4

Miss Holland’s light was out. She was apparently sitting up in bed arranging draperies at great length.

“I have not locked the door,” she said, suddenly: Miriam despaired.

“I think for to-night it does not matter. We can make a point of remembering it in future.”

“I’m afraid,” said Miriam, “I should never remember it.”

“Have you not been in the habit of locking your door?”

“I never even thought of it.”

“Strange,” said Miss Holland. And Miriam began to suppose that it was strange. She ran over in her mind some of the odd people from time to time sharing her lonely top floor. Foreign waiters when Mrs. Bailey was doing well, or queer odd men who could not afford the downstairs rooms. She had never, at night, given them a single thought. But that was not the sort of thought Miss Holland meant, or not consciously. But all this was perfectly horrible.... Yet was it foolish, or perhaps unkind, never to have been aware? O’Laughlin, dear O’Laughlin. She had been aware of him. Sorry.

“There was,” she said, “a drunken Irish journalist who used to come blundering up the stairs at all hours of the night.”

“Horrible, horrible,” breathed Miss Holland.

“His door,” it occurred to her for the first time, “was at right angles to mine.” Miss Holland was gasping. “He used to stumble about on the landing, and sometimes, poor dear, be sick.”

“Dear, dear, dear! It was a most extraordinary establishment. But I think the oddest thing is that you should not have made fast the door.”

“I suppose so. But I would trust Tommy O’Laughlin drunk or sober, now I come to think of it.... He never paid his bills, poor dear, and he borrowed.”

“He must have been a worthless creature.”

“He was a gentleman, Tommy was, and a dear. Though he once embarrassed me frightfully. It was at dinner. Of course he was intoxicated, though not looking so. In the midst of a long tirade about Home Rule he burst into tears and said if he had only seen Miss Henderson earlier in his life he would have been a different fellow.”

“No doubt he admired you immensely!”

“I’d never spoken to him.”

Miss Holland laughed wisely, but a little scornfully. No châtelaine, of course, would boast of scalps.

“He was married!”

“Dear, dear!” breathed Miss Holland.

“Trying for a divorce.”

“Dear, dear, dear!”