add HER music-stool to
the adorable inventory; but he was met by such a disturbed and
terrified look that he desisted. "Another night of this wild and
reckless dissipation will finish me," he said lugubriously to himself
when he reached the solitude of his room. "I wonder how many times a
week I'd have to help the girl play the spiritual gooseberry downstairs
before we could have any fun ourselves?"

Here the sound of distant laughter, interspersed with vivacious
feminine shrieks, came through the open window. He glanced between the
curtains. His neighbor's house was brilliantly lit, and the shadows of
a few romping figures were chasing each other across the muslin shades
of the windows. The objectionable young women were evidently enjoying
themselves. In some conditions of the mind there is a certain
exasperation in the spectacle of unmeaning enjoyment, and he shut the
window sharply. At the same moment some one knocked at his door.

It was Miss Brooks, who had just come upstairs.

"Will you please let me have my music-stool?"

He stared at her a moment in surprise, then recovering himself, said,
"Yes, certainly," and brought the stool. For an instant he was tempted
to ask why she wanted it, but his pride forbade him.

"Thank you. Good-night."

"Good-night!"

"I hope it wasn't in your way?"

"Not at all."

"Good-night!"

"Good-night."

She vanished. Herbert was perplexed. Between young ladies whose naive
exuberance impelled them to throw handkerchiefs at his window and young
ladies whose equally naive modesty demanded the withdrawal from his
bedroom of a chair on which they had once sat, his lot seemed to have
fallen in a troubled locality. Yet a day or two later he heard Cherry
practising on the harmonium as he was ascending the stairs on his
return from business; she had departed before he entered the room, but
had left the music-stool behind her. It was not again removed.

One Sunday, the second or third of his tenancy, when Cherry and her
mother were at church, and he had finished some work that he had
brought from the bank, his former restlessness and sense of strangeness
returned. The regular afternoon fog had thickened early, and, driving
him back from a cheerless, chilly ramble on the hill, had left him
still more depressed and solitary. In sheer desperation he moved some
of the furniture, and changed the disposition of several smaller
ornaments. Growing bolder, he even attacked