The streets of Springfield were covered with new fallen snow. There were apparently no street cars running at that hour. Felix started to walk toward the Prentiss residence.
He walked for an hour. It was still dark when he reached the big house on the corner. As he approached from a side-street he could see a light burning in the Rev. Mr. Prentiss’s study, at the back of the house.
The ground slanted upward from the street, and Felix climbed the stone coping and scrambled up into the back yard. Going up a terrace at the back end of the lot, he could see into the window of the study upstairs. Rose-Ann’s father was sitting at his desk, with an unlighted cigar in his mouth, not reading or writing, but just sitting there, looking at the lamp. Felix watched him. Once he moved abruptly, and shifted his unlighted cigar from one corner of his mouth to the other, and then sat quietly as before, looking at the lamp.
Felix moved incautiously, and stumbled off the terrace, covering himself with snow. He stood up and brushed it off, and then went down by the back porch underneath the studio window. A memory of Eddie Silver, throwing dollars at the window of his Canal street home, came into his mind, and he felt in his pocket for a coin and rather cautiously threw it up at the window.
It went wide of the mark. He threw another and it tinkled sharply against the glass. He stepped back, and he could see a shadow on the window-pane where Rose-Ann’s father had moved between it and the lamp.
He waited a half-minute, and threw a third coin. It rapped squarely against the pane, and a moment later the window was raised and Rose-Ann’s father had leaned out. His unlighted cigar was still in his mouth, and a lock of his grey hair fell forward from the back of his head, waving like a plume. He saw Felix standing in the snow.
For a moment the two stared at each other, and then Rose-Ann’s father leaned out still further and pointed downward with an angular arm. Felix pointed toward the porch inquiringly, and Rose-Ann’s father nodded emphatically. Then, it being clear that they understood each other, he shut the window.
Felix went up on the porch, after stamping the snow from his shoes. A light was turned on in the kitchen, and the door opened. Mr. Prentiss came out, closed the door softly behind him, and pressed Felix’s hand.
“Come on up to my study,” he whispered, “but be quiet, so we won’t wake everybody up.”
With an air of two conspirators, they went softly through the kitchen and dining room, into the hall, and up the stairs. When he had closed his study door behind them, Mr. Prentiss spoke aloud: