om his praise that he was himself a
chivalrous and tender young man whom any woman could trust.

The hour was become an hour and a half and both the pretty waitress
and the eighth woman had grown very fidgetty. The waitress saw she was
to beguile the tedious period of emprisonment by the tempest with no
dalliance with Mr. Middleton. The eighth woman was worried by the
absence of her escort. Mr. Middleton stepped to her side, where she
stood staring out at the wind-swept street, and addressed her.

"Madame, it would almost seem as if some accident had detained your
escort. May I not offer to call a cab and see you home? I have an
umbrella with me."

The lady thanked him almost eagerly, saying that she would wait
fifteen minutes more and at the elapse of that time, her escort not
appearing, would gladly avail herself of his kind offer.

Twenty minutes later, they were whirling away northward. Crossing the
Wells Street bridge, they turned eastward only a few blocks from the
river. The rain had suddenly ceased. The wind having relaxed nothing
of its fierceness, it occasionally parted the scudding clouds high
over head to let glimpses of the moon escape from their wrack, and Mr.
Middleton saw he was in a region whence the invasion of factories and
warehouses had driven the major portion of the inhabitants forth,
leaving their dwellings untenanted, white for rent signs staring out
of the empty casements like so many ghosts. The lady signaling the
driver to stop, Mr. Middleton assisted her to alight, and glanced
about him. Here the work of exile had been very thorough. Not yet had
the factories come into this immediate neighborhood, but the residents
had retreated before the smoke of their advancing lines, leaving a
wide unoccupied space behind the rear guard. Up and down the street,
in no house could he perceive a light. The moon shining forth clear
and resplendent, its face unobstructed by clouds for a moment, he saw
stretching away house after house with white signs that grimly told
their loneliness. Indeed, quite deserted did appear the very house to
whose door they splashed through the pools in the depressions of the
tall flight of stone steps. The lady threw open the door and stepped
briskly in, and her footfalls rang sharply upon a bare floor and
resounded in a hollow echo that told it was an empty house!

An empty house! An empty house! What danger might lurk here and how
easy might losels lure victims to their do