rds, toys, calendars, and those queer little suede-bound
volumes of Kipling, Service, Oscar Wilde, and Omar Khayyam that appear
every year toward Christmas time--such modest and cheerful
merchandising makes the western pavement of Gissing Street a jolly
place when the lights are lit. All the shops were decorated for the
Christmas trade; the Christmas issues of the magazines were just out
and brightened the newsstands with their glowing covers. This section
of Brooklyn has a tone and atmosphere peculiarly French in some parts:
one can quite imagine oneself in some smaller Parisian boulevard
frequented by the petit bourgeois. Midway in this engaging and
animated block stands the Haunted Bookshop. Aubrey could see its
windows lit, and the shelved masses of books within. He felt a severe
temptation to enter, but a certain bashfulness added itself to his
desire to act in secret. There was a privy exhilaration in his plan of
putting the bookshop under an unsuspected surveillance, and he had the
emotion of one walking on the frontiers of adventure.

So he kept on the opposite side of the street, which still maintains an
unbroken row of quiet brown fronts, save for the movie theatre at the
upper corner, opposite Weintraub's. Some of the basements on this side
are occupied now by small tailors, laundries, and lace-curtain cleaners
(lace curtains are still a fetish in Brooklyn), but most of the houses
are still merely dwellings. Carrying his bag, Aubrey passed the bright
halo of the movie theatre. Posters announcing THE RETURN OF TARZAN
showed a kind of third chapter of Genesis scene with an Eve in a sports
suit. ADDED ATTRACTION, Mr. AND Mrs. SIDNEY DREW, he read.

A little way down the block he saw a sign VACANCIES in a parlour
window. The house was nearly opposite the bookshop, and he at once
mounted the tall steps to the front door and rang.

A fawn-tinted coloured girl, of the kind generally called "Addie,"
arrived presently. "Can I get a room here?" he asked. "I don't know,
you'd better see Miz' Schiller," she said, without rancour. Adopting
the customary compromise of untrained domestics, she did not invite him
inside, but departed, leaving the door open to show that there was no
ill will.

Aubrey stepped into the hall and closed the door behind him. In an
immense mirror the pale cheese-coloured flutter of a gas jet was
remotely reflected. He noticed the Landseer engraving hung against
wallpaper designe