shed. “We’ve got no regular fire escapes, dearie,” she said, “but in case of trouble, you’re all right. You just step out here and if the skylight ain’t open, somebody’ll get you down with a ladder. A person can’t be too careful about fires!” Across the skylight lay a few scanty backyards—treeless, grassless, uninteresting. This city area of yards and sheds seemed to be the club, the Rialto for all the stray cats of Eighth Avenue. Susannah named them, endowed them with personalities. Their squabbles, their amours, their melodramatic stalking, gave her a kind of apathetic interest.

The interest lessened as three days went by, and the apathy deepened. “It’s my state of mind, Glorious Lutie,” she apprised the miniature. “It’s this weight that’s on my spirit. It’s fear. Just as soon as I can get my mind off—I mean just as soon as I become convinced that I’m never going to be bothered again, it will go, I’m sure. Of course I can’t help feeling as I do. But I ought not to. I’m perfectly safe now. In a few days those crooks won’t trouble about me any more. It will be too late. And I know it.”

She reiterated those last two sentences as though Glorious Lutie were a difficult person to convince. The next morning, however, came diversion. Work—roofing—began on the shed just under her window. Susannah watched the workmen with an interest that held, at first, an element of determined concentration. The roofers, an elderly man and a younger one, incredibly dirty in their blackened overalls, which were soon matched by face and hands, were very conscious at first of the brilliant tawny head just above. Once, muffled by the window, she caught an allusion to white horses. But Susannah ignored this; continued to watch them disappearing and emerging through the open skylight, setting up their melting-pot, arranging their sheets of tin.

Before she was out of bed next morning they were making a metallic clatter with their hammers. In her normal state, Susannah was a creature almost without nerves. She even retained a little of the child’s enjoyment of a racket for its own sake. But now—the din annoyed her, annoyed her unspeakably. She crept languidly out of bed, peeped through the edge of the curtain. They were just beginning work. It would keep up all day.

“I can’t stand this!” said Susannah aloud; and then began one of her wordless addresses to the miniature.

“I guess the time has come, anyhow, to strike into pastures new. Behold, Glorious Lutie, your Glorious Susie descending from the high and mighty position of pampered secretary to that of driven slave. Tomorrow morn I apply for a job as second girl. If it weren’t for this headache, I’d do it today.”

However, the hammering only intensified her headache; she must get outside. So when the landlady arrived with her breakfast, Susannah inquired for the address of the nearest employment office. She dressed, and descended to the street. As always, of late, she had a shrinking as she stepped out into the open world of men and women. When she had controlled this, she moved with a curious apathy to the old, battered ground-floor office with yellow signs over its front windows, where girls found work at domestic service. Presently, she was registered, was sitting on a long bench with a row of women ranging from slatternly to cheaply smart. She scarcely observed them. That apathy was settling deeper about her spirits; her only sensation was her dull headache. Somehow, when she sat still it was not wholly an unpleasant headache. Then the voice of the sharp-faced woman at the desk in the corner called her name. It tore the veil, woke her as though from sleep. She rose, to face her first chance—a thin, severe woman with a mouth like a steel trap.

This first chance furnished no opening, however; neither, as the morning wore away, did several other chances. The process of getting a second maid’s job was at the same time more difficult and less difficult than she had thought. Susannah had forgotten that people always ask servants for references. She had supposed her carefully worked out explanation would cover that situation—that she had been a stenographer in Providence; that she had come to New York soon after the Armistice was signed, hoping for a bigger outlook; that the returning soldiers were snapping up all the jobs; that she had tried again and again for a position; that her money was fast going; that she had been advised to enter domestic service. Housekeepers from rich establishments and the mistresses of small ones interviewed her; but the lack of references laid an impassable barrier. In the afternoon, however, luck changed. A suburbanite from Jamaica, a round, grizzled, middle-aged woman, desperately in need of a second girl, cut through all the red-tape that had held the others up. “You’re perfectly honest,” she said meditatively, “about admitting you’ve had no experience, and you look trustworthy.”

“I assure you, madam,”—Susannah was eager, but wary; not too eager. She even laughed a little—“I am honest—so honest that it hurts.”

“The only thing is,” her interlocutor went on hesitatingly; “you must pardon me for putting it so bluntly; but we might as well be open with each other. I’m afraid you’ll feel a little above your position.”

“Well,” Susannah responded honestly, “to be straightforward with you, I suppose I shall. But I give you my word, I’ll never show it. And that’s the only thing that counts, isn’t it?”

The woman smiled.

“I must confess I like you,” she burst out impulsively. “But how am I going to know that you’re—all right?”

Susannah sighed. “I understand your situation perfectly. I don’t know how you’re to know I’m all right—morally or just in the matter of mere honesty. For there’s nobody but me to tell you that I’m moral and honest. And of course I’m prejudiced.”

“Well, anyway I’m going to risk it. I’m engaging you now. It is understood—ten dollars a week; and alternate Thursdays and Sundays out. I don’t want you until tomorrow because I want my former maid out of the house before you come. Now will you promise me that you’ll take the nine train tomorrow?”

“I promise,” Susannah agreed.

“But that reminds me,” the woman came on another difficulty, “what’s to guarantee that you’ll stay with me?”

“I guarantee,” Susannah said steadily, “that if you keep to your end of the agreement, I’ll stay with you at least three months.”

The woman sparkled. “All right, I’ll expect you tomorrow on the nine train. I’ll be there with the Ford to meet you. Here are the directions.” She scribbled busily on a card.

Susannah walked home as one who treads on air. The veil of apathy had broken. And in spite of her headache, which caught her by fits and starts, her mood broke into a joy so wild that it sent her pirouetting about the room. “Glorious Lutie, I never felt so happy in my life. So gayly, grandly, gorgeously, gor-gloriously happy! All my troubles are over. I’m safe.” And on the strength of that security, she washed and ironed her lavender linen suit. Her headache was better again. Perhaps if she went out now to an early dinner, it might disappear altogether. But how languorous she felt, how indisposed to effort. She would sit and read a while. She opened Pickwick Papers on its last pages. She had almost finished the book.

“I suppose it will be a long time before I have a chance to do any more reading,” she meditated. “So I think I’ll finish this. You’ve helped me through a hard passage in my life, Charles Dickens, and I thank you with all my heart.”

But she could not read. As soon as she sat down by the window and settled her eyes on the book, the headache returned. The men were still at work on the roof, hammering away at one corner. Every blow seemed to strike her skull. Midway of the roof, the skylight yawned open; their extra tools were laid out beside it. At five o’clock they would quit for the day. Usually she disliked to have them go. In spite of their noise, she felt that still. They gave her a kind of warm, human sense of companionship. And they had become accustomed to her appearances at the window. Their flirtatious first glances had ceased for want of encouragement. They scarcely seemed to see her when they looked up. But now—that hammering at her skull! Susannah suddenly rose and closed the window, hot though the day was, against this torrent of sound. As though its futile shield would give added protection, she drew the curtain. In the dimmed light she sat rocking, her head in her hands. Her face was fire-hot—why, she wondered— The hammering stopped. They were soldering now. They were always doing that; beating the tin sheets into place and stopping to solder them. There would be silence for a time. In a moment, she would open the window for a breath of air on her burning face....

She started at a knock on her door, low, quick, but abrupt. Before she could answer, it opened. His face shadowed in the three-quarters light, but his form perfectly outlined, instantly recognizable—stood Warner. Behind Warner was Byan, and behind Byan, O’Hearn.

All the blood of her heart seemed to strike in one wave on Susannah’s aching head, and then to recede. She knew both the tingling of terror and the numbness of horror. Prickling, stinging darts volleyed her face, her hands, her feet; and yet she seemed to be freezing to stone.

They came into the room before anyone spoke—Warner first. Byan lolled to a place in the corner; the three-quarters light, filtering through the thin fabric of the flimsy, yellow curtain, revealed his clean profile, his mysterious half-smile. O’Hearn stood just at the entrance. He did not continue to look at her. His eyes sought the floor.

Warner was speaking now:

“Good-evening, Miss Ayer. We have come to finish up that little piece of business with you. It has been delayed as long as it can be. Pardon us for breaking in upon you like this. Your landlady tried to prevent us, but we assured her that you would want to see us. As I think you will when you come to your senses and hear what I have to say.”

He stopped, as though awaiting her reply. But Susannah made no answer. She had dropped her eyes now; her hands lay limp in her lap. And in this pause, a curious piece of byplay passed between Warner and O’Hearn. The master of this trio caught the glance of his assistant and, with a swift motion of three fingers toward the lapel of his coat, gave him that “office” in the underworld sign manual—which means “look things over.” O’Hearn, moving so lightly that Susannah scarcely noted his passage, stepped to the window, lifted the edge of the curtain. He took a swift, intent look outside and returned to Warner. His back to Susannah, he spoke with his lips, scarcely vocalizing the words.