rections for the repairs of his watch, and left the shop. The address,
of which he had taken a mental note, was, to his surprise, very near
his own lodgings; but he went straight home. Here a few inquiries of
his janitor elicited the information that the building indicated in the
address was a large one of furnished apartments and offices like his
own, and that the "Mrs. Smith" must be simply the housekeeper of the
landlord, whose name appeared in the Directory, but not her own. Yet
he waited until evening before he ventured to reconnoitre the premises;
with the possession of his clue came a slight cooling of his ardor and
extreme caution in his further proceedings. The house--a reconstructed
wooden building--offered no external indication of the rooms she
occupied in the uniformly curtained windows that front the street.
Yet he felt an odd and pleasurable excitement in passing once or twice
before those walls that hid the goal of his quest. As yet he had not
seen her, and there was naturally the added zest of expectation. He
noticed that there was a new building opposite, with vacant offices to
let. A project suddenly occurred to him, which by morning he had fully
matured. He hired a front room in the first floor of the new building,
had it hurriedly furnished as a private office, and on the second
morning of his discovery was installed behind his desk at the window
commanding a full view of the opposite house. There was nothing strange
in the South American capitalist selecting a private office in so
popular a locality.

Two or three days elapsed without any result from his espionage. He came
to know by sight the various tenants, the two Chinese servants, and the
solitary Irish housemaid, but as yet had no glimpse of the housekeeper.
She evidently led a secluded life among her duties; it occurred to him
that perhaps she went out, possibly to market, earlier than he came,
or later, after he had left the office. In this belief he arrived one
morning after an early walk in a smart spring shower, the lingering
straggler of the winter rains. There were few people astir, yet he had
been preceded for two or three blocks by a tall woman whose umbrella
partly concealed her head and shoulders from view. He had noticed,
however, even in his abstraction, that she walked well, and managed the
lifting of her skirt over her trim ankles and well-booted feet with some
grace and cleverness. Yet it was only on her unexpectedly turning th