g anxiously down, while the waiter at frequent
intervals was summoned to provide her courage and patience of a liquid
character. Finally, however, Bristol noticed that she had either
concluded to take a short nap, or was determined to wait patiently, for
quite a period of silence elapsed in her room, which he took advantage
of to steal quietly out into the hall, leaving his door ajar so that he
might re-enter it noiselessly as occasion required.

It was not long before the occasion presented itself, for Bristol had
got no more than to the end of the hall when he saw Devereaux ascending
the stairs from below. He quietly stepped behind the curtains that
trailed from the lambrequin over the window, and watched the old man as
he came up the stairs.

He was a little, gray, withered old man. Almost all his strength was
gone, and he certainly had but a few more years to use what little
strength was left. His hair was almost white, and his face was quite as
colorless, while the weak, rheumy eyes seemed almost ready to fall
through the flesh which had withered away to the bones of his face. He
was a living example of the blackmailer's victim as he labored along,
now and then catching at the stair-rail for help, and looking behind and
around him as if fearing some sudden discovery. Arriving upon the hall
floor, he peered anxiously at the numbers upon the doors, and after
settling in his mind what direction to take, went on tremblingly with
bowed head towards the woman who was as remorseless as death itself.

He found the room after a little trouble, and tapped at it
apprehensively. It was at once opened and immediately closed after, when
Bristol sprang from his hiding-place and was in the adjoining room
almost as soon as the next door had closed.

During the afternoon, when Mrs. Winslow had absented herself from her
room, he had dragged the bureau against the door opening into her
apartment, placed a quilt from his bed upon it in order that his jumping
upon it might occasion no noise, and with his knife cut a diamond
shaped piece out of the green paper covering the glass transom,
darkening his own room so that his eyes could not by any possibility be
seen through the aperture in the piece of paper, which had a dead black
appearance from Mrs. Winslow's room; and by the time the poor old man
had confronted the woman in a scared kind of a way, and had seated
himself upon the sofa obedient to her imperious gesture, the "retired
b