g, when she was
overcome by an attack of her old heart-trouble in the conservatory
at Mrs. Waldron's reception. Had you not been near to catch her as
she fell and to render proper attention, we might have lost her. I
would be glad if you would call and undertake the treatment of her
case.
Gratefully yours,
ROBERT ASHBURTON.

The young lady refolded the letter, and handed it to the boy.

"De gent wants an answer," said the messenger. "Wot's de word?"

The lady's eyes suddenly flashed on him, bright, smiling and wet.

"Tell that guy on the other bench," she said, with a happy, tremulous
laugh, "that his girl wants him."

THE FURNISHED ROOM

Restless, shifting, fugacious as time itself is a certain vast bulk
of the population of the red brick district of the lower West Side.
Homeless, they have a hundred homes. They flit from furnished room to
furnished room, transients forever--transients in abode, transients in
heart and mind. They sing "Home, Sweet Home" in ragtime; they carry
their _lares et penates_ in a bandbox; their vine is entwined about a
picture hat; a rubber plant is their fig tree.

Hence the houses of this district, having had a thousand dwellers,
should have a thousand tales to tell, mostly dull ones, no doubt; but it
would be strange if there could not be found a ghost or two in the wake
of all these vagrant guests.

One evening after dark a young man prowled among these crumbling red
mansions, ringing their bells. At the twelfth he rested his lean
hand-baggage upon the step and wiped the dust from his hatband and
forehead. The bell sounded faint and far away in some remote, hollow
depths.

To the door of this, the twelfth house whose bell he had rung, came a
housekeeper who made him think of an unwholesome, surfeited worm that
had eaten its nut to a hollow shell and now sought to fill the vacancy
with edible lodgers.

He asked if there was a room to let.

"Come in," said the housekeeper. Her voice came from her throat; her
throat seemed lined with fur. "I have the third floor back, vacant since
a week back. Should you wish to look at it?"

The young man followed her up the stairs. A faint light from no
particular source mitigated the shadows of the halls. They trod
noiselessly upon a stair carpet that its own loom would have forsworn.
It seemed to have become vegetable; to have degenerated in that rank,
sunless air to lush lichen or spreading moss that grew