“Yes, sir, so she told me, but it is not certain that I shall have to stay all night.”
“Of course you are to go.”
As the telegraph office would receive a good round sum for Paul’s services, the superintendent was very willing to send him up.
At noon Paul went home.
The tenement house seemed still more miserable and squalid, as he clambered up the rickety staircase. He mentally contrasted it with the elegant mansion in which he had spent the night, and it disgusted him still more with the wretched surroundings of the place he called home.
He was about to open the door of old Jerry’s room, when he was arrested by the sound of voices. Jerry’s, high pitched and quavering, was familiar enough to him, but there seemed something familiar, also, in the voice of the other, and yet he could not identify it with any of Jerry’s acquaintances.
There was a round hole in the door, the origin of which was uncertain, and Paul, knowing that he was at liberty to enter, did not think it wrong to reconnoiter through it before doing so.
To his intense surprise, the face of the visitor, visible to him through the opening, was that of the burglar whom he had confronted the night before.
“What can he have to do with Jerry?” Paul asked himself, in bewilderment.