, doing with a dress suit,
anyhow? The fact was that O'Day was either here "on the quiet" to escape
his creditors, while his friends were trying to patch things up for his
return, or he was an English valet who had stolen his master's clothes.

A new rumor now filled the air. O'Day, was a spy sent by some foreign
government to look after important interests, like that Russian who
had been employed in a publishing house, where he wrote articles for an
encyclopaedia, only to be recognized later, whereupon he had disappeared
and was never seen again. Tim Kelsey had known him. In fact, he had
visited often Tim's bookstore at night, just as O'Day was visiting it,
and where a lot of other queer-looking people could be found if anybody
would "take the trouble to knock at Kelsey's door and peer in through
the tobacco smoke some night."

All this gossip rolled off Kitty's mind as rain from a tin roof. Only
once did she rise up in anger with a "Get out of my place! I'll not have
ye soiling the air with yer dirty talk. Get out, I say! Ye don't know a
gentleman when ye see him, and ye never will."

It was when these rumors as to her lodger's identity were thickest and
when Kitty's heart had begun to fear that his despondency was returning,
his nightly prowls having been resumed, that a hansom cab stopped in
front of her door.

It was one of her busy days, the sidewalk being blocked up with twenty
or more trunks, parcels, cribs, and baby-carriages on their way, by the
aid of Mike, the big white horse, and John, to the Ferry for shipment
to Lakewood. Kitty was in charge of the quarter-deck, her head bare,
her sleeves rolled above her elbows, showing her plump, ruddy arms, her
cheeks and eyes aglow with the crisp air of the morning. October had
set in, and one of those lung-filling, bracing days--the sky swept by
dancing clouds, dragging their skirts in their flight--was making glad
the great city.

Kitty loved its snap and tang. She loved, too, the excitement aroused
by her duties, and was never so happy as when there were but so many
minutes to catch a train--a fact she never ceased to impress upon
everybody about her, she knowing all the time that she would so manage
the loading as to have five minutes to spare.

"In with those hand-bags, Mike--in the front, where that Saratoga trunk
won't smash 'em. Now that crib--no--not loose! Get that strap around it;
do ye want to have to pick it up before ye get half-way to the tunnel?