cceptable as was the money
they were careful to provide her with. They were not only always in the
house, that is one of them, smoking his old pipe and blackening up the
walls, but they looked so shabby, and kept the girl so close, and if
they did go out, came in at such unheard of hours. It was enough to
drive her crazy; yet the money, the money--

"Yes," said I, "I know; and the money ought to make you overlook all
the small disagreeablenesses you mention. What is a landlady without
patience." And I urged her not to turn them out.

"But the girl," she went on, "so nice, so quiet, so sick-looking! I
cannot stand it to see her cooped up in that small room, always watched
over by one or both of those burly wretches. The old man says she is
his daughter and she does not deny it, but I would as soon think of that
little rosy child you see cooing in the window over the way, belonging
to the beggar going in at the gate, as of her with her lady-like ways
having any connection with him and his rough-acting son. You ought to
see her--"

"That is just what I want to do," interrupted I. "Not because you have
tempted my fancy by a recital of her charms," I hastened to add, "but
because she is, if I don't mistake, a woman for whose discovery and
rescue, a large sum of money has been offered."

And without further disguise I acquainted the startled woman before me
with the fact that I was not, as she had always considered, the clerk
out of employment whose daily business it was to sally forth in quest of
a situation, but a member of the city police.

She was duly impressed and easily persuaded to second all my operations
as far as her poor wits would allow, giving me free range of her upper
story, and above all, promising that secrecy without which all my finely
laid plans for capturing the rogues without raising a scandal, would
fall headlong to the ground.

Behold me, then, by noon of that same day domiciled in an apartment next
to the one whose door bore that scarlet sign which had aroused within
me such feverish hopes the night before. Clad in the seedy garments of
a broken down French artist whose acquaintance I had once made, with
something of his air and general appearance and with a few of his
wretched daubs hung about on the whitewashed wall, I commenced with
every prospect of success as I thought, that quiet espionage of the hall
and its inhabitants which I considered necessary to a proper attainment
of the end I ha