wn the empty sidewalk in
a quick, furtive fashion, and after he had swung into the side street a
trifle of the steam seemed gone from his stiff-spined, hard-heeled gait.
It ceased to be a strut; it became a plod.

The street he had now entered was a badly lighted street, with long
stretches of murkiness between small patches of gas-lamped brilliance.
By day the houses that walled it would have showed themselves as shabby
and gone to seed--the sort of houses that second cousins move into after
first families have moved out. Two-thirds of the way along the block the
major turned in at a sagged gate. He traversed a short walk of seamed
and decrepit flagging, where tufts of rank grass sprouted between the
fractures in the limestone slabs, and mounted the front porch of a house
that had cheap boarding house written all over it.

When the major opened the front door the tepid smell that gushed out to
greet him was the smell of a cheap boarding house too, if you know what
I mean--a spilt-kerosene, boiled-cabbage, dust-in-the-corners smell.
Once upon a time the oilcloth upon the floor of the entry way had
exhibited a vivid and violent pattern of green octagons upon a red and
yellow background, but that had been in some far distant day of its
youth and freshness. Now it was worn to a scaly, crumbly color of
nothing at all, and it was frayed into fringes at the door and in places
scuffed clear through, so that the knot-holes of the naked planking
showed like staring eyes.

Standing just inside the hall, the major glanced down first at the floor
and then up to where in a pendent nub a pinprick of light like a captive
lightning-bug flickered up and down feebly as the air pumped through the
pipe; and out of his chest the major fetched a small sigh. It was a sigh
of resignation, but it had loneliness in it too. Well, it was a
come-down, after all these peaceful and congenial years spent among the
marble-columned, red-plushed glories of the old Gaunt House, to be
living in this place.

The major had been here now almost a month. Very quietly, almost
secretly, he had come hither when he found that by no amount of
stretching could his pay as a reporter on the Evening Press be made to
cover the cost of living as he had been accustomed to live prior to that
disastrous day when the major waked up in the morning to find that all
his inherited investments had vanished over night--and, vanishing so,
had taken with them the small but suffi