s to the ceiling, simply remarked, with an ecstatic smile:--

"Humph!" and left the pair, red with exasperation, to find the street
again through the darkening cave of the stair-way.

* * *

It was still early the next morning, when Richling entered his wife's
apartment with an air of brisk occupation. She was pinning her brooch at
the bureau glass.

"Mary," he exclaimed, "put something on and come see what I've
found! The queerest, most romantic old thing in the city; the most
comfortable--and the cheapest! Here, is this the wardrobe key? To save
time I'll get your bonnet."

"No, no, no!" cried the laughing wife, confronting him with sparkling
eyes, and throwing herself before the wardrobe; "I can't let you touch
my bonnet!"

There is a limit, it seems, even to a wife's subserviency.

However, in a very short time afterward, by the feminine measure, they
were out in the street, and people were again smiling at the pretty pair
to see her arm in his, and she actually _keeping step_. 'Twas very
funny.

As they went John described his discovery: A pair of huge, solid green
gates immediately on the sidewalk, in the dull facade of a tall, red
brick building with old carved vinework on its window and door frames.
Hinges a yard long on the gates; over the gates a semi-circular grating
of iron bars an inch in diameter; in one of these gates a wicket, and
on the wicket a heavy, battered, highly burnished brass knocker. A
short-legged, big-bodied, and very black slave to usher one through the
wicket into a large, wide, paved corridor, where from the middle joist
overhead hung a great iron lantern. Big double doors at the far end,
standing open, flanked with diamond-paned side-lights of colored glass,
and with an arch at the same, fan-shaped, above. Beyond these doors and
showing through them, a flagged court, bordered all around by a narrow,
raised parterre under pomegranate and fruit-laden orange, and
over-towered by vine-covered and latticed walls, from whose ragged
eaves vagabond weeds laughed down upon the flowers of the parterre below,
robbed of late and early suns. Stairs old fashioned, broad; rooms, their
choice of two; one looking down into the court, the other into the
street; furniture faded, capacious; ceilings high; windows, each opening
upon its own separate small balcony, where, instead of balustrades, was
graceful iron scroll-work, centered by some long-dead owner's monogram
two feet i