ding Ida May against the record of the violet-eyed
girl, if by any wild possibility that should be her name. There was
time still, he thought, to find her at her lodgings before she
started for the restaurant, if she worked here.

So Tunis paid his check and strode forth. The lodging of Ida May
Bostwick was not in this neighborhood, of course, not even in the
West End. In fact, it was in the South End, in one of those streets
running more or less parallel to lower Shawmut Avenue. He took a car
in the subway and got off near the address Prudence Ball had given
him.

To the mind of the Cape man, used as he was to the open spaces of
both sea and land, these dingy blocks of brick houses, three and
four stories in height, all quite alike in smoke and squalor and
even in the pattern of the net curtains at their parlor windows,
made as dreary a picture as he had ever imagined. He thought of that
pale, slender, violet-eyed girl coming back to this ugly block at
night, after long hours at the restaurant, having to look forward to
nothing more beautiful, in all probability, inside the house where
she lodged. Who would not be glad, overjoyed, indeed, to get away
from such an environment?

He found the number. The house was no worse and no better than its
neighbors. By stains on the blistered bricks beside the door frame
he gathered that scraps of paper advertising empty rooms had often
been pasted there. He rang the bell at the top of the rail-guarded
steps. After a time he rang again.

He could hear the bell jangle somewhere in a distant part of the
house. Nobody came in answer to his summons, not even after his
third ring. At length the creaking, iron-barred gate in the area
warned him that the main door at which he rang was not in use at
that hour of the day. A woman in a house dress as ugly as the street
itself, and with untidy gray hair and a bar of smut on her cheek,
craned her neck from this opening to look up at him.

"There's no use your ringing. I ain't got an empty room, young man,"
she announced.

He descended spryly into the area before she could close the gate.
Her near-sighted scowl misjudged him again, for she added:

"Nor I don't want to buy anything."

"One moment, ma'am," he cried. "I have nothing for sale. I'd like to
see somebody who lodges here."

"Who?" asked the woman, peering at him curiously.

"Miss Bostwick."

"You'll have to come this evening."

"Oh! She has--has gone to work already?"