stand something of the strange effacement of his
friend Selwyn; he began to comprehend the curious economies practised,
the continued absence from club and coterie, the choice of the sordid
lodging whither Boots, one night, seeing him on the street by chance,
had shamelessly tracked him--with no excuse for the intrusion save his
affection for this man and his secret doubts of the man's ability to
take care of himself and his occult affairs.

Now he was going there, exactly what to do he did not yet know, but with
the vague determination to do something.

On the wet pavements and reeking iron overhead structure along Sixth
Avenue the street lights glimmered, lending to the filthy avenue under
its rusty tunnel a mystery almost picturesque.

Into it he turned, swung aboard a car as it shot groaning and clanking
around the curve from Fifty-ninth Street, and settled down to brood and
ponder and consider until it was time for him to swing off the car into
the slimy street once more.

Silvery pools of light inlaid the dim expanse of Washington Square. He
turned east, then south, then east again, and doubled into a dim street,
where old-time houses with toppling dormers crowded huddling together as
though in the cowering contact there was safety from the destroyer who
must one day come, bringing steel girders and cement to mark their
graves with sky-scraping monuments of stone.

Into the doorway of one of these houses Lansing turned. When the town
was young a Lansing had lived there in pomp and circumstance--his own
great-grandfather--and he smiled grimly, amused at the irony of things
terrestrial.

A slattern at the door halted him:

"Nobody ain't let up them stairs without my knowin' why," she mumbled.

"I want to see Captain Selwyn," he explained.

"Hey?"

"Captain Selwyn!"

"Hey? I'm a little deef!" screeched the old crone. "Is it Cap'n Selwyn
you want?"

Above, Selwyn, hearing his name screamed through the shadows of the
ancient house, came to the stairwell and looked down into the blackness.

"What is it, Mrs. Glodden?" he said sharply; then, catching sight of a
dim figure springing up the stairs:

"Here! this way. Is it for me?" and as Boots came into the light from
his open door: "Oh!" he whispered, deadly pale under the reaction; "I
thought it was a telegram. Come in."

Boots shook the snow from his hat and coat into the passageway and took
the single chair; Selwyn, tall and gaunt in his shabby dress