cient income that had always been
ample for his needs.

In that month the major had seen but one or two of his fellow lodgers,
slouching forms that passed him by in the gloom of the half-lighted
hallways or on the creaky stairs. His landlady he saw but once a
week--on Saturday, which was settlement day. She was a forlorn, gray
creature, half blind, and she felt her way about gropingly. By the droop
in her spine and by the corners of her lips, permanently puckered from
holding pins in her mouth, a close observer would have guessed that she
had been a seamstress before her eyes gave out on her and she took to
keeping lodgers. Of the character of the establishment the innocent old
major knew nothing; he knew that it was cheap and that it was on a quiet
by-street, and for his purposes that was sufficient.

He heaved another small sigh and passed slowly up the worn steps of the
stairwell until he came to the top of the house. His room was on the
attic floor, the middle room of the three that lined the bare hall on
one side. The door-knob was broken off; only its iron center remained.
His fingers slipped as he fumbled for a purchase upon the metal core;
but finally, after two attempts, he gripped it and it turned, admitting
him into the darkness of a stuffy interior. The major made haste to open
the one small window before he lit the single gas jet. Its guttery flare
exposed a bed, with a thin mattress and a skimpy cover, shoved close up
under the sloping wall; a sprained chair on its last legs; an old
horsehide trunk; a shaky washstand of cheap yellow pine, garnished forth
with an ewer and a basin; a limp, frayed towel; and a minute segment of
pale pink soap.

Major Stone was in the act of removing his coat when he became aware of
a certain sound, occurring at quick intervals. In the posture of a plump
and mature robin he cocked his head on one side to listen; and now he
remembered that he had heard the same sound the night before, and the
night before that. These times, though, he had heard it intermittently
and dimly, as he tossed about half awake and half asleep, trying to
accommodate his elderly bones to the irregularities of his hot and
uncomfortable bed. But now he heard it more plainly, and at once he
recognized it for what it was--the sound of a woman crying; a wrenching
succession of deep, racking gulps, and in between them little moaning,
panting breaths, as of utter exhaustion--a sound such as might be
distille