sing
foot-fall of the multitudes. He had sat there before dawn and watched the
queer, pinky-white light steal with ever widening fingers through the
darkness, heard the yawn of the city as it seemed to shiver and tremble
before the battle of the day. At twilight he had watched the lights
spring up one by one, at first like pin pricks in the distance, growing
and widening until the grotesque shapes of the buildings from which they
sprung had faded into nothingness, and there was left only a velvet
curtain of strangely-lit stars. At a giddy distance below he could trace
the blaze of Broadway, the blue lights flashing from the electric wires
as the cable cars rushed back and forth, the red and violet glimmer of
the sky signs. He knew it all so well, by morning, by noon and night;
in rainstorm, storms which he had watched come up from oceanwards in
drifting clouds of vapour; and in sunshine, clear, brilliant sunshine, a
little hard and austere, to his way of thinking, and unseasonable.

"A week," he muttered. "She said a week. Tonight I will go out."

He looked at himself in the glass. He wore no longer the well-cut clothes
of Mr. Douglas Romilly's Saville Row tailor, but a ready-made suit of
Schmitt & Mayer's business reach-me-downs, an American felt hat and
square-toed shoes.

"She said a week," he repeated. "It's a fortnight to-day. I'll go to the
restaurant at the corner. I must find out for myself what all this noise
means, what the city has to say."

He turned towards the door and then stopped short. For almost the first
time since he had taken up his quarters here, the lift had stopped
outside. There was a brief pause, then his bell rang. For a moment Philip
hesitated. Then he stepped forward and opened the door, looking out
enquiringly at his caller.

"You Mr. Merton Ware?"

He admitted the fact briefly. His visitor was a young woman dressed in a
rather shabby black indoor dress, over which she wore an apron. She was
without either hat or gloves. Her fingers were stained with purple
copying ink, and her dark hair was untidily arranged.

"I live two stories down below," she announced, handing him a little
card. "Miss Martha Grimes--that's my name--typewriter and stenographer,
you see. The waiter who brings our meals told me he thought you were some
way literary, so I just stepped up to show you my prospectus. If you've
any typewriting you want doing, I'm on the spot, and I don't know as
you'd get it done much